Scriptures: Deuteronomy
34:1-12, Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
I Thessalonians 2:1-8, Matthew 22:34-46
In our reading today, we conclude what has been a series of
arguments between Jesus and the religious leaders in Jerusalem. In
responding to a trap question about the legality of paying taxes, Jesus held up
a mirror to the religious leaders’ own divided loyalties. And now, the religious leaders have one more
trick question. “Which commandment in
the law is the greatest.” Which
commandment in the law is the greatest.
Of course, this wasn’t a neutral question. With these religious leaders, there were no
neutral questions – when it came to Jesus, any question they asked was a
“gotcha” question. When we hear the word
“commandment”, we think of the Ten Commandments – but that’s not what these
leaders had in mind. For them, there
were more commandments. Many more. If you read through Exodus and Leviticus and
Numbers and Deuteronomy, there are lots of other commands. In fact, to the present day, according to the
Talmud, Jews recognize not 10 commandments, but 613 commandments, or
mitzvot. 248 of them are positive – “Do
this”. 365 are negative – “Don’t do
that”. These 613 commandments run the gamut from
mitzvot #1, “To know there is a God”, to mitzvot #33, “To burn a city that has
turned to idol worship” to mitzvot #68, “Men shall not shave the hair off the
sides of their head”, from #201, “Not to eat diverse seeds planted in a
vineyard, to “#610, “Not to panic and retreat during battle” to #613, “Not to
retain a captive woman for servitude after having had relations with her.” And that’s according to one enumeration,
according to the 12th century teacher Maimonides.[1] We don’t know whether the religious leaders
of Jesus’ day had fully recognized this system of 613 commandments…but we know
they recognized many more than the ten we think of. But wait, there’s more! At least some religious leaders of Jesus’ day
taught that all the commandments were equally important, for to say otherwise
was to presume to know that mind of God.
So, according to this teaching, theoretically, a commandment such as
“Men shall not shave the hair off the sides of their head” could be held to be of
equal weight to the commandment “To know there is a God.” To be fair, some religious leaders were
willing to set priorities; Rabbi Hillel, who lived and taught not many years
before the time of Jesus, famously summarized the law by saying, “What is
hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Torah, the rest is
commentary; go and learn it.”
So Jesus was asked, “Which commandment in the law is the
greatest.” And Jesus responded with
Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and Leviticus
19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And then he went to say one more thing that
I want to underscore: “On these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” All the law and the prophets hang on these
two commandments – love of God, and love of neighbor.
So in response to a “gotcha” question, Jesus is saying that
all of the teaching of his faith hung on love.
Love was the basis. Love was the
lens through which all other legal and ethical teaching was to be
understood. Jesus cut through centuries of commentary and
legal opinions to make things very basic, but also very challenging. Rabbi Hillel, whom I mentioned earlier,
summarized the Torah as teaching us not to hurt others. Jesus went beyond this. It wasn’t just enough not to harm, not to do
evil. For Jesus, it was necessary to do good out of love.
It’s easy for us to lose focus, to get so lost in the
details of a project that we forget why we started it in the first place. We can lose the forest for the trees. And life throws situations at us for which
there are no rules that fit the situation perfectly. And so we need some guiding principles. Different faiths have had different principles. For example, some faiths emphasize purity –
don’t touch or taste anything deemed impure.
“Don’t drink, smoke, or chew, or date girls who do.” The Judaism of Jesus’ day tended to emphasize
purity as a guiding principle, teaching that one should avoid non-kosher foods
and non-kosher people. Jesus emphasized
love as a guiding principle, and thus made very different decisions, and taught
his followers to make very different decisions.
