SERMON NOTES for FEBRUARY 20, 2011

Feb20: Lev 19:1,2,9-18; Ps 119:33-40 ; 1Cor 3: 10-11, 16-23, Mt 5: 38-48

Yesterday morning I was All Saints church. I was there to celebrate the birth of a new nation. Our Sudanese brothers and sisters were celebrating the creation of Southern Sudan. So much blood, suffering and hardship went into this day. Most of the people present were shaped in the long years of war with North Sudan. It was a day of joy many thought they might never see. They know there is a long struggle ahead in forming their new country in a good way, but they took this day to celebrate, to give God thanks for this new day in the life of their people. The biblical text that informed their celebration was the liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt and the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey. In between liberation and the land were 40 years in the wilderness. Those were not easy years. The people were utterly dependent on God – for food for water for guidance. Yet over all those years they forgot the ways of slavery and learned to be free. They became God's people ~ a holy people.
And so our first reading starts:
The LORD spoke Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.
And in the verses that follow, the meaning of holiness – what it looks like is laid out. And the rules, the injunctions are good. They are common sense:
You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. You shall not defraud your neighbour;and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a labourer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind... You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people...
And you can hear God's attention to the poor and alien, the labourer, the blind, the deaf – encouraging us to pay attention to the least and last. And of course the passage for today ends with “you shall love your neighbour as yourself...” which Jesus incorporates into his great commandment. These rules and others became “the holiness code” for the people of Israel. The psalmist today sings his love of this code. He piles up words for it:
the way of your statutes, your law, your commandments, your decrees, your ways, your ordinances, your precepts...
There are so many ways to name the pattern of holiness – the way of life shaped by our love of God and God's ways?

But I want to think about Paul's image:
Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?... God's temple is holy, and you are that temple.
If we had had children's time this morning I would have held up all the plans we have of our new church and The WestEnd Commons”. And we would have talked about what we were building and about all that needs to go into plans to make a good and sturdy building. We might have talked about structural engineering and a strong foundation and structure for the building, and the mechanical systems we need to heat and cool things, and all the plans for lighting and water and walkways and common areas...and what it means to follow the building code. Is our building project not analogous to God building a holy people – shaping their way of life with a holiness code? And then we hear again Paul saying that each of us is “God's temple, that God's Spirit dwells in us and God's temple is holy...” Perhaps St.Matthew's project is not about building a new building, but all about building a new people, about releasing God's Spirit that dwells within us, about relearning the ways of holiness – ways of seeing our neighbour as God's holy temple.

That was part of what Jesus was about in his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. The two teachings today are very challenging. He radicalizes the seemingly natural human inclination to retribution. I've been hit. I hit back. I've been hurt. I make the other hurt. He says no. Take back the power of the evil doer, the bully. Redefine your response. Choose your reaction, otherwise the cycle continues and even escalates. But it takes a very strong person to absorb evil and not respond in kind. It takes the kind of energy that suffers the cross. But we have seen it in our time. We have seen the power of Ghandi, of Martin Luther King, of Mandala to redirect the energy of the oppressor. And then we hear Jesus say:
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven...
children of God, bearing, sharing, shining with God's Spirit on friend and foe alike. What kind of love is that​? How do we build up and nurture that kind of deep loving. There is nothing sentimental about this. It is hard disciplined work. It comes from a deep living connection with the |Holy. Only then can we have the freedom of Spirit, the grace and generosity to love even our enemies...

But from that place comes new life, new relationships, new ways of seeing and caring for the world. It is spirit work that our world desperately needs. We can create new nations but not the peace and justice we long for. We can create ways to go to Mars and back but cannot heal our relationships and live within our limits. It's not about buildings. It's about freeing ourselves to be ourselves ~ the temples of God that we are. It's not about codes and commandments even. Its about nurturing, developing, knowing, trusting, living the Spirit of God that dwells within each of us. That is what Jesus is about in the new creation. That is what all those years in the wilderness were about. That is what we're all about.