A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, you have heard the commandment, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But what I say to you is, offer no resistance to injury. When a person strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other. If anyone wants to go to law over your shirt, hand him your coat as well.
Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the man who begs from you. Do not turn your back on the borrower, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit, amen. If this is good news, the gospel of the lord, there's one thing we can say about it for sure.
You don't see much of it around in practice. And furthermore and furthermore, if you take this text alone, you can come up with other texts of our lord which apparently contradict it. And so we have again an instance where the greatest kind of a lie is to tell a partial truth, to give an incomplete statement of a much broader principle. And so, this text of this morning which is so absolute and in the eyes of the world so ridiculous, and in fact so utterly unobserved, has to be taken for interpretation with other statements of the same blessed lord and savior Jesus Christ. Now, it has very little to do with that, but last evening there was a kind of a commentary on on the situation or not a situation, but on a problem which is called reasonable suicide.
Now there is a tie with what I'm going to say and what we've just read. What what we have just read from our Lord's mouth as reported by Saint Matthew had makes no sense whatsoever from a worldly point of view, none whatsoever. The only thing that makes that set and makes sense out of it is is is when our blessed lord is behind it and we are with him carrying his cross. Because remember that's the only criterion he gave for being a follower of his is to carry his cross. Notice that pronoun there, his cross.
Now in this commentary last night called some of you I'm sure saw it was on sixty minutes and I think it was a repetition on what is called reasonable suicide. It was supposedly one of those in-depth studies, you know, which has about as much depth as the foam on the beer. Anyway, it it gave some views and as usual, it goes and has an interview, you know, with some of the people who were in this desperate situation. And from that, you're supposed to draw some conclusions, I suppose. Now in the course of this entire discussion, where of as you can easily guess, you had the pros and the cons of whether under certain conditions, people who want to die should be helped to die by somebody giving them the means of killing themselves.
Suicide. Now in the course of this entire discussion, not once was the word morality or the word god even mentioned, not even mentioned. I believe the word right or wrong came in once or twice, but that's about it. And I'm not exaggerating. If any of you here saw it or you'll know that what I'm saying is fairly accurate, as accurate as it needs to be.
Not so long ago, just within the past week, there was an interview with a telecast of a marriage, not a counselor, but a woman out in San Francisco who has had a very successful business of bringing men and women together who want to get married. And she she's up in years now. The business flourished, but now she's almost out of business. And her commentary was that the that is in her experience over the years that at the present time, the religious element of matrimony is practically gone. Gone.
Not only are people living together without some kind of a legal form of matrimony, but as she pointed out, the religious element has gone. And of course she was bemoaning the tremendous divorce rate which in 1980 was two marriages to one divorce. Fifty percent of marriages ended in divorce in 1980. What I'm saying is this, that in the world in which we are living, and don't make any mistake, if you're not living in your world, what world are you living in? It's important to live in your world, to be part of it but not of it.
And that's the as I think Willie Shakespeare said, that's the rub, to be in it, but not of it. Because once you become of it, either you have surrendered to it or it has transformed itself into you. And the second choice, I don't think happens often, if ever. Now this message of Saint Matthew coming of our blessed Lord, transmitted by Saint Matthew, is to set up a standard of living which is totally unworldly. Now I use the word totally, as literally, as simply as I can.
A person who believes in God with a kind of faith that Newman called a real faith as opposed to notional, Their whole life will be colored, dominated by this overwhelming faith that they have in a supreme being. Not only when they're in a foxhole or in the trenches or when they're in some kind of an ultimate crisis, but in the in the ordinary carrying on of a normal life. God will be real. They will ask themselves, what does God want me to do here? How often do we ask ourselves that when we're in a decision making situation?
I'm not talking about some tremendous decision of vocation or something of that sort. I mean the routine things of life. Whether it's a sales choice of a school or buying a house or an automobile or how do you treat your in laws or how do you work out this problem in business or shall we buy this? Shall we go on that vacation? Do we ask ourselves, what would God want me to do?
Let me correct that. What does God want me to do? Because he wants me to do something. Now we come back to Saint Paul with his his great exclamation declaration and command to the Corinthians. He says, I beg you as a coworker that the grace of God be not in vain with you.
In other words, the grace of God, it does not take away my autonomy. It doesn't take away my responsibility. I can turn my back on it. It can be in vain. Not because God fails, but because I do not listen.
I do not act. I am deaf to it. And so some I've said this before that religion can be an enemy of our relationship to God. By that I mean, going through what we call religious acts, devotions, routine things, that can become a barrier. We can lose ourselves in those things and not realize the reality of God, the presence of God, the actuality of my my be being suspended at every moment of my being, contingently upon God.
No matter where I am, I don't have have to rush along and get into a church or get up into a high mountain or go down into the lowest bowels of the earth to find God. Is his presence real to me? And is it operational? By that, I mean, not only am I convinced of God's reality and of his presence and of my dependence upon him, But how do I react to it? We have every reason to pray with Saint Paul that the grace of God be not in vain because Because the horrible truth is, it can be in vain.
In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.