What Would Jesus Have To Say About Relationships?

  Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

I’ve been preaching through a series of sermons on What Would Jesus Have To Say About…. and today it’s about Relationships.  And actually this whole last section of Chapter 5 of the Sermon on the Mount, which is what we’re going through, has to do with relationships.  I really didn’t want to do the whole sermon at once, we would have been here an hour; but last week was about Anger and we’ll talk a little more about that.  Today, really things near and dear to our heart, anger and sex and telling the truth; and next week we are going to talk about love because the sermon next week is What Would Jesus Have To Say About Enemies? But just to let you know it really is talking about how to love everyone including our enemies.  What we’ve been learning in this part of the Sermon on the Mount is that everything on the outside starts on the inside.  I borrowed some architectural drawings which we have up in our office; it is the plan for the old sanctuary.  What’s interesting about these kinds of drawings is that it started out in somebody’s head and they had to draw it before anything got built.  That’s true of this building, it’s true of any building, anything.  Any emotion that we have, anything that we do, starts from here.  That’s what Jesus was trying to say.  He was talking to a culture which thought that if you kept the rules on the outside you were O.K.  But he came along and said “You thought it was O.K. not to murder someone, but I’m telling you, you should not be angry in a certain kind of way either because it’s like murder.  It starts here.  You heard you shouldn’t commit adultery, great; but adultery starts with lust, in here.  You heard that it was said ‘Don’t break your vows’ but I’m telling you, lying starts here.  It all starts on the inside.”

 Now today as we talk about relationships, I want you to see a couple things as I read the scripture to you as we go to the sermon is that there is kind of a pattern going on here.  It’s a circular pattern.  Jesus starts with anger but anger really starts, a lot of times our anger starts from broken promises or expectations that we have; and if we have anger it leads to contempt which can lead to longing for something else.  It’s true in any relationship, which can lead to a breakup and divorce, which is in itself a broken promise, which starts the cycle all over again.  I want you to see that piece as we read the scripture.

The reading from Matthew 5: 21-37.

"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca^]' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.

            "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.

            "Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'  But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

            "It has been said, 'Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.'  But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.'  But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

This is the reading of God’s holy word.

Thanks be to God!

Would you pray with me?

Father we are speaking of things near and dear to our hearts.  We are familiar with them and they’re hard things.  We pray that you would give us wisdom and understanding as we hear your word spoken to us and may this word enter our hearts and minds and change them make them more like you.  May we find things that apply to us that we can use, and use in our daily lives.  We pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

The question is how do we make our relationships thrive?  How do we make them good?  What do we have to do to guard them and to nourish them?  I think Jesus is teaching us that we have to start in the heart.  We have to understand how relationships work and how we can undercut them, and what poisons them, what hurts them, what makes them really bad instead of really good.  Have you ever seen one of those Guinness Book of World Records shows where some guy or some lady has a gazillion dominoes trying to break the record for the dominoes to fall?  Well, of course, as you look at that, one has to fall first.  So if you’re thinking about relationships, which domino is first, which starts the circle, the bad circle, if you will.  Well Jesus starts with anger; but I think, actually the center of this passage has to do with the thought of telling the truth or keeping promises.  Now whenever you are in a relationship there are always expectations.  When we get married we have a hundred expectations, most of which are unspoken.  We spend a lot of our time over the years trying to work that out.  I remember my dad was kind of an old school fellow.  He expected my mother to cook for him every night, even when my mother sold real estate and got home at ten o’clock at night.  He would be sitting there waiting for her to cook.  Now he was a good guy but he had this expectation.  Frankly, out of self preservation, I learned how to cook, because my mom wouldn’t get home and I’d be cooking dinner for dad.  But that’s another story.  You know we all have expectations.  In any kind of relationship, some are not so good, some are very good and many are unspoken.  Now what happens when an expectation in a relationship is not fulfilled?  Anger arises.  Now we all have expectations and we all have them broken and we all get angry about it.  Jesus tells us there’s nothing wrong with anger.  It is in fact a gift of God.  What he says to us is that it’s dangerous.  Anger can be very dangerous like I said last week, like gasoline.  Gasoline can be exceptionally good if controlled but very dangerous if not.  Anger’s the same way.  You know as a counselor I was taught that anger always says something.  It’s always telling you something.  It’s an indicator of something going on somewhere in some relationship either in the other person or in you.  It means something so we should pay attention to it.  We should pay attention to it and ask what it means in those relationships.  But once we ask the question, and we are honest, and this is really the first place where we can see how relationships can be good, is that we have to be honest about our anger and what it means and deal with it.  That’s what Jesus says.  That’s what he means when he says the things he says.  He says “Even if you are doing the most important thing you can think of, worshiping God, and there remember that you have something against somebody or they have something against you, go and deal with it, even with an adversary, an enemy, if they are taking you to court, make peace as soon as you can.”  Later Paul will say “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger and in your anger don’t sin.”  Nothing wrong with being angry but don’t let it fester.  Deal with it.  Communicate about it.  Talk about it.  Get it out.  Because if you don’t, if you let it fester, it becomes something worse.  It becomes contempt; it becomes hatred; it becomes resentment.  That’s what Jesus is trying to say when he says, talking about using this word “Raca” which was kind of like empty-headed idiot.  Or “Fool”.  When you start calling names, either outwardly or inwardly, you know a lot of contempt is passive.  But we all, especially those of us that are married, we know about the little digs that we do for each other.  It’s kind of like the couple I read about who celebrating their twentieth anniversary.  The husband asked the wife what she wanted for the anniversary and she said “I want to go somewhere I’ve never been.” And he said, “Oh, like the kitchen?”  Or another woman who heard a noise down at night and she woke her husband up at night and said “Honey, there’s a burglar down in the kitchen and he’s eating the casserole we had tonight.”  And he said to her “Leave him alone.  I’ll bury him in the morning.”  Now I admit I’ve just made fun of something very serious and I am not really trying to make light of it, because contempt is a horrible thing.  You know we all tease each other and those kinds of things.  I’m not talking about that.  You know, we know what we’re talking about.  We all have ups and downs in our relationships and we all know what it means to be angry with our spouse or it really applies to any relationship.  We can see it even in our jobs, you know sometimes something makes us angry in our job and then we begin to have contempt for that job or the people in it.

