Sermons at St. John's Presbyterian Church

Tough Love: the Beautiful Challenge of the Christian Life

Transcribed from the sermon preached February 20, 2011

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Leviticus 19:1- 3,9-18, 1 Corinthians 3:10-23, Matthew 5:38-48

From Leviticus this morning, we are blessed with basic ethical teaching designed that a community may live in peace and harmony.  This is basic justice, laws we want our children and our children’s children to learn.  They restrain the sinful impulses, which arise from the temptation of not getting caught.  Jesus takes us a step further from restraint from sin to a Spirit force for love.

Some of your income or harvest should be saved for the poor and the alien; we should not steal or make shady deals, or withhold the wages of a laborer.  We get a vision of lady justice, as we are told to not show partiality, but to judge without prejudice.  We are not to gossip or slander another, nor profit from blood.  And we hear the golden rule: love your neighbor as yourself.  Granted these laws refer primarily to interactions between members of the same community and people.  But they are the basic laws of civil community. 

I like the line, you shall not revile the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind: You shall fear your God: I am the Lord.  A key ingredient of these laws seems to be to restrain the temptation of being able to get away with something.  Isn’t this one of the greatest temptations, the temptation that leads to many other temptations.  It is the person being wronged isn’t going to find out it was us temptation.  But there is also the person being wronged won’t be able to do anything about it temptation.  That is, they may know you are doing something, or they may even know exactly what you are doing, but because you have more power or popularity than they do, they cannot do anything to stop nor exact justice.  But the Levitical law drops the fear of the Lord line. God is watching. Watch out.

Now we liberal privileged folks don’t like the idea of a judging God.  We don’t like to think we need to be afraid of God.  But the regular victims of injustice, the poor, the alien, the powerless, the kid who is a bit different on the play yard, the victim of mean girls, those who receive deceptive home loans or lose their savings to faceless, smart unscrupulous and powerful businessmen, peasants living under oil rich monarchs, the innocent victims of wars fought for economic control and profit, they want to hold onto that fear worthy God, a God who can see even when others can’t, and will, in some way or another, sooner or later, exact justice.    Fear God. There are divine consequences for the way we live.

Have you ever been a part of a mob?  Perhaps at a rock concert, or a demonstration, or a school fight? There is something about being a part of a big group, being one among many that often causes people to lose inhibition and exhibit latent tendencies that are normally restrained in individuals.  Our identity somehow seems to become malleable and the group itself seems to take on a life of its own.  This is why it is very easy for those who want to discredit a demonstration, or those who are greedy or violent to influence the nature of a crowd.  So we frequently see looting, scapegoating, lynching, gang rape, and other sort of violence because people become anonymous and overwhelming in the crowd.  We see this on an even larger scale across anxious and fearful societies, as whole groups of people may be slandered or maligned: the Jews, witches, African Americans, Japanese, Muslims, aliens, gays, the poor and even but less frequently the rich.  The Fear and hardship tempt us to find an object to lash out against.  And how easy is it to invoke an angry God to our side, to our group’s side, to our military’s side?  We co-opt an angry God and make him an idol to serve our worldly fear and power.  And it is the rare individual who can step out from within the crowd and name the group anxiety for what it is, to name the violence and injustice and cry stop. 

But these are Leviticus’ natural laws which stand whether they are acknowledged or not, and the violation calls for justice from a God who is not crafted by human hands.  Enter Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount.

The fear of God serves as a restraint against the temptations that arise when we sense that we will not get caught or that we are powerful enough to avoid retribution by the person or persons we harm.  It gives hope to the maligned and powerless that justice will come.  Jesus wants to take us to the next level, from restraint of fear to the embodiment of God’s perfect love.  Rather than the negative motivation of the fear he calls for the positive desire to love.  Rather than the external restraint of the law or the judgment of a God beyond us, he calls us live by the Spirit of the God within.  As Paul says to the Corinthians, we are to have Christ as our foundation, the rock upon which we build.

This gives the poor and everyone who will receive this truth, not only something to hope for, but a way to live, a power independent of the negative forces, which impinge upon us.

