choices

Sirach 15:15-20

If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice. He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whichever you choose. Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given. For great is the wisdom of the Lord; he is mighty in power and sees everything; his eyes are on those who fear him, and he knows every human action. He has not commanded anyone to be wicked, and he has not given anyone permission to sin.

Modern Psalm response

One: The love of God is deep and wide, but we have historically continued to choose narrow paths of judgment and fear.

All: Nevertheless, God persisted

One: God offered us life, and we chose death

All: Nevertheless, She persisted

One: God offered us liberation, and many chose condemnation

All: Nevertheless, She persisted

One: God offered us joy, and many chose bitterness

All: Nevertheless, She persisted

One: God offered us forgiveness, and many chose to hold grudges

All: Nevertheless, She persisted

One: God offered us diverse ecosystems, and many chose monoculture

All: Nevertheless, She persisted

One: God offered us water in the desert, and many chose to look back fondly to slavery in Egypt

All: Nevertheless, She persisted

One: God offered us a place to live when we were nomads, and many chose to hoard the gift

All: Nevertheless, She persisted

One: God offered us freedom, and many chose to turn away

All: Nevertheless, She persisted

One: God will persist in pursuing us with love and justice, mercy and grace, forgiveness and life. It is God’s way, sending prophets and teachers to hound us, to encourage us, to call us ever forward into freedom, until all of us are free.

All: For every time we persist in stubborn spite, God persists in stubborn compassion. May we come to reflect that persistent compassion in our daily living, until all of us are free.

1 Corinthians 3:1-9

Brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.

Matthew 5:21-37

[Jesus said to the disciples:] “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I saw to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body o go into hell. It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and however marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Again, you have heard it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes,’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”

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Free will and responsibility. This doesn’t sound like a very Lutheran sermon from the start, with the emphasis on keeping the law, but love and grace are not cheap, that we should grasp at them and cast our pearls before swine. Every day we have choices. And, yes, we are in worship to hear how much God loves us, we are in worship to refresh and renew, we are in worship to be refueled and filled with hope for the future after whatever the previous week did to wear us out. But we are in worship with millions of other people across the world who are living in all varieties of livelihoods, all varieties of beliefs and values and experiences and struggles. We cannot be in worship of a God this big and forget how big the community of God is, how far-reaching is this love, how many people in worship this morning are going hungry every night and how many are homeless and how many are enacting the very practices that keep them hungry and homeless. We are a church divided in a world divided, and lest we feel stuck in an inescapable rut, we must remember that we always have the power to choose, and the responsibility to own and learn from our choices.

The great lie is that we will fail and remain fallen, that we will be defined only by failure if we try anything new, that we will do something so terrible that we will be ultimately rejected by the love that only appeared to be unconditional. It is when we believe this lie that we fall prey to it, when we believe this lie that we kill each other, when we believe this lie that we find ourselves powerless and pointing our fingers and claiming that we are ‘only doing our job’ when we go with the crowd, and stop challenging authority, and do terrible things because they are easier.

Life is complicated, indeed. Patterns, habits, expectations, traditions, all seek to tie us down and lead us like sheep to the slaughter. Which is why the Lamb of God, in the power of every freedom imaginable, all authority in heaven and on earth, went to the slaughter like a lamb, freely, to be beside us even in our weakest moments. But that’s not the end of the story, brothers and sisters. That’s not where our road has to lead, where our journey naturally ends. We have a choice, every moment, to change direction, to stop causing harm, to think differently about our neighbors and our enemies, to see something, anything, from someone else’s point of view.

And in so doing, we will not earn God’s love, we will not earn heaven, will not earn redemption or another star in our crowns. These are not things to earn, notches in our belt or badges of honor to parade around like teacher’s pet. We already have God’s love, unconditionally, already are good enough, as our starting point. Any God worth our worship does not threaten us with hell for missing the mark when we try to uncover heaven in our midst, but if we are to claim to follow and worship a God who has made the cosmos and called it all ‘good,’ then we have the challenge and the moment-to-moment choice to live like we actually believe it’s true.

many uses for salt

Matthew 5:13-20
[Jesus said:] “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to so the same, will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.”