 In any relationship if that is allowed to fester we hit the next step, the next domino if you will, which is lust or the longing for something else.  Again, Jesus is saying adultery begins in the heart.  Now Jesus is not saying that sexual desire is wrong.  We have trouble talking about sex in church.  It’s hard.  It’s hard because we think “Oh, there’s something wrong with that.”  There’s nothing wrong with sexual desire.  God, like anger, has given us that.  It’s His idea.  It reminds me of another story about a couple of farmers.  One farmer had three sows and he wanted to have them mated with his neighbor’s boars.  So he loaded them up in the back of his truck and took them over.  While the pigs were getting better acquainted, he asked his friend, he said, “How do I know when it’s taken?”  The other farmer sagely said “Well if you take them home and they roll around in the mud, it hasn’t taken.  If they roll around in the grass, it has.”  Well he took them home and they rolled around in the mud.  So the next day, he loaded them back up.  Came back home and they did the same thing.  They didn’t roll around in the grass; they rolled around in the mud.  Third day he takes them back over.  Brings them home, but the next day he had to go to town.  So he called his wife and said “What are the pigs doing?”  She said “Well two of them are in the back of your pickup and the other’s blowing the horn.”  Is this a PG sermon or what? 

Sexual desire is good.  It’s given to us by God.  What’s wrong becomes the fixation that we have instead of attraction, or the fantasies that we grow in our minds that want to use and abuse or think about that aren’t real.  That’s the problem with lust.  It’s not real.  It isn’t real.  God has made us to be in relationship with another person.  Lust is just a fantasy.  The more we do it, if we happen to be married, the more we draw away from the person God wants us to interact with because we’re getting our needs, so to speak, met in some other way, an evil way.  That’s why Jesus says “Deal with it!  If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.”  Now if that’s not an eye popping illustration, I don’t know what is.  I’m sorry these things come out.  We’ve all heard about giving our right arm for something.  Now these are only illustrations.  I’ve had people ask me that question that’s why I say it.  “Is that what Jesus really wants us to do?”  Well no.  But he’s serious, deadly serious, about this sin.  Deadly serious about it.  Frankly we have been too lax.  We let ourselves watch certain kinds of movies or get on the internet.  We laugh at these things.  I’m not talking about being prudish.  I think we can go way overboard on some things and we don’t have time to talk about that today, but we can go way overboard on some things.  But we are very much lax.  It is hard this day and age, it really is.  It’s everywhere.  All you have to do is type in something on the internet, www…. And you are in the most graphic sexuality and sick stuff you have every seen in your life.  It doesn’t take much.  That’s why our kids are getting into it.  They know how to use the internet better than we do.  Even through the mail.  I was sitting there going through the mail.  I didn’t solicit any of this stuff.  A postcard, a postcard, from Victoria Secret with a picture of a woman on it; she might as well not had anything on.  And it’s tempting.  For males particularly it’s tempting because we tend to be more visual.  But it’s something that happens to us all, male and female.  Women are much more relational about it, that’s why internet chat is kind of catching on.  That’s why young girls can be easily trapped, because their relational.  Somebody gets, some predator gets on there and knows how to punch all her buttons and that’s what happens.  It’s easy to do.  And Jesus says “Deal with it.”  I heard about a guy who actually got rid of his computer and his television.  I’m not saying we need to do that.  But if your right eye causes you to sin, get rid of it.  Whatever it is, get rid of it.  If you can’t do it yourself, get some help.  We should not judge our brothers and sisters who have trouble in this area because we all do.  It doesn’t matter about the age.  We all have the same problem.  It reminds me of another story about a young priest talking to a much older priest and he said “Father I can’t help it.   I’m just attracted to these younger women.  At what age does this kind of thing stop?”  The older priest said “Three days after you’re dead.” 

