Not An Earthly Kingdom

I think it's a mistake to over-think parables. Yes, in addition to the surface message, they often contain nuances that cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of the original context and culture, but Jesus did not intend his parables to be confusing messages that must be picked apart like an episode of Westworld. They are simple speak for simple people. I really enjoyed Steve Pankey's post on this topic yesterday, and I hope you'll read it by clicking here. If Jesus saw the volumes that have been written about his parables, he might be flattered, but he'd also probably be perplexed. "It's not supposed to be hard," I can hear him saying in disbelief.

Sunday's gospel lesson (Mark 4:26-34) contains two little parables about the kingdom of God that are easy to over-interpret. First is the parable of the sower who scatters seed on the ground and, despite not understanding how, observes the seed sprouting and growing until it is time for the harvest. Second is the parable of the mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds yet grows into a shrub big enough to give birds shade in its branches. What did Jesus have in mind? What portrait of God's reign was Jesus seeking to display?

Don't overthink it. Both parables are about growth that defies understanding and expectation. Both are about something small becoming large. But both are familiar. His hearers may not have known that the mustard seed was the smallest of all seeds, but they would have understood that sometimes tiny seeds become big plants. They might not have ever thought about the process by which a seed sprouts and becomes a plant, but that's the point. Even if you never planted a bean in a cup in kindergarten, you are aware of these things called seeds and you are aware that those seeds become plants.

So what did Jesus mean? Simply that the kingdom of God starts small and grows big? That it pops up in ways that defy our understanding? Maybe. But we can dig a little deeper than that without overthinking things. This morning, I read an article about Vice President Pence's speech to the Southern Baptist Convention. The article suggests that members of the convention are experiencing a culture shift away from a narrow conservative political identity to a broader, more moderate identity. Pence's remarks, which were not surprisingly political, were not universally well received. That's not my point, but the article included a quotation from the newly elected president's speech to the convention about the relationship between politics and faith:

We believe that Jesus is the lord of the whole earth. He is the king of kings and he is the lord of lords. We believe that he, not any version of Caesar, is the Messiah. He is the Christ, the son of the living God, that salvation is found in him, not in the Republican platform or the Democratic platform, and that salvation did not come riding in on the wings of Air Force One. It came cradled in a manger

That was in my mind this morning as I read these parables about the reign of God, and I began to wonder how different Jesus' description of God's reign was from his contemporaries' experience of Caesar's reign. God's reign isn't announced at all. It pops up overnight in ways that no one really saw coming. When even the emperor's designated governor comes to town, there is a military parade. God's kingdom is best known as a mustard seed, but the Empire manifests itself in gold and silver, in marble and granite, in chariots and soldiers. The power of God doesn't surprise the sower, but it sneaks in at night when no one is looking. When Rome shows up, everyone knows it. What a remarkable difference!

I wonder what Jesus had in mind when he described the kingdom of God as some seeds scattered on the ground. I wonder whether his hearers were taken aback not at the theological complexity of the message but at its simplicity--a simplicity in message that mirrors the simplicity of the kingdom itself. If you want to see the reign of God, don't look at the big fancy church or in the words of the powerful preacher but in the homeless shelter or the generous neighbor or the committed volunteer. If you want to see the reign of God, you might have an easier time finding it in a children's book than in a preacher's sermon. Don't judge your preacher too harshly if she or he makes Sunday's sermon a simple little story. Instead, let that judgment be reserved for the preacher who says too much.

Gift and Challenge of Track 1

A year ago, our parish switched from Track 2 to Track 1. In both tracks, the Gospel and Epistle lessons are the same, but Track 2 provides an Old Testament lesson that pairs thematically with the Gospel lesson, but Track 1 moves semi-continuously through books of the Old Testament. When the Episcopal Church switched to the Revised Common Lectionary several years ago, Track 2 was closer to the BCP lectionary to which we were accustomed, so we started there, but, after a few three-year cycles of that, we decided to give the other a try. And, on Sundays like this one, we get to see the benefit and struggle that Track 1 provides.

