Barbara Brown Taylor: April 2, 2025

0:02 Oh, you do my heart good. Okay. So hello to everyone, whether you're sitting here close enough to hear your neighbor's stomach growl or whether you're tuning in from all the other places in the world where you are. I am happy to be back at my home away from home church, Calvary, speaking to you this, I think it's the fifth Wednesday of Lent. That four up there is troubling me. Is that right? If you count Ash Wednesday? By way of preface, I don't know what Jeff Chu and I were thinking when we decided to preach back-to-back sermons on that same passage. Me today, him tomorrow, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I blame him, and he blames me. Last week, I texted him, and I said, I'm working on the sermon for next week, and I believe we may be homiletical masochists.

0:55 His three dots came up on my screen right away. the first little bubble said, correct. The second one said, I already came to this conclusion a few days ago. And then he signed off with what has become my daily bread. He said, come Holy Spirit. And the Spirit did, so here goes. In the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus gives his first big sermon on a mountain, right on the heels of his baptism by John, his temptation in the wilderness by the devil, his recruitment of the first disciples, and a high mileage good news and healing tour during which his fame spread all over the place. A lot of people followed him back, back home to Galilee from that tour. They came from Syria. They came from way down in Judea and from across the Jordan River, eager, eager, eager to be the next one that he touched with those healing hands of his, the next one to shock them with those electrical teachings of his, so demanding, so full of puzzles and reversals, it was sometimes hard for them to figure out why all they wanted was more, more, more. Since this big sermon shows up only in Matthew, we'll never know whether it was Matthew who pulled all these pieces together or whether it was Jesus himself, but either way they're all there. Everything that the crowd wanted to know about the kind of life worth living, the kind they saw Jesus living, bringing the kingdom of heaven so close they could feel it in their own bodies. They could see it happening right in front of them instead of having to wait until everything was in ruins, including themselves, before they heard the trumpets blow.

2:46 If you've ever been to the Holy Land, who's visited that site? I knew there'd be some of you there. So it's kind of a shock when you just imagined it. But if you've been there, you've probably visited the site where tradition says that it happened. It's kind of a natural amphitheater nestled into the side of a grassy hill that goes down to the Sea of Galilee. That would have made it easier for a big crowd to hear what Jesus was saying. I tried to put a Monty Python thing in here but thought better of it. But according to Matthew, if you're reading carefully, he's not even talking to the crowd. They're welcome to overhear. But Matthew says he called his disciples to him and sat down and started teaching them. These were the people who needed most to get on board with the teachings, really to take them in, since they would be the ones to carry on if anything happened to him, if, not when. He began with the Beatitudes, ratifying the blessedness of the last, the lost, the littlest, the least.

3:50 And then he went on for three whole chapters like that, overturning expectations, making already things hard even harder and making impossible ones sound like something a child should be able to do. Don't resist an evildoer. Don't refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Be perfect.

4:16 as your heavenly Father is perfect. Any questions? He didn't take questions. And fortunately, he didn't give tests either, because if each of those mandates had been weighted at 20 points each, what's lower than an F? You know, my score is a zero. If he just said try before each one of them, I'd score higher. But the truth is, I don't even want to want to do a couple of these things unless the perps are dead. I'm confessing so you don't have to, but if you've got 100 on that quiz, I want to meet you so I can buy your lunch, right? This part of Jesus' sermon is so hard, even for the best of us, even in the best of times, that one of my sources said it makes functional atheists of us all. Especially now, I think, at this point in the life of our nation, with calls from all sides to fight, to stand up for what's right and be counted or admit you're a pathetic, don't care about anybody but yourself, drop out from the battle for the soul of America.

5:24 I know a lot of people who believe it's God's battle and that resisting evildoers is the whole point, the whole test of faith. Don't ask them about Jesus because some of them will tell you he was too soft. you'll be happy to hear I'm not engaging that battle today because it doesn't go deep enough. I'm more interested in where Jesus went, into the shadowy recesses where people like us decide who is evil and who is good, who are friends and who are enemies, who's worthy of being prayed for and who needs to be prayed against.

6:03 In my experience, a lot of those decisions solidify in churches and Bible studies. But they were being formed way before then by families that people grew up in and the neighborhoods they lived in, the schools they went to, and by the class systems all of us encountered on the playground. I mean, if you didn't know by third grade who your friends and enemies were, you weren't paying attention. And if your parents said, don't resist an evildoer, God help you. because Jesus' teaching on enemy love is so hard, I've noticed at least three ways the faithful approach it while keeping a safe distance. I've tried them all. First is you just give up right from the start. You say, what planet does this man come from? What kingdom is he from? You just throw in the towel. You own your total unfitness for duty, and you beg to be absolved.

6:57 I mean, surely that's what he's after, don't you think? you gaining the clear understanding that you will be saved by grace alone and not by your ability to do what he seems to be asking of you, but he's not asking really. Just spare yourself some grief and fold your cards. Second line of defense. Engage the teaching the way you might engage being the most loving, most patient parent, child, sibling, spouse in the world, knowing full well it will never happen. but hopeful that keeping your eye on the prize will make you at least a little better than you would have been otherwise. Couldn't that be what Jesus really wants from us? Reach for the moon, never stop trying, even though sometimes screwing in a light bulb's a stretch for you. You know, he knows you can do better.