Jesus says “Deal with it” because in the end it is adultery.  Now it’s not my intention today to talk about the next domino, in detail.  It would take another sermon or two to talk about what Jesus means about divorce.  But suffice it to say in his time it was way too easy.  In that male dominated culture a husband could go into his wife and say “Gosh honey, your cooking isn’t that good.  I want a divorce” and write out a certificate.  Now that may seem to be hyperbole but it really is not.  It is way to easy here and what Jesus wants to go on record to say is that divorce is not God’s intention for married people.  He’s not saying every divorce is wrong.  He’s simply saying it is not God’s intention and we know the pain and the heartache that comes from even ones that might be legitimate.  But again, see the picture, the step-by-step dominoes that fall.  We have expectations.  We have anger.  We have contempt.  We have longing for something else.   The grass is never greener, but we think it might be, after a while, and then comes splitsville, divorce; in the end, the breaking of promises. So it’s not surprising that Jesus next talks about that. 

In his day it was a big deal talking about making vows, making vows “I swear by God” or “I swear by the earth” “I swear by Jerusalem” “I swear by this” “I swear by that” to make sure people kept their word.  You know, it begs the question, “Why do we have to do that?”  Isn’t your “yes” O.K. and your “no” O.K.?  We do the same thing.  “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.” Whatever we’ve heard; or like the guy coming off the golf course who says “I really did shoot that score.  I swear.  I did.” 

Jesus wants our word to be such as his followers that people will believe us. “Yes be yes and no, no.”  He wants us to be different; because we see the cycle when we finally break that promise we go all the way back to the first thing.  When we break our promises it leads to anger; it leads to contempt and so on and so forth.  We see this merry-go-round, this cycle, that we’re on and we’ll talk more next week about love which helps break the cycle as well.  But my encouragement today, and it really is encouragement, these are hard things to talk about, they really are; but we need to talk about them.  We need to be honest.  If you get nothing else out of what I said, it really is about honesty, because if we are on this merry-go-round we need to be honest about our anger.  A lot of us deny it.  “Oh, I’m not angry.”  Yeah, right.  What causes that?  What’s going on inside of you or them that causes the anger?  What are the expectations you might have?  Be honest.  Communicate.  When we see contempt in our hearts we laugh about these things, but they’re deadly serious.  About the contempt we have for others, for ourselves, our spouses, and if left to fester we really do start fantasizing about something else.  We need to be honest about that and recognize it for what it is.  And then repent before we really do split, asking each other to help one another because we all deal with sin.  We all have problems.  None of us are exempt.  And the bottom line is being honest with ourselves about these things but also being truth tellers and promise keepers in the world.  Let others look at us as people who have integrity; who know how to deal with the stuff that’s inside and know how to deal with one another, in love.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen

Let’s pray together.

Father these things are hard.  We just pray about ourselves and our relationships and we want them to be better.  We want our relationship to be better with you and with ourselves, especially if we are married, our spouses, but everyone around us.  So give us a sense of needing more integrity, more honesty and the willingness to deal with these things, in some sense ruthlessly Lord, just not have them named among us.  Father forgive us, guide us, keep us, love us.  We thank you that you do.  In Jesus’ name. Amen.