14 Feb 2011, Posted by admin in Ellen's Sermons,Sermons,Sermons & Resources, 1 Comment. Tagged Ellen's Sermons, Sermons

February 13, 2011 – Sermon by Ellen Clark-King

Sermon by The Venerable Dr. Ellen Clark-King

Preached at Christ Church Cathedral Vancouver

Epiphany 6 2011 (February 14, 2011)

Click Here to listen to an audio mp3 version of this sermon.

Epiphany 6 2011

I want to start with a word of warning for any of you who are considering getting married, or already planning a wedding – think twice before inviting a priest currently going through a divorce to be your preacher. Jeremy and I didn’t know that the vice-principal of our seminary was in the process of separating from his wife when we asked him to give the sermon at our wedding. Which meant we were both a little surprised by his choice of text – which came in today’s reading from Deuteronomy – I set before you a blessing and a curse. We were particularly puzzled by which of us was which! It took everyone aback but he ended up saying some profound, if unromantic, things about the challenge of love and how, as a couple, we could choose life.

Love probably wasn’t the first word that went through your head on hearing our gospel – or the passage from Deuteronomy. These readings tend to send our thoughts in directions of law, judgment, guilt and failure. They feel for me like the spiritual equivalent of picking up a heavy burden – my shoulders sag and my step gets less eager and some of the brightness seems to seep out of my day. Hell-fire for those who call anyone a fool, death and curse for those who disobey any commandment, tear out your right eye if it leads you into sin – harsh, demanding, scary words. And yet there is hope and good news lurking here too – they do contain a choice for life and love if we look beneath the surface.

“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.” Well, duh! That’s pretty much a no-brainer – who would do any other than choose life and blessing over death and curses. But talk to any psychologist or counsellor – or even just reflect on your own experience – and you’re likely to find that it’s not such an easy choice as it sounds. We may know that being over-tired makes us irritable and joy-less, but making the choices to make sure we don’t end up there often seems impossible. We may recognize that taking our frustrations out on our partner or our friends isn’t increasing the sum of happiness in the world, but sometimes it just seems too much effort to resist. Most of us are pretty skilled at choosing curses, even when we know that blessings would be better for us as well as for those who have to suffer us.

What both these readings are trying to give us is some help in learning how to choose life. They do this firstly be telling us that our choices matter. And they matter big. Take hell-fire not as a description of a destination after death but as an indicator of the weight of moral, spiritual and even physical consequences that come from some of the ways we choose to act. In a sometimes flippant modern culture both these readings call us to a moral seriousness and a recognition of the consequences of our actions. Our choices matter on a cosmic scale just because we matter on a cosmic scale – there is no such thing to God as an insignificant human being, there is no human hurt which can just be ignored.

And secondly they do this by setting out the sorts of choices that lead to life and the sort of choices that lead to death. Which is where the scary part really starts for  most of us. I haven’t killed anyone but I’ve certainly been angry and insulting in my time. I come from a country where swearing is almost a national pastime and live in a culture which casually uses lust as a marketing tool. I do not take sin seriously enough to contemplate mutilating myself in order to avoid it.

So how can I – and any of us who admit to being less than perfect – read these verses from Matthew as anything other than bad news and condemnation? How can they help us choose life rather than freezing us in guilt and self-doubt?

Part of understanding this lies in first understanding what Matthew is trying to do in the whole Sermon on the Mount. First off, the fact it’s the sermon on the mount is significant. Luke sets this teaching on the plain – but Matthew wants to raise echoes of Mount Sinai in his readers’ minds. Jesus is the new Moses – the one who has authority to interpret the laws of God to God’s people. Jesus is not presented by Matthew as the one who negates the Jewish law but as the one who fulfils it, and, indeed, widens it in unexpected ways. Widens it so that it extends to all people, not just the Jewish nation, but also widens it so that it reaches beyond actions to thoughts and motivations as well.

This widening process is not unique to Jesus within Judaism, it is part of the rabbinic teaching tradition. Rabbis – teachers – take the bud of the books of the law and open them up so that new layers of meaning and significance are revealed – picture the gradual opening of a chrysanthemum with layer after layer of petals coming to the light. Matthew shows Jesus as deeply within this rabbinic tradition, opening up to us new beauties in the revealed law, and doing so with an authority that belongs to the Messiah, the chosen one of God.

These ‘new beauties’ at first read as new strictures – a code of perfection that we will all fail to meet. But the beauty lies in the new picture that is being drawn of what it means to be human, of what a human being choosing life looks like. We are being told that what matters about us is not just what we do, but who we are. That the path to life and blessing is not just about avoiding doing wrong but about a radical transformation into a more loving way of being. It’s not enough just to avoid killing, we must also avoid a habit of mind that dismisses others as of no consequence. It is not enough that we avoid adultery, we must also avoid a habit of mind that objectifies the object of our desire. It is not enough to swear truly, we must become people whose every word is trustworthy and true. We are to become more beautiful, more like God, in our inner habits of mind so that our actions become naturally more gentle, wise and loving.

And we fail. Day after day in big ways and small we fail. And that both matters and doesn’t matter. It matters because our failures are often a source of pain to others, and all human pain matters to God. This is our motivation to try again. But it also doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because God’s love is far bigger than our failure. Whatever the scale of our failure it is never large enough to lose us the love of God – however far we fall we never fall out of God’s loving arms.

In fact acknowledging and accepting our failure is a crucial part of our Christian journey – as well as a crucial part of our growth into mature human beings. It reminds us that we are not supermen and wonderwomen, saving the world through our own great virtue and power. Instead we are fallible human creatures who need one another and who need God if we are to even partially fulfil our potential. When Jesus sets the bar so high he is reminding us of this very thing – we can never reach such loving perfection through our own efforts, but nothing, not even this, is impossible with God.

The path to life abundant, the choice for blessing rather than curse, lies in our willingness to open out human fallibility to the transformative grace of God. We can use these commandments as a rod to beat ourselves with, in which case we will be choosing death not life. Or we can use them as a key to unlock the darker places of our hearts and to let God’s light shine in with forgiveness and hope. There may be a little pain there too – the door can be quite stiff to open – but it is the pain of birth rather than of death. There is life in these hard words of scripture, the transformative life of God’s Spirit breathing into our places of failure and enabling us to love more deeply. Prompting us again and again to choose life, to choose love, to choose God. Amen.