In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
So
you’re walking down the street and you see a $20 bill on the ground. No one
else is around, so you pick it up and give it to a charity. Then you go into a
store, and see the cash register unattended, so you take a $20 bill and also
give it to charity. Most of us would say that the first action is completely
fine, whereas the second one is morally suspect, if not criminal. The action,
taking a $20 bill that isn’t yours and giving it to charity, is identical. What
changed was the context, and that context makes all the difference. This is a
sermon on ethics and morality, and as evidenced by that simple example, it can
be a complicated matter.
There
are generally two major camps that people fall into when it comes to ethics.
One is call “moral absolutism,” which claims that there are certain moral
truths, particular laws that are universally applicable and should always be
followed. For example, some might say that the notion of not killing another
person or always telling the truth is a moral absolute. On the other side of
the debate is situational, or contextual, ethics. This side might justify lying
in a situation where telling the truth could cost someone their life – a
classic example being lying to the Nazi SS Patrol about where Jews were hiding.
This
is very much a live debate – you can find theologians, scholars, clergy, and
laity all on different sides of this topic. Given the witness of Scripture and
the reality of life, I’m firmly on the situational side of things, with one
caveat. And that exception is that I also firmly believe in the moral absolute
of the love of God as the metric by which all of our actions must be measured.
The
topic of morality and ethics is a vitally important one, both to our faith and
our society. You can find a lot of theories out there for why the Church has
lost some of its cultural relevance and why the fabric of our society seems to
be weaker than it used to be. Some of those theories have merit, some less so.
But I think that one contributing factor is that we no longer have public
theologians who help us to have dialogue about morality and ethics.
Consider
the fact that CS Lewis was on the cover of Time magazine in 1947, Reinhold Niebuhr in 1948, Billy Graham in 1954, Paul
Tillich in 1959, Karl Barth in 1962. This simply doesn’t happen anymore. When
religious leaders end up on the cover of magazines now, it isn’t for their
contributions to ethics or theology, but rather their celebrity. Perhaps the
closest public figure that we have who does this right now is David Brooks of The New York Times, but by his own
admission, he can’t use overtly religious language without losing his audience.
In a recent interview, Brooks says that “we don’t have common moral resources,
so we use politics, which is ill-suited to do this work of working through
moral disagreements.”
He’s
right – public conversations about morality have been outsourced to our
legislators and judges. And nothing against those in the legislative or
judicial business, but that’s not the best place to consider morality because
the focus is so often on interpreting the law rather than discerning the
goodness of the law. One poet has written “How small, of all that human hearts
endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” One theologian put it
another way, saying “Politics touches everything, but politics is not
everything.” Politics has become battle between two sides, and so the
underlying moral issues are ignored – it is debate more than it is a practice
of moral discernment in community. And so it is no wonder that decency and
goodness have left the realm of politics, because we don’t ever consider the
harder work of doing theology or ethics.
Brooks further says “Members
of the clergy are much less likely to be public intellectuals than they were in
the 1950s, and so we don’t have their voices. We’ve become a more diverse
society, so institutions that used to engage in moral discussions have decided
that their job is to be value neutral – which more or less describes the
universities. Finally, life, at least for the educated classes, has gotten more
competitive, so there’s a lot of time spent on the job and focusing on career.”
As
a preacher, I can tell you that it’s incredibly difficult to walk that line
between the pastoral and the prophetic role of the sermon. Many clergy, myself
of course included, fall into that trap of wanting to be “all things to all
people” and have to worry about membership and money. So we end up avoiding
anything that might been deemed “controversial” by even one person. The result
is that the Church has become culturally irrelevant because we have muted our
own voice. The marginalization of the Church isn’t because of a secular
society, but rather that Church, by and large, isn’t saying anything worth
listening to. Brooks refers to this reality as “a sort of moral mediocrity.”
What a public theologian
can do is to remind us of our sins of omission and our duty to each other. We
see this truth throughout Scripture: that we are always accountable to the
community and nothing that we do is ever done in isolation from God. This is
actually one of the strengths of the nation of Israel in Scripture – through
their public prophets, they were a self-reflective people. They were willing to
be open to criticism and repentance. Today though, those who suggest that
everything isn’t “A-Okay” are dismissed as being pessimistic or complaining.
The result is that, in
the words of Brooks, that “our public discussion is over politicized and under
moralized.” Consider Jesus’ words this morning in Matthew; this is what a moral
dialogue looks like. Sure, there’s a law, and it is certainly important, but
legalism isn’t the goal of faith. Religion is not about having a list of “dos”
and “don’ts.” The point of these prohibitions isn’t about the actions
themselves, but rather the human relationships that are damaged by such
actions. Jesus also seems to be suggesting that life is more complicated than a
law can capture, meaning that situational ethics are the way we understand the
law.
Some interpreters of this
passage incorrectly say that Jesus is being “stricter” than the law, but that
isn’t at all the case. Jesus isn’t any stricter, he’s more fundamental. He’s
saying “these laws exist for a purpose,” and that purpose is that we might all
have the abundant life that God intends for us. This is what is laid before us
in the reading from Sirach – the choice before each of us is life and death, things
which build up or things which destroy. God intends and desires for us to
choose life, but the choice will be ours.
