Sixth Sunday After
Epiphany Year A
Transcribed from a
sermon given on
Feb 13, 2011
At St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
By Rev. Valerie Ann
Hart
Matthew 5:21-37
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Wasn’t it a beautiful day
yesterday? It was the most perfect weather I have ever known. It was so nice
that I went down to the beach and everybody, everybody, was on the beach. There
must have been a million dogs, all running around having a good time and there
was this one poodle, I’ve never seen such a big poodle. It was the size of a
horse.
Now, most of you figured that the
poodle was maybe this big, certainly not the size of a horse. And everybody
knows that there were probably about 65 dogs not a million dogs. And not
everybody could possibly have been on the beach because you are part of
everybody and you weren’t there. So you knew that. You knew that I was exaggerating.
It’s a figure of speech called hyperbola. It is commonly used in rhetoric in
order to get people’s attention and interest and to make a point. We all know
it. We all use it. Who doesn’t, when they are in the middle of a fight or debate,
happen to say, “You never do the dishes!” You don’t say 95 percent of the time
you don’t do the dishes; you say you never do the dishes. And of course the
response is, “But I always take out the garbage.” It’s not, “I take out the
garbage 95% of the time.” We use hyperbola all the time. It makes our speech
and our conversations more interesting.
We as Americans and 21st
century people have gotten very much into facts, and getting it precise and
correct. But it doesn’t make for an interesting speech. Just think about Al
Gore.
We expect some exaggeration, some
hyperbola. In the middle east it is even more expected than it is in our
society. You always exaggerate. No one would have a meal with a friend and
leave and say, “That was one of the better meals that I have had.” You would
have to say “That was the best meal that I have ever had.” And if you didn’t exaggerate
you could insult the other person.
Jesus was a great speaker. One of
the things we can be sure of is that he wasn’t boring to listen to, otherwise
he wouldn’t have had crowds coming out to listen. So he used all the various
tricks of a rhetorician. He used humor, although the way we read scripture we
don’t necessarily recognize the humor that is there. And he used hyperbola,
which he certainly used in this particular passage.
We have to think about this Gospel
passage in context. It’s a continuation of what we have been reading each
Sunday and takes place within the sermon on the mount. He has shared the
beatitudes, which are a whole new way of saying who are blessed by God. In the
line just before this passage that was left out Jesus says, “And your
righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees.” So he has just
said that you have to be more righteous than the Pharisees, and then now he is describing
what that righteousness would look like.
There are a lot of people who say
they take the Bible literally word for word, but they are not all blind. And my
guess is that most of them at some point have had their eye lead them astray. But
they didn’t follow the bible literally and pluck out their eyes. And we don’t
have very many people who are missing a hand that they chopped off because they
did something wrong with a hand. Everyone know that Jesus didn’t mean that
literally. He was using hyperbola. He was using exaggeration.
He was reacting to the Pharisaic
mind set, which was to try to follow all of God’s commandments literally. But
there are a lot of commandments in scripture and then there were a lot of other
rules and regulations that had accrued over time. Following them became quite a
difficult process. The lawyers to tried to interpret exactly what it meant. So,
for example, one of the ten commandments is remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
It was generally agreed upon that you should not work on the Sabbath, but what
did it mean to not work on the Sabbath? Well you weren’t supposed to cook, but
you could take food out and put it on the table. You weren’t supposed to load
your donkey down, but what about taking water to your donkey? Well a donkey that
would go an entire day without water would not be healthy, so you were allowed
to water and feed your animals even though that really is sort of work.
So there was a whole process of
trying to figure out exactly what these laws meant and how are you going got
follow each and every one of them. Its sort of like today trying to figure out
the tax code. It is so complicated, and there are so many different situations,
that you have to hire somebody to figure out how to follow it. So the Pharisees
claimed that the were superior because they followed all the laws and rules. Jesus
is saying if you are going to be prove your righteousness by your own behavior,
you must be more righteous than the Pharisees This is what you really need to
do. You can’t use an excuse like divorce to say it is okay to be with another
woman. You can’t say that just because you didn’t murder someone if you have
hate in your heart that you are not sinning. He used this to make the point
that God’s law is not about getting the details right, but about getting the
heart and essence of it right.
Today we are celebrating a baptism
and we will be sharing something called the Baptismal Covenant. The Baptismal Covenant
is the essence of what Episcopalians decided was the most important essence of
what it means to be a Christian. I’d like us to take a look at that right now.
It is in your bulletin, and it
starts on page four. I am going to be talking about the ones that are on the
top of page 5. I am going to start with the last two.
The last one says, Will you strive
for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human
being.” Well if you respect the dignity of every human being you are not liable
to murder them. And if you respect the dignity of every human being you are not
liable to swear and use nasty language about them. And if you respect the
dignity of every human being you are not likely to commit adultery because you
are not respecting the person you are with or with their spouse.
The one before that is, “Will you
seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.” These statements
are positive and not negative. They are not “Thou shalt nots.” These are things
you are supposed to do, and if you really do them, if you really love your
neighbor as yourself, you are not going to hurt other people. You are not going
to steal from them. You are not going to lie to them. And if you are striving
for justice you are not going to swindle people. You are not going to be
concerned primarily for your own good.
So you can look at those last two
as the foundation of how do we live a good life - not specifics, not a whole
list of laws. The thing I like best about our baptismal covenant is the top one
on page 5. And it says, “Will you persevere in resisting evil and and whenever
you fall into sin repent and return to the Lord?” It doesn’t say if you fall into sin, it says whenever you fall into sin. We know we
can’t follow every law. We know that there will be times when we will be
attracted to someone we shouldn’t be attracted to. We know there will be times
when we will say or do things that will hurt another person or hurt ourselves.
But we have the gift through Christ to know that we will be forgiven if we
repent and return to the Lord.
In the first reading today, God
says to God’s people, choose life or death, blessings or curses. Make a choice.
Every day we have many opportunities to make the only choice that really maters,
which is do we choose to turn toward God and toward love or do we turn away
from God and away from love. That’s what repentance means. It is to turn
around.
In the early centuries of the
church, when someone would come for baptism they would quite literally turn
around. They would start the service facing to the west which represented that
which is not of God and at some point during the service they would physically
turn around to face the east which represented God and light and new hope.
Each day, each moment of each day,
we make a choice. We choose life, God and love or we choose what leads to death
which is that which is not of love and not of God. So one aspect of our baptism
is that choice. That choice to turn to God.
Today we are having the privilege of
witnessing and participating in the baptism of Savannah Grace. And even though
she is too young to choose, she will be growing into that. Her parents and her
God parents will be making those vows for her, so I would like to ask the baptismal
party to come forward.
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