This week, we will hear the story of the anointing of David as King of Israel in 1 Samuel 16. BUT, before we get there, we will hear two little verses from the end of 1 Samuel 15 that provide continuity with the Samuel story that we have been reading: "Samuel went to Ramah; and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel." Last Sunday, we heard the people of God demand a king. Samuel didn't like it, and neither did God, but God was happy to give them what they asked for. Samuel let them know exactly what they were getting--a king who would take their property and income for himself and his courtiers--but they wanted a king anyway. So God gave them Saul. All of that happened in 1 Samuel 8 and 11.

This week, we pick up near the end of Saul's reign. Of course, a lot has happened in the meantime, but, to keep the story moving, we pick up at the point when things have gotten bad. We hear that "the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel," but we don't hear why. I wish we had time to go back and read all of 1 Samuel 15 and hear how God had ordered Saul to wipe the Amelikites off the face of the earth and how Saul had decided to spare their king and save the best of their flocks and herds as the spoils of war. There's a fascinating theological reflection to be made on God's demand for total destruction and Saul's decision to hold some back and God's subsequent rejection of Saul, but we only get the slightest hint of it.

Still, that hint is enough to change the way we hear the encounter between Samuel and Jesse's family. Usually, we hear the story of David's anointing isolated from the story of Saul's rejection, but, of course, they are inextricably linked. Even if the preacher doesn't stop to mention it, the congregation gets to hear that the Lord rejected Saul and then sends Samuel to pick a new king. That tidbit adds weight and depth to the dramatic selection process, during which Samuel thinks he has found the right king only to hear God tell him not to judge by outward appearance. That famous line, "the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart," sounds different when we've already heard that God was sorry he had chosen Saul as king. It makes us scratch our heads and wonder how much God has to do with it and how much human beings look back and make the connections between human events and divine causation.

Regardless, this Sunday, we face a blessing and a challenge. We get the benefit of continuity and, thus, hear the story of David's anointing in a larger context. But we also have to leave behind the full story of that rejection. The preacher probably doesn't have time to explain why Saul had been rejected and why that makes a difference when it comes to the selection of David. But there's enough there for the congregation to wonder about it, and maybe there's enough there to encourage one or two to open their Bibles and read the story for themselves.

Recognizing God At Work

Mark loves to sandwich two stories together to make a single point, and Sunday's gospel lesson (Mark 3:20-35) has some elements of that. In the beginning of the passage, Jesus' family hears that Jesus and his disciples have been so busy attending to the needs of the crowd that they haven't even had time to eat, and they went out to retrain him because people were saying that he had gone out of his mind. At the end of the passage, the family shows up to come and get him, presumably to take him away to a quiet place so that he can calm down and recover, but, when someone informs Jesus about it, Jesus responds, "Who are my mother and my brothers?...Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

On its own, that's the kind of passage on which I'd want to preach. Jesus' earthly family cannot believe that anyone--even their own, special son--could work that hard, do that much, perform that many miracles. But Jesus, rather than rebuking them harshly, uses the opportunity to teach the crowd that submitting fully to God's work and God's will is how we find our true identity. Those who follow Jesus as "crazy Christians" can call themselves Jesus' mother, sister, and brother.

But then we get to the stuff in the middle, and I find myself glad I'm not preaching this Sunday.

The scribes come down from Jerusalem and say that Jesus is performing these miracles by the power of Beelzebul. The scribes were the keepers of the religious law. They were the interpreters of how God's law, God's rules, applied to various circumstances. This was, it seems, a semi-official pronouncement. People had been wondering--either aloud or at least in their hearts--where Jesus, who was not an officially sanctioned religious figure (whatever that meant in 1st century Palestine), was getting this power. He's either of God or against God, but he's clearly got some power. The scribes were the ones who would have made that sort of determination, and they come down on the side of Satan--that Jesus was of Satan and not of God.