At every juncture, we are
invited to choose life, to choose love, to choose Godliness. Jesus certainly
hits us with some intense topics – murder, adultery, divorce, and
truth-telling. Lest you think that all of this business about ethics and
morality was a way for me to avoid the text, let’s consider how we might
understand these very real examples that Jesus gives us.
Divorce certainly is a
sensitive topic, but not one that should be off-limits to our faith or
morality. It’s crucial to remember that the concept of marriage in Jesus’ time
really was nothing like it is for us today, and so in the same way, what we
mean by divorce and what divorce meant 2,000 years ago in Palestine are two
very different things. The issue certainly was not that Jesus was worried about
the Sacrament of Marriage, as that didn’t yet exist, nor was the issue that
divorce was immoral. Rather, the issue is that Jesus wanted to speak out
against was the injustice of leaving your wife because you wanted to marry someone
else who would give you access to more power or prestige, or who you thought
was more attractive, thereby leaving the wife out in the cold. The issue here isn’t
divorce, it’s relationship – don’t do something for personal gain that makes
someone else worse off.
Of course, divorce is
never a happy thing, but that shouldn’t at all mean that it is never the right
thing. We aren’t perfect, and our lives aren’t lived in vacuum where each
decision can be made in isolation from all others. As we all know, none of us
is the perfect spouse, none of our relationships are immune from sin, and so no
marriage is ever built upon a perfect foundation. For a variety of reasons, some
marriages just don’t work, and can never be made to work. When the Bible says
“choose life,” it’s a rebuttal to the legalistic interpretation that divorce
should never be allowed. Staying in a dysfunctional, soul-destroying, or
abusive relationship isn’t a holy thing, it’s a legalistic thing. Sometimes
divorce is the holiest thing that can be done, it can be the best way to find
the peace of God. I’m glad that many churches are now seeing that, and that
divorce is no longer the stigma that it used to be.
And since we’re talking
about controversial topics, let’s go ahead and consider abortion. I’ve never
preached on this topic, ever. But after reading exit-poll data from this past
election where many Americans said this topic made them a “single-issue voter,”
I realized that it would be a dereliction of duty for me to ignore it. If the
Church has no voice in moral discernment, then why do we bother having a voice
at all?
When we think about
abortion, instead of a conversation about legality, what if we had a
conversation about morality? Rather than asking “what should be allowed” what
if we asked “what leads most directly to the love, mercy, and grace of God”? We
can acknowledge the tragedy of the loss of all human life, we can recognize the
brokenness of sin in such situations, we can seek to avoid abortions at all
cost, but can we also find a way to have mercy, grace, humility, and dignity in
our dialogue? Can we go deeper into the complexity of ethics instead of rushing
to moral absolutes? Does a sense of situational ethics help us see that sometimes
when goods are in conflict, while there may be no perfect choice, there may be more
than one moral choice? I realize that we will not all agree on this, and that
is a good and healthy thing. The point is not universal agreement, but rather
that we think through these issues compassionately and theologically.
The issue at hand is that
we need to reclaim the language of “sin” in our moral and religious vocabulary,
but not as a word of judgment, but rather as a warning. Sin doesn’t mean that
you’re going to hell. Sin doesn’t mean that you are immoral. Sin simply means
that this isn’t the fullness of God’s love. And sometimes, sin is unavoidable,
and so morality becomes less about doing what is right and more about pursuing
grace in the midst of brokenness. Is it more sinful to steal in order to feed
your family, or more sinful to let your family starve? There’s no perfect
choice because sin simply is a part of our lives and our world.
And while we may not be
able to avoid sin, it needs to be said that there is always, always grace,
mercy, and forgiveness. I make mistakes, you make mistakes. Sometimes we do the
least bad thing, sometimes we make decisions that we regret. It is not our task
to judge each other. Rather, ours is the work of finding ways to restore the
community when it is broken. Throughout Scripture, we read about the abundance
of God’s mercy, and so whatever you have done, know that God’s forgiveness and
grace is never beyond reach.
We also need to stop
thinking in terms of “right” and “wrong.” We need to stop trying to win
cultural battles through our legal system. Rather, we need to start having more
conversations about morality. We need to struggle with topics, not each other.
And we need to focus on cultivating virtues. There are some classic and
religious virtues that could transform our lives and society if we would try to
build them up. We do it all the time with our children – we want them to be
well-rounded, so we make sure they read, play an instrument, and have a hobby.
And those are good things, but what if we focused on virtues like temperance,
prudence, courage, justice, humility, generosity, discernment, faith, hope, and
charity?
The Church is the place
where these virtues can be discussed, and hopefully found. If we can commit to
being a part of a community of faith, to reading Scripture, to studying
theology, to having conversations about ethics, to have a self-reflective and
God-oriented prayer life, then we will be better equipped to do this holy work
of becoming a more morally minded people. Focus on the grace of God, because the
more we focus on it, the more it will be manifest in our world and in our
lives.
