This is a sermon preview for the fourth week of our “Mountaintop Manifesto” series.
Visit FBCM’s Church Center Channel to view video live stream (live) or audio version of sermon (published later).
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” - from Matthew 5:33-48
Let your yes be yes, and your no, no.
Turn the other cheek. Go the extra mile.
Love your enemies.
It rains on the righteous and the unrighteous.
Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect (as the King James would have it, on the last one).
Here are some of Jesus's most famous teachings. But they are not the easiest. Anything that has "Be ye perfect" at the end of it, isn't going to be the simplest instruction. Even if we understand that "perfect" means "whole," that hardly erases the difficulty. We're fractured and torn people, within ourselves and outside ourselves. Being whole doesn't come naturally to us. But Jesus isn't showing us what comes naturally. He is showing us the super-natural way of the Kingdom of God.
These last three case studies in the Law continue from where Jesus left us last week. If last week concerned how we treat others, this week concerns how we pursue the peace of God. One point that can often be missed as that Jesus is not advocating accepting the evil in the world as the way things have to be.
At the exact same time Jesus rejects violence, he is everywhere creatively showing the way of the Gospel's peace.
It can be hard for us to imagine. So I will use an example of how resolute and wild a non-violent response can be (whether or not one finds it justified in this particular instance). I will point to the self-described "bootleg Baptist" Will Campbell (1924 - 2013).
Will Campbell was the only white minister asked by Martin Luther King Jr. to attend the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He could be inspiring, cantankerous, and perplexing all at once.
Campbell, well before the increased security after the 9/11/2001 terror aattacks, once had difficulty getting through airport security. He carried a cane. A friend had repurposed the planks of an old barn and crafted them into a beautiful new cane for him. Campbell saw it as a picture of the “Gospel — taking something rotten and making something beautiful of it.”
One day he was going through airport security with his cane and was told that he needed to go back and put the cane on the roller. He put it on the roller and then asked for the cane back so he could walk again through security. The security guard told him to come through to get the cane himself, refusing to hand it back to him.
Then, Will Campbell says, the following transpired:
I said, “No, no. If you don’t mind bring it back to me. Now I have done what you asked me to do so will you do what I’m asking you to do?” He said, “Mister, can you walk without that cane?” By then people were backed up behind me clearing their throats, ’bout to miss their airplane don’cha know. I said, “We don’t pay you to ask medical questions. That’s a different specialty. They’re called physicians. Just bring the cane back.” He was getting mad and I was somewhat out of sorts myself. When I got home and told my wife about it she accused me of being mildly in the grape but I wasn’t. Just vexed. Finally he said, “Mister, if you want your cane you’re going to have to come down here and get it.” I said, “All right. Whatever you say.” Then I got down on my belly and crawled the length of the roller. With that people were hissing and booing him. “… Making that poor old man crawl to get his walking cane.” .
Will Campbell obeys, but the way he obeys puts on display the nature of the request. He is being denied a simple dignity of being given back his cane. So he retrieves his cane, as requested, but he does so crawling. The crowd, as a result, is alarmed and upset with the security guard.
I bring up this story because it seems like an unusually bold attempt to apply what we see in this passage of the Sermon on the Mount (whether you think it was a good application or not may vary, Will Campbell's wife herself was not pleased with him in this instance, but it is a clear attempt to apply such teachings of Jesus!).
In this week's section on the sermon of the mount, we see non-resistance take on various forms. Jesus tells the crowd to give not only your shirt, but your coat to one who wants to collect your shirt as payment. He asks them to turn your left cheek to someone who insults you with a backhanded slap to the face. He teaches them to go an extra mile, when a Roman soldier compels you to go one mile.
This Sunday we will see that each case represents a creative and non-violent way to resist an evil status quo and to cling to the same truth we learned last week: each person is precious and made in the image of God.
Jesus is not asking us to be "doormats" who accept evil as a fact of life. He is inviting us into the bold new way of God's Kingdom: where we refuse to perpetuate the cycle of violence, in which enemies (inasmuch as it depends on us) are eliminated not by killing them, but by love which turns them into friends, and where simple trust in God replaces schemes which try to use religious things to gain advantage over others.
How can this be? We invite you to watch this video to begin to reflect, and to join us this Sunday for worship to find out more.