Circuit Breaker

Scripture:           Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18,   Psalm 119:33-40,   1 Corinthians 3:10-23, Matthew 5:38-48

There’s a cartoon I vaguely remember from my childhood or teen years – I tried to use the Google to find it online so I could put it in the bulletin, but Google didn’t come through.   Probably showing my age; I think the younger you are, the more cooperative the Google is.  Anyway, the cartoon started out with a boss sitting behind his desk, chewing out one of his flunkees.  The flunkee went home and yelled at his wife.  The wife yelled at the couple’s son.  The son pulled his younger sister’s hair.  And the sister kicked the cat.  It really wasn’t a cartoon that was meant to be funny….more about how anger gets passed on from one person to another.  Certainly the boss in the cartoon would have had no idea of the impact of his words – he chewed out his employee in a moment of impatience and went on with his day without giving the matter a second thought, oblivious to all of the other family members, including a cat as well, who experienced a miserable day because of his words to his employee. 

In our Gospel reading, we are with the disciples of Jesus listening to the Sermon on the Mount.  And at this point, the sermon seems to be going from the sublime to the ridiculous, or at least that’s how we may hear it.   To allow someone who has already hit us to take a second swing at us, to go a second mile with somebody we wish we’d never met in the first place, to give someone who sues us all that the court awarded plus a cherry on top, to love those who hate us….to our ears, this likely doesn’t sound holy as much as it sounds stupid and dangerous.  It sounds like Jesus is asking his disciples to be masochists, walking around with “kick me” signs on our backs, groveling and begging for opportunities to be punished.  Or, at the very least, it sounds like Jesus is asking his disciples to be mega-wimps.  And then, at the end of it all, Jesus tells his disciples to be perfect!  Yeah, sure, Jesus, I’ll get right on it.  As if!

Where is Jesus going with all this?  Is he just trying to get his disciples killed, as he would eventually get himself killed?  What’s the point?

A place to start in understanding Jesus’ words is remembering that Jesus came preaching about the Kingdom of God, the reign of God in the lives of his followers.   The phrase “Kingdom of God” is often thought to refer to heaven and the afterlife, but actually Jesus was talking about living as sons and daughters of God here on earth – which is why Jesus could tell his followers “the Kingdom of God is among you” or even “within you”.   It goes without saying that we believe we will be with God after we die – but Jesus was teaching that heaven begins here on earth, that the new life which Christ offered his followers begins here on earth, right here, right now.  The Kingdom of God is in heaven, but it’s also in Bridesburg, right here, right now – and not only inside the church, but outside it, everywhere we go.  But in order to experience this new life, we have to leave behind the world’s ways of doing things – including “eye for an eye” vengeance, including violence of any kind.    Instead, Jesus called his followers to begin living into the ways of Kingdom of God, even while surrounded by those who owed allegiance to the Empire of Rome – essentially to live to some extent as foreigners, with a different language and different values, the values of the Kingdom of God – as Jesus put it, “in the world, but not of it.”  And of course this foreign language and these foreign values of the Kingdom of God didn’t fit very well into the Roman Empire – and they don’t fit so well into the American Empire either.  Nor should it – then as now, to say “Jesus is Lord” is to say that Caesar isn’t – and this goes for our modern-day Caesars as well.

Jesus began this section of his teaching by saying, “You have heard it say, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’”  This comes from Exodus 21:23-25, and reads “If any harm follows” – and this would be in the course of a fight – “then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”  As is noted on the back of the bulletin cover – there’s an excellent article there which I hope you’ll all read on your own time – the purpose of this was to keep vengeance within proportional limits – that is to say, to take the offender’s life in retaliation for the life of the person he killed, not the lives of the offender plus the offender’s whole family; to take one eye for an eye, not two; one tooth for a tooth, not all the teeth, and so on.   It was an attempt to keep violence from escalating out of control….but it still permitted violence to continue.  And, as it has been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, if carried out long enough, will leave the world blind and toothless.  At some point, if we’re to avoid being a world of blind, toothless people, the cycle of violence needs to be broken.

