This weekend, thanks to the inspired invitation and loving encouragement of my friend Martha Burford at Grace Episcopal Church in Lexington, VA, I had the opportunity to step back into two parts of my life long dormant — singing and preaching.  It was a healing time for me — if you will keep reading, you will understand what I mean when I say that I had a chance to repair a breach of my own.  I will be forever grateful.

The following words are my word about the Word, offered on February 9, 2020, at Grace Episcopal Church in Lexington.  Thank you to Martha and to all the people at Grace, for your loving kindness and welcome.

Readings of the Day:  Isaiah 58:1-10, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20

Let us pray:

Lord, help us today.
We know that whenever you call a man or a woman to say anything in your name,
you take the risk of putting treasure in earthen vessels.
Sometimes faithful, sometimes flawed,
Sometimes strong, sometimes weak,
But always human.

Thank you for calling us here today,
To wrestle together with these words spoken over the ages,
To wrestle together with the meaning of our faith.

May we hear and speak some small measure of your light through our humanness,
May we bear your ears and voice, your hands and feet in this world, today, and every day.
Amen

I bring you greetings, one and all, from the Virginia Theological Seminary, where I am lucky enough to serve as a faculty member in the Academic Resource Center. And I would like to express my gratitude to you for having me here this day, this all-important day when your congregation comes together to do the work of community at your annual meeting. My personal thanks to you, Rev. Tucker Bowerfind, for the invitation, and to my friend Martha Burford for cooking it all up and coaxing me out of my self-imposed singing retirement for a little while.

Today we have before us a tiny piece of that central teaching text of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount.   And our reading includes some of the most beautiful imagery of that sermon, imagery that calls us all to be the very best that we can be:  be salt, be light, stand as the city on the hill that shines.   And we hear this hope that we live into the very best of ourselves after the prophet Isaiah has chastised us for our worst selves:  our failure to feed the poor and house the homeless, our failure to truly love God.  What could these two texts possibly teach us, when read together?

Let’s take a look at the social and historical context behind the words.  Our Isaiah text comes from the part of the book known as “The Third Isaiah,” probably gathered in the days after the return from the Babylonian Captivity.  This part of Isaiah speaks to us with a voice of incredible grief mixed with the hope that only faith can bring.  A small group has returned to Jerusalem, to find poverty, despair, and total destruction. There are struggles, deep class divisions; those returning had lived in the great Empire and, even though captive, enjoyed its benefits, while those who had been left behind lived in poverty.   The prophet who speaks here, in our text, knows that these people are in trouble – that worship is being treated as a superficial action, a magical bullet that will bring them back to the glory of before, the glory told by the stories that have been passed down.  This is not the Isaiah of Handel’s Messiah – no Comfort Ye, my people, no Arise, Shine, for thy light is come.  This is not that Isaiah. This prophet speaks of the difference between appearances and the truth of the heart. This prophet  speaks of responsibility.

Okay, let’s be honest.  It is difficult to pass up a text that calls us to be a “repairer of the breach” if you have ever heard Bishop William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign preach.   The words of my opening prayer are patterned after his own prayer at Rooted for Jesus in Atlanta.   His theme there was the same as Isaiah’s theme in our passage:  authenticity, the call to remember who we truly are and the responsibility to heal that comes with that remembering.  These breaches, these rips and tears in this world are all around us.   There are the breaches that we can see – the violence and despair and poverty–we are called to heal those breaches.  The rifts in our communities, the little fights and the big disagreements, yes, we are called to heal those as well.  No healing, no repair to our ancient foundations, however, can occur until we heal the most painful breach of all – that breach inside of us, that separation from our true selves, from the image of God that fuels our very breath – that breach within that causes us pain and moves us to cause pain to others.

You see, Jesus, in his great sermon, sees that breach, stands in that breach, and asks us to join him there.

