Sermon - Representation

Preached on April 14, 2013 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Introduction

This is the second sermon in a series on the core values and principles of this congregation, as discerned over the past few years with input from the whole church family.  These values are, for this church, both a vision and a description. They are a vision of what we seek to be but they are also a description of what we already are.

We’re spending two weeks on the first value, because it is foundational to the rest of them, and then we’ll spend one week on each of the next four. The first value is that “We embrace the role of representing Jesus in the world and we strive to learn and follow his teaching.”

The teaching we embrace is all the teaching of Jesus, including the teaching he spoke and the teaching he did by example, but the text we’ve chosen to focus in on in these two weeks is the collection of teachings that Jesus gave to his disciples in the sermon on the mount, gospel according to Matthew, chapters 5, 6, and 7.

You could spend a whole sermon series on the paragraph about loving our enemies. But there is also something to be said for hearing the scope of these teachings all at once. I have chosen excerpts of the sermon on the mount to serve as the scripture reading for our reflection this morning.

Scripture

Matthew 5:17, 38-39, 43-44, 48; 6:19-21; 7:1-2, 12, 24-27

5:17 ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. 

38 ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” 39But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 

43 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 

 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

6:19 ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

7:1 Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 

12 ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

24 ‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. 26And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!’

Sermon:

We embrace the role of representing Jesus in the world and we strive to learn and follow his teaching.

You may have heard that and thought, well, isn’t that stating the obvious? Can’t you see the news headline? “Local church decides to follow the teachings of Jesus.” No need to stop the presses at the Beacon-Journal. The USA Today will not run that headline.

Two things are important here before we go further. The first is to notice the emphasis on following instead of believing. We’ve found that believing, by itself, doesn’t get you very far. People who believe in Jesus can still ignore Jesus. So this is a claim that what we care about is not belief, not the content of belief, the doctrine, or the strength of our belief.  What we care about is following the teachings. We care about the way we live. We choose to become representatives of Jesus in the world by learning and following his teaching. 

As we commit to this way of following, we are being very true to our Congregationalist roots, because it was the Congregationalists who decided to move away from creeds as the test of one’s faith, and focused on the character of our lives. Given the choice between one who believes rightly and does harm to others and another person who doesn’t buy into beliefs in the right way but who shows love to others, we’ll take the second person every time. And if you spend time talking to people in this congregation, you’ll see that I’m right.

The second important note is that the teachings of Jesus are a total package. It is more than a skill set among others to be applied in only one area of life. It is a way of living, a quality of being, a life that is different. Reading the sermon on the mount is an introduction to the comprehensive reorienting of life that Jesus teaches. And as we are reoriented, we discover that his teachings restore us to the people that God created us to be. They restore our true humanity – our God given dignity

In the gospel of John Jesus says “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” It was the southern writer Flannery O’Connor, who was also a woman of deep faith, who wrote that we should also say that “you will know the truth and the truth will make you odd.”

To really live by these things will make us odd.

The poet-theologian Wendell Berry reminds us that we’ve become a little too familiar with the teachings of Jesus like “love your enemy” and “turn the other cheek.  We are too familiar with how nice these have come to sound in our ears. He reminds us that if we had been there at the time and had heard that teaching, without knowing who Jesus was or how big he would become, we might like to think that we would sign right up, but we shouldn’t be so quick to assume that we would have followed him.

Jesus teaches that if someone slaps you, to turn the other cheek. Now, really?

Take this apart with me. Imagine the scene of a person slapping another. The person doing the slapping thinks that he has some authority (it would definitely have been a he at this time). He thinks that he is better because he’s a man, or because he’s a free man and not a slave, or because he’s a Roman citizen and not an Israelite. Whatever the reason, he thinks that he can slap people around. Now, I think that there are two natural, gut reactions. One is to hit back, to rise up and make war on the person, or the class of people who have oppressed you. And there were Israelites who tried to do that. The second gut reaction, since you fear the result of hitting back, is to give up in the face of such power and accept your fate.  Jesus says that there is a third way. Instead of just turning away and accepting the slap, turn back to that person and look him in the eye. Make him confront your humanity. Have the courage to make him do it to your face.

