Sermon Manuscript 2/19/2016 Our Saviour Lutheran Church, Croton on Hudson, NY Grace and Peace to you from the one who turns our attention to love, the one who calls us even to love our enemies, and the one who inspires us to go forth the extra mile, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I think I ve mentioned to you before that I am quite a baseball fan. Growing up in the Bronx, I claim as my birthright to be a Yankee fan. And in baseball, there is no more rare and sublime achievement that when a pitcher achieves a perfect game, a feat that has occurred only 23 times in over 140 years of organized baseball. The perfect game is so hard to get that no pitcher has thrown more than one, and some of the greatest pitchers of all time such as Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Roger Clemens and Lefty Grove never even came close. In a 9-inning game consisting of 3 outs per inning, what defines perfection in baseball is simple allow no batter to reach base during the game and record an out for each of the 27 batters a pitcher would face. What sounds so simple, has proven to be nearly impossible. Even if a pitcher has all his best pitches working for him, there is so much that is out of his control, that the pursuit of a perfect game depends also on plain good fortune, and the work of others. A pitch can be thrown so well as to break a bat in half, but the ball might fall in between two hustling outfielders, allowing the batter to reach base. Perfect game gone. An easy ground ball hits a pebble and kicks off the shortstop s glove. Again, perfect game booted away. An umpire sees a runner safe at first base, but the ball arrived in the first baseman s glove just before the runner s foot came down on the base. Perfect game down the drain. It s not only the pitcher s abilities that determine if a game will be perfect, but other vicissitudes of the game have to align just right it to end perfectly. 27 up and 27 down, perfection that has occurred only 23 times in well over 200,000 baseball games played. How is it that anyone can be perfect?
What a rich set of lessons we have today as we continue listening to Jesus teach us from the mountainside. I could probably come up with six different sermons by focusing on smaller portions of these texts. The passage from Leviticus itself could be used as the basis for a whole series of sermons on right living in the kingdom of God, and the ways in which we live out God s call to love our neighbor. The Psalm is a passionate prayer to God expressing a craving for God's wisdom, God s perfect teaching, in a world broken and violent and far from perfection. St. Paul urges his bickering Corinthians to unite in Christ, the only perfect foundation of love given to us through our Baptisms. Then Jesus gets the last word in today's gospel, laying out some even more seemingly impossible assignments. This list is overwhelming: Don t seek revenge. Turn the Other Cheek. Give up your clothing. Go the extra mile. Don t hold your money back from anyone who asks? And, then there is this little gem Love Your Enemies and Pray for those who persecute you. Yes Jesus asks us to risk loving those who may never love us back. There are no exceptions to this. Nobody falls outside of God s concern. Nobody is beyond the pale. Nobody is unworthy of receiving God s Love through God s people. WHEW! And, the hardest part of these teachings is that Jesus actually means what he says. Later in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus calls his followers to be DOERS and not just HEARERS of the Word of God. How is it that we can do all that Jesus asks, all of the time? How is it that we can accomplish the impossible? How is it that we can be perfect just as God is perfect? Why should we even try? To pitch this kind of perfect game, even if we started out with the right intentions, the perfect game could be lost the first time someone cuts us off on the highway, and we toss an angry thought or maybe a familiar gesture their way. We will lose the perfect game the minute our boss gives us an urgent assignment just before we planned to leave the office for the day. Gone is the perfect game when someone says something bad about us, and we choose to retaliate rather than reconcile. The odds of being perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect is even less than it was when David Wells threw his perfect game at Yankee Stadium
in 1998. Announcer John Sterling shouted Baseball Immortality for David Wells after the final out was nestled in outfielder Paul O Neill s glove. Immortality seems far from our reach, if we have to follow without faikl these difficult teachings to get there. Who then can be perfect as our father in heaven is perfect? Some of my colleagues will be preaching on this text and comforting their communities by telling them that Jesus knows that this list of commands is daunting and impossible for us to follow, and that he lays this all out to help us understand how much we need the love and grace of God in our lives so we don t fall so deeply into despair. Jesus knows our weakness and sets us up to receive the gospel of forgiveness, the grace that overwhelms all the requirements we fail to meet. Now, this is good and classic Lutheran theology which I do not refute. But if that is the only conclusion we can draw from these passages, we might think that Jesus is simply an accomplished rhetorician and not the Lord and Master of our lives. We might walk out thinking that Jesus doesn t really mean what he says, he just wants us to love him more. I find that rendering of the text somewhat unsatisfying in that we are not just living into the final days when God will open the gates of heaven for all of us to enter as forgiven souls, but we are called to live now, to live in community with each other, even those of us we don t even like even those who might even be hostile toward us. As Christians, the arc of our existence must always bend toward peace, and we are called to be the peacemakers. And blessed are the peacemakers because they shall be called Children of God. That s peacemaking in the here and now, not waiting for some promised restoration of paradise lost. Since we are children of God by virtue of our baptisms, by virtue of the foundation of grace, and by virtue of the foolish wisdom of God, we are called now to make peace by loving those who might just be unlovable, by doing more than required, by giving away with no expectation of return and by seeking understanding instead of retribution. By being perfect, as our father in heaven is perfect.
