Our church is blessed to have a voice, in the form of our large backlit double-sided street sign on Imperial Highway. A friend in the community, who happens to be a professor of ethics, said that our sign functions like an ink blot test– his friends and neighbors see in it what they bring to it.
Christian ethics means different things to different people. Really different things. How do you make moral decisions? Is there a bright and powerful beacon in your life that invites you to life and wholeness and right relationship? I hope so, because I try to talk about that beacon every Sunday. Call it following Jesus, or seeking the Kingdom of God, or being filled with the Spirit. But make it your beacon and let it guide you into right action. And enjoy our street sign. Or your Christian faith may be all about fences instead of beacons: rules and creeds and proof texts; who’s inside the fence and who’s out, who belongs and who’s pure and who’s going to heaven, and who’s not. If you expect those kinds of fences in your religion, you may be in the wrong church right now. And our street sign will really annoy you.
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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ
November 12, 2018
Ethics: Fences and Beacons
Mark 10:2-16 Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” 5But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; 12and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 14But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. 15Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” 16And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
Our church is blessed to have a voice, in the form of our large backlit double-sided street sign on Imperial Highway. A friend in the community, who happens to be a professor of ethics, said that our sign functions like an ink blot test– his friends and neighbors see in it what they bring to it.
Christian ethics means different things to different people. Really different things. How do you make moral decisions? Is there a bright and powerful beacon in your life that invites you to life and wholeness and right relationship? I hope so, because I try to talk about that beacon every Sunday. Call it following Jesus, or seeking the Kingdom of God, or being filled with the Spirit. But make it your beacon and let it guide you into right action. And enjoy our street sign. Or your Christian faith may be all about fences instead of beacons: rules and creeds and proof texts; who’s inside the fence and who’s out, who belongs and who’s pure and who’s going to heaven, and who’s not. If you expect those kinds of fences in your religion, you may be in the wrong church right now. And our street sign will really annoy you.
We actually need both fences and beacons. But Jesus was light on the fences and big into beacons. When he’s asked a question, he usually answers with another question, or a parable. Not a rule, not a law! He says, “Follow me!” Jesus isour beacon – he goes off doing amazing things (and sometimes rule-breaking things), and we try to follow him.
Fences are simpler than beacons. Identify the rule and follow it. You can stand inside the fence and say, “Look! I’m doing the right thing, I’m good with God. Mission accomplished.” God’s beacons are always a bit beyond us. When our eyes are on the beacon we often feel that gap between who we are and who God is inviting us to become. In fact, the closer we come to the holy, the more we can see our own flaws. That’s the bad news. The good new is: the closer we come to the holy, the more we see new possibilities for living well.
We can also discover that we have turned our backs on the beacon and we are in shadow, moving away from God. That’s the bad news. The good news is: no matter how far away we are from God’s beacon, we can always turn around and face it, and start moving toward it.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is asked, “where is the fence,” in this case about divorce. His reply condemning divorce is one of very few rules Jesus gives in the whole Gospel of Mark, and he seems to give it reluctantly. Was he sticking up for the safety and economic rights of women? Maybe Christians in Mark’s community thought they should divorce their non-Christian spouses. We don’t know the context. We do know that Jesus was shining a beacon of light on the sacred covenant of marriage. Take your marriage vows seriously; they’re meant to last. We also know that if we take our marriage seriously and it still fails, we will be forgiven. And then Jesus moves on and shines a beacon on us that is a little blinding: “Receive the Kingdom of God like little children,” he says. What does that even mean? Be humble? Be teachable? Get out of our own way? Climb into his lap? Whatever it means, it is surely a beacon and not a fence.
Ethics. Fence-based ethics are different from beacon-based ethics. I was talking to a same-gender-loving woman who was raised in a conservative Christian home. She was committed not to have sex before marriage. And thank God she can marry. She said, “The bible makes a convincing case about not having sex before marriage, right?” I said, “Let me get back to you on that.” So I looked it up on the internet: the seven verses used to forbid sex before marriage– easy. Some are sketchy, some might apply, none are from Jesus, and all are from a very different culture than our own. I realized I couldn’t proof text like that- grab verses out of context to make rules.
I do ethics differently. I point to the beacons of “love your neighbor as yourself” and “marriage as a sacred covenant” and then I try to figure out what they look like in the face of possible children outside of marriage (clearly not an issue for her), avoiding STDs, and how do you show respect and consideration to a person with whom you are being intimate and may want to just leave. That, against the good of marrying someone you know how to love well and know you can live with. Fences are easier than beacons.
Of course the first fence churches usually put up is: don’t question the leader. The leader speaks for God and therefore the leader is always right. I feel confident that nobody here believes that about me. Thank God. Leaders are human, and fallible. Question authority.
The Catholic Church has been in the news lately, and not in a good way. A small but persistent minority of priests around the world have abused way too many children. And their bishops covered it up, allowed them to repeat their crimes over and over again. These bishops were breaking no formal rules. But why would they need one? What about the simple shining beacon of: protect the lives entrusted to you— first do no harm? This is a long shadow over the institutional Catholic Church. This shadow is called: “protect privilege, and ignore the suffering of the powerless.” This shadow, in one form or another, is always with us if we have any power at all; we can only minimize it by searching all our actions in the light of God’s love for the last and the least.
A young friend of mine is part of a conservative Christian community. They have put up a bunch of fences for her; for some reason they mostly have to do with sex. She had already had sex before marriage, but as part of her marriage preparation through her church she had to stop, and live apart from her fiancé. Now she is married and she is not supposed to have male friends. There are reasons for these rules, but I wouldn’t submit to them. We do it differently here. So let’s do the work. How will our church teach the sanctity of the covenant of marriage? What shall we do to support it?
My friend got another fence from church: you know who you need to vote for in the 2016 presidential election, despite his obvious moral failings. Which, incidentally, was her church breaking a tax law. The goal was to appoint Supreme Court justices who could impose that church’s fences on all of us. We can faithfully disagree about the morality of abortion. The shadow I see here is “win at any price,” The beacons of environmental protection, human rights, the rule of law, are fading under that shadow of “win at any price.” We follow a savior who surely did not win at any price. He lost on purpose, for us, on a cross. To win human power struggles at any price is to abandon the beacon of God’s Kingdom.
Is there a beacon to be had in politics today? I believe there is. We have beautiful ideals in common. John McCain’s eulogies have allowed people to express them at length. And it’s painful to see how far away we are from those. But giving up on government is turning our backs on the precious beacon of those ideals and resigning ourselves to living in deep and destructive shadow. We may not get very far, but we need to be walking in the right direction. I do have one fence for myself here. I will educate myself about the whole ticket, even the water district, and vote the whole ticket, and invite my friends to do the same. Care to join me?
Do you talk about ethics with your friends, coworkers and relatives? I think we can go a little deeper than the slogans on our sign. So when somebody gives you a proof text, or says, “there’s no law against it,” you could explain that we look at ethics differently. Fences are easier than beacons, but beacons are more powerful. Let your light shine. We have ideals. We may never reach them, but in striving to live the gospel our hearts and minds are opened. In speaking our values, we challenge ourselves to live them. And in following the beacon who is Jesus Christ, we discover deep integrity, and abiding grace, and the transforming power of love. Amen.
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