Sermons Online ...
Sermon: The Eighth Sunday after the Epiphany (A) - 27th February 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7,8 &10 am
Readings: Isaiah 49:8-16a Psalm 131 1 Corinthians 318-4:5 Matthew 6:22-34
The film The Last Station is set in 1910, the last year of the long life of internationally celebrated writer and philosopher Count Leo Tolstoy. As the film begins, turbulence mounts as the Count’s devoted and idealistic disciples, manoeuvre against his more practical and family oriented wife, Sophia. The main setting is the Count’s country estate of Yasnaya Polyana. The Count and Countess have a long-standing and loving marriage, but his idealistic and spiritual side is at odds with her more aristocratic and conventionally religious views.
Contention focuses on a new will that the “Tolstoians” are attempting to persuade the Count to authorize. It will negate all of his copyrights and put his writings into the public domain, potentially leaving his family without adequate support after his death. The manoeuvring is seen through the eyes of a brand new secretary to the great man, who finds himself having to mediate between the two sides. He takes time out for an intense love affair with one of the Count’s less content followers, Masha.
In the end, the Count reluctantly signs the new will and leaves Sophia and their home to travel to an undisclosed location where he can continue his work undisturbed. She unsuccessfully attempts suicide. During the journey, however, he falls ill. The film ends with his death near the Astapovo train station, where the Countess is allowed, barely and reluctantly, by his followers to see him one last time.
Christian anarchism is a movement in political theology that combines anarchism and Christianity. The foundation of Christian anarchism is a rejection of violence, with Leo Tolstoy’s, “The Kingdom of God is Within You” regarded as a key text. Tolstoy sought to separate Russian Orthodox Christianity, which was at that time merged with the state, from what he believed was the true message of Jesus, as contained in the Gospels and specifically the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy takes the viewpoint that all governments who wage war, and churches who in turn support those governments, are an affront to the Christian principles of non-violence and non-resistance. Although Tolstoy never actually used the term “Christian anarchism” in “The Kingdom of God Is Within You”, reviews of this book following its publication in 1894 appear to have coined the term.
We have been reading through the Sermon on the Mount, or the Beatitudes, over the last few weeks. Today is the sixth, and last time we will read them for sometime.
The traditional title has been the “Sermon on the Mount” since Augustine so labelled it in the fifth century, but the content represents Jesus’ teaching more than his preaching. Matthew does not call it a sermon, but Jesus’ “teaching”. The core of Matthew’s Gospel proclamation, shared by John the Baptist and Jesus’ disciples, is the coming of the kingdom of God and the human response of repentance. Yet neither of these themes is found in the Sermon on the Mount. It is not directed to the general public, but assumes the community of disciples who have already responded in faith to Jesus’ preaching, who pray to God as Father and relate to each other as brothers and sisters. Unless this preaching foundation is assumed, we should be cautious in referring to it as a summary of Jesus’ message.
Matthew’s conviction of Jesus being the Christ, the Word incarnate, is inseparable from the story that he has composed. The sermon is to be interpreted as part of Matthew’s telling the story of salvation. It is a speech made by the main character, within the story Matthew has carefully constructed. The statements of the Sermon on the Mount are not general moral principles or advice of a religious genius or guru that can stand on their own. Both their meaning and their validity are derived from the story of what God has done in Jesus. Without the priority of grace, the sermon can be misunderstood as the ultimate legalism. Although it has many imperatives, the sermon is not a list of things we should do. As elsewhere in Matthew, the imperative of human response presupposes God’s action in the first place.
It has not been easy for people of faith to come to terms with the sermon on the mount. Throughout the centuries, the ups and downs of the church’s struggle to understand and obey its teaching may be classified under the headings of those to whom the church understood these instructions to be addressed and when these instructions were thought to apply. If it seems impossible that the sermon is intended to apply to everyone at all times, can its intention be better understood by limiting the persons or times to which it applies?
