The Examined Life in the Community of Grace
Our key scripture today suggested to me the sermon title, The Examined Life”. You may have heard of this saying by Socrates, an ancient philosopher: “The unexamined life is not worth living." It struck me that, in some very strong language, what Jesus was getting at was the importance of guarding the heart, keeping track of our impulses, of not taking our freedom for granted.
But then I thought some more, and I thought about the
community of disciples that were with him on the Mount of Olives, I thought about us.
We are The Community of Grace. All that we have in life, all that we enjoy in God, all that God has done for us in Christ, is his grace. And grace is unmerited favour.
I think it’s near impossible to even really hear what Jesus says in this passage, on our own, without a community of Grace to work this out in. We can quickly, on our own, become quite legalistic.
[Frenetically] “O.K. this means that just to let my eye wander or to think a lustful thought means that I committed adultery, which means that I committed a horrible sin, which, basically means I’m toast...And so I need to gouge out the source of this problem. My eyes. Man, I’m going to miss my eyes.”
Henri Nouwen, a catholic priest and friend to the mission until his death in 1996, said this: “How do we befriend our inner enemies lust and anger? By listening to what they are saying. They say, "I have some unfulfilled needs" and "Who really loves me...Instead of pushing our lust and anger away as unwelcome guests, we can recognize that our anxious, driven hearts need some healing. Our restlessness calls us to look for the true inner rest where
lust and anger can be converted into a deeper way of
loving”.
A deeper way of loving. That is what Jesus is pointing to. And the community that Jesus was creating when he spoke these words is the community of grace.
So what does it mean to belong to community of grace?
A community of grace understands that we all make
mistakes. We are all sinners. There are no super-saints among us. In this kind of community we can be who we truly are, and develop into what God wants us to be.
In Foundations we’ve talked a lot about church culture. Sometimes in church we feel we need to wear masks to protect ourselves. We sense a pressure to act more together than we really are. We try to pretend we don’t struggle with sin. We pretend we don’t get angry. We don’t have doubts.
But the community of grace is a culture where you are who you are and I am who I am, warts and all, and still we find love and acceptance in each other’s presence.
There’s a story in the bulletin today that I’ll read to you:
“I once knew a very old married couple who radiated a
tremendous happiness. The wife especially, who was
almost unable to move because of old age and illness and in whose kind old face the joys and sufferings of many years had etched a hundred lines, was filled with such a gratitude for life that I was touched to the quick. Involuntarily, I asked myself what could possibly be the source of this kindly person’s radiance. In every other respect they were common people, and their room indicated only the most modest comfort. But suddenly I knew where it all came from, for I saw those two speaking to each other, and their eyes hanging upon each other. All at once it became clear to me that this woman was dearly loved. It was not because she was a cheerful and pleasant person that she was loved by her husband all those years.
It was the other way around. Because she was so loved she became the person I saw before me”.
A community of grace is a place where we can become the best we can be by being loved.
By loving one another, by treating each other with respect, by honouring each other, by taking time with one another and by sharing each other’s burdens, we demonstrate love to each other. Every kind action and loving interaction we have can help each other become the people God wants us to be.
And simply being in a community of grace reminds us that we have been given much, we have been forgiven much. And such a community enables us to search our own hearts, to examine our lives before God, honestly,
earnestly.
And so we come to God. Thankful for what He has done in us so far, and also we know that we have unclean hands. We know that we have sinned, in the doing and the not-doing.
We know that our own efforts find us guilty before God, because no matter what good we’ve done, we know the hidden things that defile us. And so we come together to God, to ask him to wash us clean. To make us holy again, by the blood of Jesus Christ, and to restore us to right relationship with Him.
And if we listen we hear from God. We hear, “I love you. I forgive you. You are beautiful to me. I love you!” So we can each examine our hearts, our motives from the inside out, moved by the Holy Spirit and not some churchy expectations of how I should behave.
So if you’re with me so far, how do we then, as a
community of grace, respond to the challenges from Jesus that we read today in Scripture? I want to look at this in 3 sections.
Mt 5: 27 "You have heard that it was said, ’Do not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Eugene Peterson’s version in The Message, puts it like this: 27"You know the next commandment pretty well, too: "Don’t go to bed with another’s spouse.’ 28But don’t think you’ve preserved your virtue simply by staying out of bed. Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body. Those leering looks you think nobody notices--they also corrupt.
Lust doesn’t have to be acted upon in order to be damaging to us. We may know this instinctively, and we may find it weird that Jesus says it to us so bluntly. But like any sin, it can captivate us, and then enslave us.
James 1:14 “Each one is tempted when, by his own evil
desire, he is dragged away and enticed.15 Then, after
desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death”. That is the bottom-line problem with lust, or with any sin.
Now What?