He would interact with people that many Jews of Jesus’ day deemed
unclean – and thus the constant complaints from religious leaders about Jesus eating
with Gentiles and sinners. An example on how decisions based on love
might work out differently from decisions based on purity: A bar patron is heavily intoxicated – bombed
out of their mind. This person wants to drive home. Do I, instead of letting the person drive,
offer this person a ride home? If purity
is my guiding concept, I probably don’t – I don’t want to be seen in the
company of drunks – if others see me near a bar with someone who is
falling-down drunk, my reputation might take a hit - and besides they might
throw up in my car. And so if the person
drives and totals their car and hurts or kills themselves or someone else,
well, that’s their problem. My hands are
clean. But if love is my guiding
concept, of course I offer this person a ride home. If they toss their cookies in my car, well,
barf washes off….but the guilt if I let the person drive drunk and they hurt or
kill themselves or others doesn’t wash so easily. Concern for purity will lead me not to get
involved. Love leads to involvement….I
can’t just stand idly by.
We as individuals sometimes lose focus and need to be
reminded of our basic priorities.
Religious institutions have the same problem. Of course, on this Reformation Sunday, we are
reminded of reformers such as Martin Luther, who felt that the Roman Catholic
church of its day had lost its focus, obsessing about selling indulgences to
raise money to build St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome while neglecting the heart
of the faith. The Reformers felt that
the Catholic teaching of its time put too much power in the hands of the
clergy, from the Pope right down to the local parish priest, and that these
clergy did more to block the way to salvation than to lead the flock on the
path. This Tuesday, October 31, marks
500 years to the day from Martin Luther’s fateful trip to nail his 95 theses to
the door of the Wittenberg cathedral, and a copy of them in English translation
is in your bulletin.
But I think it’s too easy to say that the Catholics had it
wrong and we Protestants have it right.
The Reformers emphasized five principles – salvation by faith alone, by
Scripture alone, through Christ alone, by grace alone, to God’s glory alone. But this teaching was often distorted into a
very heady faith in which salvation came by believing the right things, by
being able to quote the right Bible verses, by being able to recite the right
creeds. And so it’s important to ask, in
Tina Turner’s words, “What’s love got to do with it?” Remember that St Paul famously wrote that
“Faith, hope, love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is – what? –
love! Not faith. Not hope.
Love. Faith and hope are
important, but love comes first. For those of us raised in the Protestant
tradition, it may startle us to realize that the main thing Jesus taught – love
– isn’t among these five principles taught by the Reformers. During the time of the Reformation, love certainly
had very little to do with the religious wars fought between Protestants and
Catholics, and between different flavors of Protestants.
Christian author Phyllis Tickle observed that every 500
years or so, the structures of institutionalized Christianity become so rigid
and so brittle that they have to be shattered so that growth can resume –
perhaps somewhat like crustaceans and other organisms that shed their
exoskeletons periodically after they’ve become too tight, so that they can resume the growth
process. Or to use another of Phyllis
Tickle’s images, every 500 years, the church holds a giant rummage sale, going
through all of the theologies and practices and organizational structures it
has accumulated over the centuries, holding them up to the light, seeing which
ones are still useful in their original form for their original purposes, which
may be able to be repurposed for new uses, and which should be discarded and
kicked to the curb. 500 years ago,
Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door. Roughly 500 years before that, the Great
Schism or split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches
happened. 500 years before that – well, actually,
more like 600 or 700 – the emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the
Roman Empire, and for the next few
hundred years, numerous creeds would be written summarizing the beliefs
of the church.
As our Conference Minister, the Rev Bill Worley, writes in
his message in this Sunday’s Communitas
– also in your bulletin – at this very moment, we are going through a new
reformation. It would appear that the church has once again
outgrown its shell – outgrown many of its institutional structures – and is
shedding them. And much of our society
seems to think it has outgrown the church. On Facebook, there’s a running theme about
all the things that millennials, the current generation of late teens and
20-somethings, are “killing” because they don’t use them or can’t afford them –
everything from paper napkins (because paper towels work just as well) to the 9
to 5 work week (more likely to be stringing together multiple part-time gigs) to
dinner dates (who needs to shell out dollars for dinner when you can meet
someone for free on OKCupid) to golf (these days the now 40-something Tiger
Woods is known more for DUI arrests than trophies) to department stores
(because who needs to go to Sears or J C Penney when you can order it on Amazon.com) to the
Applebees restaurant chain (just because....). And
organized religion would certainly be on the millennials’ hit list. Among millennials, the religious affiliation
showing the greatest rate of increase is “none of the above.” But here in Bridesburg, it’s all ages that
are staying home. We have a population
of around 8600, where the one remaining Catholic church gets maybe 700 people
out each weekend, the two remaining
mainline churches including us get maybe 40 or so combined, and Real Life and
Grace Baptist get maybe 250 between them – that’s around 1,000 out of 8,600
folks in Bridesburg who attend church regularly. And of course we’ve seen the closure of All
Saints, Bridesburg Baptist, and Bridesburg Presbyterian, and our congregation
and Bridesburg Methodist are struggling.
