Matthew 5:17-48

"The world is too much with us, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," so wrote the famous English poet William Wordsworth many years ago. At the risk of appearing presumptuous, I would like to disagree. I do not think that the main problem is that the world is too much with us but rather that we are too much with ourselves.

The American poet e. e. cummings would never capitalize the letter "I" in part to protest against this domination of the individual ego. We are the problem, not something out there. But the "I" which dwells within. A young boy at an October football game sat on his hands in order to keep them warm but when he went to move them he couldn't, they had gone to sleep on him. And so he complained to his mother, "I can't get myself off of my hands."

This is the problem that we all face. We see life through our own perspective. We interpret the actions of others in light of how it affects us. We cannot get ourselves off of our hands! That is why when you're feeling down often the very best thing that you can do is try to help somebody else. Because, as you help someone else your problems suddenly don't seem as important as they used to, nor as insurmountable either.

It is the fact, that we are too often preoccupied with ourselves, imprisoned by our own egos, which provides the necessary clue to help us understand this morning's gospel reading and, in particular, Christ's comment to "be perfect, . .., as your Heavenly Father is perfect." As one biblical scholar puts it, Matthew 5:17-48 has to be one of the most difficult and puzzling of all Christ's sayings. The reason why as fairly simple. Throughout the gospels we see Jesus constantly breaking or reinterpreting the Jewish law in favour of the needs of individuals, as summarized by Jesus's comment, "the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath." Why then, in Matthew 5:17-48, does Jesus seem to say the opposite? Indeed, when you read this passage Jesus seems to be out-legalizing the actions of any Pharisee who ever lived. Not only are you not to commit adultery but you cannot even think a lustful thought. And if you do then pluck out your eyeball because it is better to enter the kingdom of heaven maimed then to perish in the fires of hell!

Throughout the Middle East, at sites deemed to be holy by the Muslim people, you will find blind beggars with red and white hats begging for money. These are not just any beggars. They are special beggars, given the privilege of begging at the holy sites because they have been to Mecca: having seen the most wonderful sight there is to see in the world, they have plucked out their eyeballs, blinded themselves, so that the last sight they will ever see in this life is the Black Rock of Mecca. Is this really what Jesus wanted us to do? If we looked at a picture of Cindy Crawford or Patrick Swayze to pluck out our eyeballs if there was even the slightest stirrings of desire within us?

The answer is `no,' Jesus was not trying to out-legalize the Pharisees. This was not his intention at all. That is not say that Jesus didn't care about the claims of the law, either. I need to make this point quite clearly because throughout history there have been Christians who have claimed that since they were saved by grace and not by the law, then the claims of the law could be disregarded by them; they were above the law, so to speak.

You find this attitude being attacked by the apostle Paul when he writes to the Christians gathered together at Rome as he asks this hypothetical question, "are we to continue to sin that grace, may abound?" And then Paul thunders out his answer,"by no means.

St. Augustine once said that the guide for Christian behavior could be summed up with this saying, "love God and do what you please," which, at first glance, appears to be a very dangerous comment to make. "You mean to say as long as I love God, I can do what I want to, anything I want to?" "Yes," Augustine would reply, "but if you love God do you really want to do that which is wrong, hurtful to God and harmful to others?

Jesus respected the law and thought, as did the apostle Paul, that it had a very important role to play. So please don't interpret what I have to say as justification for ignoring the law. But the point still remains that although on the surface it looks as if in Matthew 5:17-48, Jesus was creating simply a harder version of the law, he was really doing something very different. He was trying to attack and to find a solution to this perplexing problem that we are too much with ourselves, that we cannot get ourselves off of our own hands.

I probably have you a bit confused at this point, so let me try to explain. When you focus on keeping the law you end up focusing on yourself, the big "I" of the ego becomes even more of a problem than it already is. Either you think that you have achieved the demands of the law and you are smugly self righteous and full of pride or, more likely, you fall short of the law's demands and feel that you are a miserable, sinful wretch. But either way you end up focusing on yourself, on your goodness or your badness. That is why Jesus prefaced each of his comments by this phrase, "you have heard it said, but I say unto you.' That is why the summary of what we are to do is to look to God and seek to be like God. Because, you see, what Jesus is telling us is this, "don't worry about yourself but about God, try to be one with God, and you will find that the problem of the ego, of the self, the big "I" becomes much less of a problem."

A football player went into the big game wanting to play his very best. He was determined not to make any mistakes and to do everything right. You know what happened, don't you?. He was so focused on not making any mistakes that he played a wooden, uninspired game. When the ball was passed to him, he fumbled it. When the openings were there he failed to take them because he was too worried he would do something wrong.

At the half he sat in the dressing room, head down, convinced that the coach would pull him. Instead, the coach said nothing to him at all, he talked about how much fun it was to play football, about the joy of it all. And then before the second half began he called out the starter's names and the player was on the list! That player went out there that second half and he forgot about himself, about not making any mistakes, about having a perfect game. All he wanted to do was to please the coach for showing confidence in him. He played the very best game of his football career. He played better than he had ever played before. He played like a man inspired. Because, you see, he wasn't thinking about pleasing himself, but about pleasing his coach and about how much fun it was simply to play the game.

As the old hymn puts it, "turn your eyes upon Jesus look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace." When Peter saw Jesus walking to him on the waters, Peter immediately jumped out of the boat to meet him. Suddenly, he became self conscious. The "I" of the ego reared its head. He thought to himself "what am I doing here? I'm going to drown!" And immediately as he took his eyes and his attention off of Jesus, Peter began to sink.

