The New Through the Eyes of the Old

Good morning!  I’m afraid I have to start off my sermon with an apology, today.  You see, normally when pastors write a sermon we do so with certain goals in mind.  Our hope, in the end, is to glean a relevant message from God out of the Scriptures and then do our level best to hit you square in the heart with it.  You see, to live in this broken and sometimes all too ugly world of ours is to have our hearts harden, to have them darken and grow cold.  It becomes all too easy to withdraw from the world, to ignore the needy, to turn our backs on the vulnerable and defenseless, to focus only on our own selfish wants.  It is for that reason, I think, that we as Christians know it is in our best interests to gather into community often and hear a message that tenderizes the heart.  A message that brings light to the soul even as it warms the cold places of our spirits.  It is for that reason that I need to apologize, however, because I have no intention of giving that kind of sermon.

                I have no intention of giving that kind of sermon not because I don’t feel it is important, that we as human beings don’t need to be deeply intentional about the state of our hearts, but because our text today requires something different.  Indeed, I feel if I preached such a sermon I would do a grievous injustice not only to you but to our lesson as well.  Ladies and Gentlemen, something absolutely remarkable happened with the institution of the New Covenant, and when Christ declared that he was giving us the keys to the kingdom it really was a groundbreaking and unheard of thing.  Coming from the religion of Judaism, a religion that told you what to wear, what to eat, and where to worship, a religion that regulated almost every area of human life; to have Jesus tell his disciples, both the apostles and us living today, that we have the keys, that we now are trusted as the highest officials in the kingdom, able to set policy, and make important decisions as to life, faith, and even worship all on our own.  We can choose what hymns we sing, what holidays we will follow, secular or otherwise.  We can create liturgy, and decide for ourselves what foods we ought to eat.  Yes we have Communion and Baptism, but even with these the particulars of when, where, and with what have been entirely left to the faithful.   But all this freedom comes at significant price, we have the freedom of choice, but we are also held responsible for what we do choose. 

To be responsible requires that we be very intentional with our choices, that we be thoughtful about what we do and why.  This means not only being aware of the advantages of what we have chosen, but also being very careful not to ignore the flaws that come with it either.  On point for our lesson today is our community’s choice to preach solely from the gospels.  I want you to know I agree with this decision wholeheartedly.  It makes us supremely Christ-centered, and deliberately keeps the gospel the focus of not only our worship but our lives as Christians.  I would not have it change for anything, but as a minister called by God under this system, I must tend to its flaws.  The flaw of preaching only from the gospels is that when you need the Old Testament to understand the gospel, the temptation is to do without.  By focusing only on a small portion of scripture it becomes really hard to show you what a passage means given the whole of the Scriptures.  And when really Big Picture things are happening in our gospels, Big Picture things that took several books in the Old Testament to articulate, we miss them, and we skew our reading of the gospel because we haven’t preached on anything else. Such is the case with our gospel lesson today.

                Now, as a pastor, I could have ignored all that.  I could have simply ignored the big picture, I could have stuck to our chosen method of simply writing an emotional sermon that only considers these few verses out of context from the much larger history of Salvation.  I could have hit you square in the heart, pounding the pulpit and shouting, “WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?  ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE FAMILY FOR CHRIST?  HOW DOES GOD KNOW IF HE’S FIRST IN YOUR LIFE IF YOU HAVEN’T SENT YOUR OWN MOTHER TO THE CURB FOR HIM?”  I could have done that, I could have written a sermon that punched your right in the solar plexus.  But that isn’t the point of this passage, and it would have been irresponsible and unfaithful of me to preach that sermon, though indeed at this point as Americans we all have heard it preached.  I could co opt the small picture presented in this gospel to my own selfish ends, but I am not going to do so.  Instead, what I am going to do is to help you see the part of the story in light of the whole, to the flower the mind in addition to stoking the embers of the heart.

