Diving into the Wreck: a sermon for Year A, Epiphany 6

Preached on Sunday, February 13, 2011 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. Lectionary readings this sermon is based on can be found here.

Well. Let’s not dither about, shall we? Let’s dive right into our gospel reading for the day, and let’s do so because it seems to be saying to us, to very many if not most of us, “Hey, you! Out of the pool!” Our reading from Matthew gives us Jesus as that whistle-blowing, rule-abiding, power-abusing lifeguard we all knew as kids who with a shrill trill of his whistle would put a stop to all our summer fun, shouting, “No Horseplay! Out of the pool!” As if the best part, the whole point, of going to the swimming pool on a summer day was not in fact to engage in horseplay.

Jesus is speaking to the crowd that has gathered at the foot of the mount to hear him preach the Sermon on the Mount. He has intoned the beautiful Beatitudes to the people as we heard a couple of Sundays ago. And from this mountain he has called his listeners the salt of the earth, and a light unto the world, as we also heard on a recent Sunday. 

It was in our gospel reading last Sunday that Jesus reminded us that he came into the world not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. So, this Sunday, in the passages of Matthew’s gospel that immediately follow this pronouncement, not too surprisingly we find Jesus expounding upon the law as it has been received through Scripture and tradition.

And just what does Jesus say to the crowd? What is his interpretation of the law? He starts with the sixth of the Ten Commandments, the injunction against murder. Not only does Jesus tell us that murder is wrong, but he says even anger, any enmity between ourselves and our brothers and sisters is wrong. It’s not only a literally murderous rage we should worry about, but any rage or anger that impairs our relationships is subject to God’s judgment. 

Next up is the Seventh Commandment, the injunction against adultery. Adultery was a crime that was very well articulated, maybe even over-articulated, in Jewish law in Jesus’ day. Adultery was defined as a married woman’s having sexual relations with a man other than her husband. It was considered a violation of the husband’s rights to his wife as his exclusive property and his right to the assurance that any children born to his wife would be, in fact, his own. 

But Jesus focuses his opprobrium not so much on the act of adultery but on what proceeds it. This is the famous ‘Jimmy Carter’ confession -- Jesus says it’s wrong even to lust for another’s wife, not just to carry that lust to its conclusion. 

Next comes the divorce section of the passage. And here, Jesus goes a bit off the rails. There is no Scripture in the Old Testament, nor does any law in the tradition that Jesus inherited prohibit divorce. Divorce was legal. And the law said that any married man -- and only the man, not his wife -- could seek a divorce for almost any reason. 

Though it seems that this passage deals with divorce specifically, it’s really a continuation of the pronouncement against adultery. If a man divorces his wife for no good reason, he is guilty of sin because he causes her to sin by dissolving her legal marriage, and the man who takes up such a woman as his wife is guilty of sin as well, because she has been deprived of her marriage with no say, perhaps deprived of it unwillingly so. Not only is adultery within one’s heart a sin, but Jesus calls it adultery when the legal strictures of divorce are exploited unfairly and without good reason.

This passage is steeped in the patriarchy of its time, and some of the patriarchal attitudes we find here are still with us today. And Jesus’ teaching is not essentially anti-patriarchal, much as we might wish it were. But it is worth noting that in these teachings against adultery, it is the men involved in adultery that Jesus is calling to account. The divorce and adultery laws and customs favored men, and often left women vulnerable to social and economic ruin, to punishment poverty, penury, starvation and death. The system in Jesus’ day already dealt harshly with women involved in adulterous relationships. But here, Jesus is saying that men who participate in adultery, through lust and through the male-privilege ensconced in the divorce laws, are just as guilty of sin.

Next comes the prohibition against swearing oaths, which seems somewhat curious to us today. And rather than unpack this prohibition at length, it might be time to look at just how literally Jesus meant this and his other pronouncements to be taken.

As we heard, in the section dealing with anger, Jesus says that it is a sin even to speak in anger, specifically to call someone a fool. He says that anyone calling another a fool is subject to the fires of hell. Well, just a while later in Matthew, at chapter 23, verse 17, Jesus is debating the Pharisees, and in anger he says to his adversary, “You blind fool!” Oops! Awkward….

And then a bit later in Matthew 23, in verses 19-22, we’re still involved in the same argument with some Pharisees, and the subject of swearing oaths comes up. Now, I’ll be honest with you, these legalisms about oaths are labyrinthine to say the least -- and you can get lost down that rabbit hole if you want to, perhaps never to come out again, and I want to avoid that here. But let us just note that in this later passage in Matthew, Jesus responds to a legal opinion of the Pharisees about swearing oaths by saying that any oath one swears, by heaven or by things on earth, is in fact binding -- directly contradicting the teaching on swearing oaths we have in our reading today.

So, clearly, it’s not the products of these preachings of Jesus -- not new regulations or interpretations of the law -- that are the point of our gospel reading today, but rather it is the process Jesus is engaging in that commands our attention. 

