Welcome to Church of the Apostles

“Subprime Faith”
June 1, 2008- RCL Year A, Proper 4
The Rev. Mark Byers

We talked a little bit about Matthew’s Gospel last week. Let me give you a bit deeper background. Different scholarly sources break down the structure of Matthew in slight different ways: here’s a fairly standard breakdown from the New Oxford Annotated Bible.

1-2 Birth of Jesus
3:1-12 Activity of John the Baptist
3:12-4:11 Baptism and temptation of Jesus
4:12-18:35 Jesus’ preaching and teaching in Galilee
19-20 Journey to Jerusalem
21-27 The last week, concluding with Jesus’ crucifixion and burial
28 The resurrection; Jesus’ commission to his disciples

The book breaks up roughly into sections of narrative and then of speeches/teaching. There are five major sections of teaching. Different scholars, again, do this in various ways, but this is a helpful one, again, from the NOAB:

5-7 Sermon on the Mount
10 Instruction for missionary disciples
13 The parables of the kingdom of Heaven
18 On sincere discipleship
24-25 On the end of the present age

The teachings are separated by narrative sections, which tell the story of Jesus’ life and mission. The first section of teaching is the Sermon on the Mount, chapters 5-7. I’ll be talking about part of this section today. This sermon is a key teaching; it is sometimes referred to as a new Torah or Law, like the Torah given to the Israelites, but for a new stage in God’s relationship with humanity.

Let’s look at an outline of the Sermon on the Mount, just to get an idea where our passage falls within the teaching. This is from the Harper’s Bible Dictionary. If you’re interested in having a basic reference book to help your study of scripture, this book is a good one.

5: 1-2 The setting
5: 3-12 The Beatitudes
5: 13-16 The new community
5: 17-20 The abiding validity of the law
5: 21-48 On practicing righteousness toward others in matters of:
Murder (5: 21-26)
Adultery (5: 27-30)
Divorce (5: 31-32)
Oaths (5: 33-37)
Retribution (5: 38-42)
Love of enemy (5: 43-48)
6: 1- 7: 12 On practicing righteousness toward God:
Almsgiving (6: 1-4)
Prayer (6: 5-15)
Fasting (6: 16-18)
On not laying up false treasure (6: 19-24)
On not being anxious (6: 25-34)
On not judging (7: 1-5)
On not squandering what is precious (7: 6)
On resting assured that God hears prayer (7: 7-12)
7: 13-27 Concluding warnings and exhortations

Notice where this passage comes in the sermon. It’s the last part. A lot of times, we’ll hear people, sometimes from inside the church, many times from outside the church, talk about the faith of Christians as being primarily about forgiveness and not judging. And this is partly true. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ does involve being forgiven our sins. It also involves restraining ourselves from judging others. We should not, however, fall into these two mistakes:

First, imagining that forgiveness is automatic, or simply a one-time act. Jesus tells his disciple Peter, when Peter asks him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” To which Jesus replies, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” We can expect, I’m sure we all know, that we ourselves and those we are related to, from family up to nations, will sin against one another often, and repeatedly. Forgiveness is a life-long disposition and discipline, not something we work ourselves up to occasionally when the mood strikes us.

Second, judgement is a part of our faith. However, judgement is primarily God holding up a mirror to us, not something that we do on our own. The church, as a body, is commanded by Jesus Christ to be both prophetic and merciful: we point both to where we and our neighbors have fallen short of God’s will, and also to the ultimate and only source of mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

We find ourselves, in our country, in the midst of economic struggles brought on by, among other things, sub-prime mortgages. These are, in a nutshell, loans made to borrowers with less than ideal credit at higher than regular interest rates. Many lenders even allowed or encouraged false information from borrowers. So a good many people ended up unable to pay their mortgages and went into foreclosure. Some even had their houses taken away. Many more find themselves struggling with higher than ideal mortgage payments.

We go through things like this periodically: people are persuaded that somehow, reality has changed, and that they can afford things that are beyond their means, or that they can believe things that seem unbelievable, or that, yes, we’ve lied to you in the past, but now we’ve mended our ways. Think of the “Tech Bubble,” when companies that never had made much or any money were selling on the stock market for enormous prices, or the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” the attack by North Vietnamese gunboats on U.S. Navy vessels that never actually happened, but that served as a pretext for getting involved in fighting in the Vietnam War. I’m sure you can think of other things, either in your own life, or in our common experience.

