Thankful Memorial, Chattanooga
February 16, 2020
Year A, Epiphany 6

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 119:1-8
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

There is a rationale behind the selection of scriptures we read in church each Sunday.  Sometimes, that logic is hard to find, but this morning, most of our readings go together in an obvious way.  Deuteronomy’s imagining of the words Moses spoke to the Israelites before they crossed into the Promised Land, the Psalmist’s first verses in a long song of praise, and a portion of Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Matthew’s gospel – all of them have one thing in common: God’s Law.  Clearly, we are meant to put these texts in conversation with each other and see what they tell us about ourselves and God. 

But, if we do that work too quickly, we’re liable to come to some pretty alarming conclusions.  “If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God[…] then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you” says Moses in Deuteronomy.  “But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray[…] you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land.”  With just a cursory glance at this text, we might assume that our relationship with God is purely transactional.  Follow God’s rules and you’ll be blessed with health and wealth.  Don’t and you’ll die.  So, choose “life and prosperity” over “death and adversity,” as Deuteronomy puts it, by choosing God’s Law.

In a way, there is some comfort in this reward-or-punishment type of Bible-reading.  Don’t murder people.  Don’t lie.  Don’t worship idols and you’re good to go with God’s promises.  Easy peasy.  But such comfort is short-lived the moment you turn to Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Matthew’s gospel.  Because there, Jesus says it’s not enough to just refrain from murdering people; you’ve also got to refrain from doing violence to others in your mind and heart.  It’s not enough to just avoid adultery; you’ve got to always keep your desires in check, too.  The way Jesus interprets God’s Law, it all of a sudden becomes much more difficult to keep up our end of the bargain – and then what happens to God’s promises to us??

But, the truth is, that’s a misreading of the Bible.  Our relationship with God has never been and will never be a transactional one.  For God’s Law is a gift of God’s love and that love always, always precedes our responses to it.  In other words, God doesn’t give us rules to live by so that we can try to earn God’s love.  Rather, God loves us so much that God gives us the law of life.  And so, the psalmist spends all 176 verses of Psalm 119 (of which, thankfully, we only sang the first eight) praising and thanking God for the gift of the Law as a sign of that love.  And to understand why the psalmist is so enraptured with the idea of God’s Law or torah, we need to rethink what torah really means in this context. 

Usually, we think of laws as rules that we are required, by a higher authority, to follow, like a speed limit, for example.  But what if we think of the Law of God more in the way that we think of, say, the law of gravity?  Now, law isn’t a set of rules to follow but an explanation of the way things function in our lives and in our world.  Considered this way, God’s Law is a description of the way in which we human beings best function in God’s good creation.

Think of it like this: if you disobey a civil law, like the speed limit, you might get a ticket.  But, if you tried to disobey the law of gravity by stepping off a cliff – well, that’s something altogether different.  Similarly when we push against the Law of God, we won’t function very well in God’s community here on earth. 

That’s what Jesus tries to tell his followers in the portion of his sermon we heard in Matthew’s gospel.  His language is harsh: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out… it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”  But Jesus is desperately trying to get our attention because he knows what the writer of Deuteronomy knew, too.  This law-talk is not just theory.  It is life-and-death.  We have got to figure out how to walk in the ways of the Lord so that we don’t step off the side of a cliff because we haven’t understood the basic Law of God’s kingdom. 

And if it’s Jesus’ mention of hell that discomforts us then we are not really listening to him in the first place.  Because if we are angry with another member of God’s community and we allow that anger to fester into resentment, if we disregard the feelings of another enough to cheat them or cheat on them, if we objectify others and use or abuse them for our own selfish purposes until we have isolated ourselves from true love, if we lie to our brothers and sisters or fail to be transparent about who we are such that we leave a legacy of broken relationships and hurt, then what else are we doing but creating our own variations of hell right here on earth anyways.  We humans don’t need God to throw us into hell; we do it very well on our own.

But in Moses’ words in Deuteronomy, in Psalm 119, from Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, we hear a much harder and higher calling, not to strain against the ways of God’s world but to delight in them.  As Jesus’ followers, we are called to deepen our commitment to God’s law for us and root our lives in God’s desire for our flourishing.  So, to put a positive spin on Jesus’ message in Matthew, let us not just avoid murder, but rather work to share God’s abundant life with all.  Let us not just refrain from cheating on our spouses, but give of ourselves in trusting relationships with one another.  Let us not just stop telling lies, but show by authentic words, deeds and actions in the world the power of truth to overcome fear and hatred. 

When we strive for these things, when we seek thus to walk in the way of the Lord, we do not earn God’s love but we do bask in it.  And that’s why the Psalmist can praise God’s Law so powerfully and so passionately, for “Happy are they … who walk in the law of the Lord!  Happy are they who observe his decrees and seek him with all their hearts!”  Amen.