Stuck in a Web

Sunday, February 12, 2017
6th Sunday after Epiphany

A note about today’s text: We use texts from the ecumenical Revised Common Lectionary, assigned for each Sunday. Sometimes those texts seem particularly challenging to wrestle with. Today’s assigned gospel reading tackles some tough topics – violence, anger, adultery, divorce, etc – and comes to us in the 21st century in 1st century language. These texts are part of our scriptures, and as such we are called to wrestle with their gift and challenge, we try our best to do so in the larger context of God’s grace and welcome for all people and in light of a God who forgives and renews no matter what brokenness enters our lives.

Listen to audio of today’s gospel reading and sermon:

[Jesus said to the disciples:] 21“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ 22But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. 23So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. 25Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.
  27“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out 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. 30And if your right hand 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 go into hell.
  31“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
  33“Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ 34But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” – Matthew 5:21-37

One of the most annoying things in the world has to be getting caught in an unseen spider web. Out for a nice early morning walk in the woods, you know you’re the first one out when you find yourself every few hundred yards violently swatting at the invisible sticky strands of spider silk, appearing to anyone else as someone ineffectively fighting an imaginary attacker. Tangled in a trap you weren’t expecting, one you didn’t think was even meant for you but one that seems to stick with you longer than it should. A trap that won’t seem to let go of you…not unlike our gospel reading this morning.

For those of us who are figuratively out for a lovely morning stroll in the woods, content that we more or less mostly avoiding the major pitfalls of the ten commandments – no murder, no adultery, no swearing falsely, Jesus quickly manages to catch each of us in a trap. I think this reading tends to bother us so much, not because it names sins that have a particular stigma but because it casts the net so wide that not one of us walks away without getting a reprimand, without getting reminded that we regularly fail to live up to Jesus’ standards. Anger, resentment, lust, broken relationships, and subtle lies and deceptions. It’s as if Jesus is describing here what it means to be human. And we don’t like it. The accusations stick with us, get under our skin, bother us, because we know we’re trapped. We just want to get rid of the accusations that stick to us. Jesus isn’t talking about the other people, the bad people, them. Jesus is talking about us. Telling us to cut out an eye or cut off a hand. Throwing us in prison. Telling us that hell awaits.

And Jesus is right. Eternal destiny aside, we live in a hellish prison of our own making where our daily actions threaten our own lives and those of our neighbors. We are stuck together in a complicated web of relationships, and none of them is perfect. We are stuck together, with other imperfect people sometimes fighting those ties, frustrated at our own and others’ imperfections. We are people in the midst of an extremely polarized political situation, who perhaps come today refusing to consider any kind of reconciliation with our neighbors who are different. We are people who, in the words of the first reading, fail to choose life for ourselves and for others. We who thought we were doing a pretty good job of following Jesus.

Preacher Karoline Lewis says this so clearly, that I want to quote her at length here: “In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus insists that life is threatened when anger and judgment and insult reign. Life is threatened when women are objectified, merely fulfillment of sexual desire or the carrying on the family name. Women, Jesus insists, are not culture’s for the taking. Life is threatened when women are consistently reduced, even discarded, based on their capacity to satisfy privileged and patriarchal needs and their capacity to bear children. Life is threatened when you do not follow through with oaths you make.

“In other words, Jesus is saying that interpreting the law is far more complex than you make it out to be. And if your interpretations lead to death — the silence of voices, the discounting of the personhood of the other, the disrespect and demeaning of entire groups of people, the labeling (which is a nice way to say calling names) thereby putting people in their place — then you have to think long and hard about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.”

That’s the essence of this trap. That it makes us think long and hard about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. What does it mean to engage the tangled web of relationships in such a way that every last person is honored not only in action but in thought, too? Is that even possible? It’s a high calling from a God who deeply values our human relationships with one another. We who tend to think of ourselves as managing pretty well, are caught just as much as anyone else in this mess.

But trapping us isn’t what Jesus is ultimately about. Nor is the Jesus who has just in the previous paragraphs named us blessed and beloved, salt and light for the world, actually asking us to cut limbs and gouge out eyes today. But Jesus is acknowledging that we are trapped in a web of imperfect relationships with imperfect people where we end up angry, lusting, harboring resentment, lying to get our way. Acknowledging, it needs to be said, that divorce is painful even when it is the best or only option available, and that all parties should be cared for when that is the case.

It seems to me that God could try to disentangle us from the web, in a sense dismantling our community. Or that God could sweep the whole web out of existence. But instead Jesus chooses a third option to join us on our walk, to get tangled up in that crazy complicated web of relationships with us. We confess this every week in our creed – that God becomes flesh for us. Jesus enters our human sphere to become a recipient of our misdirected love, our anger turned to violence, our false accusations, all the way to the cross and back again. This same Jesus who warns of the terrible mess we make of things, who warns of hell itself, descends, we confess in that same creed, to our hell and death to raise it up, to name us holy and beloved in the midst of our hellishly violent world. The trap he lays out for us is one he knowingly enters himself to get our messy web of anger, lust, and lies stuck on him.

That’s what makes our understanding of community different in the church. As we gather today after worship in our annual meeting to celebrate our ministry together and to make decisions together about moving forward, we gather as an imperfect community. We don’t always agree, we don’t always live up to our best selves, we don’t always get it right, but we believe that Christ is somehow tangled up in this imperfect community, and that begins to transform our imperfect efforts into a church that proclaims good news and the promise of hope and resurrection, transforms our work into God’s work for the sake of a broken and hurting world.

And so we approach this table, not always fully repentant, not always having resolved our differences with one another, not always seeing the vision that God has in mind, but seeking God’s offer of life for us here, an offer of life that sticks with us despite our occasional efforts to fight it off. So come and be nourished, you who are stuck in a complicated and broken world, that you may know God’s sticking with you and God’s work of making you whole again.

-Pastor Steven Wilco