Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

––

––

By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity

(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Feb. 12, 2023)

In the name of God, the one holy and undivided Trinity, amen. My older brother, Dan, is a lawyer in Tokyo. He works for a large multinational corporation there. My dad and I were on the phone with him on Friday night and he asked me what story I was going to tell to open the sermon. So because he is a lawyer, I just wanted you to know that he registers his protest over the story I'm about to tell from our childhood.

I remember when I was about my son Danny's age. He just turned 10. When I was his age ... He is a little younger. I remember I was in a small argument with my older brother, Dan. He was a few years older than me, five years older than me, and I remember that we were insulting each other a little bit, giving each other a little bit of grief. And I called him a fool. And as my memory has it, he immediately whipped out a bible and opened to the passage we have for Matthew today and read to me, "Whoever calls their brother a fool will surely see the hell of fire," which with the quickness with which he pulled out that bible, he must have been goading me into it. This is my interpretation. He must have been trying to get me to say it so he could do this, which is a very lawyerly thing of him to do. And maybe he was anticipating my own future career that I would be very concerned about this particular teaching.

Whatever it is, this is an extreme teaching from Jesus today. I mean, these are the stakes as they're given to us. Whoever calls somebody a fool will be subject to the hell of fire. My brother Dan made the most of that when we were kids, and I want to talk about that a little bit, not really about the particular insult, although I'll get to that in a second, just about anger.

This passage is about anger, at least the first part of this passage is about anger. Jesus begins by saying, "Whoever is angry at their sibling, at their brother or sister." Now this teaching comes out of the fifth chapter of Matthew, which is itself the first chapter of three chapters of foundational teaching of Jesus. This is the Sermon on the Mount.

A couple of weeks ago we preached or I preached about the be attitudes, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn. This is how Jesus begins his sermon in the Gospel of Matthew. It's his first sermon, it's the foundation of his ministry. It's where he begins. As I said, the sermon takes three full chapters in the Gospel of Matthew, but to my mind, chapter five is the heart of it where some of the most important and also most demanding teachings lie, and this teaching about anger is in that chapter.

Goes on from here. We won't hear it next week because it's the last Sunday of Lent, but the next verses after the verses we end with for today, Jesus says, "Love your enemy. Bless those that curse you." Whatever demands our teachings have today continue as we go on towards the end of chapter five.

But as I said, this particular teaching, call your brother a fool and go to hell is pretty extreme. And I partly think that we can just accept that as exaggeration, as hyperbole. I don't think many people either then or now take this teaching literally true or seriously. And I think we all kind of agree on that. Even folks who claim to read the Bible literally they call people fools sometimes. And you'll notice if you look closely at the passage, there are a couple of verses that are taken out of the middle here.

I'm going to confess that I took those verses out. These readings are assigned by a collection of churches working together. I thought that they would be distracting a little bit, but I'm going to tell you what they say. The first verse is a teaching about divorce where Jesus says, "You have heard it said that if you want to divorce your wife, hand her a certificate of divorce." But he says, "You cannot divorce except on grounds of unchastity." Mark and Luke have different grounds that justify it, but those are Matthews'.

And then the other verse that I took out, which I will address quickly but didn't have printed or read, Jesus says, "You have heard it said, you shall not commit adultery." But he says, "I tell you, if you look at a woman with lust, you have committed adultery in your heart." And then Jesus says, "So if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off." Again, I don't think anyone's taking these verses literally, even biblical literalists. And I'm avoiding those verses, not because they're unimportant. On the contrary, I think they're very important. I just think I want to talk about anger more today.

But I will say a word about those. I preached on divorce last year a bit. And I think what's really important with these two teachings about divorce and desire on my reading, they aren't critiques of divorce and desire as such. Sometimes relationships fail. That's human life. And maybe even more problematically, Christianity has made a habit of demonizing desire throughout its history. It's a cruel effect for many people.

I think what Jesus is actually doing with these lessons, these two lessons that weren't read, Jesus is inviting his hearers, who were all men, to understand how patriarchy can frame institutions and impulses and make them harmful, how their power as men affected the way institutions like marriage or human impulses like desire bear out on others who are more vulnerable than they are and he was calling them to recognize that. But when this lesson comes around again, I'll preach on that more.

I want to talk about anger because that is where this lesson begins. It's a thing that I worry about. It's where this teaching about the calling somebody a fool comes because I think anger is really important. As I think most of you know, I published a book on forgiveness last fall and I spend a good amount of time in that book talking about anger and about the moral value of anger.

Anger lets us know that we've been harmed, it signals to us that others have been harmed, it inspires us, inflames our desire for right. And if we pay attention to the way anger is treated in culture, we see that certain sorts of people who we are less willing to allow to be angry. The anger of women and people of color in particular, of queer people is less acceptable to broader culture than other kinds of anger. We police anger in many cases to suppress calls for justice.

And in my book, and I've been going on podcasts to promote the book or whatever I say over and over again, "Anger's good. Anger's right. Anger is not in itself a moral problem." And I think in a couple of podcasts I even said, "Jesus doesn't care what you feel. He cares what you do." But now I have Matthew chapter five to deal with. "Don't be angry," Jesus says.

As those of you who know my sermons might guess, I'm going to go to the Greek to try to wiggle out of this. The word that's translated as angry here is orgízo, which means to be angry. But it has another sense, an additional sense. In the Greek lexicon dictionary I had, it says that it has a sense of settled opposition, antagonism. Not just anger, but antagonism. There's a stubbornness to it, even a hostility to it.