Those who work with electrical wiring – I don’t, so please forgive me if I don’t quite have the language quite right – but those who work with electrical wiring are familiar with circuit breakers, and why they’re needed – and of course, before there were circuit breakers, there were fuses.  While they work somewhat differently, the purposes of fuses and circuit breakers is the same – if the load of electrical current on the wire rises to dangerous levels, perhaps because too many electrical devices are drawing too much current from the same outlet, before the wire becomes hot enough to start a fire, a fuse or a circuit breaker interrupts the flow of electricity so that the current can go no further, and the wire can cool down.  And of course, it’s a nuisance – the lights go out or the television goes off, and we have to replace the fuse or flip the breaker, and find some other electrical outlets or call for an electrician to install heavier wiring – but it’s a whole lot better than having your house go up in flames.  And, at least those of us of a certain age have likely used similar language to describe not only electrical surges, but surges of anger and rage, when we may have said that “So-and-so got so mad they blew a fuse.” 

Remember my cartoon from earlier in the sermon – the one with the boss yelling at his flunkee who yelled at his wife who yelled at the kid who pulled the hair of the other kid who kicked the cat?   Anger and eventually violence pass on from one person to another, like current through an electrical circuit. Trauma reproduces itself, passes itself on…that is to say, people who have been hurt, all too often, go on to hurt other people.  Traumatized people traumatize other people.  And this trauma not only passes on across networks of families and neighbors, but through time, as trauma can be handed down over generations from grandparents to parents to children, and later to their children.   Without healing, without something or someone to break the cycle, trauma and abuse will just continue to be passed on.   The task of family therapists in bringing healing involves finding out where trauma began in the family system and how it has played out over generations.  I think in teaching his disciples – teaching us – not to retaliate, not to strike back in kind, Jesus is asking us to act as circuit breakers, stopping cycles of escalating anger and violence by not responding in anger to attackers, or passing on the anger to others.  Jesus is asking us, instead of reacting from instinct, to respond creatively but nonviolently in ways that keep anger and violence from being passed on, and above all to forgive, as God forgives us.

Jesus’ words about turning the other cheek, going the second mile, and giving your cloak as well as your coat, are examples that need some cultural context – and in this I’m drawing from the writings of theologian Walter Wink, who wrote about the nonviolent ethic of Jesus.[1]  Jesus said that if anyone strikes you on the right cheek – this would have been a slap using the back of the right hand against the right cheek of the person facing them, a way of insulting or demeaning someone – Jesus says to turn the other cheek.  Well, for one thing, this would be unexpected behavior – not hitting back, not hanging one’s head and hiding, but turning the other cheek and looking the person squarely in the eye as if to say, ‘I’m still here, you haven’t scared me off.’  Obviously not good tactics for a barroom brawl – or for dealing with spousal abuse for that matter - but Jesus wasn’t talking about a barroom brawl or an abusive spouse, but about someone lording it over someone they considered beneath them.  For someone to give someone who won a lawsuit their coat and their cloak would have left them standing naked – and in that culture would have embarrassed the person who brought the lawsuit – sort of as if someone sued me for my sports jacket, and I handed them not only my sports jacket but my shirt and trousers as well.  Not a good look for the guy bringing the lawsuit, standing there holding someone else’s shirt and trousers in his hand.  Jesus’ words about going the second mile were in the context of the Roman occupation, where a Roman soldier by Roman law could compel a Jewish subject to carry their travel pack – which would have weighed 60 to 80 pounds or more, a significant load – for a mile, but no further.  To carry the soldier’s pack a second mile would have saved someone else from having to carry the gear, but might also have made the soldier feel increasingly uneasy during the course of that second mile….”why is he going a second mile?  Why is he being so friendly?  What this guy got up his sleeve?  Is he going to give me back my travel gear?”  These teachings of Jesus, intended in his cultural context for specific situations, have been made generic and, too often, turned into a license for abusive people to continue dishing out abuse and a command for abused people to stand there and take it - not at all what Jesus had in mind.  Rather, Jesus is asking us to find our own nonviolent but creative ways to respond to those who abuse us, to throw them off balance, off their game so they reconsider their actions – and nonviolence is crucial.  Walter Wink gives his own example of a grade school classmate of his who early in the school year got picked on by bullies.  Turns out the classmate had awful sinuses that were constantly running, so that he was endlessly blowing his nose.  When someone tried to bully the classmate one day, the classmate got a bright idea…he blew his runny nose into his hand and walk up to the bully and try to shake hands with him – of course, the bully, not wanting to be slimed, stayed far away from that dripping hand, and, thanks to his awful sinuses, the classmate always had an ample supply with which to reload his hand at any time – and it didn’t take long until the bullies left him alone.   

