"Anger, Lust, Divorce (6th Sunday after Epiphany)"
Pastor Roger Gustafson
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Matthew 5:21-37
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
A survey was taken recently at Duke University, and the students were asked this question: “Which of the following has the greatest impact on your life – the stock market, television, politics, or moral values?” It is notable, I think, that 48 percent of the students said moral values had the greatest impact on their lives – 48 percent! Granted, that’s one survey at one school, but let’s be optimistic and generalize; let’s say that response would be shared among the college population across the country. That’s good news indeed for our country, and it’s especially heart-warming for us Christians, because it connects with a big word that’s never mentioned in our Gospel lesson this morning but which weaves its way like a connecting thread throughout the reading. The word is “righteousness.”
Last week during the sermon time the question was raised, What is righteousness? We said that as Jesus used the term, it referred not to the obedient following of religious rules and regulations – that’s what it meant in the Old Testament – but it referred to faith, to trust in God; and to a life that is lived based on that trust.
Throughout the Gospels Jesus talks about righteousness as a lifestyle, but this morning he illustrates it in several very specific areas of human life, areas that are relevant to each of us. He talks about it in terms of religious law – “you have heard it was said” – and then he goes deeper and talks about God’s intention behind the law – “but I say to you.” There is what is said, and then there is what is meant. Those can be two very different things.
For example, Susan and I were driving down the highway, she was driving and I was teasing her, and she said, “Oh, would you just step out of the car?” We’re going down the freeway at 70 miles per hour. Now, she’s not really suggesting that I get out of the car; she’s just saying, “C’mon, give me a break.” There is what is said, and there is what is meant.
Jesus acknowledges the Old Testament law, and then he talks about God’s intention, what God means. He addresses specific issues that are relevant to all of us, and I’ll focus on three: anger, lust, and divorce.
He doesn’t start by talking about anger, but by talking about murder. Thou shalt not kill; it’s Commandment No. 5. Most of us successfully avoid the physical act of taking another person’s life; but Jesus says to us that God is concerned with the internal attitude that has the potential to lead to murder, whether the act is carried out or not.
One spring day in 1894 the Baltimore Orioles came to Boston for a regular-season game against the Red Sox. At some point during that game, words were exchanged between a Baltimore player and a Boston player. The words turned into punches, and it turned into a bench-clearing brawl – both teams swarmed onto the field. The fighting frenzy spread into the stands, and the fans got into it with each other. The situation there went from bad to worse; before long, someone set fire to the stadium and the whole place burned down, but not before the fire spread to the neighborhood surrounding the ball field, and before it was over 107 buildings went up in the inferno. That probably was not the original intent when two players exchanged words that afternoon.
The act of murder is never simply a dispassionate, intellectual decision; it is rooted in something far less obvious, far less dramatic: the dark impulse of the heart to do another person harm.
God’s intention is that we value and respect each and every person as a unique creation of God. That’s why Jesus is so hard on trash-talk; cursing another person disrespects that human gift, and, by extension, disrespects the Giver. With God it’s all about relationship. That’s why Jesus calls us to do all that we can to repair broken relationships. Last week, at Monday Night Bible Study, one of the participants was struggling with this, and said, “So if we know that someone has an issue with us, we’re supposed to take the initiative and go to that person and try to make it right?”
“That’s right.”
“But what if we don’t think it’ll go very well?”
“Doesn’t matter.” We can’t control what other people do. We can only control what we do; we can only plant the seed of reconciliation and trust that God will make that seed grow in God’s own time and in God’s own way.
What seeds we plant and nurture, especially in our own hearts, is important to God. And so Jesus turns his attention to the issue of adultery. The physical act is prohibited by the 6th Commandment, and the people in Jesus’ original audience would certainly have harkened back to a very important figure in the history of their nation, King David. The story is reported in 1 Samuel in the Old Testament. King David’s army was off to war. While his soldiers were gone, David happened to notice a beautiful woman, Bathsheba. She was married to one of David’s soldiers, but David didn’t care. He saw Bathsheba, he wanted her, and he took her. His act of adultery did not begin or end with his illegitimate taking of Bathsheba. In fact, it ended with the arranged murder of Bathsheba’s husband, the end of a fatal process that began with a wrong desire in David’s heart, a desire that he cultivated.