Jesus responds to them in parables. Satan cannot cast out Satan. A house divided against itself will not stand. If you want to plunder a house, first you must bind the strong man. Jesus applies a rational response. It makes no sense that the work he does is by Satan. He, who was casting out demons, cannot be on the side of demons. Not only are the scribes incorrect in their spiritual assessment of where Jesus' power comes from, but they are also failing to make any sense.

Jesus offers a profound, rational pronouncement: Anyone who blasphemes the Holy Spirit will be guilty of an unforgivable sin. We seem to get sucked into that sentence. "Unforgivable sin" has a certain scary ring to it. But Jesus is just trying to make sense of the mess unfolding all around him. If you need the Holy Spirit to receive forgiveness and you deny the Holy Spirit's work, how can you ever have forgiveness? If God is at work in your life to show you God's presence yet you deny that God is at work, how can you ever recognize God?

When you sandwich the two pieces together, it softens the concept of the unforgivable sin yet heightens the requirement that we submit to God's will. Even Jesus' own family comes dangerously close to rejecting the work of the Holy Spirit. Clearly, Jesus is channeling an other-worldly power. He's working so feverishly that he isn't even stopping to eat. His family comes to get him because they've heard that he is out of his mind. But he's not out of his mind. He's full of the Holy Spirit. And those who are likewise willing to submit fully to God's work get to claim a share in that family. Those who find it easier to label the Spirit's work as madness find themselves not only out of the family but guilty of an unpardonable sin.

How do we recognize God at work? God shows us God's own presence. Is it always gentle, comforting, and easy? Not hardly. It's rarely serene and sweet. Think of all the ways God is at work around us. Think of all the people who have gifts of the Holy Spirit. Those of us who prefer buttoned-up religion may have a hard time recognizing God at work in strange ways, but that's how God works. If we want to be part of God's family, we must ask God to help us let go of our preconceived notions of how God works and accept that sometimes even those who think they know God the best may have it wrong.

I Need Help

I need help. Lots of help. All the time. Every day. And I bet you do, too.

I'm a high-functioning (i.e. over-functioning) detail-oriented (i.e. control-freak) person who prefers to get on with it (i.e. impatient) and not stop to ask for help (i.e. defiantly independent). And all of that means I need God in my life in powerful, hit-me-over-the-head, bring-me-to-my-knees ways every single day. What about you?

The collect for this Sunday is the prayer I need: "O God, from whom all good proceeds: Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen." There are three elements of this prayer that grab my attention this morning: one obvious, one familiar, and one knee-buckling.

First, the obvious: "O God, from whom all good proceeds." For some reason, the etymological link between "God" and "good" has been on my mind a lot lately. A few days ago, I haphazardly wished someone a "good day" and thought, "Yes, that's my job--to wish someone a good, which is to say a godly, day." God is good. God has revealed God's self to humanity as good. Even apart from revealed religion, philosophers of religion can identify the source of humanity's definition of God (or god) as good. Sometimes that good is above our perception, but, even when it challenges our understanding of what is good for us, we trust--we believe, we declare--that what God does is good and that what is good is of God.

Second, the familiar: "grant that...by your merciful guiding [we] may do [those things that are right]." It isn't uncommon to ask God to help us do the right thing. When facing a difficult decision, when struggling with temptation, when writing or delivering a sermon, when taking a test for which we have not fully prepared, we ask God to help us do or say the right thing. Implicit in our humanity is an experience of failure. Paul says it well: "For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do the what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (Rom. 7:15). We need help when it comes to doing the right thing. After a long day, in a season of stress, under a pall of grief, encompassed by physical pain, it is too easy to do the very thing we do not want to do--offer a curt word to one we love, pour that extra drink, cross that forbidden boundary. In those moments we need God's help, and we often ask for that help in our prayers.

Finally, the knee-buckling: "Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right." The hardest truth of all is that, before we can even ask for God's help in doing the right thing, we need God's help to see what the right thing is. Or, to put it another way, I can't even know what is right and good until God shows it to me. I am blinded by my own sin. That I need help in the first place--that I am a stubborn, prideful, conceited person--isn't clear until God reveals it to me. That's the powerful first step in a twelve-step program: "We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable." Step one is not a given. It is itself a revelation. And, as Christians, we recognize that God himself, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, has revealed to us our powerlessness over our addiction to our own distorted sense of self-worth. The truth that this collect conveys, therefore, is that God is good, that God has the power to help us, and that God has the power to help us see that we need help doing what is good.

I don't pray this prayer every morning, but I could. In other ways--in other words--I look for ways to submit myself to God and to ask for God's help. That help starts when I recognize that I can't even tell up from down. Like a swimmer bounced around by a powerful wave, I cannot even tell which way is up. But God can because God always is good. And a life spent pursuing God's presence each day helps me see that truth and the good thing that comes next.

Loving And Letting Go

Boniface

Acts 20:17-28; Luke 24:44-53

Taking that first step. Going to the first day of school. Spending the night at a friend's house. Getting behind the wheel of a car. Going out on a date. Heading off to college. Falling in love. Walking down the aisle. Starting a new job. Having a child.

The cycle of life is full of moments of love and letting go that repeat themselves over and over. We love our child with every ounce of life and love that we possess. And then we say goodbye and say it again and again. Sometimes in little ways, and sometimes in ways that are huge and terrifying. And through it all, the love never stops, even when we have pulled away completely.

Being excluded from a friend group. Forgetting your homework. Taking a final exam. Writing a college essay. Undergoing surgery. Struggling with addiction. Losing a job. Losing a parent. Losing a child.

Life is full of challenges that we cannot fix on someone else's behalf. We can try, but trying is usually a mistake. Instead, we can journey with someone, loving them deeply and fervently but, at the same time, letting them go, letting them hurt, letting them heal. The instinct is to rush in a protect the one we love, solve her problems, dump our wisdom and our effort and our love onto the situation. That makes us feel better. We convince ourselves that love makes it our duty to save the one we love. But that only hurts things. Sometimes love means letting go when letting go is hardest.

Today, as we commemorate the life and Christian witness of Boniface, Archbishop of Mainz, missionary to Germany, and martyr, we hear two New Testament stories of loving and letting go. First, Jesus. This is his final farewell--at least until he is reunited with his followers in God's kingdom. He reminds the eleven and their companions how his life and death and resurrection were the fulfillment of God's plan for him and for the world. Then he leads them out of the city, taking them as far as Bethany, and, while he was lifting up his hands to bless them, he was taken out of their sight. 

But why did he go? Why did Jesus need to go? Imagine how fruitful his ministry could have been if he had hung around, performing transformational feats of power, reversing the course of human history, overthrowing the oppressors, bringing the full status of love and acceptance to the ends of the earth. But, of course, that could not be. That work was Jesus', but it wasn't his to do. It belonged to his disciples. The transformation of the world cannot succeed if it takes place in and through only one person. As long as Jesus was here, the disciples would only be followers and not the apostles who are sent out to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth. In John 16:7, Jesus tells his disciples that they should rejoice because he is going to be taken from them. Only then, he explains, can the Holy Spirit come. In a very real sense, the sending of the Holy Spirit is an expression of a love that requires a letting go.