It is only in seeing each other’s humanity that enemies are turned to friends. Didn’t Martin Luther King, Jr. remind us of this? As courageous protesters turned the other cheek to the violence inherent in segregation, not returning anger but not cowering either, they confronted us with our shared humanity, and began to dismantle the evil of a racist society.

How often do people do and say awful things to other people that they would never do if they had to consider and acknowledge that person’s humanity.  Kids know about this. In those cruel years of middle school and high school they know how kids will say terrible things in text messages, twitter, facebook, and it’s easier when you don’t have to look the person in the eye. Jesus tells us to walk right up to that person so that you see each other. This is the beginning of restoring our God given humanity.

Jesus teaches us not to judge, for the measure with which you judge is the measure you will receive. This doesn’t mean that God will judge us, it’s a truth about the human condition that the ones who are most judgmental of others are the ones who are least at peace with themselves, who hold themselves to the highest standards and have trouble receiving love that they don’t think they have deserved. Do not judge others for the speck in their eye because your vision is clouded too. Better to see in each other a common humanity, a common bond as God’s children. If I see you with God’s eyes then I can begin to see myself that way.

I was talking to a parent in this church a couple years ago who remarked at how his children had really been affected by growing up in this church. He said that they are quick to be accepting and slow to be judgmental. They’re grown up now and sometimes they are the ones to catch him: “hey, Dad, you shouldn’t judge them like that.”

In a world of snap judgments, competition, and scapegoating, this will make us a little bit odd. Jesus teaches us to see the humanity in each person, to see in everyone the image of God.

Jesus teaches “Do not store up treasure on earth.”  Harvey Cox used to teach a class at Harvard called the moral teachings of Jesus, and they’d get into these real struggles about storing up treasure in heaven but not on earth, and another part of the sermon on the mount which says don’t worry about what you will wear, or eat, or about tomorrow. Is Jesus telling us not to worry about money, about our family budget? They class struggled because they saw both sides. On the one hand, the danger of wealth and being overly concerned with it is the temptation to corruption and selfishness. Think of Ebenezer Scrooge before meeting Marley’s ghost. On the other hand, it is a terrible thing to be poor. We don’t think that poverty is a good thing.

So Harvey Cox brought got some help in a guest lecturer who was a Franciscan monk from Brazil named Brother Leonardo. He told them about the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, who gave up his wealth and inheritance to live closely with the poor to whom he ministered. And he made the important distinction between voluntary poverty of St. Francis which carries its own spiritual rewards, and the involuntary poverty which crushes and strangles millions of people in the world. The point of the first kind of poverty is to relieve the misery of the second.

And then he looked out at these Harvard students, who would soon be in positions of influence, and he said “we welcome men and women into the Franciscan order, but that life is not everyone’s gift.  Most of you should get the best education you can, and then use whatever power and money God allows you to have to subvert the social and economic structures that perpetuate misery and inequality.”

Use the life you have to make things better for your fellow travelers. That’s how we store our treasure in heaven.

Following these kinds of teachings may make us odd. But none of these things are odd because they are unnatural to us. What Jesus teaches is the way that we are created to be. This is the kind of life we were made for, and if it feels unnatural, that is only because the image of God in each of us has been distorted, caged, injured. And that is why Jesus came to heal our injuries, to set us free of our cages, to restore our vision, so that we could live as God created us to live.

We live into these teachings. These are practical ways of living in the kingdom of God as that kingdom dawns in this world.

There are only a few times when Jesus spoke to a large crowd. Mostly what he did was to train disciples. He knew that God’s love and justice and peace would be shown in the world by the specific actions of people, of disciples, who would make different choices, would act on different values, and in the way they lived they would represent Jesus to the world. Jesus didn’t conquer with armies, or wow people with dazzling showmanship. He taught people how to live. He got some good representation.

We embrace the role of representing Jesus in the world and we strive to learn and follow his teaching.