Now we’re in the midst of the resulting and inevitable cycle of blame. The next time you hear someone talk about how Christians shouldn’t judge, just think about this. Christians and non-Christians alike love to blame other folks for what ails them. And sometimes they are right. Good, God-loving people do foolish things, or are misled, all the time. And there are some people who claim to love God who do things in God’s name that are contrary to God’s will.

I call this sermon “Subprime Faith.” Are there Christians whose faith is less than perfect, as there are borrowers whose credit is less than perfect? Are they, then, liable to “foreclosure”? I suppose both of these things are true, to a degree. We are all sinners, whose “credit” is less than ideal, and we do face ultimate accountability in our relationship with our Lord.

People in Jesus’ time were as able to believe the unbelievable and do the incredibly foolish as we are. Jesus is saying a number of things in the Sermon on the Mount, of course, but here are two important things. First, that God is doing a new thing in Jesus Christ, but that the “old things,” the old ways of living aren’t gone. Jesus simply says that we are to go even further in them, by behaving, in our faith, as active participants in what he is unfolding in our midst. So we don’t just love our neighbor and hate our enemy in the kingdom: we are called to love both neighbor AND enemy. We don’t just worship God because we want to put a good face on for those around us.

We worship God, we live in faith, because we know that worship and faith are our food, that they are essential to who we are, that they remake us as stronger, wiser, and better people than we were without them. If Jesus were a good businessman, going on humanity’s track record, he’d never risk anything on us. Humanity hasn’t got the best “credit score.” But for the sake of his love for us, for who we might become through him, he gives us grace, forgiveness, and gifts to be servants of his purpose. We are, in a word, receivers of the biggest “liars loans” in history. We have no income and no assets to offer as security for what God is offering. Yet there it is before us. It costs only our worship and our commitment to faithful living.

And still, we so often choose other things. Even people who claim allegiance to Jesus. Even we who should know better. I knew a man, in a congregation I served in years ago, as seminarian. One Sunday at church, we were talking, and he was telling me that he had been laid off from his job. He was bright, and talented, and hard-working, yet this had happened several times to him before. He had tears streaming down his face, and he said something like this, “Mark, every time I take a new job, I put my heart into it. I focus on it. I work hard, and I’m loyal. And every time this happens, my heart is broken. And I realize that I’ve put my trust in the wrong place yet again, that my love and faith should belong to God.”

Hear this Good News from Matthew:

Jesus said, "Don't look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire, easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don't fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do. The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires total attention.

"Be wary of false preachers who smile a lot, dripping with practiced sincerity. Chances are they are out to rip you off some way or other. Don't be impressed with charisma; look for character. Who preachers are is the main thing, not what they say. A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook. These diseased trees with their bad apples are going to be chopped down and burned.

"Knowing the correct password—saying 'Master, Master,' for instance— isn't going to get you anywhere with me. What is required is serious obedience—doing what my Father wills. I can see it now—at the Final Judgment thousands strutting up to me and saying, 'Master, we preached the Message, we bashed the demons, our God-sponsored projects had everyone talking.' And do you know what I am going to say? 'You missed the boat. All you did was use me to make yourselves important. You don't impress me one bit. You're out of here.'

"These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock.

"But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don't work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards."

Long after we start coming to church, we’re hopefully still growing in faith and wisdom. But it’s always a struggle, because the Gospel is not the only message we live with. We come from a culture that tells us that what we own, how we look, what we watch on television or read, our ambitions, our competitiveness, who our friends are, who our enemies are, that these things define us. What I would suggest to you is this: that we become something different. That’s really the essence of the Gospel: “Change your life. God’s Kingdom is here.”

I want to see us become a church that doesn’t blame or condemn others. That we be deeply committed to self-transformation and mercy to others, regardless of what they look like or what they’ve done, or anything else. That we become a church of wise disciples who are not afraid to look in the mirror that God holds up in front of each of us, and all of us together. Do we look like God wants yet? Do we have what God needs in order for us to deserve what God is offering? No. But God’s willing to sign the papers anyway. Are we willing to make the payments?

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