Choose

Allen's Hummingbird; Sandrine Biziaux Scherson. https://sandrine.smugmug.com

Because God is often thought of as a parent, what kind of a God we believe in will shape our choices. God is the ultimate model, for better or worse. Does God authorize eternal damnation? Well then, why be compassionate? Does God love some people and reject others? Then we are free to do the same. Does God set inflexible rules that defy common sense and compassion? Then we can too. There are a lot of ethical atheists out there. They are atheist because they cannot stomach the kind of God whose followers could choose such hurtful rules. 

We know a different God.  So we can choose differently.  The God we know gave us this beautiful planet, and asks us to care for it.  The God we know made people of all shapes and sizes and colors and languages and personalities and abilities and loves them all. The God we know implores us to make peace with justice, so that all people may thrive. And the God we know in Jesus loves teaching and learning and healing and partying and listening well and having lively discussions about what is the right thing to do.  Let’s make our choices remembering who we are, and whose we are, and what we value.

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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ

April 29, 2018

Freedom and Responsibility

Mark 2:23-3:6 One sabbath [Jesus] was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain.  24 The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?”  25 And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food?  26 He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.”  27 Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath;  28 so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

            Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand.  2 They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him.  3 And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.”  4 Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent.  5 He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.  6 The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Jesus was a Jew.  You know that, right?  As a Jew, he followed Torah, Jewish law, as found in the first five books of the Bible. There was also oral law, which told you how to apply (or to ignore) the ancient written laws.  “Torah” was both the written and unwritten laws, plus the lived practice of the Jewish people.  Nowadays Orthodox Jews describe all this as halakhah, which means literally, the way to walk.  Christians cut themselves loose from Jewish religious laws about two thousand years ago, and we haven’t always been respectful about them since.  It’s helpful to remember that Jesus followed Jewish law.  And we all have our own rules and laws, written and unwritten. We are walking a Way, following that law-bending Jewish Rabbi.

In Jesus’ day Pharisees were the guardians of the law. Things like keeping Kosher food and observing the sabbath. This was their way to be right with God.  It was also a way to keep their Jewish identity under occupation by foreign empires. And Pharisees were the nit pickers, the naggers.  But, in the Pharisees’ defense, give people an inch and they’ll take a mile.  For instance, if you were going to take a real sabbath and really not work all day, what would that look like?  Should you avoid peeking at your email? Driving?  Cooking? Doing the laundry? What if you get stuck in traffic and Sabbath starts? Better get home early just in case. Pharisees made “a fence around the law”—purposely overdoing it, so people can keep the law well.

Some people like to have that kind of security.  They just want to know the rules and not have to think about things. How to be right with God. How to be holy. How to get your ticket to heaven.  How to get rid of guilt. Anybody who’s actually lived like this knows that it solves some problems, and creates others. It takes away our responsibility for making a lot of decisions. It also takes away our freedom to figure out how to best serve God in this time and place. And it draws a line that leaves some people rule-followers who are right righteous, and some rule-breakers who are wrong and bad.  That’s not a line I want to draw through God’s children.

People who come to this church… are not usually the kind who just want to know the rules and not have to think about things.  I trust that we all want to live wisely and compassionately and well.  To support our diverse community.  To be forgiven and to keep trying when we fail to keep to our plans or live up to our principles.  Which we all will.  We have freedom, to craft a life that honors the principles Jesus taught us.  And that gives us  a huge responsibility, to actually think through what works and what doesn’t, and then to try to put our ethics into practice day to day. 

It’s a whole lot easier to blindly follow the rules, or at least pretend to.

I wonder if you grew up with some religious rules or laws?  I remember some in my home growing up.  There were “holy days of obligation;” these were obscure midweek holy days where my mom would be barreling around like a crazy person trying to get the whole family to church so we could fulfill our obligation. There were the doilies we were supposed to wear in church, that my mom would fish out of the bottom of her purse as we were walking in the church door. And we ate fish instead of meat on Fridays, which was supposed to be a form of fasting, but to our family fish was a treat, not a sacrifice.

What religious rules or laws did you grow up with? 

Did these rules help you live better?

We have just about no rules here.  But I know most of you don’t take that freedom for granted.  You take up the responsibility to love God and neighbor, each in your own way.  Some of you pledge or tithe, and without that voluntary commitment, we probably wouldn’t be here. Some of you strive for love and justice in simple ways and powerful ways. We don’t have a list of laws and the religious police to keep us in line, so I want us to be able to connect our faith and the principles that Jesus gave us to why we do what we do. And scripture is always a great starting point for that conversation.   

