February 12, 2023, Don’t Touch the Stove (and other ways to choose life), Matthew 5:21-37 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ February 12, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

An outline of the sermon is given below:

1. If you are a parent, you know that all parents make rules for their children – as soon as they begin to move around. Rules for little children are usually all about keeping them safe. We had a farm, so there were a lot of dangers: our rules for the little children were things like – don’t touch the hot woodstove, don’t climb on the rusty machinery, don’t go into the woods all by yourself, don’t play under the cows or horses – basically, our rules were all about keeping them alive and undamaged, one day at a time.

2. But as our children grow up, the rules we have for them are less about keeping them alive, and more about helping them grow up and become themselves. We make rules about how they treat other people, about politeness and honesty and kindness. We make rules about how they treat animals, how they use objects, and how they do the work that is given them to do.

3. And if we are good parents, we don’t make those rules to impress our neighbors or make our furniture last longer or to get a good financial return on our child’s education – at least not primarily. We make rules that are intended to bear fruit in our child; so that our children will grow up to be fully the person God created them to be.

4. The heart of obedience is not keeping rules or being punished for disobedience; the heart of obedience is all about how helping our child grow into the full personhood of a beloved child of God.

Like the rules we made for our tiny children, “Don’t touch the stove” and so forth – “Thou shalt not,” Jesus tells us, is just the barest of bare beginnings. Because just staying alive – just not dying – and living a full life – those are not the same thing at all. John 3:16 “God sent his son so that we would have life, and more, abundant life”

5. Example #1 Murder

– anger – “be angry, but don’t sin” Eph. 4:26 – give no opportunity to the devil

– insult – a safe way of causing another person pain, tearing them down – we often camouflage it in humor, or pretending to be honest

– “fool” – contempt – denying the worth of another person, dismissing them as beings of lesser value

These ways of acting hurt others, but more than that, they are death to us because we are choosing not to love

6. Romans 13:9 – Paul points out that the whole law is fulfilled by love – and that was true from the very beginning. Matt. 22:34-40 Jesus says love God, love your neighbor: the whole law and the prophets hangs on those two principles

7. And Moses told the people of Israel: – “Choose life” We are growing and becoming every moment. But what we are growing into depends on how we choose to live. Are we choosing to love or not to love; life or death? This is a matter of life or death, not just a matter of following rules, not about future punishment or reward

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8. We live in a world where rules and commands are bound up with power and authority and subordination; worldly obedience, at best, comes from a place of respect, and at worst, from a place of fear.

It is easy for us to read the words of Jesus in the voice of the world. “You know the command “do not murder.” But I say to you that that isn’t good enough….”

9. But if we hear Jesus’s words like that we miss what is at the heart of this, and all Jesus’s teaching – it is all about love: our love for God and neighbor, but most important, the love the Father has for us, the Father who sent his Son so that we could live abundantly.

The Father love of God isn’t in the business of laying burdens on his children to crush them; in love, he calls us to grow up into the fullness of what he created us to be. In love, he calls us to choose life.