Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 02.16.14
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 5:21-37
We are creatures of habit, and creatures of pattern. Those things we do and do regularly come to give us a sense of identity, forming us and shaping us. They are things we get good at, and that we incorporate into our personhood.
Like, say, the patterns that we get into in the evenings, which for me for decades tended to involve a beer or three. It was just a part of the Hobbitish pattern of my evenings, as I’d settle in with a nice complex Belgian Triple or a warm and easy stout, a bright and light pilsner or...preferably...a hoppily aromatic and potently flavorful imperial India Pale Ale. It was that last category that I used to brew myself, at the only professional grade do-it-yourself brewery on the eastern seaboard.
A typical evening would involve I’d have one as I was making dinner, one with dinner, and one as I settled in to read or write in the evening. I didn’t think much of it. Didn’t really even notice. For five years, ten, then twenty, it was just how I rolled. It was warm and pleasant and relaxing.
But late last year, I realized that this pattern meant that though there were seven days in the week, I was consuming ten days worth of calories. As my metabolism began the deceleration into middle age, I’d gathered so much mass that things weren’t working quite so well. Getting into my motorcycle riding suit was increasingly feeling more and more like what I imagine it’s like to make haggis. I’d begun to more regularly notice Newton’s first law as I moved around the house. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and I was tending to have to stay at rest a whole bunch more than I used to.
Talking to a doctor friend over a few delicious and potently flavorful imperial India Pale Ales, it was pretty plain. “You’d be better off if you were twenty pounds lighter,” he said. “You’ll live longer.”
Twenty pounds? That seemed rather a lot, as I thought about it. That’s about how much an arm weighs, or my leg below the knee, plus maybe an ear. That’s a whole bunch of me to be getting rid of. How can that happen? I shopped around on Amazon for home liposuction kits, but ultimately decided the cleanup wasn’t worth it.
There were just parts of myself I was going to have to remove. Beer every night? It’d have to go. Eating anything and not paying attention, or just snacking because I feel like it? Not any more.
This last week, I hit the mark I’d set for myself last year. There’s this much less of me, just gone, no longer a part of my person. After I hit the mark, I went down and snagged this weight, twenty pounds of iron, and walked around the house a bit. It seemed like a whole bunch of me, gone, like I’d lopped off an arm, and in fact it was. But it wasn’t the mass. It was an entire pattern of living, a way of being. That was what had to change.
And if we are to change, and change ourselves for the better, that’s how we have to do it. It requires a significant and sustained engagement. It takes time. And it takes a willingness to set aside old patterns of behavior and...and this is harder...old patterns of thinking.
That transition from an old pattern of being to a new one was central to what Jesus is teaching here in this fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Last week, we talked about the vital, central nature of these teachings in Matthew for the entirety of the Gospel.
Today’s passage continues the pattern we’ve seen earlier in the Sermon. In the section presented, Jesus starts by saying “You have heard that it was said,” and then takes it to the next level by saying, “But I tell you...” He begins by presenting us with the Biblical teaching on murder in Matthew 5:21 and 22.
We hear that commandment, thou shalt not kill, which is part of the Mosaic Decalogue, the fancy words Bible scholars use when they talk about the Ten Commandments. It comes from Exodus 20:13, and Deuteronomy 5:17. We tend to interpret it as limiting our killyness. No killing!
Generally, the problem Christians have with this verse comes when we look at the passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy, and realize that this messes with many of the ways we run our societies. We get into legalistic arguments about what it means relative to the death penalty, and we argue whether or not the wars our society fights are justified in the eyes of God, quibbling about the nuances between killing and murder.
But those arguments completely miss the point, because Jesus goes further. If you want more than simple justice, if you actually want to participate in what he has declared to be, if you want to aggressively and intentionally make things better and tip the balance to the side of grace, then you need to press it way down deep. You need to pour out your grace, even to those who seem to be taking more from you than is their right.
That means that it isn’t just murder that violates what Jesus is teaching. It’s the intent itself, the anger, the hatred, the willingness to belittle or destroy. It is the heart of it, that inner desire. Not killing people is easy, most of the time, even in traffic and in meetings. We can pull that off. But not wanting to do violence, ever? Not letting ourselves hate, not letting our hearts turn red in tooth and claw? That’s a deep, rough thing.
He goes on, laying out similar, deeper challenges throughout the passages are to come, and among those comes a particularly difficult metaphor. If your eye causes you to sin, pop that sucker out? If your hand causes you to mess things up, off it goes? I mean, really, ew.
It’s a rough, difficult, and heavy-feeling image. It’s a little too brutal, a little too aggressive, a little too bloody. It reminds me, frankly, of that scene in Sam Raimi’s 1987 absurdist horror-comedy classic Evil Dead 2. You know...um...the one where Bruce Campbell’s hand becomes possessed with an evil spirit and tries to kill him? No spoilers here, but the solution comes when the hero wrestles his hand into the toolshed and utters the single line: “Chainsaw.”
OK, maybe that was a spoiler, but it’s such a great line.
I will freely admit that this is not the best family movie night choice, but it’s actually a little more family-friendly than Evil Dead 2: The Musical. And yes, that actually exists.
What we want to hear from Jesus is something easier, maybe something involving a new prescription for our glasses when our eyes bug us. Or maybe we could reword it as “when your hand offends you, try this delightful moisturizing hand lotion.” Jesus
But as hard as that saying is, it has the unfortunate character of actually being true. When we’ve allowed ourselves to become defined by a particular way of thinking, removing that isn’t easy. It’s a difficult thing, changing the way that you feel and view the world. It’s remarkably hard, harder even than changing a comfortable and long-lived pattern of behavior. It requires a change that alters our self.
Excising those things that have woven themselves into us is immensely difficult. When we feel a deep anger towards someone, when we feel we have had a trust betrayed or been fundamentally mistreated, that can become a defining feature of our identity. We can carry that rage in us, and it can weave itself in and out of our soul like a cancer.
When we’ve suffered powerful setbacks and loss, and had our sense of who we are shaken, that can turn itself into self-loathing and despair, which drives us deeper and deeper into darkness.
Those things, if we allow them to thrive and grow in us, will destroy us. Whatever that may be for you, the first step is to identify it, name it, and realize that you yourself do not need it to be a part of you. Then, through a pattern of actions, work your way to it from the outside in, cutting away at it until it is gone from you.
Because some parts of us we simply don’t need, not if we’re going to live into the Reign of God that Christ proclaimed.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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