Time to Teach Us Well: A Sermon for 6A Epiphany

 I have been seeing a lot of really bad behavior lately. 

The heckling during the State of the Union address last Tuesday was over-the-top. We have already had some one yell, "You lie!" at President Barack Obama, a sign of disrespect that only further underscored racial tensions since the person yelling was a white man and the Obama is black. 

At least that Representative faced consequences from the chamber for being out of line.

That won't happen to the likes of Marjorie Taylor-Green or Matt Gaetz. 

Times in Congress have changed drastically.

The Republicans have hamstrung Speaker Kevin McCarthy by making him agree that any one member of Congress can call for McCarthy's removal as Speaker. McCarthy entered into that devilish deal in exchange for the votes of the Chaos Caucus so he could win the Speakership. This after 14 rounds of polling the Chamber over the course of a week. 

I am not exaggerating by calling them the Chaos Caucus. At one point... Gaetz voted for disgraced former President Donald Trump for House Speaker. 

Chaos and caustically Caucasian.

The growing White Christian Nationalism in America is a threat to everything that I believe the Gospel represents. And it is turning us into an increasingly angry mob. I don't like it. 

And so I am doing as I was told to do in seminary. One of my roles as a priest is to teach. And this sermon is all about teaching. 

Thanks be to God I have Moses, Paul, and Jesus to help!

Texts: Deut. 30:15-20; Ps.119:1-8; 1Cor.3:1-9; Matt 5:21-37

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The other day in the office… we were discussing the recent death of the singer David Crosby. Similar to the Beatles… or Elvis… or Jimi Hendrix… the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash with or without Neil Young… conjures up memories for a couple generations of people.

Their songs have endured the test of time.

One in particular that still gets played is “Teach Your Children.”

Crosby and Stills sang the harmony on that tune, but it was really Graham Nash’s song.

It enjoyed moderate success when it was released in 1970…and one could say it has enjoyed greater achievement since then.

I mean, it’s still in the rotation on Classic Rock stations more than fifty years later.

Nash once told a reporter that he wrote the song after seeing a photograph of a child playing with a toy grenade in Central Park.

This was at a time of the Vietnam War…and Nash was a pacifist.

The photo gave him pause and made him ask,

What are we teaching our children?

After this week’s State of the Union address… where we had elected leaders screaming and heckling during what is normally a staid and dry speech from the president… I think it again begs that question:

What are we teaching our children?

The scriptures this morning are all about teaching.

Moses, Paul and Jesus. Each with words to teach us… guide us toward how to live and move and have our being.

We move from the choices placed before us in Deuteronomy to Paul’s continued correction of the Corinthians… and finally Jesus’ unpacking of the basic tenets of the Torah… the law…in his Sermon on the Mount.

In the Deuteronomy reading…Moses is giving his last testament of God’s will for the people of Israel.

He’s about to die…and the people are preparing to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land.

He’s warning them there are two choices to make in this world: stick with the God and remain in covenantal relationship or reject God and toss out that covenant.

One path leads to life and prosperity.

The other leads to death and misery.

He poses this to the collective.

The choice is collectively theirs.

It’s collectively ours as well.

We’re not talking about life and death as in whether you continue to wake up each morning and breathe.

This is about accepting that we are loved by God…unconditionally.

And by having that love so firmly rooted in our hearts… returning that loving-kindness to the others and to all of creation.

This is the path that Moses says will lead to life and prosperity.

The other choice… to seek and pursue relationship to smaller…lower case “G” gods.

There are lots of those… the things of life that give us temporary satisfaction.

A nice car.

The newest iPhone.

A better wardrobe.

All those things are great…and can give us joy. But they are still just things. And the joy is temporary and fleeting.

The car will break down.

The iPhone will be obsolete in a few days.

And clothes wear out.   

While some states have reduced this passage to a motto on a license plate based on a political ideology… this “Choose Life” teaching of Moses is about something far more important.

This is about sticking close to the Source of Love… and loving God with all our heart, mind, and soul.

When we do that… when we align our lives along that path… love becomes an ethic for action in the world.

Because we have chosen life… we reach out to the person in need.

Because we have chosen life…we seek to make this a more fair and just society.

Because we have chosen life… we listen to each other’s stories… and we talk through our differences with each other with respect for each other.

Do we hear Jesus in this?

Some have said that Jesus is replacing this very basic tenet—choose life or choose death—with what he’s saying in his Sermon on the Mount.

I think that misinterpretation comes because of the way Jesus is phrasing things… “You have heard x-y-z, but I am telling you a-b-c.”

He’s not replacing anything or telling us to forget all those lessons we learned from our Jewish heritage.

No, what Jesus is doing is telling the disciples…and us… to take what we already know… and go deeper with it.

It’s not enough to say that murder is bad. Of course it is!

But in what ways do we kill each other in less lethal ways every day?

What words do we use with one another that are making for little deaths?

If we were to bring this lesson from Jesus into something closer to the 21^st Century… we might say:

“You have heard it said, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ But I say to you, anyone who calls their neighbor a derogatory name or makes false accusations against them leaves a more lasting wound than a broken bone.”

How we treat one another and talk to one another is that important.

The Franciscan friar and mystic Richard Rohr talks about how he spent time in Albuquerque serving as a prison chaplain.

Rohr says that if there was one thing he saw as a common denominator in all the inmates he counseled, it was that none of them ever heard the words Jesus heard at his baptism:

“You are my beloved with whom I am well-pleased.”

That lack of love…spoken and intentional… can do so much to mess up a person’s life.

And yet so many people…not just prisoners… but just people… have never heard that from a parent or grandparent or any person with some level of authority in their life.

In turn… so many people grow up without that grounding in love… which leads to hurt… and hurting others. 

Graham Nash and his bandmates were encouraging parents and children to know they are loved… and yet we see evidence in our politics and in our institutions…that we never seemed to have learned that song… no matter how many times we’ve heard it.

In this Gospel… Jesus is takes the “choose life” message of Deuteronomy and embellishes it. “Choosing life” means seeing the greater picture: that we are all beloved creatures of God.

 We ought to treat each other in the same way.

Live into that love as the center point of our being…give encouragement to one another and… as Paul says… allow God then to give the growth.

Imagine how different everything in the world would be then?!

I encourage all of us to give that some thought. As we pass the peace with each other this morning…remember that each of us is a beloved child of God…and treat everybody right.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.