It’s that internal, dangerous desire and the conscious choice to cultivate it – something to which we are all susceptible – that is targeted by Jesus. He calls it lust, and it threatens God’s gift of relationship. We believe that through Christ, God has established a relationship with all of humanity, a relationship that is filled with love and honor and respect and nurture. That basic relationship that God has with us is to be mirrored in the marriage relationship of two people. But lust is a wrong desire to break into that relationship and disrupt God’s intention. The extreme penalty that Jesus specifies here is exaggeration to make a point, and the point is this: God’s intention is so precious and good for us that we should go to any lengths necessary in order to honor and maintain and fulfill that intention.
The tragic reality, though, is that sometimes marriages break. In the United States we apparently are seeing an improvement in the divorce rate; it had been at about 50 percent for many years, but now appears to be dropping to the low 40 percent range. Experts caution, however, that the drop in the divorce rate might be due to the economy – couples who really want to end their relationship find it simply too expensive to do so.
There are no divorce statistics for Jesus’ day, of course, but we do know that divorce was very easy to obtain. It was an extremely patriarchal culture; wives were literally the property of the husband, who had the power, for example, to decide when and if the wife was welcome in the home. In that culture there was no provision for a wife to divorce her husband, only for the husband to divorce the wife, and he could do so with little or no cause. For example, suitable grounds for divorcing a wife, literally abandoning her, included poor cooking skills. The only legal stipulation had to do with what happened after the divorce had taken place. The husband had to send the wife off with a certificate stating the fact that she had not been found guilty of adultery and therefore could marry again, something she almost had to do in order to physically survive. Jesus, however, is challenging the assumption that any divorce, except on the grounds of unfaithfulness, was permissible.
Jesus’ words here are hard, and we do ourselves no favor if we try to soften them. Jesus’ concern is that we get back to basics, back to first principles, back to God’s original intention and purpose for marriage: that marriage be a lifelong union of two people, and that that union be a reflection of the faithfulness of God toward humanity. God intended marriage to be a place of safety, honor, and nurture.
The tragic fact, though, is that a marriage can become so distorted from God’s intention, so irretrievably broken, that the marriage itself can become an assault on those very values. Marriage can become a place of physical, emotional, and spiritual violence; and when marriage becomes a place where people destroy each other, we must ask how the safety, honor, and nurture of the people in the marriage can best be preserved. And that means more than simply defending the institution and practice of marriage at all costs; it means remembering that the goal is not to live a sinless life – we can’t do that – but the goal is to live a life in keeping with God’s intention and values, and remembering that we all of our lives in the hands of a God who is with us in absolutely the most difficult decisions we make.
Last Sunday during the sermon time someone asked why I was Lutheran and not a member of some other faith tradition. The response that came out of me was automatic. One word: Grace. I believe that despite our best intentions we fall short of what God desires and expects of us, that we cannot on our own live righteous lives. I also believe the New Testament claim that Jesus Christ has become our righteousness, that he has done for us what we could never do for ourselves – put us in a right relationship with God by taking the brokenness of our sin upon himself and destroying its power to destroy us. That act, that gift, is grace. That grace is free to us, even as it cost Jesus his life.
By grace we:
+ do our conscientious best to live a life that is in alignment with the intentions and values of God;
+ see our lives not as our own possessions, to do with as we please; but as God’s gifts, to be used as God pleases;
+ urge others to be all that God intends them to be, and we allow others to encourage the same of us;
+ above all, cling to the cross of Christ, and remember that the life of the Christian is a matter of dying and rising, again and again and again.
By grace, only by grace. And for that, thanks be to God.
Amen.