Sermon

Choose This Day…

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

It would be the first day of class. The professor would hand out the course outline, spelling out the requirements for the semester. The more pages involved, the more I would inwardly groan. “Let’s cut to the chase,” I would say to myself. “What do I have to do to get through this course?”

I wasn’t being lazy. Well, maybe I was. Mostly, though, I was being human. To me, my most precious resource was my time. I didn’t have a lot of it. And that class, as with all of the other classes I was taking, made demands upon -- depleted -- my resources of time. To ask the question, “What do I need to do to get by?” is to operate out of a particular principle: a principle of scarcity. My time is scarce, my resources are scarce -- how am I to parcel it all out?

Jesus addresses this principle of scarcity in today’s gospel passage -- a passage which reflects on the Law of Moses. The Law, as you recall from our first reading today, was highly detailed. It spelled out appropriate behavior for the people of God, and it spelled out the consequences for misbehavior. Do this, and you’re fine. Do that, and you’re in trouble.

But to Jesus, the Law was something different. It was less a series of requirements which, if followed to the letter, would result in an “A” in the course entitled Life 101. Instead, to Jesus, the Law reflected a state of being-in- relationship with God. The Law was not something you obeyed in order to be loved and blessed by God; the Law was something you followed because your life had already been transformed by God’s love and blessing! Do you see the difference here? The human tendency is to view the Law from the perspective of scarcity: something that we have to follow, something that places demands upon our freedom, something that is burdensome, something that lends itself to guilt, something that tempts us into rationalization.

The human perspective often is that of scarcity. And if that is the only lens through which we look, it appears that Jesus is turning up the heat. It isn’t enough merely to commit neither murder nor adultery nor to break promises made in the sight of God. We need to be attentive to those things that happen long before the act is committed: the hate-filled anger, the impersonal objectification of the other sex, our hurtful carelessness with words and relationships. And if we are inattentive these things, the consequences are just as severe.

So long as we live out of a principle of scarcity, we’re going to squirm whenever we hear this passage. Who among us has not gotten angry? Who among us has not objectified another human being? Who among us has not been careless with our promises? Who among us has not missed the mark?  So long as we live in scarcity, we’re going to hear these challenging words of Jesus and glance away, and shut down. Because it’s just too hard to hear.

But in fact, Jesus subverts our tendency toward scarcity. In fact, the entire Sermon on the Mount presents an alternative to scarcity. We can choose instead to live out of abundance. What a concept! We can choose to understand righteousness not as a means to salvation, but as the result of salvation already begun in us.

What do we have in such abundance? God’s love. Each one of us here today is filled to overflowing with God’s love. We’re not always aware of it. Often, we are so consumed with what is scarce in our lives – things like time, energy, money, recognition, approval, meaningful relationships – that we have little or no capacity to feel anything other than absence. And yet God’s love still fills us to the brim, and overflows. It is a love that says to us, “I hurt when you hurt. I grieve when you grieve. I ache when you walk away from me and my ways. When you harm some one or some thing you also harm yourself. You are of me, we are connected.”

When we are in scarcity, we cannot hear this love. Any more than when we were teenagers and heard, “Be home by midnight or you’re in big trouble,” could we hear the love behind it that said, “I love you, I worry about you, I cannot bear to think of harm coming to you.”

We are filled to the brim with the abundance of God’s love. We can choose to ignore it and continue to lead our lives of scarcity; or we can choose to be open to the transformation that life in abundant relationship with God brings to us. We can choose to live out of that abundance, being careful stewards of our lives, our relationships, and our resources (such as they are) because we know that we are beloved children of God.

It comes down to choice: death by scarcity, life by transformation.

What will we choose?

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral