Lent 3, March 15, 2009
Jews desire signs and Greeks wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. I Corinthians 1:21
I want to spend some time today focusing on a topic I sometimes mention in passing as a side point in sermons. It is a basic part of what I understand to be the heart of the Christian message, and it is a point that sometimes brings consternation to the faces of some of you when I touch on in those sermons. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians really invites a discussion of what he calls the foolishness of his message, and for some reason, I feel especially comfortable talking foolishness, so here goes.
Christianity is not....is not...some kind of moral code. The goal of Christianity is not to teach us how to act morally or how to be moral people. I can’t put it any more bluntly than that. I realize that runs against the grain of what a lot of us were taught, and it doesn’t offer much hope to those who bring children or spouses here week after week hoping they will receive some sort of moral tune-up. Christianity’s agenda is not primarily to teach us a set of rules we should live by. Now if that sounds foolish or even a little crazy, just remember it was Paul who got me going this morning.
I suppose this sermon is brought on also by that list of commandments we heard a few minutes ago, I think there were ten of them. They are fine rules, I can’t find anything wrong with any of them and I think it would be great if everyone would live by them. We hear them in church from time to time, especially in this Lenten season, but those rules are not the heart of Christianity.
I know that many of us were brought up to believe that going to church is about learning to walk the straight and narrow, that the church is supposed to show us the right path to walk and buffet us around the conscience a bit if we stray. I once heard a woman say that she liked to come away from a sermon feeling kind of bad. She wanted the preacher to make her feel guilty each week so she would know how to adjust her life. I was glad I didn’t go to her church.
Now I suppose I could get to the punch line and tell you what I do think Christianity is about, but I think I’ll wait. I want the contrast between this morality business and the message of Jesus--the one that Paul calls foolishness--I want that contrast to be stark when we finally get there.
I actually began to think about these things last Saturday, before I had even looked at the readings for today. Some of you may have seen an interview with our bishop, Peter Lee in last Saturday’s Post. Peter is retiring after 25 years as a central leader, not just in the Episcopal Church in America, but in the worldwide Anglican Communion. He is known and respected as a wise and reasonable presence in a church struggling with controversy as it tries to understand its message and its calling in a new era of human history. Our bishop is not a foolish man.
In one of the questions, Peter was asked about the turmoil and divisions in the Virginia church these last few years. He answered that he was sad that the separatist churches had chosen to view Christianity through the lens of 20th century moralism. That was the second time I had heard someone I respected and whose opinion I valued question the idea that the church is in the morality business. Several years ago I paid a visit to the professor whose teaching had challenged and shaped my in seminary. We met to talk about church and life and parish ministry. During the course of our conversation, he said something about how the western church had gotten into trouble near the end of the fourth century when Augustine shifted the focus of the church’s message toward the teaching of morality. I’m sure I must have heard him tell me what the church was about if it wasn’t about morality, but I left that conversation with a lot of questions. The answer is right there in the gospels, it is in almost every story about Jesus and it is even in the oldest stories from the time before Jesus. The message of the gospel, of the prophets, is right there in bold print, but it is difficult to see if you have any idea that the bible is some kind of rule book.
Now if that runs against what you were taught as a kid, if it sounds just plain foolish, then I appeal to Paul and claim to be standing on firm ground.
But you don’t have to believe me, or Bishop Lee or some seminary professor you’ve never met. Listen to Jesus. As soon as you begin to entertain the idea that the bible and Christianity aren’t primarily about rules, you might begin to notice that much of Jesus’ teaching involved calling the rules into question.
Christianity grew out of an older tradition that was very much concerned with rules. In Jesus’ day and probably still today, any rabbi worth his salt could tell you just exactly how many rules there are in the Torah. People asked Jesus about rules often, and much of the time his response somehow turned the question upside down, or left the inquirer with some new and deeper question. “Jesus, should you really be healing people on the sabbath? You know healing is a lot like work.” “Well you tell me,” says Jesus, “Is it ok to do good works on the sabbath?” “Jesus, the law says I can divorce my wife by giving her a letter of dismissal so it would be ok if I did that. Right?” “No,” says Jesus. “No it wouldn’t.”
Into a world dominated by rules upon rules, the kind of rules that allowed those money changers to do their business in the temple, Jesus came to live out a new kind of message. Jesus was, in many ways, an all or nothing kind of guy. He had problems with the rules as they were understood by many he encountered, especially the religious leaders. Jesus wasn’t going to be satisfied with some kind of morality code. Any set of rules you can stack into a list will fall short of what Jesus was about in his ministry and his teaching. Rules have a lot of drawbacks.
As soon as you have a solid list, you begin separating people into those who keep the rules and those who don’t. Specifically today, we hear that Jesus had a problem with rules that required people to buy an animal to sacrifice in order to make their peace with God. Not everyone could afford sacrificial animals. Of course there are rules we hope we all obey, and those ten we just heard about certainly make most people’s list. Of course we need rules. But rules, a code, teaching about morality could never bring about the result we are told that God sought in coming among us as one of us. I can think of several reasons why rules could never be enough, but I only have time here to speak about one of those reasons, and yes, this will finally get me to what I think Christianity is about.
The problem with rules is that they define boundaries of behavior and they are limited. With the idea of rules comes the notion that at some point, as long as we are living according to the rules, the rest of our life is ours. When I face the rules I don’t like, the ones I wish I didn’t have to follow, the moral code may seem to diminish my freedom. The truth is,though, that any list of rules provides freedom. They mark the line between what we must choose to satisfy some standard and what I am free to choose as I wish. People were always asking Jesus about that free space beyond the limits of the rules. “How often should I forgive my neighbor? Seven times?” “How about seventy times that. Start there and ask me again.” When people asked Jesus about what rules they had to satisfy before their lives became their own, Jesus recast the question or redefined the rule. He knew that they were trying to preserve some little piece of their life outside of the obligation to God and neighbor. He never let anybody off who came looking for such a loophole.
Jesus’ message--his purpose--was much more all-encompassing, much more demanding than simple morality. His agenda was and is relationship. Relationship has always been God’s hope, God’s dream. “ I will be your God and you will be my people,” says God long before even that short list of ten rules, and certainly before the hundreds of rules that followed that list. “Walk with me, trust me, let me help you with your life.” That was the original call. Shared life, shared values, shared love and respect. I think God had in mind the kind of relationship that doesn’t need rules. I’m sure we could argue about whether that is possible, but I am convinced that that is the heart of the gospel. Not that we can live that way, but that that is what it means to be in the image of God. Maybe the closest model we have is the relationship of husband and wife. When a marriage is in trouble, couples start making rules. When things are good, couples treat each other well not because of rules, but out of love and respect and shared values. Jesus came to teach us, to model for us what it means to be in relationship with God--relationship in which we invest our whole lives, as Jesus did, holding nothing back.
John Baker