Rev. Gale Watkins, Pastor

From recent Sundays at Westminster: 

Scripture and sermon from February 16, 2025

Matthew 5:38-48 (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)

 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, 40 and if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well, 41 and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42 Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 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. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Jesus has a vision for those who have joined with him as his followers, people like ourselves.

He wants us to live a new kind of life.

We are part of the coming Kingdom, God’s Kingdom..

This Kingdom is different from the surrounding world.

It’s a new and better life that Jesus has in mind for us.

But, in order for us to live as Jesus wants us to live, we need help, lots of help.

Help has come in the teaching that we call the Sermon on the Mount.

We need encouragement and instruction in so many different areas of life.

One of these areas is the realm of relationships.

Now, relationships are a gift.

In fact, the biblical story of the creation of the man and the woman includes the Lord God saying, It is not good for the man to be alone.

We thrive when we have one another.

But, you will tell me, the people I know are not that easy to get along with.

They have issues, and sometime we wonder if it’s worth it.

Jesus knows how life works. He knows that his disciples are going to have trouble unless he gives them some help in the form of a whole new vision, something better than what usually happens.

There are two major relationship crises that Jesus identifies, retaliation and hatred.

Living in 2025, we know all about both of these.

Retaliation and hatred are easy to find.

The saying, An eye for an eye, was meant originally to put the brakes on the cycle of violence.

Once hostilities commence, the level of harm done tends to increase.

This provision in the law was given as a safeguard.

Don’t overdo it!

It was meant to save lives, but like a lot of good ideas, it fell short.

The reasons is that conflict seems to have a life of its own.

One thing leads to the next, and before long, there is bloodshed.

Of course, in 2025, we have found other ways to retaliate.

We can cause damage to the person who has harmed us without doing something that will land us in jail. 

We have discovered new weapons that are very convenient and effective.

Now you can be unfriended or ghosted.

So it is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The other crisis that Jesus identifies is hatred of enemies.

Highly respected religious leaders turned to the Bible, where it says, You shall love your neighbor.

That sounded great, but they thought it would be even better to add a little something to complete the thought.

So they made what seemed like a sensible addition to the biblical text, And hate your enemy.

People must have eaten that up!

There is nothing more satisfying than finding new and more effective ways to humiliate the enemy you hate.

I’ve heard of social scientific studies, conducted recently, that reached the conclusion that in our politics, it’s no longer good enough for our side to win.

We now want to destroy the other side.

A shocking number of those polled say that there comes a time when politically-motivated violence is justified.

When Jesus was speaking, those who loved the law added something that wasn’t there because, while there are people we love to love, there are others that we love to hate.

The hatred of enemies that Jesus observed in the first century seems to have made its way into the twenty-first century.

Jesus has come, carrying a vision for his friends that is out of the ordinary.
Non-retaliation! Can you believe it?

Love for enemies! Can you believe it?

He expects us, his disciples, to practice the greatest act of love, which is prayer, on behalf of the very people who would would be glad to hear that we have suffered a major accident.

We naturally say to Jesus, this is impossible!

Life doesn’t work like that.

We have to be realistic.

I expect that Jesus would agree up to a point.

What he has in mind is impossible if it depends entirely on our own energy.

We’re caught up in the way of the world around us, and we’re shaped by our own personal history. Left to our own devices, we will join everyone else in escalating conflict and enthusiastically hating identified enemies.

We benefit from Jesus’ challenge to be different.

Having the challenge before us, impossible though it is to meet, is a step in the right direction.

But Jesus offers us more than that, and this is the good news I want to offer in my sermon.
He tells us about God!

Your Father in heaven, he tells his disciples, gives good things to everyone, the evil and the good.

It’s exactly what we read in the Bible, in places like Psalm 145, which says, The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.

Here is the really good news that makes Jesus’ teaching on these difficult realms of life encouraging rather than discouraging.

God, our Father in heaven, has loved us, even us.

As we receive that love, we are transformed, so that we find ourselves doing strange things, such as praying for people who despise us, or not getting even with the other person, the one Jesus dares to call evildoer, when we have the opportunity.

Jesus has a compelling vision for us. He wants us to be different from the rest of the world, different from what we used to be.

Teaching us, he uses the word more.

If you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?

He goes even further than that when he says, be perfect.

