Dayschool Sunday Epipahny 6 2.16.20

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Matthew.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Jesus said, You're familiar with the command of the ancients, do not murder.

I'm telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder.

Carelessly call the brother the I word, and you just might find yourself hauled into court.

Thoughtlessly yell the S-word of the sister, and you are on the brink of hellfire.

The simple moral fact is that words kill.

This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters.

If you enter your place of worship and about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering.

Leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right.

Then and only then come back and work things out with God.

Or say you're out on the street and an old enemy accosts you.

Don't lose a minute.

Make the first move, make things right with them.

After all, if you leave the first move to them, knowing their track record, you're likely to end up in court, maybe even in jail.

If that happens, you won't get out without a stiff spine.

You know the next commandment pretty well too.

Don't go to bed with another spouse, but don't think you've preserved your virtue simply by staying out of bed.

Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body.

Those leering looks you think nobody notices, they also corrupt.

Let's not pretend this is easier than it really is.

If you want to live a morally pure life, here's what you have to do.

You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful ear.

You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile.

And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly.

Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump.

Remember the scripture that says, whoever divorces his wife, let him do it legally, giving her divorce papers and her legal rights?

Too many of you are using that as a cover for selfishness and whim, pretending to be righteous just because you are legal.

Please, no more pretending.

If you divorce your wife, you're responsible for making her an adulteress unless she's already made herself that by sexual promiscuity.

And if you marry such a divorced adulteress, you're automatically an adulterer yourself.

You can't use legal cover to mask a moral failure.

And don't say anything you don't mean.

This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions.

You can only make things worse when you lay down a smokescreen of pious talk saying, I'll pray for you and never doing it, or saying, God be with you and not meaning it.

You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace.

And making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.

Just say yes and no.

When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.

The gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thank you for joining us on Day School Sunday, where we worship like our day school students do every Tuesday, except just a little bit longer.

Normally we get to hear one story, and today we got to hear our normal four.

Normally we only sing one or two hymns, today we'll sing three or four.

So we've met in the middle.

And these are really wonderful words we got to hear.

They're long passages, but they're things that really matter at this time in our national life, if you don't mind me saying.

We learned a long time ago that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words may never hurt us.

And Jesus reminds us today, we all know that's not true.

We talk in our day school class, our day school uh chapel about how Moses gave the people ten rules.

And most of us know those ten rules.

We call them the Ten Commandments, and you know those are just minimums for how to live together.

If we kill each other, we can't really live together.

If we steal from each other, it's really hard to live together.

If we're jealous all the time, it's really hard to live together.

Really hard to make friends with somebody you're jealous with.

But you know what we talk about with our kids too?

Is you can keep every single one of the Ten Commandments and never even get to know your neighbor.

In fact, it might be a lot easier to keep them if you don't know your neighbor.

You won't know what they have, so you can't be jealous.

They won't make you mad, so you may not want to hurt them.

These rules are about minimums, and Jesus reminds us today not to settle for minimums.

Jesus and Moses today say, don't aim low, aim big, because everything we do leads us either to life or to death.

Not physical death.

We know we're all gonna die one day, but living in a way that is lonely and afraid and friendless.

And it's great to hear Jesus say, our words matter?

We tell this to our children all the time.

Don't use words like the S word.

Boy, was I relieved to find out what the S word was.

It was not the one I was thinking.

And yet, you turn on the TV, and not only do our political leaders defy exactly what we tell our own children to avoid, but when we talk about those leaders, we do too.

If you haven't checked your Facebook page, have a look.

Not only do we say people are wrong, we now say that they're evil.

And here it is, it's only February, and we've got 10 months to go in what could be the most divisive election any of us have lived through.

Divisive, not because we disagree about principles, but because we hate people who think differently than we do, and we talk like that at home in front of our children, and then we wonder where they learned it.

Jesus is saying, our words give life or death.

Now, two weeks ago we got to hear this great saying.

I think this is really right.

If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing, don't say anything at all.

That's a minimum.

The maximum is if you can't say something nice, think harder until you can.

