7th Sunday after Epiphany Year A

7th Sunday after Epiphany
February 20, 2011
There once was a woman who had been married for 28 years. She and her husband had gotten a divorce because he had been having an affair with a much younger woman. He went on to re-marry this younger woman, and they and the former wife were all present at a social engagement. Through the whole evening, the ex-wife spent her time sending venomous looks toward the happy couple and rehashing all of the details of her betrayal with the person sitting next to her at dinner. Finally, when she was leaving, she said to her dinner companion, “Now you can understand why I am so happy to be rid of him!” Her dinner companion countered: “But you are not rid of him! In fact, you are more married to him right now than you have ever been. In fact, you are his prisoner. Until you forgive him you have completely bound yourself to him and to his new wife…” The woman responded: “I’ll never give him the satisfaction. Forgive him? I’ll see him burn in hell first, even if I have to go down there with him to stoke the fire.”
There was another man who was a young African student of theology studying in the United States. He received word, one night, that men in uniforms armed with guns, grenades, swords and clubs had entered his home village in Rwanda and killed about 70 people there, many of whom were his friends, neighbors, church members and included most of his family. At first this young man wanted to wreak vengeance upon those who had murdered all those dearest to him. But as he studied and prayed and prayed some more, he became convicted that God was calling him to a ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation in his home country of Rwanda, and he knew that he had to begin by forgiving those who had killed all those whom he loved.
How are some people able to forgive when they are injured while others are consumed by their desire for vengeance, even when it poisons their own life?
How do we live into God’s command to be holy? A people who are set apart, a people who forgive and do not seek vengeance? How do we, as disciples of Jesus Christ, choose life and organize our lives around the missions of love of the other and peace? How do we live into his seemingly impossible command to “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”?
In our Old Testament reading for today, which is the only time our Revised Common Lectionary has us read anything from Leviticus, we get a glimpse of the heart of the Torah, what is known as the holiness code. “The Lord spoke to Moses saying: ‘Speak to all the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy…’ ‘You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord’.”
And in our gospel, we have Jesus’s continued teaching for his disciples in this week’s portion of the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous…”
Both of these readings are so very powerful and challenging to us because they are portraits of the very heart of God. They show that God acts out of love and concern for the other; that God chooses peace and harmony over vengeance and retribution. They show us that God loves the unlovable, suffers the worst that humanity can offer, and then rises to forgive us.
These reading remind us that God calls us to holiness, to being set apart from the way that the world works; Jesus calls us to discipleship, to perfection, to being complete in God; and in this call, we are, once again, asked to make a choice: to choose life over death, blessings over curses, reconciliation over retribution, peace over vengeance, the way of Jesus (the way of the cross) over the way of the world.
“You shall be holy…” God tells God’s people. It is both a command and a promise of fulfillment. We cannot be holy on our own. The very nature of holiness is that it belongs to God, and for anything to be holy other than God, then it must be somehow marked by God. In Christ’s humanity, God’s holiness was pleased to dwell, and when we are baptized into Jesus Christ, we are “marked as Christ’s own forever;” we share in his holiness. The goal of the children of God, the goal of discipleship in Jesus Christ, therefore, is imitating God. It is loving how God loves.
I am the Lord…God says again and again to the children of Israel in the reading for today. It is God’s refrain in this call to holiness, and it serves to remind us that we cannot live into God’s call for us, we cannot live into Jesus’s call for our discipleship, when we are focused on ourselves. We must look at God Incarnate, we must look to Jesus Christ as the model for holiness, as the model for peace, as the model for our lives, as the model for how we love as God loves; and we must work to imitate him. In that process of imitation, the Holy Spirit will transform us, more and more, into the image and likeness of Christ. And in that way, we become, every day, more and more holy.
There once were two parents of a five year old little boy. One day this boy slipped away from his nanny and went to the nearby small military base to play with ‘his’ soldiers. On that day, one of the soldiers put the boy up on a horse-drawn bread wagon, and let him go for a ride. As they were passing through a gate on a bumpy cobblestone path, the boy leaned sideways and his head got stuck between the door post and the wagon. The horses kept going. The boy died on the way to the hospital, a son lost to parents who adored him. When the soldier whose carelessness had caused the little boy’s death went to court, the boy’s parents insisted that they would not press charges saying, “Why should one more mother be plunged into grief, this time because the life of her son, a good boy but careless in a crucial moment, was ruined by the hands of justice.” After the solider was discharged from the army and went home unpunished, the father of the little boy would make the two day journey to visit the young soldier because he said he was concerned for the soldier and wanted to talk to him once more of God’s love, which is greater than our accusing hearts, and of the parents’ forgiveness.
Those two parents were able to forgive the soldier because they looked to God and remembered how God had forgiven them. It was not an easy choice; choosing life never is, and they lived with the pain of their loss their entire lives. But they embraced God’s call to holiness in their lives. They lived into the call of their discipleship in our Lord Jesus Christ as they loved the unlovable in imitation of God.
May we have the courage to go and do likewise.