A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli
at Foundry UMC August 14, 2016, the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Is it possible to legislate morality? Will stricter gun laws keep people from
killing each other? If we outlaw online extramarital
hook-up sites will people stop cheating on their partner? Will legally enforced compliance with the
agenda proposed by the Black Lives Matter movement insure the end of racism in
every police precinct? Of course the
answer to those more specific questions is absolutely not. But that didn’t keep Foundry from being
deeply invested in the work of the Anti-Saloon League in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Some may scoff at that as a romantic and
misguided investment of resources and energy, but at that time alcohol was tearing
at the fabric of families and whole communities on a massive scale. Something had to be done. The pros and cons of Prohibition are still
debated today. Some may suggest that
Prohibition—and gun control legislation as a contemporary corollary—are not
“legislating morality,” but are rather attempts to protect citizens by setting
legal boundaries for production, sale, and use of death-dealing products. And others will counter with statements like
“guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”
And then the debate has a tendency to turn toward the need to focus on
changing hearts and minds of individuals versus the benefits and necessity to
address systems through policy and laws.
In Jesus’ time, the debate was a bit different since
there was no separation of “church” and state. The “law” was inherently and
simultaneously religious, social, legal, and moral. And the differentiation between “individual
rights” and “communal systems” was nothing like it is for us; the
interdependence of the individual and community was simply understood. In today’s reading from Jesus’ Sermon on the
Mount, Jesus says that he hasn’t come to abolish the law or the prophets, but
rather to fulfill them (Mt. 5:17). Jesus’
fulfillment of the law is his life, the way that he shows what it looks like to
truly embody not just the letter, but the intent of the law. One of Jesus’ primary critiques of the
scribes and Pharisees is the hypocrisy manifest among many, the ways that their
lives don’t match their words (Mt 23:3).
He also challenges the tendency to apply laws in a way that ignores or
harms the poor and oppressed (Mt 12:10-12).
So when Jesus goes on to challenge his followers to exceed even the
scribes and Pharisees in faithfulness to the law (Mt. 5:20), it seems that he
is saying: know the law and the teachings of the prophets and then try to
actually live and apply them in life-giving ways. Jesus then offers some examples to help his
