Matthew 5:13-20
In 1986, the United States Supreme Court delivered a decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. In a 5-4 ruling, the majority affirmed the right of the state to criminalize consensual sexual activity between adults in the privacy of a home. And lest there be any confusion, this was about one thing and one thing only. Many states, including my own Commonwealth of Virginia, had sodomy laws on the books in order to criminalize homosexuality.
I had only been out as a gay man for a couple of years at that point, and only partially out, for if my Army Reserve unit asked and I told, I risked a dishonorable discharge despite having completed my Active Duty obligation, and even faced the possibility of a court martial and time at Fort Leavenworth, the military’s prison in Kansas.
Seventeen years later, the ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick was reversed in Lawrence v. Texas. Of course, marriage equality was still years away, as was protection in employment and housing. By the time the LGBTQ+ community had basic civil rights, I’d moved north, out of the so-called Bible Belt, a region that has subsequently abandoned the Bible and aligned with a heretical cult.
Every week, we remind ourselves here at Park that law and righteousness are not necessarily the same thing, that the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, while the Underground Railroad was criminal, and we are proud to be heirs of the criminally righteousness.
The Supreme Court’s reversal on privacy and sodomy laws aligns well with an oft repeated quote from Thomas Jefferson, carved into the wall of his memorial in Washington, D.C. and taken from a letter he wrote to Samuel Kercheval, a Virginia lawyer and author. Jefferson wrote:
“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
Of course, we look back at Jefferson, so critical in the development of our democracy, and see an enslaver, and by some standards, a rapist, for not only did we mostly cast off slavery as a nation, but we problematize consent when there is an enormous power differential, as there was between Jefferson and his slave and mistress, Sally Hemmings. To quote Hamlet, Jefferson is “hoisted by his own petard,” being cast as a barbarous ancestor.
Lawfulness and lawlessness are part of our national conversation these days, a lawless regime engaged in ethnic cleansing of opposition party enclaves while claiming those they target due to ethnicity and national origin are the actual lawless ones, presumably including five year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.
Law and authority were very much part of the national conversation in the time of Jesus as well, and later in the time of Paul, inflection points when it comes to following Jesus and religious law, and following Jesus and civil law. And I’d like to suggest that we come to opposite conclusions.
Christianity has been plagued by supercessionism for far too long, and with genocidal consequences. This is the idea that God’s covenant with the followers of Jesus supersedes the covenant with the Israelites. It is literally stated in every Christian Bible, for covenant and testament are the same thing. Every time we say “Old Testament,” we are suggesting that the covenant between God and the children of Abraham is no longer valid.
Many Christians believe, explicitly or implicitly, that Jesus came to found a new religion to replace the Judaism of his day. There is zero evidence of that, even with the gospels being written by an increasingly Gentile movement decades after the execution of Jesus. In today’s reading from Matthew, Jesus says that he has not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. The Law in question is the Mosaic Law, the 613 commandments God supposedly gave to Moses on Mount Sinai.
The Mosaic Law was actually developed over centuries, much of it after worship was centralized under a priestly caste in the Temple. But that Law was the cultural and religious context of Jesus. Though the gospels use a number of archetypes from the Israelite tradition for Jesus, including Messiah, Son of Man, and Law-Giver, there can be little doubt that Jesus ultimately thought of himself as a Jew preaching a Jewish reform, not as the founder of a new religion.
Thinking about this cultural context can help us understand what Jesus is saying. The Law had become burdensome in two ways. First, even at the time of Jesus, parts of the Law were centuries old and hard to follow in the context of a colony that was fairly cosmopolitan, no longer a small system of tribes and clans. We know exactly what it was like trying to live under an outdated legal code, for America is plagued by privileged white men who argue for an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution based on the thinking of the late Enlightenment, before Darwin, Oppenheimer, and Bad Bunny, when white men had the most privilege.
Interestingly, during the time of Jesus, the major Jewish movement that tried to interpret the ancient law for modern times, at least modern to First Century Palestine, was the Pharisees, the group most often portrayed as the opposition to Jesus.
The second way the Law had become burdensome was that the Temple depended on extractions from a population that was mostly small-hold farmers, extractions in the form of both Temple taxes and offerings. When Rome added to that burden, many ended up losing their family land, that family small hold and sons being the two most important assets in that ancient culture. We see these displaced people in the parables of Jesus, including the day laborers who get hired at different points in the day yet are paid the same wage. And just like today, the wealthy took advantage of hard times to buy up distressed properties.
The heart of the Law was still idealistic, filled with justice and hospitality and the crazy notion that the only true ruler was God, but that heart, politically and theologically radical, was buried behind hundreds of regulations and thousands of interpretations and men who benefited from certain interpretations.
Jesus is accused of breaking this Law when he heals on the sabbath, famously replying that the sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the sabbath. In declaring sins forgiven, as he frequently does, Jesus takes power from the priests, from the burdensome Law. He is advocating for fulfillment of the Law, not just getting back to the revolutionary heart of the Law, but reaching beyond the concrete to the spiritual, so that the “why,” the motivation and intent, matters just as much as the outward behavior. Don’t have an affair with your neighbor’s spouse. In fact, if you even think about having an affair, it is a sin.
