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Fifth Sunday After Epiphany | Sermon on Matthew 5:13-20, by Paula Murray |

¹³Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. ¹⁴You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. ¹⁵Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. ¹⁶In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. ¹⁷Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. ¹⁸For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. ¹⁹Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. ²⁰For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Gospel: Matthew 5:13-20

From the first inhale at birth to the last exhale at death, human beings continue to change. The rapid changes of infancy, childhood, and youth are too apparent to all to miss. Everyone around the child gets to watch the tiny newborn grow into a sturdy toddler, a curious grade school child, a moody teenager, and finally, a young adult whose life is full of possibility. Much of that change is driven by biology, but change also occurs in response to family, faith, education, and the pressures and challenges of life. One of the joys of long association with a single congregation is that Henry and I have the opportunity to watch not only our children grow up but the children of the congregation. Children I baptized and confirmed are now graduating from high school and beginning families of their own.

Change is not just the purview of the young. I grew up with much older people, still I suffered the usual bias of the young who assume that, with the exception of wrinkles, older people stop growing and developing from the age of 30 to the day death claims them. Instead, they just kinda get smaller and weaker, right? And older people lose hair in some places and grow it in previously hairless places, which is uncomfortably weird to contemplate for both the young and the old. Graduate school, my work with our elders in this congregation, and my own internal changes over the decades illuminated my ignorance. We do continue to grow and develop over the entire course of our lives; it’s just that our growth as adults is internal, not external. We can take joy in that kind of growth in our elders and in our own older selves as we take joy in the growth and development of children, even if that joy is tempered with an acknowledgement of the realities of old age.

It is possible to overstate the degree of change we undergo over the course of a lifetime, or to misunderstand it. We are so very different as thirty year olds than we were as three year olds, and our 80 year old selves are different yet again from our 30 year old selves. But there remains a constant self who undergoes that change; there is continuity through our changes. We are not literally a different self from decade to decade. Instead, the changes we undergo unmask who we really are, clearing away the chaff, revealing the truth of our personal foundations. Long term relationships with family and friends allow us to watch, over time, the unmasking of an individual, revealing the wonders of his or her personality or character, their triumphs over adversity, the places where pain and suffering left its mark. The unmasking continues until that last day, when all that is not true to self or God is discarded with the guilt of our sin and our mortality.

That’s a long wind-up to a description of the purpose of the Church’s observation of the season of Epiphany. The word epiphany, as I’ve reminded you previously, means revelation or manifestation. A little like those television shows which give the television audience a set of clues which should allow them to figure out who a masked singer is, the biblical texts over the course of the season of Epiphany unmask the nature of that Child whose first hours were spent in a star lit manger.

This can be countercultural even for the Church these days, where sermons may lean more to anthropology (study of the human being) or self-help than Christology. I was once asked to teach a course around Rick Warren’s book, “A Purpose Driven Life,” by a bunch of Lutheran lasses. I agreed to do so with the conditions that we utilize one version of the Bible (the NRSV) and Luther’s “Small Catechism.” It was supposed to take us 40 days, but it actually took us 18 months, in part because some of the group could not get over the first line, “It’s not about you.”

It is all about Jesus, the texts, the hymns, the sermon are all about Him who was born of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit, God Incarnate, whose death on the cross thirty plus years latter vanquished our sin and put death to death. Bit by bit, over the course of the seven weeks or so of Epiphany, the truth of the nature and the benefit of Jesus Christ for God’s creation is unmasked, and our salvation is revealed. This may not be “about us” in any immediate sense, but in the end, knowing Jesus, who He is and what He does, leads us away from fruitless self-absorption and into a relationship with the Son of God that allows us to know Him better and to love Him more with every passing day. Life with God is not static; it grows, and we grow with it.

We grow in love of God and of God’s people; the texts this morning are insistent that love of God leads naturally to love and care of the neighbor. Worship that does not lead us to be compassionate to those who suffer reflects a misunderstanding of God Himself and may even be idolatry. God’s passion on this point burns through the Old Testament reading from Isaiah. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? ⁷Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? ⁸Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. ⁹Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’” Jesus, echoing the prophet of His advent, simply says, “Let your light shine before others, so they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”

The continuity from the Old Testament to the New Testament in the understanding that love of God necessarily leads to love of neighbor gives the lie to an often heard complaint that the Old Testament God is an angry God while the New Testament God is a merciful God. Growing with God also means growing in the knowledge of God and of God’s work in your life and community. The claim that the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New Testament is a common tactic used by the evangelists of despair, those who claim God does not exist and work to destroy the faith of believers. Few of us are as biblically literate as we should be, so we’re susceptible to these mistruths. But, if we’re conversant with the Old Testament, then we realize that the whole of the Old Testament is as filled with God’s grace as is the New. The Law is God’s gracious gift to His people, the means by which they learn God’s love and are led to live in ways that reflect love of neighbor and not hateful exploitation of the neighbor. What do we hear at Lent but these words, “The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” words that recur over and over again in the books of the Old Testament (for instance, Exodus 34:6; Numbers 14:18; Psalm 86; Joel 2:13).

God’s love is as real in the Old Testament as it is in the New. Creation itself is an act of love overflowing into the making of the beloved, and God’s anger is kindled, in the New Testament as well as the Old, by the sin that darkens His works of light and love. The whole of the Bible from the third chapter of Genesis to the 22^nd chapter of Revelation is a working towards the restoration of the relationship between God and His creation damaged by sin. In Jesus Christ, the demands of divine Law are satisfied in the perfection of His grace. Jesus Himself proclaims the unity of His ministry with that of those who came before Him, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus is unmasked this fifth Sunday after the Epiphany not as one who disdains the work of the Patriarchs and the Prophets as barbaric and misdirected and the God whose work they do as some pie in the sky petty dictator. Rather, Jesus’ intent is to complete what God had begun in those men and women who, in their human imperfection, sought to speak God’s Word to His stubborn and stiff necked people and to lead them to a joyful obedience to the Law for love of God and love of neighbor. What humanity cannot do for itself, the Incarnate Son of God will do for us, fulfill absolutely God’s Law, while simultaneously illuminating the totality of His grace.

Thanks be to God.

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The Rev. Paula Murray

E-Mail: smotly@comcast.net