Jesus asks us to respond to oppression and abuse in nonviolent ways that throw the oppressors off their game – but also, ideally, in ways that appeal to their conscience, in ways that remind the oppressors that those they’d oppress are human…which is why Jesus taught us to love our enemies and pray for them – because even though they’re enemies, they are still human beings with consciences, however shrunken and shriveled those consciences may be.  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, in crafting his boycotts and marches, took Jesus’ words very much to heart.  In the context of loving his enemies, even as he and his followers were attacked with clubs and police dogs and fire hoses, jailed, sometimes killed, Dr. King wrote the following:

“To our most bitter opponents we say:  We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering.  We shall meet your physical force with soul force.  Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you.  We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.  Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you.  Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you.  Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you.  But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.  One day we will win freedom, but not only for ourselves.  We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”[2]

Well.  I’m not Dr. King, and neither are you, and those are really hard words to live up to.  But then again, at least at this moment, you and I aren’t being threatened with prison and violence and murder, though who knows what the future of this country may hold.  For now it’s enough for us to break the cycles of violence in our own relationships and in our own communities. 

Jesus ended this section of teaching with the words “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  Remember that Jesus has just reminded his disciples that God makes the sun rise on the righteous and the unrighteous – that is to say, on all.  God’s love is for all, not just some.  And in saying “be perfect”, Jesus is saying, “Be complete with your love, not partial.  Loving our friends is the easy part of the work.  Do the hard part of the work as well by loving our enemies, so that our love may be perfected, so that the work of love may be complete.”

Perhaps the best way to interpret these teachings of Jesus is to look at the life of Jesus.  He had no hesitancy whatsoever to confront false teaching and false teachers – but without violence, and in ways that called them to higher ways of living.  He told creative stories, parables, that helped them see their lives differently.  Perhaps his closest approach to violence was in throwing the money changers out of the Temple – but even then, while some tables got toppled and some feathers got ruffled, nobody got hurt.  And of course, at the end of his life, he faced arrest, trial, and crucifixion with prayers that God would forgive those who crucified him, for they knew not what they had done.  And after Jesus’ drew his last breath and gave up his spirit, the centurion who supervised the crucifixion did not say, “Truly this Jesus was a mega-wimp”, but instead said, “Truly this was the Son of God.”

Our culture is fixated on a myth of redemptive violence – that the answer to a bad guys with a gun is a bigger good guy with a bigger gun.  But, of course, while in the movies the good guy with the gun wins and the credits roll, in real life there’s bigger bad guy with a bigger gun, and the cycle continues.  Jesus calls us from the worship of so-called redemptive violence to the practice of transformative non-violence.  In the words of Paul’s letter to the Romans, may we not be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds.  And, our lives having been transformed, may Christ use our example to transform other lives, to transform Bridesburg, transform Philadelphia, transform our country and our world. Amen.