You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  When we hear this today, it tends to sound like a tough stance, a justification of violence.  But when it was issued it was a restraint.  It sets the terms of justice at a certain level and no more.  We can assume this law came about as people, perhaps mobs of people, exacted vengeance and justice by doing something even worse than what had been done to them.  If they took out an eye or a tooth, you would take off their head.  Obviously, this law was an attempt to prevent an escalation of violence, to restrain the vigilante mob, and establish just punishment. 

Jesus says, do not resist.  Walter Wink does a great word study on this word resist and notes that it doesn’t mean be a wimp, but don’t react violently.  I share just a piece: “Stasis, the noun form of stenai, means "a stand," in the military sense of facing off against an enemy.  By extension it came to mean a "party formed for seditious purposes; sedition, revolt."  The NRSV translates stasis in Mark 15:7 as "insurrection" (so also Luke 23:19, 25), in Acts 19:40 as "rioting," and in Acts 23:10 as "violent dissension."
    In short, antistenai means more in Matt. 5:39a than simply to "stand against" or "resist."  It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection.  Jesus is not encouraging submission to evil; that would run counter to everything he did and said.  He is, rather, warning against responding to evil in kind by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition.  Perhaps most importantly, he cautions us against being made over into the very evil we oppose by adopting its methods and spirit.  He is saying, in effect, do not mirror evil; do not become the very thing you hate. “ (Wink, Walter. Beyond Just War and Pacifism: Jesus' Nonviolent Way http://www.cres.org/star/_wink.htm)

A key to Jesus teaching is that our sense of pride and self worth is, by the grace of God, independent from the world and in particular, those who may have worldly power over us and intend us harm or shame. 

⁴³“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵so that you may be children of your Father in heaven;

Jesus is not invoking a sense of fear, but love and a desire to emulate.  So the key to all of this radical action is focus on the perfect love of God for us, rather than the evil around us. 

Here Jesus goes beyond the law we read from Leviticus, which addresses relations within the community.  Limited definition of neighbor still leaves room for exploiting other peoples, for that mob mentality, the loss of self within a crowd, which lashes out at the other and shapes a judging God to side with us.  Since Constantine, the Church, thinking it had to preserve the empire to preserve the Gospel, has too often become the mob.  As Gandhi once quipped, "The only people on earth who do not see Christ and His teachings as nonviolent are Christians."  Jesus takes the command to love beyond our kin, our clan, our religion, our nation to include others, even our enemies.  We may decide that we must fight, but we slander Jesus when we try to claim we do it for him or by him.  There is nothing unusual about loving those who love us, about loving our family. Even mobsters do this. We are to love and pray even for our enemy. 

Now the fear of God is still worthy. It connotes reverence, respect, honor and awe. When we get off track of the Spirit as our guide and way, there is nothing wrong with respect for a God of justice.  But God would rather be loving first, that the need for judgment and fear would not be necessary.

In a Time to Break the Silence, a sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. at Riverside Church, while using the text of I John, God is love, he speaks out against the Viet Nam War.  “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tide of hate.  History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.  As Arnold Toynbee says, ‘Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil.  Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.’” (MLK. A Testament of Hope. P.243)

Let us pray: God of love and peace, there are laws whose breaking should cause us fear, for you are a God of justice.  And so we must first ask forgiveness for our sins, especially for the sin of hatred and violence. We pray for those whom we have harmed, and that by our repentance and your forgiveness, they too may be able to forgive us. By your grace, may your Spirit lead our way from within, and our focus on you give us the strength to love even and especially when it is difficult.  Even as we are disrespected and wronged, may our self-esteem stand firm on the solid rock of your love for us.  We pray for those individuals with whom we find ourselves in conflict.  We pray that they and we would turn to your way, and for the hope that we would no longer be enemies but friends.  Give us the strength to love them despite their shortcoming, and that we would be able to stand strong for love even when others stand for hate against us.  Dear God of all people, we pray for our Muslim brothers and sisters, for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and ask that we would end our actions motivated by fear and hatred and that we may we stay true to love, freedom, equality justice and peace.  We pray for those of the other political party, and that you give us the strength to avoid slander and propaganda even as our leaders are attacked.  We pray for the criminals of the back street and Wall Street, that they may fear your sovereign justice and turn from greed. May all have the opportunity for productive work and a living wage.  Finally, we thank you for Jesus, who lived as he spoke, forgiving sins and loving us still, showing us the Way, the truth and the Life.  Come, Lord Jesus.  Amen.