Ordinarily, that would be the most discouraging thing ever.

We would be defeated completely.

But in the context of his teaching, he’s telling us that our heavenly Father is kind and generous to everyone.

I found a helpful comment on this saying made by Dale Bruner: The kind of perfection to which Matthew’s Jesus refers, as the context shows, is the perfection of mercy, of wide- and whole-heartedness, not the “high” perfection we associate with impeccability.

You see, when we discover that God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous, including ourselves, that works a change in us.

If we’ve been loved so lavishly by the Lord who is good to all, even us, our hearts will be transformed.

And then Jesus’ vision for us to live a new kind of life will come about, not because we grit our teeth and try with all our might to change, but because we have discovered and received the goodness of God, which changes us for the better, and which we are happy to share.

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Scripture and sermon of February 9, 2025

Psalm 141:1-4 (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)

I call upon you, O Lord; come quickly to me;

give ear to my voice when I call to you.

Let my prayer be counted as incense before you

and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.

Set a guard over my mouth, O Lord;

keep watch over the door of my lips.

Do not turn my heart to any evil,

to busy myself with wicked deeds

in company with those who work iniquity;

do not let me eat of their delicacies.

Matthew 5:33-37 (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)

“Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ 34 But I say to you: Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37 Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” 

Today, we come to a part of the Sermon on the Mount that doesn’t seem to have the same weight or urgency as other parts.

Oaths? Is that really worth worrying about?

Oaths seem to us a formality, a small nuisance you have to put up with.

It’s signing your name below the fine print, the terms and conditions that no one actually reads.

For some reason, Jesus thought that his disciples needed to hear his teaching about oaths.

At the time when Jesus was speaking to his friends, oaths were a big deal.

Formulas were becoming more and more elaborate.

The reason that oaths were popular was that people didn’t always tell the truth.

When you can’t trust the other person to say what they mean and mean what they, it’s hard for a community to function.

So you try to convince people that you really are telling the truth by swearing an oath.

It’s a serious issue that Jesus is addressing. 

Even devout people found ways to escape the demands of truthfulness.

They knew that it’s a serious matter to misuse the name of God.

That’s clear enough in the Ten Commandments.

You don’t want to renege on a promise you make in God’s name, because God just might strike you dead. 

So prominent leaders counseled people to keep from saying God in your oath.

It sounds like a great arrangement.

The problem, though, is that it didn’t make people tell the truth.

You can’t trust people, even if they do utter a fine-sounding oath.

Jesus knows that his disciples will have to make their way in a mixed-up world.

I wonder if we too have to make our way in a mixed-up world.

Can you believe everything you hear?

The check is in the mail! Really?

Don’t worry about a thing because we’ll take care of you! Really?

You can count on me! Really?

After you’ve been disappointed again and again, you don’t know what to believe, or who to believe.

Business relationships, for a company or for an individual, are complicated by the uncertainty of our words.

Promises are not always kept.

So we try different strategies to make life work better.

We may not have the elaborate oaths that Jesus was talking about, but we do have plenty of safeguards in place, and still, it’s a mixed-up world that we inhabit.

Jesus has a vision for his disciples.

They will be different.

You won’t have to pin them down to be sure that they aren’t dodging the truth, because they are truthful all the time.

No oath is necessary for them.

When these people who have been keeping company with Jesus say Yes, that is exactly what they mean.

Their speech has been shaped by Jesus.

You see, Jesus is the very embodiment of truth-telling.

It’s not that these disciples are inherently better than everyone else. 

It’s their association with Jesus that makes the difference. 

For us who follow Jesus as our Lord, the oath and the signature aren’t necessary.

The reason is that our Yes means Yes, and our No means No.

Jesus’ vision for us is that we are truthful all the time.

This makes sense because our Lord is the very ideal of truthfulness and trustworthiness.

However, shaped by a world in which everything is so murky, and influenced as we are by our old habits, we may have a long journey ahead.

To make this journey, it will help if turn to a prayer found in the Bible,

It will be good to make it our own.

This prayer comes from Psalm 141, and goes like this: Set a guard over my mouth, O Lord; keep watch over the door of my lips.

We need help with our speaking, and thus we pray.

I suspect that this is a prayer that God loves to hear, and answer.

The God whose Word is true wants us to people people who say what we mean and mean what we say.