7:52 Third line, those who can't, teach. Deal with your inability to follow these teachings by teaching them to other people. Start a book club featuring authors like Howard Thurman and Sharon Salzberg and the Dalai Lama. Organize a neighborhood group designed to bring people with different political signs in their yards to talk about something other than politics and trust that if you do these things, they will draw you further in. Isn't that what Jesus taught? We make the path by walking. you'll be relieved to know I can't find anything essentially wrong with any of these, except that they're all detours around what he said. He didn't say give in to grace or try harder or fake it till you make it.

8:49 He said, do this, don't do that, and if you think those are hard, well, be perfect, as your Heavenly Father's perfect. That last teaching was the circuit breaker for me. It was such a clear overload, I had to find some other way in to this teaching. If the truth will set you free, I knew for sure that perfect love was not in my skill set, any more than perfect obedience was. Just scanning the verbs in that passage Catherine read, it's like counting the peaks in the Himalayas. Turn your cheek, give your coat, go another mile, give freely, refuse no one, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. But because I had to work so hard on this passage, I all of a sudden noticed there's a why you should do these things in there.

9:45 There's a little why in there. It was so familiar to my ears, I just skipped right over it at first. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, Jesus said, 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 the unrighteous. That's when the sun came out for me, when I noticed that why? So that you may be.

10:16 That's Jesus' reason for everything else he says. It's a be verb, so that you may be. More fundamental than the do verbs, I submit, since it's about who his listeners are and are becoming, about how we came to be and whose image we bear. So that you may be children of your Father in heaven. That's not something you do to be a child of your Father. It's something your Father does. Making a place for you in the lineage, in the divine lineage. It's yours, no matter what. You can lean into it or not. It's your choice. But it's still who you are. By this light, it seems possible Jesus is not presenting a list of impossible commands so people can feel bad about themselves.

11:09 He's not inviting anybody to step up, but to step in, into God's own being for a minute. To step into God's own reality, seeing things, good, bad, evil, righteous, seeing them the way God sees them, just for a moment, loving things the way God loves them, the evil, the good, the righteous, the unrighteous, friends and enemies, wheat and weeds, with the same sun shining down on all their faces, and the same rain falling down to grow their crops and fill their wells.

11:48 Elsewhere, Jesus says, there'll come a time when things are sorted into separate piles, but that time is not yet. For now, everything that lives has the most loving, most patient parent ever, aching for the children to be who they already are. If you can follow that thread, maybe, just maybe, the second B almost makes sense when it ties the bow at the end. Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect. Be what the one who made you is. It turns out that's a doctrine in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is as old as the Roman Catholic Church and 1,500 years older than the Protestant Church, which most of us know a lot about.

12:42 In that ancient Eastern tradition, the main point of being Christian is to become Christ. Divinization, theosis. Not to be saved by him. The main point is to become like him. Listen to Irenaeus of Leon writing in the second century. Christ became what we are in order to make us what he is himself. Not who he is, what he is. Listen to Athanasius of Alexandria writing in the fourth century. For the son of God became man so that we might become God. of one mind, one nature, one being. It's mystical. It's shocking. But Jesus seemed to think there was something to it that we have it in us to be whole like that, inside like that, to see what God sees and love what God loves, though there are times when we would gladly douse the sun and dry up the rain on our enemies if we could just reach the controls.

13:52 But impossible? The things he asks of us are not impossible. These very verses from Matthew struck such a deep chord in Mohandas Gandhi that he based his Indian independence movement on them, trusting Jesus' teaching on nonviolent resistance, what Cory Booker did yesterday, until the British packed their bags and left the continent in 1947. Martin Luther King Jr. followed in the same footsteps went to India to find out how Gandhi did it and brought his own version home teaching people how to absorb violence instead of making more of it if you've ever watched the old footage of his pacifist activists being trained to sit quietly on lunchroom stools while evildoers put cigarettes out in their hair It can take your breath away.

14:55 The human cost was terrific. The struggle's not nearly over, but the images that survived from that early civil rights movement burn, burn with the bravery of people who faced enemies with fire hoses and billy clubs and lunging dogs and paddy wagons without losing faith in their goal, which, like Gandhi's goal, was not only to win freedom for themselves, but to win freedom for those who persecuted them. By holding up a mirror, a nonviolent mirror, so they could see themselves on television being people no child of God was born to be and turn around and be born again. Violence is a virus that infects everyone, no matter which end of the stick they're on. Enmity serves no one, especially when it's passed from generation to generation, each new one charged with avenging the harm done to the last.

15:54 What must it be like to watch grown children behave like that, to be the kind of parent who keeps turning your cheek and turning your cheek while you wait for your flesh and blood to remember who they are. it's a high bar. But if what Jesus said is true, you won't lose the Father's love by choosing self-defense, self-preservation instead. The sun will still rise for you. The rain will still fall soft on your face. The divine lineage will continue when it's honored and when it's not. The important thing, best I can make of it, is to stay teachable. Stay alert to the invitation that's always standing open to make things better instead of worse to hold a punch when you can land one to lean into your godly DNA long enough to see the world through different eyes making a different choice than you might have made if it had been up to you alone because you're not alone you're in this crowd of people straining to hear what the teacher is saying to his disciples so you can decide whether to stay or go.

17:11 It's up to you. The pull is strong either way, a way of life you know, a way of life you can't yet imagine. But whichever one you choose, you can't shake this teacher, this Christ who sees in you the power to be what the one who made you is.

17:35 May it be so.