In a time where peaceful resistance to authority seems to be returning to vogue, perhaps this understanding of Christ s call to be peacemakers makes a lot of sense. For Christ, resistance wasn t so much about rising up against injustice, as it was about not cooperating in the cycle of injustice and retaliation that birthed even more hate, hostility, division and death. On the Mount, Jesus is not calling us to a passive acceptance of injustice, but instead to show resistance through the power of love. In other words, if you want to put out a fire, you don t bring more fire, you bring water. If you want to put out a fire, you don t fan the flames, you take away air that enables the fire to burn. If you want to quench hate, you don t do so by hating in return, you show love perfectly, just as your father in heaven is perfect. There is an elephant walking in this room today, and if I leave you know, some of you might be inspired by the Holy Spirit to respond to Jesus call to be peacemakers, to seek no vengeance, to resist by not resisting, to love even those who seek to harm you. But many of you might ask, what about this idea of being perfect? It still sounds like God is filling out our report cards, rating our moral and spiritual purity, against a standard impossible to meet. We know that we can t always do what Jesus asks of us. If we have to be perfect in all these difficult teachings, what then is our hope? To answer this question, we need to reframe perhaps what we mean when we use the word perfect. Our modern understanding of the word reflects a flawlessness of execution of a particular task or tasks, often measured by standards set by others to achieve a grade of 100%. Perfection then, is understood based on the absence of something that would be considered wrong. Being perfect is actually understood today more by what it isn t than by what it is. This understanding of perfection is based on a task or goal orientation that is not really a bad thing in many contexts, but steers us to a misinterpretation of what Jesus is trying to say to us.
The gospel today is not really about accomplishing tasks and performing them flawlessly to achieve perfection. In fact, the Leviticus and Psalms passages are not really about doing all things perfectly to get an A+ on God s report card. These lessons are about RELATIONSHIPS. And if they are about relationships, then the final verse in Matthew's gospel needs a second look today. The word translated as Perfect is TELOS in Greek, which can be translated as Perfect, but not in the sense of perfect performance. Instead, it can also be translated as complete or fulfilled, so perfection should be understood as wholeness, not necessarily as flawlessness. Some of you might remember when learning grammar in school, that sentences are constructed with tenses, most often present, past and future. When a tense is also described as perfect, it signifies an act has been completed, or if you will, perfected in the sentence. When I say to you, I am your Vicar, that is present tense reflecting an ongoing characteristic of our relationship. But if I say to you I have been your vicar for 5 months, I am using a perfect tense, indicating that the statement has already been completed. Now none of you will say that I ve been a perfect Vicar for 5 months, but I have indeed completed 5 months as your Vicar. So, our understanding of perfect should be more nuanced than just a reflection of performance, don t you think? Then, perfection, or Telos, is less about doing what God commands all the time, and more about living into the fullness of what God has called each of us to be. The Telos of an airline pilot is to bring his passengers from point A to point B safely. The Telos of a farmer is to provide food and nourishment to others. The Telos of child of God is to be all you were created and called to be, just as God is all God is called to be. It is not a call to be like God. It is a call to be what God likes in you! It is the very promise which was sealed forever in your baptisms, and in the relationship with God already perfected and complete through God s abundant grace. Jesus did not come so that we may live flawlessly perfect lives. Instead Jesus came so we may
have Life and live abundantly. This perfection, completeness or wholeness is lived out in our relationship to God, Christ, our neighbors, and yes, our enemies. Calling us to "Love our Enemies" as we work for wholeness and completeness in our relationships, Jesus gives us hope. Now, instead of a series of actions we must observe, God's law has a newfound beauty to it. Because Jesus has changed our way of thinking, through the gospel, the Law of God becomes grace. The commandments of Jesus become the song we sing as we live out in loving relationships to the people around us. Perhaps the greatest beauty of song is that it helps us remember the words. We can sing about loving our enemies, about going the extra mile, about seeking reconciliation instead of retribution, about giving without having to get. We sing and we remember the words. We sing because the commandments have been (perfect tense!) completed, perfected and made whole in the love of Jesus Christ. Some of you might think this is an idealistic way of interpreting the gospel, but there is a living example of this that we celebrate each week. As we celebrate the Eucharist later in the service, come to the altar with this in your mind. The first time that Eucharist was celebrated, Jesus invited to the table, dined, washed feet and made future plans with the following people: 1. Someone he knew would betray him. 2. Someone he knew would deny him. 3. Someone he knew would doubt him. 4. The others that he knew would abandon him. Even those who were closest to Jesus were, at that time, his enemies. He loved them anyway. That is what we reenact every time we celebrate the Eucharist. Jesus calls us to the table, not because we are perfect, but so that we may be complete, so that we may be Perfect in the love that has already been procured for us. Jesus is the foundation that we stand upon, fall down upon, and stand upon again when we get back up. We belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. Through this relationship, we are made perfect, complete and whole! AMEN!