There have been different ways to interpret the sermon. This is where we tie Tolstoy back into the history of interpretation. One line of interpretation says that t he sermon applies to everyone, or to all Christians, and to all times.
The literature of early Christianity assumes that the principle of the sermon applied to all Christians, and that they were simply to be done with common sense being the guide. Even after the problem with such things as literally turning the other cheek and giving away one’s property became sharper, there have been individuals such as Leo Tolstoy and groups such as the Anabaptists who believed the sermon was simply to be literally practiced, which often meant a withdrawal from ordinary society.
In a second way of applying the sermon to everyone supposes that Jesus and Matthew are thought of as wholesome idealists who gave us goals that, even if we cannot literally reach them, provide us with direction for our striving. Older Protestant liberalism tended in this direction, reducing the sermon to principles and attitudes that should influence our practice. The centre of the sermon became 6:1-18 as the key to the rest. Verse one of that chapter reads, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them”. It also contains the Lord’s Prayer. The purported legalism and externalism of “the Jews” became the foil for the “inner” ethic of Jesus.
Another approach, developed in the Lutheran tradition, applies the sermon to everyone in all times, but understands its function to be negative. In this tradition the sermon is understood to function as Law. Just as the Law was given to make us aware of our own inability to fulfil it and our need of God’s grace, so also the sermon was given to reveal to us our own impotence and drive us to despair, to compel us to stop exerting ourselves in establishing our own righteousness. This very Pauline understanding can lead either to a perverted view of cheap grace, or to an interpretation in which Jesus is the one who, as the Second Adam, fulfils the Law.
Another interpretation states that the sermon applies only to certain people. That interpretation tries to come to terms with the perceived difficulty of the sermon’s demands by arguing that it was not intended to apply to everyone, as all the above approaches assume, but only to certain people. During the Middle Ages the view, typified by Thomas Aquinas, was developed that the principals of the Christian faith apply to all Christians, but that the “counsels of perfection” are only for priests, monks, and nuns. This seems to have some support from Matthew’s own editing of Mark, where he adds to the Ten Commandments, required of all, the counsel “but if you would be perfect”. This need not be thought of as a compromise, but can represent the view that, if it is unrealistic to ask the majority to live strictly by the Sermon on the Mount, then at least some should do so, not as a matter of self-righteousness or being better than others, but as a testimony to and embodiment of the will of God for all.
A third major approach comes to terms with the sermon by arguing that it applies only at a certain time, that it is qualified in relation to the second coming of Christ. There are three varieties of this view.
The kind of divine ordering that argues that the Sermon on the Mount was not intended for Jesus’ hearers or for our own time, but is the kingdom ethic that will be practiced during the millennial kingdom, after the second coming of Christ, when this theology states there will be a thousand year reign.
Albert Schweitzer, and others, showed that in the synoptic Gospels, it has an end times meaning, and argued that Jesus expected the apocalyptic end of the world to come very soon and that his teaching was intended to be practiced literally, since it applied only to the brief period before the end.
Schweitzer’s view is not held by any New Testament scholar now, but his rediscovery of the end times aspect of gospel ethics became the foundation for developing a view that has been influential. In this view, an orientation towards the end times allowed Jesus, and Matthew, to perceive and announce the unconditional will of God, valid for all times, not just as an emergency matter for the interim period before the end. Matthew’s Jesus is understood as one who sees the world and life in the light of the dawning kingdom of God. Jesus who can so reveal the life God requires in this light, without qualifications. This approach takes the historical situation of the sermon seriously, without making it a relic separate from our own time and our own decisions.
What ever you feel about the teaching contained in the Sermon on the Mount remember the words of Jesus from the next chapter, after todays reading, towards the end of the recorded sermon, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock”(7:24).
This sermon based upon material from The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol VIII, Abingdon Press, Nashville. 1995, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Station - cite_note-station-0, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_anarchism