Sunday, February 12, 2023
/The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
Sirach 15:15-20; Psalm 118:1-8; 1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Matthew 5:21-37
The Rev. Clint Brown
Today is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, born in a log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky in the year 1809. Without question he was one of our greatest presidents, if not the greatest, and if we had the benefit of his insight today, I’m sure there would be plenty worth hearing from someone celebrating their 214th birthday! But as it is, he has long since left us, tragically so. But he did leave behind a record of a great many wise and insightful things, and among many examples I had to choose from, the one that came to my mind as I prepared for this sermon was a certain letter that he wrote to his stepbrother who had asked for an advance of money. It is a brief letter and won’t take too long to read. Here is what it says:
Dear Johnston:
Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think it best to comply with now– At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me "We can get along very well now" but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again– Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct– What that defect is, I think I know– You are not lazy, and still you are an idler– I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work, in any one day– You do not very much dislike to work; and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it– This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty, and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children that you should break this habit– It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it; easier than they can get out after they are in–
You are now in need of some ready money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work "tooth and nails" for somebody who will give you money for it– …Now if you will do this you will soon be out of debt and what is better you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again– But if I should now clear you out, next year you will be just as deep in as ever– You say you would almost give your place in Heaven for $70 or $80– Then you value your place in Heaven very cheaply for I am sure you can with the offer I make you get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months work– You say if I furnish you the money you will deed me the land; and if you don’t pay the money back, you will deliver possession— Nonsense! If you can’t now live with the land, how will you then live without it? You have always been kind to me; and I do not now mean to be unkind to you– On the contrary, if you will but follow my advice you will find it worth more than eight times eighty dollars to you–
Affectionately
Your brother
A. Lincoln[1]
As you were listening, you may have recognized in this kind of talking what most of us today would call “tough love.” Lincoln may sound harsh, but that’s all because he would be failing his brother is he did not give him a good dose of reality. Lincoln is not saying tough things because he wants to demoralize his stepbrother, or because he gets a kick out of kicking a man when he’s down. No, what Lincoln wants to do is convert his stepbrother to the idea of personal responsibility. And I think that that is precisely what God has been up to since the beginning. It is the idea of moral and ethical seriousness that God had in mind when He gave the Law, but a Law that for a thousand years, from the day Moses came down from the mountain, the Israelites had tried and failed and tried and failed again to keep. A new ethic was required.
Now, by the time of Jesus, there was no one who took God as seriously or were more exemplary in doing what the Law required than the Pharisees. In fact, we cannot understand what Jesus’s sermon is about if we don’t look on them and admire them. For here is Jesus saying that not even what they are doing is enough. The best are not the best. “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (v. 20, emphasis added). That is what he tells the crowd, and the crowd must have turned to each other in utter astonishment. And so Jesus uses six illustrations to explain his meaning, of which we hear four today: concerning anger, concerning adultery, concerning divorce, and concerning oaths.
“You have heard that it was said…but I say…” In each case Jesus uses this formula, but, in each case, it is important to know that Jesus is not displacing the Law with a better one; the Law is not being destroyed, but perfected. What was old is good, it’s just that the emphasis has been all wrong. The problem is the age-old conflict between the outer and inner forms of spirituality, and here Jesus shows which tail should be wagging the dog. It is not what someone does that defines their position for Jesus, but, rather, who they are. What he is driving at in each of his examples is, “What does my action and speech reveal about my character?” Am I angry with someone? Jesus says that that is as punishable an offense as murder. Notice that. Notice that as devastating as the effect of our anger may be toward its object, and it cannot help but be terrible, Jesus dwells not on that but rather on the danger to me. And that, then as now, is “the best way of securing the aim of the old Law. A [person] will not murder without a motive, and the [heart] that excludes hatred and anger will not only be justified in itself, but will [also] make murder impossible.”[2]
Or take the prohibition against adultery. It is perhaps easier to see in this case more than any other how sin must be committed in the mind before it can be committed in action, and so Jesus proposes a radical treatment: if your eye causes you to sin, he says, gouge it out; and if your hand offends, cut it off (5:29-30). This is, of course, is the language of hyperbole, and its meaning is crystal clear: as valuable as an eye or a hand is, nothing is more valuable than our character. And what is “character” except the way we properly relate to each other?
In the same way that sound needs air to propagate, so living God’s law requires people. The message of Jesus’s sermon is relationship. The Law was always meant to be expressed chiefly in our behavior toward one another. Moral and ethical seriousness, about which Lincoln wrote in his letter and of which we have been speaking, is not an added-on thing, it is the whole thing; and so we want to become the kind of person who cannot err in this most vital of arenas. As our own Bishop Monterosso is fond of saying, there are many ways to love our neighbor, but there is only one way to love God – and that is by loving our neighbor. Learn that and the kingdom of God will have been born within you.
[1] Abraham Lincoln to Thomas Lincoln and John D. Johnston, 24 December 1848, accessed February 11, 2023, https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D200534. Some spelling and punctuation has been modernized.
[2] Theodore H. Robinson, The Gospel of Matthew, The Moffatt New Testament Commentary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1960), 39.