So we are going through a time of transition, a time of
reformation. Old ways of being church
are dying. Many churches are dying. Even many of the things that made church cool
20 years ago –praise bands and such – have become passe, have become old news.
But as Christians, we believe that on the other side of death is
resurrection. That’s the core of our
faith – that death is not the end. So
while we lament the death of the church we’ve known, we need to be attentive to
what is being born.
In his Communitas message, Rev. Worley writes, “I want our
Reformation to be shaped by the belief in, and the experience of, the
transformative power of the resurrected Spirit of Jesus Christ. I need that and I suspect you do too. I know the world does and it is our call as
disciples of Christ to make sure the world has it.”
I’d like to add a bit to Rev Worley’s message. I believe that the way the world will
experience the transformative power of Christ is through love. Millenials are looking for love, just as
everyone is looking for love. The need
to love and be loved is a big part of what makes us human. I believe people have left the church because
they couldn’t find love there, couldn’t feel love there. People came to church and perhaps heard words
about love. But they saw actions that
were judgmental, hateful, excluding, anything but loving.
Our Reformation needs to be grounded in love, rooted in
love, love of God, love of neighbor.
Church needs to be a place where all sorts and conditions of people can
come and experience – not just hear about, but actually experience, see and
touch and smell and taste as well as hear, the love of God. Love – love of God, love of neighbor - needs
to be at the heart of everything we say and do here. Not just make-believe love – people can smell
phonies a mile away – but genuine caring. If we can’t connect what we do to
love, we may need to ask why we’re still doing it.
And let’s be clear what kind of love we’re talking about,
when Jesus speaks of love of neighbor.
Remember my earlier example of driving the drunk person home, out of
love. It doesn’t mean that I suddenly
have warm fuzzy feelings for the person.
Doesn’t mean I want to ask them out on a date – in fact, with the other
person in that condition, that’s the last thing I want, or the other person
needs. The love of which Jesus speaks is
about caring for the other person’s well-being, wanting them to be safe and
healthy, wanting the best for them in the same way I want the best for myself,
and being willing to do what’s necessary to make that happen. The love of which Jesus speaks is a
recognition that our lives are connected, and so what happens to one affects
all – as St Paul described it – if one member suffers, all suffer; if one
rejoices, all rejoice. As I quote Paul’s
words, if you’ve ever been in a union, words like “solidarity” and phrases like
“an injury to one is an injury to all” may come to mind – and that may be one
way to catch a glimpse of what Jesus was saying. Or maybe you prefer the Three
Musketeers’ motto: All for one and one
for all. It means we have one another’s
back, and that of our neighbors. And so if you come here hungry, hopefully you
won’t leave here hungry; if you come here feeling alone, hopefully you won’t
leave feeling alone. And maybe when
you’re on your feet, you can help the
next person in the same way. And
honestly, who can turn down that kind of love, that kind of caring?
And this comes from love of God, the recognition that all we
have and all we are comes from God, that when we turn our back on God, God
doesn’t turn his back on us. It comes
from recognizing that both we and our neighbor are created in God’s image, have
something of God in us, and so when we love our neighbor, we love God as well.
I’ll close with a Hezekiah Walker
song:
I need you; you need me, we’re all a part of God’s body
Stand with me, agree with me, we’re all a part of God’s body
It is His will that every need shall be supplied
You are important to me; I need you to survive
You are important to me; I need you to survive.
Amen.
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