                Often times when Jesus is doing something that seems out of character or just odd for him it is indeed because there are Big picture issues at work.  The Old Testament prophets held out a fervent hope that the new covenant would move away from a restricting religion to a relationship of conscience.  That instead of a thousand rules to enforce the externalities of faith there would instead be loving hearts that have no need of them.  The prophet Hosea proclaimed loudly that God desires mercy, not ritual sacrifice, and the acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.  The prophet Micah shouted from the mountains, “The Lord has shown what he requires of you, he has shown you what the rules are…to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”  But of them all perhaps Jeremiah articulated the point best, when, in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem, and as the last nail in the coffin of the old covenant was about to be struck, he offered this unrelenting vision.  “Israel will survive saith the Lord, and the covenant I will make with them will put my Torah in their minds, and it will be written on their hearts.  No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, “Know the Lord,” for they will all know me.”   

                Now, when you reached the New Testament, when you read the words in the gospel that said, “I am giving you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven,” in that moment you may have heard much.  You may have heard 16^th century European theology, you even might have heard the voice of Mrs. McGullicutty, your old Sunday School teacher, but what you didn’t hear was the clamoring joy as the hopes and dreams of generations of Israelites were fulfilled.  It was here!  The time came!  The faithful no longer need to be broken under the law, no more is righteousness found in keeping such a cornucopia of rules.  With the coming of Messiah, the anointed one, humanity can at last enjoy the firstfruits of choice!  The saving work of God had not been in vain!

                But just as you would not have seen the Old Testament in that gospel lesson, just as you might well have read that verse and not realized all that those few words brought into being, so also might we miss the culmination of so many Old Testament hopes in the passage that lies before us.  Just as the prophets proclaimed the coming of a New Covenant of Freedom and Conscience, so also they too proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God.  Isaiah declared with boldness,

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord— and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist. The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

            Neither was the prophet Daniel silent, “And in (those days) the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all the kingdoms of mankind and bring them to an end, and it alone shall stand forever.  And, “There before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”

                So when we read our passage, when we see Jesus saying, “I have not come to bring peace but the sword,” we are confused, we scratch our heads, and we are tempted to move on, but what we are missing is the culmination of what generations of prophets foretold.  Jesus is saying “How can you not interpret the present time?  The promises of God are being fulfilled before your very eyes!  I am here!  I am the foretold One!  I am the branch of Jesse.  With Justice I decide for the poor, with righteousness I judge the needy.  I slay wickedness with my words and I am the One who establishes the kingdom where tears are no more.  But make no mistake, I am not here for peace at any cost!  The Father did not lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to abandon them to the oppression of either Rome or Jerusalem.  My mission is not the elimination of a tyrant but the elimination of tyranny.  Every oppressive system, every government, every religion, that breaks my people’s backs will be hauled off in chains before me when all is said and done, and because of this, because there is so much at stake, expect the people who rely on those systems, who benefit from misery and despair, expect them to absolutely come out of the woodwork because of everything that I am doing. They will not be some far off Lord, they will not be strangers or aliens living in your midst, they will be your mother and your father.  They will be your brothers and sisters, they will be very people that you hold most dear.  They are the ones that will side with the enemy and they will do everything in their power to get you to do the same. 

                You see my friends, just as we in the New Covenant are enjoying the firstfruits of freedom promised to our ancestors so also do we see the Kingdom of God working diligently in our midst, but it means that we must be diligent.  We live in a very special time, a time when the promises of God our unfolding in ways never before seen, and because of that we must be wary.  Both require faithfulness and intentional obedience to Spirit of God among us.  Let us resolve to be careful in our actions, to be discerning in our words and in our relationships.  If we say we serve the Lord of Freedom, a Christ who teaches us how to act rather than telling us what to do, then let us be sure we act in such a way that all the forces of misery and oppression count us as implacable foes and let us do so knowing just who might turn on us in that fight.  Keep to what is good, steel your spirits for what is right, and do so knowing the battle has already been won.  No matter the evil or the ugliness, Good will overcome.  Amen.