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[1] Walter Wink:  Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way; Fortress Press, 2003

[2] Martin Luther King Jr., sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama at Christmas 1957, written in the Montgomery jail during the bus boycott.  Reprinted in the A J Muste Essay Series, Number 1 (A J Muste Memorial Institute, 339 LaFayette St, New York, NY 10012, cited Wink, Walter, Jesus and Nonviolence.

Be Reconciled

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

There’s a story about W C Fields, a well-known comic in the first half of the 20^th century.  In his movies, Fields played hard drinking con men who hated children and dogs.  He also joked frequently about the lack of entertainment options in his home town of Philadelphia, such as when he called Philadelphia “a cemetery with lights” and said, “I went to Philadelphia on a Sunday once.  It was closed.”  Someone once saw Fields, a vocal atheist, reading a Bible – perhaps the last book anyone would have expected to see in the hands of W C Fields.  Not surprisingly, the person asked Fields what on earth he was doing reading a Bible, and Fields responded, “Looking for loopholes, young man, looking for loopholes.”

Our Gospel reading this morning continues in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, a collection of the teachings of Jesus that takes up three chapters in Matthew’s gospel.    Last week we read the Beatitudes, a series of blessings Jesus gives to categories of people we might consider unblessed – the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for righteousness’ sake.  Jesus then went on to tell his followers that they must be like salt and light, bringing a unique flavor, a unique perspective, to their interactions with others, preserving relationships and community as salt preserves food, and shining the light of God’s love into the dark corners of the world where injustice and oppression conceal themselves. 

Last week’s reading was fairly warm and fuzzy, but in this week’s reading, Jesus gets down to some specifics about what it means to be salt and light in the world – and as we hear these specifics, we may feel our blood pressure rising.  Jesus begins with teachings from the Ten Commandments or from elsewhere in the law of Moses – do not murder, do not commit adultery, a person asking for a divorce must give a certificate of divorce to the party being divorced, and oaths are faithfully to be kept.  But Jesus interprets these teachings in ways that, among other things, seem to take away nearly all of the loopholes.  Jesus not only instructs his followers not to kill, but not to be angry.  He not only tells them not to commit adultery, but not to commit lust.  He left only adultery as grounds for divorce, and tells his followers that the best way to avoid breaking an oath is not to take one in the first place. 

What is Jesus trying to do here?  It would seem he’s setting his followers up for failure.  After all, depending on circumstances, it may be difficult to get through a day without feelings of anger or lust.  More than once I’ve shared my own struggles with anger when I’m behind the wheel, especially when somebody is dawdling in the passing lane when I’m in a  hurry to get someplace.  It’s the one place where my “Pastor Dave” mask slips or flies out the window entirely, as I hit my horn, use words I never learned in seminary, and perhaps interpret my words with some some creative sign language as well.  And yet obviously I’ve never been overcome with road rage to the point of killing or injuring anyone, nor have I been tempted to – not even close.  So where is Jesus going with all this?  Some have said that the purpose of Jesus’ seemingly impossible standard is to remind us of our need for grace – a true statement so far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes all that far.   One would hope Jesus had a higher purpose to his teachings than to send his followers on guilt trips.

In the Gospel accounts, most of the other religious leaders Jesus encounters seem to be fixated on rules – what kind of animals to sacrifice, how often to fast, how scrupulously to tithe.  I have to say that while this was likely grounded in reality,  the portrayal of these leaders may also reflect the tension between the followers of Jesus and followers of the mainstream Judaism of the time, so that the other leaders were made to look bad so that Jesus looks better by contrast.  But in any case, Jesus seems to be pushing his followers to move beyond focusing on rules – which can always be interpreted in ways that provide loopholes – to relationships and the maintenance of community.  The bottom-line question underneath Jesus statements seems to be, “does this or that behavior strengthen community or damage it?  If a behavior strengthens relationship and community, it should be encouraged.  If a behavior damages relationship and community, it should be avoided.”  And while murder and adultery and the breaking of promises obviously damages relationships and community, so do the attitudes that behind these actions such as anger and lust, even if we don’t act on them.  Both murdering somebody and saying about someone “he’s dead to me” break off relationship – though obviously in the second case, relationship can still be restored.