That is how you make friends.

That is how you share life.

If we can't find anything nice in somebody else, it's not their shortcomings, it's ours.

Our faith tells us that God is everywhere.

Well, that means not only in contemporary Christian music, friends, but in gangster rap.

And if we can't find God there, it's because we're not listening.

Sometimes it's harder.

Sometimes we have to be more creative.

But God is there.

That's the promise of our faith.

We get to hear more about our words today.

My dad made five promises to me my whole life, and he kept all but one of them.

So when my dad said I promise, he was gonna do everything he could to make it happen.

I knew that.

The promise he didn't keep, he couldn't.

But you know why we have to say I promise?

Because yes and no have we've lost our uh street credibility.

We say yes and no to stuff all the time and we don't follow through.

So what if we just followed through?

I get really, really worried when I hear national and political leaders talk about how God is behind their politics.

I get really worried about it.

So why do we throw God onto our side?

Why don't we just try to be on God's side with what we say to one another?

Choose the words that they give life.

Oh, I want you to pray for Carl.

He's drinking again.

I want you to pray for Elisa.

She's got secret sins in her life.

What we were doing, you see, is gossiping in God's name.

Now, I hope you've never experienced that.

We love to do this, whether you're churchy or not, to put the veneer over talking poorly about other people.

Jesus says, cut it out.

Cut it out.

We don't like it when our kids do it.

Which means we know between life and death, we just choose to live in death.

That's what Jesus is telling us this week.

We are choosing to live in death.

Not that we kill other people with our words, we wallow in it ourselves.

There's this funny thing about telling secrets on other people.

You sort of think, hey, if I do that with somebody else, they'll never do it back to me.

And of course, we all know that's wrong, don't we?

People who gossip about somebody else will always gossip about you.

It's wallowing in death.

And we get to hear this other passage.

The churches I grew up in, if you were divorced, you couldn't be in leadership.

There are churches around that if you're divorced, you can't come to the Lord's table.

We know that.

This isn't about that.

We get to hear today that people at the time were buying women as wives.

That's how it worked.

Women didn't have rights.

They were owned by their fathers and then by their husbands.

And if they displeased their husband, well, he could just sell them.

He could upgrade, get a newer model if he had enough money.

Jesus said, that's not how life works.

That isn't how life works.

Thank God that we have different rules now.

Women can own property, women can inherit businesses.

But you know, while we're talking about words, and I think this is really important to say, I think Jesus is really inviting us to think about the words we use even casually.

I've been running for three years.

I run through the neighborhood, and I'll be honest, I don't run well with a shirt on when it's warm because the shirt gets really hot.

In three years of running, I've never had somebody tell me, you go, boy.

I've never had somebody tell me how nice my bottom is.

My wife went walking three times, walking in the last week, and she had to put up with that from people.

You go, girl.

Nice.

These are words that kill people.

Make them hate their bodies.

These are words that we are totally unaware of, and they're opportunities.

Do we treat women like property meant to please us?

Do we only talk about how pretty our girls are, or do we talk about how bright and hardworking they are?

Do we ever call boys bossy or do we call them leaders?

This is the kind of stuff Jesus is asking us to think hard about, because otherwise we're creating a world, frankly, where women don't make it like men do.

And that doesn't just hurt women.

That especially hurts men.

Today's story is all about what words we choose to use, what evils we choose to accept, whether or not we look about giving life or death to one another.

And I think it's really, really helpful to get to hear because we're facing some elections, Paul say, Who is Donald Trump?

Who is Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, whoever it is?

Our hope is not in elected officials.

Our hope is in Jesus Christ, resurrected, leading us into life.

And if we ever forget that, Paul takes us to task.

Our leaders are there to do menial work.

God is there to provide growth.

We are there to help God grow life in one another, not win our opinions.

So I invite you.

And if you can't find something nice to say, think harder.

At a minimum, don't say anything at all.

We'll start there.

The world will be a better place if we could just do that.

But why settle for less?

Think harder.

Please join me in standing as you're available, and let's say our children's cream.