So it's less about emotion or at least not only about emotion, it's also about enmity. The other is against me. I'm angry because the other is other, because the other is my enemy. We have settled into opposition. We are on opposite sides that cannot be reconciled.

That's what Jesus is talking about when he begins this lesson, and that's the context in which he starts to problematize the insults that he names. And that's what sets up what I think really is the heart and soul of this passage and the most important line in this passage, the point at which this passage becomes not merely moral or political, although it might be those things as well, but where it becomes theological, which is the verse where Jesus says, "If you bring your gift to the altar. And remember, that someone has something against you, put that gift down and go to that person."

Now, this line might sound familiar to us because it recalls the prophets of Hebrew scripture, prophets that Jesus of course knew. "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," says God. But I think the familiarity of it makes us maybe listen to it too quickly. We don't really consider how radical the implications of this teaching are. If you remember that someone has something against you, as you come before the altar, put down your gifts and get out of there and go to that person first.

The first Sunday of this term, I preached on repentance. I preached on Jesus' initial teaching. "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And I said then that teaching the kingdom of heaven is at hand doesn't mean God's kingdom is coming up around the corner down the path that we're waiting for it. What it means is God's kingdom, the kingdom of heaven is right next to us, in the person beside us, that God meets us there. Not in some future place we haven't arrived at, but that God meets us in our neighbor and the person beside us. And this is an explication or illustration of that teaching.

When you come into church, into church to meet God, to offer your sacrifice to God, and you remember that you have wronged someone. The framing here, if someone has something against you, you come into church, you want to see God, you want to be with God, you want to be there for God, to serve God, to honor God, and you remember that someone has something against you, get out of that church because God is not there. God is with your neighbor. Turn away from the altar and put down your sacrifice and go to the one you have wronged. Go to the one with whom God resides.

That's where God is. The kingdom of heaven is not looming out there in some future, or hold up in some tabernacle behind the altar. God is not waiting to be met or appeased or propitiated by your sacrifice. The kingdom of heaven, this is the teaching. The kingdom of heaven is right next to you, right now, right next to you. The presence of God is only as far as the nearest person to you.

The thrust of this teaching from Jesus is that your relationship to God is worked out in and through your relationship to others. So our task, our religious task is to treat others with the reverence we owe God.

I think we like to think, and by we I mean religious folks, folks who when their children are ... feel implicated by verses like this one. I think we religious folks like to think that we can get right with God without meeting God in our neighbor. Wouldn't that be nice, if we could leave the complexity and the messiness and the difficulty and the challenge and the struggle of human life and human relationship behind and just come before the temple, come before the altar, come into the sanctuary and say to God, "You know that lot, they are difficult and complicated. But you in your inscrutable mystery and your forgiveness and your silence, you, I like"?

But I think this is what Jesus means when he says, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." It means treat your neighbor, treat the one next to you with all the reverence you owe God, because that is how you approach God. It's what blessed are the poor and blessed are the mourn means. Treat them with reverence, with all the reverence you owe God because that is how you approach God. Give up your hostility, your enmity towards your opponent. Give up the hatred towards even the one you're angry with. Revere that one. Give that one the reverence you owe God, because that is how you approach God. It's what the teachings and the warnings about divorce and desire mean here, I think.

Treat the other with the reverence you owe God, even the one with whom you are breaking relationship, even the one you desire. Treat that one with that reverence.

There is no way to God that is not also the way to our neighbor. And if we, religious folk, need further evidence of this truth, consider Jesus himself. We call this man Jesus, God's only son. In the jargon of theology, we call that the mystery of the incarnation. And we call this man Jesus, the second person in a three-person God, the mystery of the Trinity.

Those mysteries are mysteries because they hide so much. Sometimes frankly, they hide more I think than they reveal. But what they do reveal at least is this, that even for God, even God works out God's own relationship to God's self, from father to son, from Christ to creator, God works out that relationship through others, through us. Jesus comes to us. The kingdom of God is at hand for Jesus too. If that's the way it is for God, why should we have it any different?

I do believe, and I still believe, that anger can be important and useful and morally necessary, especially when it is rooted in the righteousness of love. But it's not those things when it is flat or atavistic hostility, not when it's settled opposition as the Greek recalls, not when it's opposition for opposition's sake.

The world around us is full of that kind of anger, anger for anger's sake. We saw a lot of it this week actually, this week at the State of the Union address. And we saw these things in Congress. We saw this in Congress, acted out by our highest officials, anger for anger's sake. The world is full of it, full of that sort of enmity, that sense of opposition, antagonism.

Meanwhile, the world is also full of other things, full of all the same folks Jesus preached about 2000 years ago, the poor, the persecuted. It strikes me. It alarms me while performing their anger in Congress, rescuers roam the ruins of cities in Turkey and Syria where at least 25,000 people have died, where a million people are homeless.

Does anybody, do any of us doubt which is the holier task, which honors the sanctity of God and our neighbor more, this desperate and daring work of rescue and compassion or these performed acts of anger for anger's sake? It's scandalous to me that we could think any responsibility more pressing than responding to our neighbor with reverence. While rescuers roam the ruins of our world, God deliver us from becoming so preoccupied with our manufactured rage that we forget that the ruined world is exactly where our God roams to.