Whatever may have been be the actual circumstances of the men from the East and their search for the place to which they believed the star was leading them, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew was wanting as convincingly as possible to suggest that the birth of Jesus Christ was not just a local event, in Bethlehem, or a national event, in the Roman province called Judea, but a cosmic event, a universal event, an event which would change the world forever. It was where East would meet West, and God would bring together all peoples everywhere.

It is impossible to ignore the power of individual recollection and imagination. It also is impossible to ignore the power of collective recollection and imagination. For example, think of where you were when you first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Or think of where you were when you first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Then ponder how your personal memory of those events was affected by the things you saw on television and your conversations with many other people immediately afterward, and how together all of us formed a national understanding of how those events occurred and how we interpreted their meaning.

A funny thing happened on the way to giving this sermon a title. A couple of weeks ago I started an intermittent sermon series called The Wisdom of Jesus. The first one was about adversaries, and this one is about forgiveness. I had not actually decided on any scripture passages when I announced today’s sermon, but I thought that Jesus frequently spoke about forgiveness in his wisdom teaching. However, as I discovered to my chagrin, he didn’t.

Today we shall look at two passages about how we should relate to personal adversaries. They are included in what the Church has always called the Sermon on the Mount, which is found in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 5 through 7. The entire “sermon” illustrates many examples of what may properly be called “Wisdom Literature.”

The primary purpose of religion that I hope you will think about this morning is that religion always attempts to lead people into a life of faith. That is especially true of the Christian religion. One of the primary reasons for its existence is to assist people to make what Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and others have called “the leap of faith.” The first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews is perhaps its best-known and most influential verse: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

This, in one sense, is literally a life or death sermon. I have talked about death before, probably too much, because I may admittedly be fixated on it. I likely have seen too many people die and I have officiated at too many funerals for me to have psychological and theological equilibrium on this subject. But this time I am going beyond anything I have ever said before. This time I am saying it may be ethically acceptable to take one’s own life, not for the sake of oneself, but for the sake of one’s spouse or family or friends, and for all of society. That is why it is socially-oriented suicide. It isn’t for the patient or for the person who decides to end life sooner than would occur naturally; it is for the sake of the world than we might choose to die.

What follows is an historical summary of how I believe the crucifixion of Jesus Christ came to have such immense importance in the New Testament Church and in the entire Church of Jesus Christ ever since the first century. Make no mistake about it: Without the cross, Christianity as we know it would be a totally different religion from what it is. If Jesus had died as an old man, we might never have heard of him. His death on a cross became a central element of Christian belief.

We have all known what we call “perfectionists.” They strive for perfection in many goals of the human race: to be the perfect athlete, the perfect parent, the perfect employer, the perfect employee, the perfect doctor, lawyer, merchant, or chief. And it is all in vain. No one can be perfect in anything, let alone everything. Even the apostle Paul, the one indispensable man of the New Testament Church, recognized that. In his letter to the Philippians, he said he was trying to improve himself physically, mentally, and spiritually. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect,” he wrote (Phil. 3:12 ff), but he was pressing on “toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

What is religious extremism? It is religion that finds its essence in rules and regulations, in attempts to delineate mainly what the people of God should or should not do, and it spends much of its energy disapproving of other people’s behavior while never examining one’s own behavior. Extremist religion is The Scarlet Letter, Elmer Gantry, fundamentalist Christianity, some forms of evangelical Christianity, extremely liberal Christianity, ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Salafist Islam, Al Qaeda, ISIS, ISIL, or the Islamic State (take your pick), or Burmese Buddhists killing Burmese Muslims. Extremist religion comes in many guises and forms in all religions.

This sermon shall be like none other I have ever preached. It shall consist mainly of ethical questions with respect to politics for which I shall provide no answers. You should not deduce from that that I have no answers to these questions for myself. Quite the contrary, I can answer each of them very quickly to my own satisfaction. Furthermore, you may deduce by some of my follow-up questions how I would answer them. But I want you to think about how you would answer these questions. These inquiries are, I believe, important issues, and we as voters should give them much thought as we listen to the candidates when they attempt to gain our votes. God wants us to be as honest and truthful in our politics as in all other aspects of our lives.

Today I want for us to think about the many concepts of Christ we also create, and for similar reasons. We cannot see God at all, but we’re sure that certain people in the 1st century of the Common Era did see Jesus, and most if not all of them formed their own concepts of who he was by having been eyewitnesses to his life. Today, twenty centuries after Jesus lived, we who are Christians also form our own concepts of him, but we do so from a very different perspective. Much of what we conclude about Jesus is determined by what we have heard or read from the four Gospels and from others who have given us their views of Jesus for twenty centuries.

We have come to the end of this series of six sermons about David, the second and the greatest of the kings of Israel. In the Books of I and II Samuel and I Kings, we learn more about particular events in the life of David than we are told about anyone else’s life in the Bible, including both Moses and Jesus. The Torah and the Gospels tell us more about what Moses and Jesus said, but the history books tell us more about what David did.

How do family members treat one another? Are they respectful and considerate of one another, or do they act like some of the characters they see on television sit-coms, whose situations are often more pathetic than comic? Do they realize that each has a major stake in the success --- or failure --- of all the others?

The king and we are intimately related to one another. We are all cut from the same cloth. Our being has the potential to be flawless, but in fact it inevitably becomes flawed. Not to recognize that is to do a great disservice to God as well as to ourselves, but to let it destroy us is to do a greater disservice to both God and us.

Let me begin with a deliberately provocative statement. We shall destroy our planet. Allow me to repeat it: We SHALL destroy the earth. There is no question that it will happen; the only question is when. Will it be in fifty or a hundred or two hundred years, or maybe a thousand years? Surely it won’t occur after that. However, at this point no one can accurately predict when the last cockroaches or one-celled animals and the last inanimate lichens or mosses shall disappear into oblivion. It will be well after all humans have become extinct, and all the other “lower” animals, if indeed there are any animals lower than the species Homo sapiens (“wise humans”: what a joke!). We in our vaunted wisdom are the only species capable of destroying the world in which we find ourselves. Lions and tigers and bears won’t do it; Oh, no. But human beings will destroy the planet; of that there can be almost no doubt.

Two weeks ago we encountered David in his first appearance in I Samuel as the boy warrior who killed Goliath, the Philistine giant. Last week we learned that David became a favored member of King Saul’s court when he was still a boy, playing the harp to soothe the tortured psyche of the increasingly erratic first monarch of Israel. Then, over time, Saul came to be jealous of David, who was more popular with the people than Saul. Saul tried several times to kill David. Nevertheless, even though David had a few easy opportunities to kill Saul in self defense, he refused to do so, on the grounds that Saul was the Lord’s anointed, and it would be politically, ethically and religiously unacceptable to commit regicide. As it turned out, Saul was killed in a battle with the Philistines, and thus did David become the next king.

There is one man in the Bible who has more written about his personal life than anyone else in holy writ. He is not Jesus, as Christians might expect, or Moses, as Jews might expect. There is certainly far more in the Bible written about Moses in general, but not about his personal life. As for Jesus, we know very little about his personal life. But the man of whom I speak is David, Dovid ha-Melech, David, the second king of Israel.

If you were to write a narrative of what you considered to be “the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” what would you include in your Gospel? Would you carefully study all four Gospels, and put in only those things you were absolutely convinced were authentic? Would you do what Thomas Jefferson did, take all four Gospels and cut out everything you thought was inaccurate or inauthentic? What would be your narrative about Jesus, were you to write one?