What Jesus is doing in today’s reading from Matthew is reaffirming the ancient law, which he has said he comes not to abolish but to fulfill. And most importantly, Jesus is radicalizing that law. Now, when most of us hear the word radical, we think of something that is extreme, that is on the outer fringes, something that is way, way beyond the pale. But in fact, radical means not the outer edge of possibility, but rather the inner core, the root. In fact, the root of the word radical is the Latin word radix, which means literally root. In this sense, the opposite of radical is not traditional or conservative, as we might think based on how the term is often used in our political discourse. No, the opposite of the word radical, in this sense, is superficial. 

Jesus is radicalizing the law by leaving behind the legalistic, superficial interpretations of the law, with all its various cases and applications and interpretations, and looking to see what lies at the heart of the law, and by doing so, he invites us to look into our own hearts when we transgress God’s law, when we sin.

Jesus isn’t saying, “Out of the pool!” He’s saying, “Dive in, dive into the deep end. Dive into the wreck of your transgressions and find what lies deepest within you and your actions. For therein lies the cause of your sin -- and your pathway to salvation.” 

‘Thou shalt not murder or kill’ is not an injunction against war or bodily harm, it is at its root, at its heart, an injunction to live in love, to seek harmony and concord with everyone else everywhere else. And in the example Jesus gives, we might take his teaching about leaving the altar to make peace to mean that even more important than our duty to God is our duty to love one another. After all, we know it is our God who finds it easier to forget our callousness and disregard of him; it is our God who finds it easier to forgive us, than we do with each other. 

Recently, in a speech given on Martin Luther King Day, Robert Bentley, the governor of Alabama said to those gathered to hear him, “So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister…”   I think the good governor has his cart before his horse, and if I’m reading today’s gospel passage correctly, I think Jesus would concur. And I take it from our reading from 1st Corinthians today, that Paul might have a problem with the governor as well. When we treat each other as brothers and sisters, when we put to rest the anger and enmity that separates people of different faiths, of different nations and different opinions, then we can come to God’s altar as true Christians. It doesn’t matter whether our brothers and sisters are Christians; it matters whether we are, in deed as well as word. 

The injunctions against lust and adultery and divorce are not so much injunctions against sexual thoughts and actions or about how ironbound the strictures of marriage are or should be, rather they are a call to love one another in a healthy way, to intimately love one another in such in a respectful way. We are called to help one another, to strengthen one another in our intimate relationships. We should not be predatory; we should not take advantage of each other. We should not make one another more vulnerable or weaker or more dependent; but rather our committed relationships should make us safer and stronger. We should build each other up, not tear each other down. We should join in true partnerships, not take hostages. And the sum of our coming together in intimate love and committed relationships should make us greater than we are individuals, greater than the sum of our parts. 

And when we endeavor to make assurances, when we are called upon to tell the truth, we should do so simply and honestly, regardless of what the consequences might be. We should be believed not because we swear on the Bible or on our mother’s grave, but rather we should be believed because our “Yes, Yes” or our “No, No” comes from deep within us. When it really matters, we should go deep down, to the root, and speak from the deepest part of our selves and our hearts, and tell the truth.

As our Old Testament reading from Ecclesiasticus tells us, we can do this, we have a choice. We can keep the commandments and act faithfully, we only have to choose to do so. But choose we must. We have to choose peace over fear; we have to choose true, healthy love over selfishness and exploitation. We have to tell our truth when it matters most, from a place of faith in God, that whatever the consequences, the truth will set us free.

The poet Adrienne Rich wrote a poem about scuba diving into a shipwreck. She called the poem and the collection that contained it Diving into the Wreck. One of my favorite lines in the poem reads, "I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail."

If we as Christians are willing to, if we choose to, we can dive deep into the wreck of our sins and transgressions to see what lies at their heart, at their root. At the root of our anger, do we find old resentments we’re unwilling to let go of? Old injuries we’re unwilling to allow to heal? Do we punish with our anger those around us for wrongs that lie elsewhere, in our past, wrongs done us by people in our past? In our committed relationships, are we true partners, or do we cling to one another out of fear of being alone? Do we hold our partners hostage, rather in hold them deep within our hearts? Are we willing to let our partners grow and change, even if that growth and change feels threatening? And what about the little lies we tell? Underneath them, are their bigger, darker lies we tell ourselves? We tell our little lies to keep from hurting someone’s feelings or to keep the peace, but do those lies really protect us, keep us from the conflict that we are so afraid of, hide the truth from one we think might disapprove of us if they knew the truth? Is our mendacity nothing more than a smokescreen we hid behind because we don’t really believe what Jesus told us, that the truth will set us free?

If we dive deep into our sins and transgressions, to the radical heart of our wrongs, we’ll learn a great deal about who we are. And if we are willing to do so, if we choose to do so, we can dive deeper into God’s law, into God’s love for us, for there we will find true treasures that prevail. We’ll find laws that seek to draw us into greater love with one another and with God. We’ll find commandments that seek to draw us down deeper, below the surface, beyond the superficial into the root of who we are, who we all are, as God’s children.

So, dive in deeper, move beyond the surface, dive into the wreck. For the wreck is none other than the cross of Christ -- and on it is found a healing grace and forgiveness, and a compelling, strengthening, unfailing love.

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins