St John the Evangelist

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OPENING SENTENCE OF SCRIPTURE
Happy are they who walk in the law of the Lord

HYMN

GREETING

Grace and peace to you from God our Father

and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen

COLLECT FOR PURITY

Almighty God,

to whom all hearts are open,

all desires known,

and from whom no secrets are hidden:

cleanse the thoughts of our hearts

by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,

that we may perfectly love you,

and worthily magnify your holy name;

through Christ our Lord. Amen.

SUMMARY OF THE LAW

Our Lord Jesus Christ said: The first commandment is this:

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The second is this: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these. Amen. Lord, have mercy.

CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION

God is love and we are God’s children. There is no room for fear in love. We love because God loved us first.

Let us confess our sins in penitence and faith.

SILENCE

God our Father,

we confess to you

and to our fellow members in the Body of Christ

that we have sinned in thought, word and deed,

and in what we have failed to do.

We are truly sorry.

Forgive us our sins,

and deliver us from the power of evil,

for the sake of your Son who died for us, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

ABSOLUTION

God, who is both power and love,

forgive you and free you from your sins,

heal and strengthen you by the Holy Spirit,

and raise you to new life in Christ our Lord. Amen.

GLORIA
sung by Sue St Joseph

COLLECT

Almighty God, grant that with our minds set always

on your wisdom and love,

we may pursue both in word and deed

those things that are pleasing in your sight;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God world without end. Amen

PROCLAIMING & RECEIVING GOD’S WORD

FIRST READING:
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20 read by Annette Beagrie

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall certainly perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”

SILENCE

SECOND READING
1 Corinthians 3: 1-9 read by Andrew Ratnam

On Divisions in the Corinthian Church

And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people but rather as fleshly, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still fleshly. For as long as there is jealousy and quarrelling among you, are you not fleshly and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not all too human?

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and each will receive wages according to their own labour. For we are God’s co-workers, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.

GRADUAL HYMN

GOSPEL READING
Matthew 5: 21-37 read by Rev Chris Wren

Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St Matthew chapter 5 beginning at verse 21

Glory to Christ our Saviour

Concerning Anger

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder,’ and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment, and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

Concerning Adultery

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members 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 of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.

Concerning Divorce

“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Concerning Oaths

“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.’ But I say to you: Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 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 one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

Give thanks to the Lord for his glorious Gospel

Praise to Christ our Lord.

SERMON

When you hear the word radical what comes to your mind? If you were to say the word “radical” to the average person, the name of “Jesus” will likely not be the first thing that springs to anyone’s mind.   If you think about “radical acts,” the Sermon on the Mount is unlikely to come to mind, either.   Radicals throw Molotov cocktails at police and stage sit-ins and carry placards in the town square.  But that’s not Matthew 5-7!  We like to think of the Sermon on the Mount as gentle and soothing but in fact, it is quite radical!

A while ago now in New Testament studies at New College I was reminded that the word radical comes from the Latin word “radix” which means root. The radix gets at the root, at the origin of something.  And so there is a sense in which a radical is someone who wants to return something like a religious belief system or a political system to what it was intended to be in the beginning, at the root of all things. In Matthew 5 Jesus is indeed a radical because what he is doing with God’s Law here is radicalizing it, getting everyone’s attention back to the basics and the root origin of God’s commands.  From the outside looking in, it looks like Jesus is making the Law of God new and ridiculously hard to keep.  

“You haven’t slept with a woman not your wife?  Good for you.  But you looked at your co-worker Helen and thought about it so that ‘Do not commit adultery’ command is in shambles in your life as far as God is concerned.”

“You haven’t stabbed anyone through the chest or shoved someone to his death off a cliff?  Good for you but when in your anger you told Francis last week to go take a flying leap, in God’s eyes the ‘Do not murder’ command snapped quite cleanly in two in your life.”

“You haven’t sworn out a false oath in God’s name?  Good for you but when you knowingly lied to your boss about what you did while attending the convention by saying ‘I swear on my children’s life,’ then in God’s eyes the ‘Do not give false witness’ command died a sudden death because your children are God’s children and they bear his image.” Tough stuff.

But is Jesus changing the Law into something new and different and harder to keep?  No, he is radicalizing it, he is bringing everyone back to the roots of why God gave the Law in the first place.   The point is that the Law of God was meant to foster human flourishing at every level, including at the deepest levels of our hearts and minds.  God wants us to respect each other, to love each other, to see God’s own image residing deep within one another.  Human life is not supposed to be some giant game in which you scheme and scam to strive ahead for yourself. We are not to use people as pawns, as objects of our lust, as vehicles for our scorn, as the targets for our desires to brutalize, manipulate, and then discard.

On the contrary, the root origin of God’s Law is about other people and about God himself. It is about how we see and treat others. It is about how we treat them in our heart of hearts?   Do we think it doesn’t matter how furious we are at every driver who cuts us off or makes some mistake in traffic (a driving mistake that we surely have made more than once ourselves)?   Do we think it’s pleasant to nurse a grudge for years such that every time we see Jack and Jill our innards coil up and bile curdles all over again in our gut?   Do we think that that attractive guy or that fetching woman exists for our pleasure only?  Do we think that this other person who just asked us a question is so worthless as to be undeserving of hearing the truth?

Let’s face it, by getting back to the radix, the root of the Law, Jesus really does highlight the sin of every last one of us. There is a sense that the larger function of Jesus’ teachings on the Law is to cast us back to a reliance on grace alone. We are sufficiently mired in sin and selfishness that we know full well how easy it is to see ourselves in the pictures Jesus sketches. But Jesus is not just being tough on us: he is at the end of the day reminding us of a truth that is actually so very encouraging: God created us to flourish in his good creation.  God wants all of us to flourish. We are made to flourish.

To flourish we must first get rid of murderous intent. Jesus says that: Murder is a sin, but so is hatred. Hatred devalues human life. Hatred says to another person: “you fool.” And, here’s the problem: Do we expect to avoid the judgement of God because we have never physically murdered anyone? Jesus says, think again. Hatred directed toward another human being — also created in the image of God — is subject to the judgement of God. And, I believe Jesus means what he says — such hatred is to have no place in our lives. It eats us up, it consumes us and so it prevents us from flourishing. Flourishing is all to do with forgiveness and love. For after all, despite all our flaws God forgives and loves us, so we are to forgive and love others, despite all their flaws. As scripture says: “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” Flourishing is about loving each other deeply.

To love each other deeply, we must not be content to look at the surface of our lives- at our words and deeds. We must look at our motivations- we need to look at what is going on within us – at our thoughts, intentions, attitudes, and desires. When all is said and done it is the heart that matters. It’s what’s in the heart that matters. The heart is what I am deep down. It’s the real me, and what is in the heart will come out. The state of the heart will deeply affect how I live. This is what Jesus is getting at, in this particular section of his teaching. The heart of the problem is the human heart.

It is only in recent times that magazines have written about recreational sex. Sex is the second strongest instinct in the human person, after self-preservation. Our sexual instincts have the capacity to run riot, causing adultery of the heart. Jesus knows that the heart of the problem is the heart. He confirms the Old Law but he goes much further in saying that if a man looks lustfully on a woman, they have already sinned. Women can be violated by men’s attitudes, not just by physical acts. Women are cheapened when they are simply treated as sex objects, and Jesus asks his disciples to forgo that violence. I assume that the same applies of women in their lusting after men.

However, the focus here is on women because of the culture of that time. In those days a man could divorce his wife even if she burnt her husband’s food. Jesus is showing respect for women here. The Law of Moses allowed for divorce but it wasn’t possible for a wife to divorce her husband. Jesus is putting here, husband and wife on equal footing. Both are equally obliged to make the marriage work. When a husband can divorce his wife for any reason, there is no need to explore and evaluate what is weakening his commitment; he is simply getting rid of what no longer pleases him.

But let’s be real, divorce is different today. The church rightly in my mind permits a divorced person to remarry. The matter I think that is being explored here in this particular teaching is that of true love. True love will neither exploit nor abuse the other. True love will be willing to sacrifice for the other and to have the best interests of the other always at heart. True love supports, encourages, and perseveres. That love as it says in 1 Corinthians 13 never fails. It is this love that we are called to mirror in our lives.

This love as 1^st Corinthians 13 says rejoices in the truth. Jesus is underlying in this section of his teaching the importance of honesty. The words of a person should match the thoughts of the heart. In honest communication, the type of communication that sustains community life, yes and no is all that is needed- no oath taking is required! Love demands trust in an environment of openness and mutual confidence. Love requires honesty.

This powerful text from the Sermon on the Mount suggests that we search the mind and heart and come to self- knowledge around a few crucial issues. We should know how anger rises in us, comes to expression, and then subsides. We should watch lust and note how it grips us and rushes us along paths we may not choose. We should also come to understand how we want shortcuts on forgiveness; how we hesitate and completely stall when it comes to initiating reconciling conversations. Coming to this knowledge is the work we must do, if we wish to heed Jesus’ teaching on the law of love. This law of love might sound unattainable for us mortals but Jesus is calling us, nonetheless, to adopt his law of love; to choose life, to flourish and be his co-workers. Amen

THE CREED

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

God from God,

Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one substance with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven;

by the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary,

and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;

he ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,

and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit,

the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father.

With the Father and the Son,

he is worshipped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

PRAYERS

God of the resurrection

Strengthen and renew us

God you have shown in Jesus your love for us,

so we entrust to you now our cares and concerns.

Gracious God, we come before you with faltering faith

with doubts and anxieties,

teach us to wait patiently on your presence

rekindle within us the gift of grace and gratitude.

God of the resurrection

Strengthen and renew us

Loving God, we thank you for your holy word

that speaks into our lives.

Help us to take your word to heart.

As we examine ourselves.

awaken in us afresh

our utter dependence on your grace.

Empower us to choose life

by adopting your law of love.

God of the resurrection

Strengthen and renew us

Generous God, may our society be mindful of

those who have particular difficulties.

May our laws testify to our sense of justice,

honour and integrity;

may the world’s leaders be wisely advised

and honestly motivated.

God of the resurrection

Strengthen and renew us

Compassionate God, we lift to you those

whose homes and families have been destroyed

by earthquakes or war,

and pray that they will receive

the international help and support they need.

We pray especially for families in Turkey, Syria and Ukraine

as they seek to rebuild their lives,

after much destruction and loss.

God of the resurrection

Strengthen and renew us

Faithful God, we pray for all

who are under stress or strain at this time,

we ask that they may experience your faithful presence and love.

Give them coping skills and mechanisms

and grant them your peace and comfort.

God of the resurrection

Strengthen and renew us

Wise and all understanding God,

we pray for all who are battling with illness.

Give courage to the long-term and chronically ill

and give respite to those who are at their wits’ end.

Hear our prayer for those known to us

that are sick or suffering at this time,

and touch them with your healing and love.

God of the resurrection

Strengthen and renew us

Gentle God, we remember those

who have lost loved ones recently.

Grant them your peace and comfort.

We lift to you those for whom

this month is the anniversary of the death of a loved one.

May they know your solace

and be filled with your loving presence.

God of the resurrection

Strengthen and renew us

Holy God, with great thankfulness we praise you

for your constant faithfulness to us,

your recognition of our deepest thoughts

and your desire for our healing and wholeness.

Merciful Father accept these prayers for the sake of your Son,

our Saviour Jesus Christ who taught us to pray together

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins

as we forgive those+

who sin against us.

Do not bring us

to the time of trial+

but deliver us from evil.

For the kingdom, the power

and the glory are yours,

now and forever. Amen.

BLESSING

Christ the Son of God gladden your hearts with the good news of his kingdom; and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.

HYMN

DISMISSAL

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord

In the name of Christ. Amen