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February 13, 2011
1 Corinthians 3: 1-9; Matthew 5: 21-37

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen.

When you think about the Sermon on the Mount, I think it conjures up mostly good thoughts. The Beatitudes. The prayer of Jesus. Advice about loving enemies, giving to others, trusting in God, not flaunting your piety.

And then there is today’s reading, which deals with those uncomfortable things like anger and adultery and lust and divorce and honesty. What are we to do with that?

Did Jesus really say if you look at another person and think they are sexy, you should pluck out your eye?
Or that we shouldn’t even bother coming to worship if we haven’t made things right with those we have offended?

Yup. He said it. But what did he mean?

Let’s start with a commercial from the Super Bowl last Sunday. It’s a commercial that spun off a fair amount of controversy in the last week. It was the Pepsi Max commercial. And here’s how it went:

A man is sneaking fattening foods and each time, his wife catches him. Then she finds him drinking a soda on a park bench. He looks worried until she tells him it has no calories. They are all smiles … until a female jogger plops down on the next bench, smiles at the man and he smiles back. His wife throws the soda can at his head, he ducks and it knocks out the jogger. The startled couple runs off hand in hand.

So you’ve got anger … and not much of a reconciliation.

You’ve got lust … or at least flirting.

You can see a divorce in this couple’s future.

And as they run away, you witness their dishonesty, their unwillingness to admit what they have done.

The things Jesus was talking about are not so uncommon in our world. I think his central message was: don’t think you are doing OK if you are just following the letter of the rules religions have established.  Those rules merely set a framework. What really matters is paying attention to how we restore and sustain relationships – with each other and with God.

The anger piece is not so hard to understand. Jesus recognizes that anger is part of life. He also recognizes the potential for violence in untended anger. What he is talking about are ways to restore a relationship when it has gone bad.

In the Jewish tradition, during the High Holy Days, the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, everyone has an obligation to seek out those they have wronged and to ask for forgiveness.

So Jesus uses the imagery of coming to the altar with a gift aimed at reconciling with God and says: First, work on reconciling with those you are separated from. I don’t think he meant don’t come to the altar until every fence is mended. This is a place, after all, where we come as broken people trusting in God’s love to carry us through. But it is a vivid reminder that all of us have relationships that need tending and that untended anger can fester and lead to really bad things.

OK, so that wasn’t so hard. And then we get to adultery and lust. Now it gets more interesting.

It’s not terribly radical to say that adultery is wrong. In Jesus’ time, one aspect of adultery was the understanding that a woman was the property of her husband. But this is a prohibition that spans time and culture.

And today, as we understand committed relationships growing out of mutual promises, having sex with another person’s partner violates trust on so many different levels. Not that it doesn’t happen. Not that in the best of circumstances that trust cannot be rebuilt and the relationship restored. But it is clearly an act that fractures a relationship.

Jesus goes one step back, though, to the whole idea of lust. I don’t think this has to do with recognizing that somebody else is sexy. I think it has to do with getting so engrossed in the fantasy of another that it risks your own relationship. I think it has to do with not treating other human beings as sex objects.

In our culture that sexualizes so many things, whether for advertising – check out the Go Daddy commercials at the Super Bowl – or for profit – check out the sex trafficking industry in this country and around the world.

There are plenty of real instances of sexual exploitation in our world. That runs a lot deeper than a jogger and a guy on a park bench giving each other a smile. Jesus may have talked about plucking out eyes and cutting off hands, but it seems to me he was using hyperbole to underscore his point.

Our eyes and hands are safe. The danger to our humanity and thus to our ability to reflect God’s love comes when we get caught up in the webs of sexual exploitation, whether on a personal level or on the commercial level.

And then there is divorce. This is where I think a lot of folks start squirming in this passage from the Sermon on the Mount.

There are an awful lot of people in our society, in this congregation who have been through the pain of a divorce. That would include me. And so reconciling what has happened in our lives with the message of Jesus takes some serious thought and prayer.  

It is also way too easy for folks who have not experienced the disruption of divorce to get sort of smug and self-righteous and quickly judge those who have been in relationships that crash and burn. Some folks grab on to these words from Jesus to condemn others.

It’s worth remembering at this point something else Jesus said during the Sermon on the Mount: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7: 3)

The whole divorce passage, though, brings us right up against some of the most contentious issues that divide Christians today.  Just what do we think about marriage? What can we learn from the Bible about marriage and what does that mean for our relationships with one another?

We are clearly in a period in history when the ideas of what constitutes marriage are changing.