As Nouwen says, " Instead of pushing our lust and anger away as unwelcome guests, we can recognize that our anxious, driven hearts need some healing”.
On our own, we might just keep trying in vain to push
away lust and anger. You may have noticed that this rarely works. In the community of grace, we can find another way. Together we can find ways to guard our hearts. Isn’t that the main thing Jesus is saying. Be very careful lest lust be your downfall. And you need to take care of your soul.
If you struggle a lot in the area of lust, set up an
accountability relationship with another person of the same gender in the community of grace, knowing as 1 Corinthians 10:13 says. “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it”.
So what does Jesus say next.
29 If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
I think the normal human response to sin is to get pretty used to it pretty quickly. We get dulled quickly. Barb and I have a friend who, when she was 10 or 12 would rail against smoking. To her it was the most disgusting thing in the world, and unimaginable that anyone would willingly inhale toxic substances into their body.
At 14 she started smoking and has been a pack-a-day
smoker ever since. We accommodate pretty quickly, don’t we? We compromise.
I think it’s because of this human tendency to waffle, that Jesus uses such strong language here. You may have noticed that most churches including this one aren’t filled with folks with only one eye and one hand. That’s not because we’re perfect. It’s because we get that Jesus is exaggerating here to make a point, to get an important lesson through my thick skull.
To the community of grace, Jesus is saying, “Take the
things that are stumbling blocks to you seriously; don’t play with sin; there’s a real enemy truly after your soul. Don’t play into his hands by indulging in things that gratify in the short term and destroy in the long-term. Keep short accounts.
If you sin, go to God right away. Don’t hide away in
shame. God is definitely not shocked or surprised by
anything we do. He is grieved though, because more than anything he wants us to be free...free to choose to love and live unselfishly. He grieves when we compromise our freedom in Christ in order to sin.
31 "It has been said, ’Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.
What might this mean to a community of grace? On the
one hand, if Jesus is creating a strict rule here, it is clear that God does not want anyone to get divorced. We just need to go to the book of Malachi.
Malachi 2:16 "I hate divorce," says the LORD God of
Israel, "and I hate a man’s covering himself with violence as well as with his garment," says the LORD Almighty. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith”.
What’s the point that Jesus makes and that Malachi makes? A commitment is a commitment, and there are holy and sacred things in life. Actions have consequences that are very serious. Get married only if you are committed to stay married no matter what. Don’t trifle with the institution of marriage.
And I believe there is another part of this. It is, If you are married, don’t violate your vows. Abuse of any sort is a violation of a vow. Notice how God says, “I hate a man’s covering himself with violence as well as with his garment”
A man came into my office with his very quiet and
submissive wife a number of years ago, sat down and
opened up his Bible and read this passage to me. He then challenged me. “This means a woman can never divorce her husband right. To do so would be to sin against God”.
He was testing my orthodoxy. Challenging me to see if I thought right. I told him that Scripture says that God hates divorce, yes, and that divorce is a terrible thing to go through on all counts. I then said that infidelity was a breaking of the sacred vow of marriage. He liked that.
I then said that abuse was also a breaking of the sacred vow of marriage. He didn’t like that. I said that a woman should never stay in an abusive relationship, and that God never calls us to be victims. He didn’t like that.
Some of you know Rick Tobias, Yonge Street Mission’s
president and CEO. He’s coming to speak to us on Easter Sunday in a few months. Rick speaks at about 50 churches a year. That’s part of his job. And he’s often spoken about something he discovered in the churches when he spoke about the problem of abuse in the family, and in particular when he spoke about wife-beating.
As he would talk about the trauma of abuse, he noticed
some women in the pews looking away, not making eye
contact with him. Then he noticed some women looking
down, their eyes tear-ing up. Beside those women sat men who were squirming in their seats, looking very, very uncomfortable.
Rick finally figured out that the women who were looking away were doing that because they knew of other married women who were suffering abuse at the hands of their husbands. The woman who were fighting back tears were the ones who’s husbands were beating them.
How can this happen? In the church? Among men who
profess to be Christians? This violation of marriage vows happens when people close off their lives and their struggles from the rest of the body. When people make the decision to not really be members of the community of grace.
They go it alone, cut off from the lifeline that is the body of Christ, the community of grace. They struggle to do it all alone, when that’s never been God’s intention for His people.
There is a natural impulse, for many of us, to retreat from church when things are hard. But when we’re really struggling in life, we need to learn the discipline of being part of the community of grace no matter what. That is how you and I will grow. That is how Christ is formed in us.
That is the situation God wants us to find ourselves in, so we can examine our lives, look critically at what needs to change in our lives, ask for forgiveness from God and from one another, and find ourselves, warts and all, accepted in the beloved. Members together of the community that Jesus Christ came and lived and died to create, the community of grace.
