Sermon Tone Analysis

Unpacking the Baggage

If you travel by air, you will recognize this.

A bar-coded tag is placed on your checked bag at their airport counter and you watch it as it heads down a conveyor belt, presumably to be loaded onto the same plane on which you are about to fly.

Some hours later, you arrive at your destination, and make your way to baggage claim.

There, you stand with 200 other passengers, waiting as the carousel went round and round almost magically spitting out piece after piece of luggage.

One by one each passenger spotted their luggage, pulled it off with a smile and heads for their hotel.

The last bag appears on the carousel—and it is not yours.

There you stand in the airport.

No clean clothes, no toiletries, no underwear, nothing but the clothes on your back.

Before you think you are somehow unique, realize that airlines lose about 26 million bags each and every year.

So despite the terrible inconvenience, the reality is that you are just a small part of a much bigger statistic.

You might feel like the guy who was standing in line to buy an airline ticket.

He stepped up to the counter with three pieces of luggage.

He said, “Ma’am I want this first suit case to go to Phoenix, the second suitcase to go to Seattle, and the third one to go to New York.”

Dumbfounded, the attendant said, “Sir, I am sorry, but we can’t do that.”

The man said, “I don’t know why not.

You did it last week.”

There is nothing worse than losing baggage… unless it is baggage you need to lose.

The truth of the matter is most of us have some type of baggage we carry around with us all the time that we need to lose.

It weighs down our relationships with our friends, family, co-workers and neighbors.

Often, it destroys marriages, dissolves friendships, and damages our abilities to relate properly to God.

Every time you bring two people together you are going to add baggage.

Everybody brings some baggage into a relationship.

The key to building and maintaining a healthy relationship is:

Being able to recognize you have baggage

Being willing to lose it (Merritt)

We come to texts like today's with all of our baggage, which often makes these things hard to read.

Sometimes we automatically shut down because of how the words have been used to perpetuate damaging patriarchal ideas about modesty.

This baggage can cause us to look at this text through a lens of unnecessary-yet still very real-debilitating shame.

Or sometimes we come to a text like today's with an overwhelming sense of guilt over things we've done or the ways we've failed.

Maybe it's something from a distant past that is still close enough to cause unease.

Sometimes we come to this text with immense anger because we carry the baggage of watching a marriage fall apart due to adultery.

Or maybe because we are a child who was born from an affair, which makes it so hard to read this text without feeling some sort of weight.

The truth is, this is a text that is hard to separate from our baggage.

We should try because there is something here for us to wrestle with, something that is important for us to know.

And maybe it is even more important for us to wrestle with because of the ways it has been misused, so we can discover the way this passage should truly be about restoration, love, and respecting the image of God in others.

If we take the time to work through this text and what it truly means, maybe we will begin to unpack some of the unnecessary baggage we've been carrying as well.

Defining Lust

The Greek word translated as "lust" here is a verb, not a noun.

We typically use nouns and adjectives to describe emotions, but a verb describing the action of lusting emphasizes the fact that it is more than just having certain feelings or emotions.

In fact, the root of the word is the same root as the word for "covet," which is a strong, sinful desire to have something that does not belong to you-and often the willingness to do whatever it takes to get it.

Our culture often thinks of lust as the beginning of love, but that is a mistake.

If lust is linked to coveting as the Greek root implies, then lust cannot lead to love; it can only lead to sin.

One pastor wrote:

Living with lust is like being shackled to a lunatic.

Lust is the craving for salt by a person who is dying of thirst.

Lust confuses intensity with intimacy.

Lust does not call for condemnation.

Persons sitting in this Sanctuary today struggling already feel enough shame.

I'm not coming to shame anybody but I've come to say to you, there is a better way.

I've come to say to you there is a way of liberation; there is a way of freedom; there is a way of meaning.

It's called Love.

(Olds)

Reexamining what lust means is incredibly important for deconstructing the baggage we bring to this text.

Jesus is trying to humanize women in a culture that often dehumanizes them.

A helpful story for us, in wrestling with this text, is the narrative of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.

The religious leaders bring a woman to be stoned for committing adultery.

We all know it takes at least two people to commit adultery, yet only the woman is held accountable according to this text.

Jesus says the famous words, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her," and in response, the leaders drop their stones.

Another helpful story to contextualize this text is the Old Testament story of Judah and Tamar in

There are many complex ethical questions worthy of attention in this story, what's important today is the fact that Judah knowingly has sex with a woman he presumes is a prostitute, then seeks to have his daughter-in-law burned to death for her adultery when he finds out about her pregnancy.

He only backs down upon discovering the children are his, from his own sin.

This Old Testament story illustrates once again how a patriarchal society is eager to lay blame solely at the feet of women for the sin of adultery.

Jesus in our text seeks to emphasize the shared responsibility of men in adultery in a culture that has a tendency to scapegoat women.

These are just a couple of examples, but there are other biblical examples as well.

Patriarchal societies often hold women responsible for the sexual ethics of the men around them.

In Matthew 5 Jesus shifts that focus from women to the covetous act of male lust toward women.

Jesus is calling men to stop treating the women around them as mere objects.

Responsibility for Sin

These seem like incredibly harsh words, and they are often interpreted as an exaggeration, but when we examine them in the context of the definition of lust, they seem far less exaggerative.

These are drastic words intended to prevent a tragic act.

Coveting another human leads down a path toward rape or other forms of sexual violence, abuse, manipulation, and control.

Jesus's harsh words here show the lengths to which someone should go in order to prevent inflicting their own sin upon others.

While the exaggeration isn't meant to be taken literally, the meaning behind it absolutely is.

If your desires are leading you to victimize others, do whatever you need to do to keep that from happening.

This is one area where we struggle as a culture.

Instead of helping people find freedom from their sin, we often cause them to push their desires down deeper, repressing them, pretending they don't exist.

Then we are caught off guard when "heroes" of ours are found caught up in sexual sin even though we haven't created any sort of "eye-gouging" systems for them.

We must create spaces for people to talk about the places they are struggling, in order to address the root of the problem.

These spaces include accountability systems, mental health resources, systems of corporate confession, encouraging true repentance, and systems of restitution.

A culture must be created and fostered that humanizes others and roots out the type of toxicity that leads to lust in the first place.

We have struggled with this in the past, evidenced by our tendency to blame victims.

Modesty culture that focuses on women is an example.

Another example is the way women are shamed and blamed for certain sexual ethics while their male counterparts are applauded and celebrated for the exact same actions.

Once again, this is not new.

These patterns and systems are evident in biblical narratives too.

It's important to note that the blame for lust lies with the one who is lusting-not the objects or victims of that lust.

The verse is speaking to the sinner: "gouge out your eye," not "ask your victim to cover up."

This is an incredibly important distinction.

We are responsible for our own sins.

We are responsible for the consequences of our actions.

If we take following Jesus seriously, we will do what we can to care for others.

Jesus affirms repeatedly, with both his words and his actions throughout the Gospels, that women aren't objects or worth less than men but are created equally in the image of God.

Thus, they should be treated with the same respect and dignity as men.

That verse is a helpful reminder for us here.The kingdom of God includes women and men together, as equals.

Lent is a season that is designed to "gouge out eyes."

It is a time of self-reflection and examination to root out sin that often goes overlooked.

It's important for us to take time to examine ourselves to find where there is sin, and remove it.

Fasting, prayer, and Bible reading all help with this, but so do times in community, counseling, and discipleship groups.

When we find sin, it is important not to ignore it but to confess it.