A couple of generations ago, it was unthinkable for couples to live together before getting married. Now it is common.

Once divorce was a great stigma in public life. It was a big deal Ronald Reagan was the first person elected president who had been divorced. Now hardly anyone blinks if a public figure has been divorced.

Today the sharp dividing lines are over same-sex relationships – domestic partnerships in a state like Wisconsin, civil unions in other states, marriages in a few states.  

The United Church of Christ nationally has stood firmly on the side of same-sex couples who choose to make a solemn commitment to one another.

Memorial’s status as an open and affirming congregation means we welcome all.

And I’m part of a group of UCC folks locally who are working on a video project where people of faith talk about how their beliefs allow them to support sacred commitments in many forms.

Marriage is so much in flux in our country that a poll done by the Pew Center for TIME magazine last fall found that 40 percent of Americans think marriage as an institution is obsolete. But it also found that only 5 percent of Americans under the age of 30 say they don’t want to get married.

There still is clearly a good market this weekend for Valentine’s Day cards and bouquets of flowers. Love and romance seem to be alive and well. But that leaves that question: how do we make sense of all of this in the light of what Jesus was saying during that Sermon on the Mount?

A new book by Jennifer Wright Knust offers one way to think about this. She is an American Baptist scholar of the New Testament who teaches at Boston University – a college with deep roots in the Methodist tradition.

The book, that came out last week and is featured in this past week’s Newsweek, is called Unprotected Texts. One of her primary points is that there is no single view of marriage in the Bible.

What was acceptable in some books of the Bible – multiple wives, mistresses – is condemned in others. The Song of Songs is an incredibly sensual poem about the attraction two unmarried young people have for each other. Lust abounds.

Paul in his letter to Corinthians that we heard part of today is addressing among other things various views on sexuality in this new Christian community. Yet Paul reminds them that even with their differences, they are all one in Christ.

The words of Jesus on divorce we heard today leave a loophole that does not appear in a similar passage in the Gospel of Mark. Even these earliest Christians offered different interpretations of Jesus’ message.

Listen to what Knust wrote in her new book: “The Bible doesn’t have to be an invader, conquering bodies and wills with its pronouncements and demands. It can also be a partner in the complicated dance of figuring out what it means to live in bodies that are filled with longing.”

Throughout this section of the Sermon on the Mount, remember, Jesus was building upon the basic rules and urging people to do better than simply follow the law.

The Jewish law of that time did not leave options for women whose husbands cast them aside. Jesus is shifting the burden of responsibility back on the man. Jesus is talking about putting care for the individuals, for the responsibilities that come with a committed relationship back at the center.

Jesus in his talk about adultery and lust and divorce was doing something else as well. He was reaching back to the ancient story of how God created humanity where a man and a woman could walk naked through a garden and feel neither shame nor fear.

Their relationship was what God had hoped to see in this creation. But as humans, we could not sustain that. We figured we could find a better way to do things. In the process, relationships got fractured. Jesus is looking to the day when the world will be the way God hopes it could be.

The point of all this is not that any kind of sexual expression, any kind of relationship is okay. It is that we look to the many and varied stories from our faith tradition that can help us understand and live out:
* selfless love,
* deep commitment,
* a spirit of forgiveness and
* a continual respect for the divine image in the people we encounter.

Jesus ends this passage by talking about truth-telling. It’s not a matter of refusing to ever take an oath – although some Christians through the years have interpreted Jesus’ words about oaths as well as so many other things in the most literal sense.

What it is a matter of is being so straightforward in what we say that we have credibility simply by the life we live and the words we use. We don’t need to invoke God’s authority to cover up our deceptions.

That really gets at the whole relationship piece as well. Whether we deceive people in public settings or the people to whom we profess the deepest love, no invocation of God’s name will set things right. It is our commitment to be honest with one another – speaking the truth in love, we sometimes call it - that will carry us forward.

So maybe that Pepsi Max commercial could have ended another way. After the jogger smiled at the guy and the guy smiled back, maybe his wife could have tapped him on the shoulder and then given him a kiss. It would have been a wonderful reminder of where his heart should be.

As we head into this Valentine’s Day, take Jesus’ words today not as harsh words that you’d never want to ask Hallmark to put on a card.

Take them instead as an invitation to take those times you are angry with your beloved as chances to forge a new bond.

Take them as an invitation to appreciate the beauty of other people without objectifying them.

Take them as an invitation not to thoughtlessly cast aside those we love.

Take them as an invitation to speak simply and honestly so our words reflect who we are.

Let these be invitations to revel in the dance of life and find God’s love there in the midst of it all.