Sermon by canon douglas williams

A Sermon

Rev. Canon Douglas E. Williams February 16, 2014

From this morning’s Gospel: “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 say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.”1 “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.”2 “Again, you have heard that 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….Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”3 Commandments, and rules, and regulations. And if the Old Testament Law wasn’t bad enough, our Lord here, in the Sermon on the Mount, adds the straws liable to break the camel’s back.

Now the rules aren’t just about what we do. Now they are also about what we think. How can we possibly follow all those rules?

We can’t.

And so what are we to do, throw out all the rules and start over?

In a sense, yes.

Rules and regulations are necessary in any community composed of more than one person.

Alone on a desert island, I don’t think you would need much in the way of rules. But put a second person on that island, and before long you would have a few rules. We are all different, with different understandings, different feelings, and different agendas. If we are going to live 1

Matthew 5:21-22.

Matthew 5:27-28.

3 Matthew 5:33-34, 37.

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together, we must have some commonly agreed rules to help us navigate through the differences.

Otherwise, life would be a continual skirmish of everyone against everyone else. Load up that island with a few more people, and sooner or later somebody would have to start enforcing the rules. Given all the differences between us, it’s impossible to get unanimous agreement even on the rules; so somebody becomes the enforcer. All that is basic sociology. That’s the way human beings work.

But because we live with enforced rules almost from the day we are born, we come to think of “rules and regulations” as a basic structure of reality, including basic to our relationship with God. And so the fundamental picture of reality becomes: Do well, follow the rules, and God will reward you with heaven. Do badly, break the rules, and God will punish you with hell. And God becomes the great lawgiver at one end of heaven, and the great courtroom judge, handing down sentences and pounding the desk with his gavel, at the other.

But I will let you in on a secret.

It doesn’t work that way.

You may remember in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, that they were allowed to eat anything in the garden except “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”4 Now it can sometimes be a mistake to focus on the details of Biblical stories, but I puzzled for years over that particular detail: why forbid the knowledge of good and evil? Wouldn’t it be a step forward if they knew good and evil? Isn’t that better than unknowing innocence? And at one level it is better. But it eventually dawned on me that the point of that detail lay elsewhere.

Up until that point in the story, Adam and Eve had lived freely in the garden, in an open relationship with God. Now, having eaten the fruit, it was a matter of rules and regulations.

“Oops! I am naked,” thinks Adam. “I must sew some fig leaves together. Or at least get Eve to do it for me.”5 No longer was the relationship free and open; now “doing good” and “avoiding evil” had come in between Adam and Eve and God.

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Genesis 2:17.

Genesis 3:10, sort of.

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In human life as we know it now, that is where we probably always have to start—with being good, and avoiding evil. But when we begin to realize what God in Christ has done for us and with us, we come to discover that what is going on in this morning’s Gospel, and in the whole Sermon on the Mount of which it is a part, is not a long laundry list of rules and regulations, and those even more burdensome than the laws of the Old Testament. No, what we have is a description of what it is to be human. And the talk about heaven and hell is not a discussion of arbitrary rewards and punishments handed out by God; it is a description of what we become.

Now please do not mistake my meaning. I am not saying that it doesn’t matter what we do. But I am saying that the reason it matters is not because God, for some inscrutable reason, has given us a set of rules. [If God is God and we are God’s creation, then clearly God’s will and intention for us is paramount. To follow any other path is death, but not because God is the great courtroom judge, waiting to pass sentence. To follow any other path is death because God’s will for us is life in all its fullness. God’s will for us is expressed in the very act of creation. God has created us to be fully human. We share with the Jewish community, with Muslims, and even with Christian fundamentalists, the conviction that God’s will is absolutely crucial. Where we differ from the fundamentalists, however, is that we believe that God’s will is reasonable.

The theologians of the high Middle Ages—such as the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscan St. Bonaventure—saw God’s first characteristic as reason, and therefore saw God’s will as reasonable. God’s omnipotence meant that God could do anything consistent with God’s own nature—whose first quality is love—but not otherwise. In the later Middle Ages, theologians began to see will as God’s primary characteristic, a will unlimited even by God’s own nature. And so we found ourselves with Adam and Eve after the Fall, with a whole set of arbitrary rules and regulations to follow. But Aquinas and Bonaventure were right. God’s will is absolute. But it is not arbitrary. God’s will for us is that we become fully and completely human.]6 How far we are from that. Judged either by how well we follow the rules or by how close we are to being genuinely human, we do not come out very well. And the weight of our sins hangs around our necks like lead weight. We cannot fix that by following the rules; if it were possible, that would only keep us from acquiring even more lead weight in the future. What can we do

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Material in brackets is from a sermon preached in St. Anselm’s Anglican Church, Vancouver, on 9 February 2014.

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about what we are now? We can accept the forgiveness which God holds out to us in Christ.

When we sin, we describe it as being “only human”. In reality, it is becoming subhuman.

Forgiveness is permission to resume being human. Forgiveness does not live in a world of rules and regulations. It is not a legal transaction. Forgiveness lives in a world of relationships.

After you have stood naked before God, and your genuine penitence has enabled you to fully accept the forgiveness of God, and to resume being human, then go back and reread this morning’s Gospel, and reread all those places where there are rules and regulations, exhortations and commandments. Only this time, read them not as rules—as “dos” and “don’ts”—read them, instead, as descriptions, descriptions of what it is to be fully human. Oh, there are probably a few of the rules that won’t translate that way. Even the Biblical writers couldn’t get it all straight. But most of the rules will translate. It is one thing to chalk up pluses and minuses in a rule book. It is quite another to discover how human or subhuman you are, and to discover ways of becoming more and more fully human.

A little before this morning’s part of the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel for last Sunday, our Lord said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” And in re-understanding rules as descriptions, we can begin to see what he meant.

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