That’s a pretty high standard. Lutherans believe it is an impossible standard, leaving us dependent on God’s grace. Many were shocked back in 1976, when presidential candidate Jimmy Carter gave an interview to Playboy magazine where he admitted to experiencing lust. A half century later, and most of us would be happy to have a president who simply isn’t a rapist.
Jesus wants us to do the right stuff for the right reason, and the right stuff exceeds the demands of the Law. The Law requires justice. Jesus requires love.
Now let us turn to Paul. He is the reason we are here in this place this morning. Without Paul, the Way of Jesus never spreads to Gentiles, that is to say, to non-Jews, and likely dies off soon after the Jewish War, as did most of the other movements in early First Century Judaism. Essenes, Sadducees, followers of John the Baptizer, all gone. The Pharisees may become the forerunners of Rabbinic Judaism, though even that is contested.
Paul challenges the idea that Gentile followers of Jesus must follow the Mosaic Law, must be circumcised and keep kosher. He goes to Jerusalem and appears before Peter and James, the brother of Jesus. The Acts of the Apostles recounts Peter’s dream that opens the door to foods considered unclean under the ancient Law. And since the faith Paul spreads among the Gentiles is radically loving, embracing the things we believe Jesus actually said, just without all the legalism, we’re good. Except that Paul created this frame of faith vs. works, but that is a sermon for another day.
Paul becomes a problem not in terms of religious law, but in terms of civil law. Paul is a Roman citizen. For all of its martial brutality and exploitative imperial economy, Rome was incredibly egalitarian, granting citizenship to worthy non-Romans, allowing for the mostly free exercise of religion, as long as you made the necessary sacrifices at the imperial shrine.
Paul’s missionary activity angers some folks, including Jews in the Diaspora. He becomes a focal point for unrest, and the Roman way to deal with the source of unrest is to kill it, possibly on a cross just outside the city as a warning to others. But the local authorities can’t do that. Citizen Paul has a right to appeal, and so he is sent off to Rome.
Confident that the authorities in Rome will save him, he instructs the churches he has founded to be obedient to the empire in most things. This idea is picked up by Martin Luther, who articulates a theology of the two kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of earthly princes. Remember, the early Protestant reformers were not advocates for religious freedom. They were as willing to outlaw what they viewed as heresy and to align with princes as was the Vatican. The Zurich reform was more democratic with a small “d,” which did not save the early Anabaptist Felix Manz from execution by drowning.
Luther’s idea, this claim that earthly governance and God’s kingdom are distinct realms, becomes the justification for many German Protestants to align with the Nazi Party. Though to be honest, the church has been aligning with empire since the Edict of Milan decriminalized the faith in 313. Just before the German and Soviet invasion of Poland set-off global conflagration, the Roman church aligned with the Fascists in Spain’s barbaric civil war.
The irony, of course, is that Luther articulated this idea of Two Kingdoms based on the epistles, authentic and otherwise, of Paul, but Paul’s confidence in Rome was misplaced. Tradition tells us he made it to Rome, waited for a verdict, and was then executed.
The Law of Moses is humanly-constructed, but Jesus takes the good parts, the parts about love and compassion, and multiplies them by ten, which becomes the Christian ideal. It is the civil law in the person of Pontius Pilate that executes Jesus after brutally torturing him. And it is those members of the Jewish elite who are benefiting financially from the burdensome Law of Moses who demand his execution.
Jesus was a Jew who practiced the Law of Moses, the law of the Temple and the Priests, and then stretched it from performance to intention, from just enough to never enough, from transactional justice to radically transfiguring justice. Most of us are not Jews, and may or may not live under a specific and concrete religious law. But we can sure stretch civil law, so weaponized by the current administration, into a law of love, and where it is retributive, we can seek to make it restorative.
May we cast off the regimens of our barbarous ancestors and lean into a new Christianity in a new America, an imperfect sign of God’s in-breaking kingdom. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
it is so human to claim you,
for a species, race, gender, or nation,
but You are not ours
and Your ways are extravagant,
life and entanglement and complexity,
the whirlwind and the stillness at dawn.
We pray this morning for the children,
children seeing their role models depicted as apes,
children in hiding due to ethnic cleansing
in our benighted nation,
legal immigrants from Haiti and Somalia,
targeted by white supremacists,
klan hoods replaced by facemasks,
the lynch mob by ICE.
We pray for vulnerable elders
as care workers disappear,
for farmers going broke
as tariffs disrupt markets
and farmworkers disappear,
for so many former government workers
who kept critical government services running,
thrown away by a billionaire
because they could not be exploited,
and those who remain,
stripped of what protection and dignity
they still had.
Most of all
we pray for ourselves,
that we may live in a holy kin-dom,
agents of extravagant love
and restorative justice
in the tradition of the prophets
and of one un-credentialed rabbi
who taught us to pray, saying:
Our Father…
COMMISSION AND BENEDICTION
Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign used an English language version of a phrase coined by Delores Huerta for the United Farm Workers in 1972. “¡Sí, se puede!” Yes, we can. We can restore our democracy and build a just economy. We can be agents of truth and reconciliation. We can model for our community a love that knows no limits, that is extravagant. We can remind the world that greatness comes not from how much we take, but from how much we give. Let us do so in the name of the one who gave us life, in the name of the one who modeled courage, and in the name of the one who fires our imagination and fuels our hope. Amen.