In order to maintain life-giving relationships, we have to respect one another’s dignity as human beings with something of God inside them.  Often anger results when we expect others to follow the roles we want to assign them, and they aren’t willing to play along and follow our script.  And when we lust after somebody, we often undermine their dignity by viewing them as a collection of attractive body parts instead of as a whole person with a heart and a mind, as well as a body, a whole person created in God’s image. 

In the American church, we need to be reminded of these teachings.   American Christianity is very individualistic and very otherworldly, obsessing on questions such as “what must I do to get to heaven” and “will I see my family members in heaven” – all about “I, me, mine” and all about the afterlife, often to the point of being so heavenly minded as to do no earthly good.  Even in our religious observance, selfishness can creep in, and often take over.  In many self-proclaimed evangelical churches, following Jesus is reduced to walking up front to the altar and praying a little prayer, sort of like getting one’s ticket to heaven punched.  There’s a focus on Paul’s teachings about the grace and forgiveness Christ death and resurrection brings – which are conveniently applied to church members – and a focus on certain passages in the book of Leviticus, which are conveniently applied to people outside the church.  Many churches limit their discussion of social ethics to the hot button topics of abortion and homosexuality – topics Jesus never mentioned even once during his time on earth.  Jesus did, however, have a whole lot to say about how we treat our neighbors, how we treat strangers and foreigners, a whole lot to say about how we use our time and our money – preferably to help our poor neighbors.  Indeed, far from having us obsess over our own status in the afterlife, Jesus seems to urge us to forget ourselves entirely as we plunge into helping others, as he said, “Those who would save their lives will lose them, and those who would lose their lives for my sake and the sake of the good news will save them.”   Jesus valued community, to the point where he formed his own followers into a kind of alternative community – an alternative community into which we as followers of Jesus are likewise invited, where we are invited to live into the values of the Reign of God during our time on earth.  We sometimes forget that Christians were never called to support the ways of empire, the ways of the majority culture – that started during the reign of Constantine, when Christianity became the religion of the Roman empire, and is perhaps where the church began to lose its voice, or, as Jesus would put it, where the salt lost its flavor. Instead, through our words and actions we’re supposed to model alternative ways of living – and Jesus’ teaching in our Gospel reading today (and also next week) gives us some sense of how God is calling us to be in community.

While anger may not lead to murder in our personal relationships, anger can lead to killing when governments set policies – and indeed governments often whip up anger to gain support for their policies  .  Anger can convince us that some lives are more valuable than others, that, for example, children born in some countries are worth saving while children born in other countries aren’t. In Germany, anger at Jews, gypsies and gays led to the death of millions. During World War II in our country, fear and anger at the Japanese led to the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent in our country. This congregation likely encountered anti-German suspicion and anger during World War I and II.   Our church history notes that English worship services were introduced right after World War I, and German services were ended during World War II – and I suspect both these changes were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to fit in as loyal Americans during periods when anti-German feelings were running high.  During the Cold War, fear and anger directed at political dissidents and at gays caused people to go to jail, destroyed careers, led some to commit suicide. And so, when our government tells us it’s ok to be angry at this or that group or to hate this or that group, we need to be very careful.  We need to guard against being manipulated.  Above all, we need to ask the WWJD question – what would Jesus do?

“Be reconciled”, Jesus said.   As we approach Valentine’s Day, may we live in love – not only the kind that causes us to buy cards and candy, but real caring for one another and for neighbor.  May our neighbors say, as the Romans said of the early Christians, “See how these Christians love one another.”  Truly, may they know we are Christians by our love.  Amen.