Perfection doesn't mean meeting all the requirements of the law, it means directing your attention towards God, towards knowing God and being like God. As the hymn writer puts it, "come near and bless us when we wake, Ere through the world our way we take. Till, in the ocean of Thy love, We lose ourselves in heaven above." That's what perfection really means, it means being so immersed in the contemplation of God and God's love that we lose ourselves and so find the heaven that is not only above, but within as well.

Karl Rahner, the great Roman Catholic theologian, once put it like this, "the Christian of the future," he stated "must be a mystic or he or she will be nothing." If true, and I believe that it is, this is rather unsettling statement for us as Protestants and even more so as Baptists. We are used to being activists, to seeking to do the will of God. A few of us move on to being theologians, to trying to understand and reason out our faith, but we veer away from being mystics. It smacks of the exotic and the bizarre. Long haired, bearded, wild-eyed individuals come to mind. We don't have the rich tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. we don't know how to meditate, how to be still, how to be lost in the contemplation of the divine.

We are going to have to learn how. Our society has been so permeated with the claims of the Judaeo-Christian faith, that ethical behavior is almost as common outside the walls of the church as it is inside. People are cultural Christians. They may have lost the reason why but they still do the right thing anyway. And while in the end, I cannot help thinking that this is like building a house on sand, nonetheless, in the meantime their behavior, their lifestyle is a Christian one.

When I was a boy in the country of Bolivia I caught a lizard by the tail. I didn't know at the time but I soon found out that one of the defense mechanisms of that type of lizard was to be able to separate itself from its tail and to run away to safety I didn't capture the lizard, then, and he scurried off to safety but I did have his tail. I held it in my hand as it writhed and moved about for what seemed like eternity. It was the strangest thing. I knew it was dead, but still it seemed to be alive, as if it were still attached to the lizard!

It is the same way with our Canadian society. The tail of ethical behavior has been separated from the body of Judaeo- Christian faith. In time the tail will stop moving, loose its ethical action, but in the meantime, it still appears for all intents and purposes to be attached to the body. You don't need to be a Christian, you don't need to go to church, in order to do what is right. From birth Canadians are taught what is right. And even if they have absolutely no Christian faith whatsoever, and think of God on the same level as the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, nonetheless they follow God's laws and are for the most part, obedient to God's commandments. If you count on ethical action to lead you, to lead others to a contemplation of God then you will be disappointed.

In a similar way, the link between reason and the existence of God has also been cut. Relativism has given birth, in due course, to decontructionism. There is no truth any longer, everything is relative. Before deconstructionist philosophy took hold this meant that everything was equally true, now it means that everything is equally false.

Of course this process of separating reason from faith has a much longer history than that. It can be traced back to the writings of Immanuel Kant who taught that the finite mind of man cannot comprehend the infinite existence of God. And so, according to Kant, the only path open to the human creature was ethical action. But we have seen what has happened to that pathway. Christianity in Canada has been killed by its own success! Kant was wrong, though. Not in his analysis of the limitations of reason. In that unfortunately he was correct. But he was wrong in teaching that ethics was the only pathway left open to God, to knowing that God exists, to serving God, to being one with God. There is another pathway, there always has been, although it has been walked on by very few people over the years and the centuries, but it is the pathway which we must tread in the future if we want to retain and to grow in faith. Moreover, it is, in the end, the only pathway which will really lead you to that perfection which Christ called for. "The Christian of the future," said Rahner, "must be a mystic or he or she will be nothing." The pathway that we must learn to walk upon is the pathway of mysticism. It is the pathway not of doing the will of God, nor of understanding the mind of God, but the pathway of losing oneself in the contemplation of God.

How, in heaven's name, can we activistic, rationalistic Westerners ever learn to walk on this pathway? That is a good question and I really don't have time to answer it this morning. As the little poem puts it, "roses are red, violets are blue, hold on for ten minutes and I'll soon be through." But I don't even have ten minutes do I? My time is almost up. So very, very quickly let me offer these suggestions:

Firstly, we must learn, as the psalmist put it, "to be still and to know that God is God." The hurried rushed lifestyle of the average Canadian is inadequate. From time to time You must learn how to be still, how to listen to that voice which speaks in the quietness, that still small voice, which is the voice of God.

Secondly, we must learn to empty ourselves, to surrender up to God all our goodness, our morality, our wisdom, our achievements. We must learn to become little children once again.

Thirdly, we must learn to become poets and artists, to go deep inside of ourselves and find that creative language which we knew before we became educated. We must plumb the depths of our beings and learn as John Donne once put it, "that the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing."

And fourthly, we must learn how to listen, to really listen. We must learn how to see, to really see. Not just to listen with the ears of the flesh, nor to see with the eyes of the head, but to listen and to see with the eyes and the ears of the spirit.

Let me close with two comments. The first is by the American naturalist and poet Walt Whitman, who after attending a rather dry and boring academic lecture on astronomy wrote these words:

When I heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon accountable I became tired and sick, Til rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

The second is by a musician named Ariel who one morning heard a brass band playing under his window. The music moved him almost to tears;

It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over me [he wrote]; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres, whose sweet sadness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. If music thus carries us to heaven [Ariel concludes], it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.

May the beauty of nature, of music and of poetry lead you beyond yourself to a contemplation of God. May you lose yourself in the contemplation of God's love and so find the perfection for which you were intended -- the perfection which is heaven.

delivered at the Pereaux Church 11 February 1996