What would Jesus do? Or, better, what might Jesus invite us to do?  Well, what did he do? Maybe that is one of the reasons I keep returning to the Gospel of Mark.  It’s the first collection of stories of Jesus that we have. The writer of the Gospel of Mark is a mystery to us. Mark was probably Jewish, knew a little scripture, but certainly was not a religious scholar.  He wasn’t very good at geography, or Greek grammar.  Some people think he was writing in Rome; I think Mark sounds like a Jewish country boy who cares a lot about liberation of his Jewish homeland. 

Mark’s gospel doesn’t spend a lot of time fussing about law or rules, just lets Jesus give those nit-picky Pharisees a good scold occasionally.  Picking wheat seeds is work forbidden on the sabbath? I mean really! Jesus is right, of course. In the gospels Jesus is always right.  But look at the way they talk, the style of discourse.

In this passage, Jesus doesn’t just say, you nit-pickers lay off! Instead he gives what seems to me a rather belabored explanation about the time King David, back in his youth when he was a hill bandit, ate some bread that had been consecrated to the local temple and told everyone that was OK with God. The point Jesus is making is that if a religious law is leaving people hungry, we might want to set it aside for a few hours.  Only he’s making that point in the strange logic of the religious scholars of his day. (That Mark even bothers to report this bizarre form of argument makes me think he must have been Jewish.)

Jesus is more blunt when it comes to healing on the sabbath.  If a religious law will leave people hurting, make an exception.  It’s clear in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus is human and he really does need rest. But preachers don’t rest on the sabbath anyway, and Jesus is healing someone who may not be able to find him the next day.  Observing sabbath doesn’t mean closing hospitals one day a week, right?

This back-and-forth discussion, argument sometimes, about what is the right thing to do, was a part of the Jewish culture Jesus grew up in. And it’s still a big part of Jewish culture.  The style of discussion is odd to us.  But if we claim our freedom and our responsibility before God, having conversations about what is the right thing, and what is doable, are important.   Don’t let me do all the talking up here! Let’s find ways to have those kinds of conversations. 

There will never be enough rules or laws to keep us out of trouble if we are not aspiring to live the principles behind the rules. What are some of the principles that guide us as Christians?... One comes from our reading today: The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.  Rules are here to help us, not to cause us suffering! 

From our principles we choose what is right, and doable.  We build rules and habits for living.  And we fall short of the tasks we set for ourselves.  Our best-laid plans will fail.  It’s OK to talk about that too.  It’s OK to laugh about it, and to cry about it.  We are not trying to follow rules well enough to qualify for admission to heaven.  We are trying to be transformed into the Beloved Community, the Kingdom of God, and we will not get there in this life.  But it is very important that we name the direction we want to go, and plan ways to move forward.

Our Congregational form of church government means you get to have that conversation for our church.  What values are we excited about living out at Brea Congregational UCC?  What old and new ministries might make those values real? What kind of pastoral leadership might you need to do that?  In our UCC, nobody but the people gathered here (and the whisper of the Holy Spirit) are going to tell you. You have the freedom, and responsibility.

I have had a preview of your conversations in my Listening Interviews with many of you.  One thing I heard from a number of people was that this church is a voice for justice, for GLBTQ rights, for creation care… an alternative voice to so many Christians whose actions do not seem to match the teachings of Jesus. We do it twitter-style on our signboard. I wonder if there are other ways of being that voice. That voice is needed, amid all the voices for a mean-spirited and win-at-any-cost and rule-bound kind of religion that claims to be following Jesus.

When I think about us, and God, and rules, my mind goes to parenting.  Hoping that my son would learn to do what is right, I imagined what a loving God might be hoping for us adults.  I tried to set rules for my son.  Ah, but how to enforce them?  Star charts failed utterly. Watching the movie “Lion King” was the only bribe, “reward”, that ever worked on him.  And I didn’t have the heart to find out how dire a punishment would actually bend his will into submission. Only when he was convinced why he should do a thing could I get him to do it. I think I raised a good Congregationalist.

In a lot of ways I suspect my son just learned to do what he saw his parents do, for better or for worse. We tend to choose what we know, what we see modeled. So choose your models. I like hanging around with people committed to loving God and neighbor, and watching how they do things.

Because God is often thought of as a parent, what kind of a God we believe in will shape our choices. God is the ultimate model, for better or worse. Does God authorize eternal damnation? Well then, why be compassionate? Does God love some people and reject others? Then we are free to do the same. Does God set inflexible rules that defy common sense and compassion? Then we can too. There are a lot of ethical atheists out there. They are atheist because they cannot stomach the kind of God whose followers could choose such hurtful rules.

We know a different God.  So we can choose differently.  The God we know gave us this beautiful planet, and asks us to care for it.  The God we know made people of all shapes and sizes and colors and languages and personalities and abilities and loves them all. The God we know implores us to make peace with justice, so that all people may thrive. And the God we know in Jesus loves teaching and learning and healing and partying and listening well and having lively discussions about what is the right thing to do.  Let’s make our choices remembering who we are, and whose we are, and what we value. Amen.