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The last time I paid attention to salt was in a long bath soak, where those Epsom salts are used to draw out impurities from the skin. It's rare to slow down long enough for a nice long soak in the tub lately, so much to do, but drawing out toxins is important work. Especially when those toxins have been planted so deeply for so long that they have taken root, it might make us sick at first to pull out those structures that hold up disease, so as to make way for health. Like going for a really good massage and forgetting to hydrate after, if we don't recognize the toxins and take care of cleansing and resting and repairing after breaking up the infections, they just come back, resettle, root a bit deeper and get nastier as time goes on. Which is another reason salt is important - when you conquer an area and destroy the city of the oppressor, you salt the earth so they can never again put down roots in your land. It's extreme, but salt is cleansing, it is powerful and valuable, and our ability to tolerate injustice has gotten to the point that extreme measures are looking less and less extreme in comparison. Not only that, but injustice robs us of our voice, our diversity, our health, and our character, so the power of salt to highlight our natural flavor is also vitally important in these days. You want to see the kingdom of God? Righteousness, my friends. It exists in the righteousness that celebrates, rather than ostracizes, diversity. The righteousness that claims justice for the least of these, as expressed in the laws of God, which stress care for the outcast and widow, protection for those who cannot protect themselves, leaving the gleanings of our fields for the migrants who pass through, remembering ourselves what it means to be a wandering people. Even the laws in Leviticus about what animals we are to eat or not to eat center on the theme of not hunting those creatures which have no defense against us.
We live as salt for the earth both when we uproot injustice and when we contribute to the thriving of those whose lives are different than ours. This of course takes effort, because the entropy of privilege lulls us with promises of comfort, of safety if only we keep our noses clean, of peace kept by avoiding conflict. But that sort of passive inactivity is how a garden becomes overgrown with weeds, how neglect of a body leads that body to wake up with bedsores and brittle bones to boot. Sure, we can ignore the injustice around us as long as it does not affect us directly, but the way of it is those vines creep into our view eventually, choking off our lives by first shrinking the diversity of our ecosystem until we no longer live by the give and take of diverse minerals and nutrients. Am I making sense to anyone? You know they say if you want your insides to function optimally it's a good idea to ingest diverse bacteria, probiotics, to recolonize the guts with those organisms that help our internal systems to function in the healthiest way possible. Yet injustice acts as swallowing bleach or trying to subsist on only super bowl snacks, it might feel awful for some at first and great for others, but eventually the entire body suffers for it.
This is a lot of metaphors, isn't it? And lots of Jesus' stories are meant to connect in us with the contexts where we live, so they're not really specific, but illustrative of themes and values, so that we can think for ourselves about how they translate into our understandings of what makes for a world that thrives. And whether the law prohibiting preachers from pushing politics from the pulpit it lifted or no, it should be made clear that everything we do is political, because it all has an effect on the world and the people around us, and all that politics is is how we live with people. How do we decide who deserves what and what to do about it when those expectations are not met or different expectations from different life experiences come into conflict. Refusing to voice our values or preventing others from doing so would be to deny our saltiness, to refuse to feel our feelings or let others be heard and seen, that is the opposite of righteousness.
So how in this day and age is your saltiness coming into contact with the world that needs its full flavor to thrive? How is your saltiness uprooting injustice and bringing out the natural flavors of those who have had their cultures and characters stifled? And how are you uprooting those injustices that have kept you captive, how are you being supported in celebrating your full humanity? Because if you're not, then you need to find a way and a community where that does happen. God did not make you to stifle you, but to experience your fullness in community with the fullness of your neighbors, so that life may thrive in every place, in every color, in every shade of light and dark, in spite of every tragedy and fear. That, my friends, is the kingdom of God. Nobody gets left out or left behind. Nobody gets turned away. Nobody has to prove their worthiness, because everyone's unique flavors are uncovered and embraced, uplifted and made to shine. Because salt cannot lose its saltiness. Just by existing we have already changed the world. So, salt, keep on being your holy, human selves, keep on encouraging your neighbors of every color, language, and nationality to do the same.