Our Gospel text, like our passage from Isaiah, speaks to us from a difficult, divided time, and also calls us to live with authenticity, embrace our identity, and accept the responsibility that comes with that awareness.  Both Jesus, and whomever wrote these words down for us, speak to us from a time riddled with corruption, social warfare, and dominated by the agents of empire.  At Matthew’s writing, the Temple has been destroyed, the Romans have tightened their grip on the province, underground rebellion that will lead to the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem is beginning to grow, the final war between Rome and Judea is on the historical horizon.  And, without the Temple as its center, Judaism itself is in turmoil. How would it survive?  What would it look like?  Who would lead, and from where?  Followers of the Way (as yet, not called Christians) sat side by side in the synagogue with others, even with Gentiles, known as Godfearers for their devotion to the Jewish God. There were so many groups, so many teachers, so many interpretations…

There is a complaint that I hear often at the seminary.  Why should I study the Old Testament, it is only the Gospel that matters.  Or, my personal favorite, I would NEVER preach about the Old Testament text, so angry, so violent.  And you might be asking today, why even read our Isaiah passage? We read it because, Jesus, in the one sentence, commands it.   When he says,  “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill,” we become obligated to understand all that came before, we become tied to that first Covenant forever.

You see, Jesus ALWAYS preached the Hebrew Bible.  That was his Scripture.  That was Paul’s Scripture.  That was the scripture of the missionaries in Acts.  Everything that we know as the New Testament has as its ancient foundations, the Torah, and the teachings of Isaiah and the other Prophets.  No matter what passage we choose, we always teach the Hebrew Bible when we teach the Gospel. But we teach it through the experience of a person on earth who was both fully human and fully God.  We read through the lens that Jesus taught us.

The two words in Jesus’s statement that sometimes send us down a perhaps too-human path, are, I think, “the law” and “fulfill”.  Let’s look at that verb fulfill.   The Gospel writer uses this word that we translate as “fulfill” two times before Jesus’s statement, the First and second times in the telling of the birth story and then in the story of the flight to Egypt.  And now, Jesus himself uses the word to refer to himself, his presence, his ministry:

Our modern reading?   We understand the word “fulfill” as a transaction, for example, when a pharmacist fulfills a prescription, or when a publisher fulfills our subscription to a certain magazine.  I am by no stretch of the imagination a Greek scholar, but I can use a dictionary, and when I look up pleroo, I find more interesting translations that take us out of the transactional:  to infuse, for example, or, to be fully arrived – I like that one a lot.  To be fully arrived would mean to be fully present in this moment, to embrace all that has come before, all that is, and all that might be.  It turns “fulfill” from a transaction into a word of fullness and being.

And what about the Law.  Here, we get lucky because if we skip ahead in Matthew, Jesus tells us that meaning himself, not by giving us new words but by quoting from Deuteronomy and Leviticus:  “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matt. 22:37-40, quoting Deut. 6:5 & Lev. 19:17-18).

All the law, all the prophets, all that is and will be, hang on this knowledge:  that you are called to love, that you are love, that you must give love.  That it is in love and by love that all breaches will be repaired.

Law is not just a list of do’s and don’ts, a list of judgments and punishments.  Fulfillment is not just a transaction. To live the law, to fulfill the law, is to live a life of habitual practice, a habitual practice of the way of love. Jesus is preaching here to all of us.  He stands in the breach, embracing the was-ness, the is-ness, and the what-will-be-ness of the moment, fulfilling his unique position as the Son of God, as the most authentic expression any earthen vessel can offer, and asking us to join him, and to fulfill our true identity.

Here, Jesus calls us to remember this truth, to remember our authentic selves, this self that is loved and is love.  He calls us to remember the law, the way of being given to us through the covenant, explained to us by the prophets, and to bring that law into life in the world around us, and in ourselves. He is simply here to remind us, to tell us to remember…to remember that we are loved, and to remember, most of all, to share that love with the whole world.

Amen