Gospel for the day: Matthew 5:21-37
Recorded at Atonement Lutheran Church in Wyomissing, PA on February 12, 2023. The Gospel reading and sermon begins at the 20:00 minute mark.
Here is the sermon manuscript I had in front of me but it is not the exact words I preached:
Good morning, grace and peace to you from God our creator and Jesus our Christ.
This season of Gospel readings is from the sermon on the mount – one of the best stretches of moral teachings we get from Jesus in the gospels. This section might sound familiar to us, not just because it’s so quotable but because Jesus is doing some explaining about the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people living in Galilee under Roman Rule.
It is important to remember that Jesus came to the Roman-occupied Jewish people as the Messiah – But we’re going to put a pin in that for later.
Right now, we have some pronouns to unpack. The very first word spoken aloud by Jesus in this passage as we translate it is, “You.” So often when we read scripture, the translations we have of the Bible don’t quite capture the difference from Greek or Hebrew between a singular you, and a plural you. Sometimes I want to go through a reading for a Sunday and change all the plural you’s that I know are there to y’alls or yinz or yous people just to make it very clear in scripture who is being spoken to as a whole body or a whole church, not just as individuals. While the practice of our faith is yes, an individual pursuit at times, it is importantly also a community endeavor. Jesus is not just preaching on individual acts of faithful living, but a way of faithful Community living that is more important than a singular pursuit.
Now lets step into the deep end of this passage. The four major moral teachings Jesus is touching on here are anger, adultery, divorce, and oaths that on first glance might remind us of a transactional type of law & reward message. If I do good, say the right things, come to church every Sunday, pray just right, God will love me and I’ll be hashtag Blessed, as the social media trend goes.
Or “If you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” “If your right eye causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” Yikes. What are we supposed to do with such dire warnings?
Again, when we read the ‘you’s’ here, remember that Jesus is speaking to the crowd. It is so easy in our 21st century thinking to think of Jesus’ teachings here as something that me, Mycah, needs to heed all by myself.
What if instead, Jesus is helping the multitudes who listened on that mountainside in Galilee and for the multitudes gathered here today imagine a whole new community. What if we are building an active beloved community who doesn’t commit murder because we learned that murder comes from anger, and anger’s ability to dehumanize our neighbor and justify violence but instead we go to that person and reconcile immediately.
What if we are imagining a world where adultery, which was so often exploitation of vulnerable people and their bodies, was protected against? Jesus warned against divorce because it would bring so much shame to the woman and oftentimes leave her destitute on the street. She could not go home, and her husband would have removed her from his home, leaving her without resources or connection – thankfully that is not as often the case today, and we have community connections that support people in that situation.
But there’s a lot of injustice in the world that strips away our humanity. Jesus had picked these examples to help us imagine what would the world be like if instead of abiding by unjust understanding of how we have understood our community, we began imagining something new. Something that doesn’t demand a transaction to earn love or faith or salvation. What happens if we read this as Jesus imagining a new way for us to live?
What Jesus was saying was radical to the Jewish people back in occupied Galilee. Here’s that pin about the Roman Empire: There was so much injustice under the empire. When Jesus was born, there were often revolts against the Roman governors in the province of Asia Minor where they were located. The people were hungry for a Messiah, The Messiah, to deliver them from under the Romans. Y’all see, the Jewish people knew what it meant to live unjustly under someone else’s rule. They had done so for many generations under the Egyptian pharaohs – and then Moses shows up and delivers the people into the wilderness on their way to promised land! Great!
But what does Jesus do when he shows up? He came to preach and teach. To heal and challenge social norms, but not smite the Roman Empire. Jesus imagined a new way of living in community. A new way of living that doesn’t demand transactions to be reconciled, or a community that needs us to earn our right to humanity. A new way of looking at the laws that were leading to injustices that stripped away people’s humanity, left people feeling less than whole, living partial lives, and imagined a way to live together where we make each other whole, reconcile with one another, as a community. To be the imagined beloved community that centers the love that Jesus had for each of us on the cross and in the resurrection. God created us with that inherit humanity. This new way of living is about loving God, and our neighbor as ourselves. All the laws and the prophets hang on these two commandments.
A modern way of thinking of how Jesus imagines a beloved community might be a twist on our focus on how Jesus says y’all instead of just you. Lets imagine what we would be like if we focused less on self-care and more on community care.
I was remembering my first week on internship recently, getting used to the commute from my home in Downingtown to here. I tend to take back roads by Honeybrook and Morgantown because it’s a bit faster and usually the only traffic I hit is Amish traffic maybe once a week. But my first week felt like a trial by fire commute. On my second day coming home, there was a literal car on fire on the highway, and then later in the week, I got rerouted through farmland around Honeybrook because of a silo catching fire. It was a devastating pilar of smoke to see as I watched my GPS continuously reroute me toward Reading.
At one point, I could tell I was probably going the right way because I watched over a dozen men and boys on horses or push bikes fly past me toward the flames. Later, as I drove home and again the next morning when I was on my commute, I drove by the farm and saw the buggies lined up alongside several extra parked trucks and watched the silo get rebuilt swiftly day by day.
That was community care in action.
I know I’ve experienced community care whenever I have needed to move or been able to help my friends move. I’ve been part of the community care team for friends with chronic illnesses or cancer diagnosis, driving folks to appointments or being there for care after procedures or on hard days. Community care is the work we do as a church, or through ministries like Lutheran Disaster Response who are currently on the ground helping relief efforts in Turkey and Syria after the earthquake or ministries more locally focused like Common Ground Recovery Community. It’s the work of the pastoral care team here at church checking in on folks.
Sometimes community care is scaled down. Sometimes it’s a shared meal or a thoughtful call or text. It’s connecting with one another to recognize the inherit beloved-ness that God created each of us with.
Our actions as a community extend beyond the walls of this church, though they begin here. They begin when we hear the Word of God and the message of Love, Reconciliation, Grace, and Hope that Jesus brought into the world to all y’all. What we remember each time we partake in the feast at the communion table.
How does the church become a place of divinely inspired community care? How do we change from a ‘you’ mindset to a ‘y’all’ mindset? It starts by remembering God’s love for us. For God’s saving Grace that he made a free gift of when God sent Jesus to live, teach, preach, heal, die, and be resurrected amongst us. Realizing there was nothing we could have done to deserve that but be made in God’s beloved image.
So we remember at the Communion table that this is a place to be fed and sent out into the world to be God’s hands and feet. Grace Pak once preached “Worship includes all aspects of our lives outside of the sanctuary. The relationships we have, how we treat each other, and what we say and do express our faith in God. Thus being worshipful “out there” inspires true worship ‘in here.’” (Grace Pak, The Abingdon Preaching Annual 2020, p. 16).
So imagine along with me the community Jesus might imagine for us today. Now, go and be part of that ministry in the world. Amen.
