From the Mountaintop

From the Mountaintop

          Like Moses before him, Jesus is still up there, on the Mountaintop
—giving God’s Law to God’s people
—placing before us standards that rightly seem impossible. In fact, more than one Christian has taken a look at Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and concluded, “Man, we’re all going to hell, aren’t we?”

Impossible, yet Jesus is speaking a community into existence, answering our yearning question:
“What does the Kingdom of Heaven look like?”
What is it like when God reigns, when the Kingdom comes near,
when we can peer through the key hole,
crack open our dim cell and see the light,
see the world as it should be,
see God’s image shining forth from other people, alive and on the move!

          We hear our calling to a high ideal, Jesus calls to us from the Mountaintop; he dares us to imagine.

Prayer

          It would be enough, to my mind, if we could hold back murders, right?
 If such tragic acts were deterred to the point where they were no longer a worry for anyone… that would be enough…

but Jesus calls us to something more, to a community where anger and insults and having anything against another, is as serious as murder!

          Who here is without anger?

          For that matter, how can we not look at our world and see the fruits of anger—hatred, racism… prejudice of all sorts, and not despair.

          As some of you know, every year a group from the New Jersey Synod makes a trip to Bosnia Herzegovina—to support their Peace Camps, and to bear witness to the ethnic cleansing that took place there in the ‘90’s and still shapes the lives of so many.

          One of the stories that stuck with them, was of a Serbian family who decided to stay in a Muslim majority city, even when their fellow Serbs besieged it. During the siege the family was harassed by their Muslim neighbors, two sons were killed, and soon enough all that remained of the family was a mother, a father, and a pregnant daughter-in-law.

          And the Daughter-in-law had the baby, but was too starved by the siege to be able to nurse her…
thousands of babies died in these types of siege situations
—but their neighbor, a Muslim man, had a hidden cow, and every night for 442 days he dodged Serbian snipers to bring a liter of milk to the family for their baby girl.

          Now… this isn’t one of those happy ending kind of stories, the hidden cow was eventually slaughtered to feed soldiers, the Muslim Neighbor became homeless and the family was eventually displaced and became refugees in a Serbian city…

          But for those 442 day, for that one little girl, for that barrier their neighbor broke for the baby’s sake, the Kingdom of Heaven had come near—hate had not won.

          In the face of the impossible pressures of the World, we are freed from anger and hate
—freed for a reason,
freed for reconciliation!
 The Kingdom calls us to be repairers of the breech,
we are called to be reconcilers and to be reconciled!

          Jesus doesn’t stop there—he’s kind of on a roll! He heightens the seriousness with which we are to take our sexual and romantic relationships and pursuits.

          If you look with lust—lose that leering eye.

          If you are prone to unwanted touching—tear that hand off.

          If you do not stop using other people’s bodies for your pleasure—you will burn.

          In this Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo era—God help us…

          For that matter, Jesus holds marriage as an unbreakable bond in this life.

          At Pub Theology this last week, I talked about the changes I and three other editors made to the new edition of “Minister’s Prayer Book” which originally came out in the fifties.
One of the major changes was how Pastors ought to talk about family in prayer
—not only did single and LGBT folk need to be included,
but also we needed to acknowledge that these days marriage is a coin flip—50% of them end in divorce, and so blended families and divorced folk needed to be reflected in the prayer life of Lutheran Pastors… this is the relational landscape we live in.

          And, I need to say this to you all as your pastor, because a flat reading of Jesus’ words about divorce can frankly slaughter souls.
—there are good reasons to get divorced.
If you are divorced you are no less a beloved Child of God.

          With that said, friends, please know that Christ has freed us for respect, fidelity, and consent.

          Then there is Jesus’ command regarding oaths—any untruth uttered is from the Devil.
Vows not kept, drag God’s creation and name and reputation, into the Devil’s hands.

          In a society that sees itself more and more as “post-truth”,
-Where social media siloes truths into consumable bits that feed our own biases,
-a society that has embraced, what some Philosophers call “emotivism”,
( that is, facts and values are seen as personal preferences and knee-jerk emotional reactions are seen as of greater value than the actual study of the subject at hand )
-where reality gives way to a Will-to-Power and truth has been so soundly eroded…

          In such a society as ours, we must acknowledge there is something truly diabolical afoot.

          And more than that, we ought to hold fast to Christ’s calling—he has freed us from falsehood and called us to be truthful.

         

          From the mountaintop, Jesus dares us to imagine
—imagine a world where God’s name is not manipulated by liars…
instead every word spoken is the truth!
Every promise fulfilled,
a world where we can trust each other again!

          From the mountaintop, Jesus dares us to imagine
—imagine, a world without cat-calls, without unwanted touches, without sexual abuse
—where the #MeToo movement is unnecessary and abuse of authority for sexual fulfillment is unthinkable…

Where every marriage is entered into with the best of intentions and those intentions are fulfilled.
Where marriages lead to the flourishing of both partners!

          From the mountaintop, Jesus dares us to imagine
—imagine anger ended, all enmities and insults offered up on the altar of reconciliation
—siblings embracing.
Prejudice, envy, and intolerance transformed into love and friendship and understanding.

          Dare to imagine.