open-hearted metaphors

I made it to the end of the Sermon on the Mount in my sermon last Sunday, a journey that was meaningful and surprising to me. Here is how I wrapped things up.

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This morning we complete the series we began fifteen Sundays ago when we read the Beatitudes, which are the opening verses to the Sermon on the Mount. We have gone passage by passage, listening to Jesus as he called his hearers to think about some of the specifics of what it means to live out our trust in God. So, now I want to ask you to get comfortable in your seats and take a deep breath so that you are relaxed as the ushers hand out the quiz over what we have studied.

Sorry. That’s the old teacher in me.

As we read in our passage for today, Jesus used three metaphors to pull together all he had been saying. He told people to go through the narrow gate and not take “the gaping gate and the roomy road” that was more populated. Then he warned people about those who preached false gospels by saying that high quality trees bear good fruit and poor quality trees bear bad fruit. The last contrast he made was between those who built their houses on a foundation of solid rock and those who built on sand. Only the rock foundation endured the storm.

Jesus’ sermon is filled with so many things to remember and contemplate, even before we get to these metaphors, which have a lot to say on their own, and at the same time, there are ways in which all of the different things come back to the central idea we have continued to repeat: God is with us and we are with each other, which means our trust in God gets lived out in our relationships with one another.

For that reason, I want to go back to the beginning for a moment so we can remember how Jesus framed all of the instructions and guidance he offered.

As we have talked about before, the people sitting on the hillside listening to him were people living in the grip of Roman occupation, which was brutal and exhausting. There wasn’t an end in sight. They might have felt the way writer Anne Lamott felt, when she wrote this week about living through these days when life feels difficult and exhausting. She said she remembers the words of one of her friends who asks, “Another day? Didn’t we just have one yesterday?”

It was to those tired, oppressed people that Jesus said,

Happy are those who are exhausted and crushed because they will find hope because God’s realm belongs to them.

Happy are those who are living with heart-breaking grief because they will find sustaining comfort.

Happy are those who are gentle in the face of brazen power because they will be the ones who inherit the earth.

Happy are those who are starving for justice because they will feast like never before.

I pointed out to you that all of those he named were groups: happy are those. And the verb is plural. He was reminding them—and us—that we are not alone, even in our grief and exhaustion, and neither are we alone in our hope.

God is with us and we are with each other.

The closing of his sermon brought it all full circle when he talked about choosing the narrow road or the rock foundation. Once again, Jesus said, we have to continually choose whether we will engage the world by wielding power or by offering love. Power and wealth may build big castles, but they have no relational foundation. We build solid lives when we choose to love, when we choose what is best for all of us, not just ourselves.

How we make those choices everyday add up to the story of our lives.

I mentioned Anne Lamott earlier, and I want to draw from her again. She wrote this week that when she is feeling most beleaguered she has a Jesuit friend who tells her, “We do what is possible, what is practical, simple and kind.”

Maybe that is one way to think about the narrow road: when things get tough, that’s the road we are called to take, strengthened by our trust in God and leaning into our belonging in God’s community, we choose to stay true to the promises they have made to God and to one another.

God is with us and we are with each other, so we keep our promises.

This week, a friend I went to high school with in Kenya and who now lives in Fairfield sent me a link to a sermon by a rabbi who talked about a new translation of the verse from the Torah that Jesus quoted: love your neighbor as you love yourself. She said the Hebrew word that was translated as an adverb to modify the verb love was really an adjective modifying the word neighbor, so that the best translation is, “Love your neighbor who is just like you.”

To see everyone as just like us is a narrow road as well. That is not the prevailing message being broadcast in these days. Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said that road leads to destruction. I don’t think he was speaking in some sort of eternal euphemism. He was talking in real time. Unless we choose to love one another, we all die.

Even as I say those words, I am mindful that Jesus wasn’t preaching at people. He wasn’t merely correcting them or scolding people for bad behavior. Listen to the way Matthew summarizes the response of the crowd.

When Jesus finished these words, the crowds were amazed at his teaching because he was teaching them like someone with genuine authority and not like their legal experts.

Amazed. Astonished. He was saying things in ways they had not heard before, like someone who trusted his own words rather than someone who was bent on bending people to their will.

Maybe that is the narrow road: to be willing to keep our hearts open such that we can continue to be astonished by the Spirit of God and by how that Spirit connects us with one another, even in the times when it seems least likely to be true.

As we gather at the Communion Table again today, may we come with appetites for astonishment. May we come to be fed, to find bread for the journey on this narrow road of love, remembering the words of theologian Reinhold Neibuhr:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint; therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

It is another day, just like the one we had yesterday. Life is beautiful and broken, and so are we, but we are not alone. God is with us and we are for each other, no matter the weather. Amen.

Peace,
Milton