Then, Paul. He calls together the elders of Ephesus because he knows that he will soon be taken from them. "You yourselves know how I lived among you...serving the Lord with all humility and with tears." Paul reflects on his life and ministry and counts them of zero value except that he, with God's help, might be faithful the Lord in completing the work that God had given him to do. Having given up almost completely the noble identity of a Roman citizen, Paul prefers chains worn for Christ's sake and for the sake of those he serves than the freedom he could find on his own. His love for the Ephesians is real and clear, but now it is time for him to step back: "And now I know that none of you, among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom, will ever see my face again. Therefore I declare to you this day that I am not responsible for the blood of any of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God." It seems almost harsh that someone who loves them that fully would step back so dramatically. "I am not responsible for the blood of any of you," he says. You're on your own. And you have to be. Even though I am willing to die for you, I cannot hold your hand anymore.

God's great love for us is one big and beautiful letting go. As any parent on the first day of school or spouse waiting outside the surgery suite or child sitting in the first pew at a parent's funeral can attest, letting go does not mean an end to love. The love is as strong, as present, as complete as it has ever been, but it is a love that values and honors the other so fully as to let that one go. It is trust. It is faith. God shows us this love every day, and God invites us to participate in it. How might we be loved so fully by God that we find the freedom to love others in the same way--to love them and let them go?

Identity Politics

In the Track 1 Old Testament reading for this Sunday (1 Samuel 8:4-20; 11:14-15), the people of Israel demand a king. Samuel is grieved by this. As we heard yesterday, the Lord has been with him, not letting any of his words fall to the ground. As a prophet and religious figure, he had, more or less, been holding the tribes of Israel together in a loose confederation of questionable effectiveness. He had appointed his sons to succeed him, but, like Eli's sons before him, they had proven unworthy. The people wanted a unified, central ruler. They were tired of existing as a scattering of clans. It's hard to convince leaders from Ephraim and Judah to raise an army to repel an invader in the territory that belongs to Dan. The people wanted a king. Toward the end of the lesson, we see that they wanted a king because they wanted to "be like other nations" in having a king to rule them and go out before them in battle.

Samuel knows better, but we see that his motives are mixed. The Lord says to him, "Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them." Those seem like words of consolation, words God has given Samuel to comfort his bruised ego. "It's not you; it's me," God seems to say. In God's classic way, God tells Samuel to inform the people what they're getting into and then let them make their own decision, accepting whatever consequences come with it. So Samuel puts it all on the line:

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots...and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest...He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work...And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.

In other words, no matter whom you appoint, that king is going to start acting like a king, and he's going to want you to pay taxes so that he can live like a king. And, when you're angry about it, God isn't going to listen to you. You will have made your bed, and it will be your time to lie in it. But the people don't care. They want a king.

Tomorrow is primary election day in Alabama. My phone rings several times every evening with pollsters who don't really want my opinion but instead ask questions like, "Did you know that Candidate X was fired from his law firm in 1992 because of financial irregularities?" and "Now that you know that, does that make you less likely or more likely to vote for him?" Like everyone else, Alabamians want leaders who look and sound and act like they think that they themselves do. The truth is that people are no good. And another truth, of which Samuel reminds us, is that power brings out the no-good in people. Just look at Alabama's track record for Governor.

Politically speaking, Israel needed a centralized government with a central leader. Read the book of Judges and see that the struggle without a king is real. The problem wasn't Israel's decision to have a king. The problem was thinking that a king would solve all of their problems. In the religious framework of 1 Samuel, we see that a king cannot be a substitute for God. The people still need to honor the One who truly holds them together. Perhaps there's a lesson here for us as we approach primary election day. Instead of electing people to solve all of our problems, maybe we should remember what it means to belong together as one people and remember that it's our job to participate in that community. There is no "right person" to put into office because all people are no good. Sure, some are less no-good than others, but all people are people. Because of that, it takes more than one or two or twenty to hold us together. Yes, go to the polls and vote for the best people for each office, but don't stop there. The work isn't done. It's our work even after the election is over.

When Religion and Love Collide

June 3, 2018 – The 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 4B

1 Samuel 3:1-20; 2 Corinthians 4:5-12; Mark 2:23-3:6

© 2018 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here.

During the summer after my first year of seminary, I stayed in Cambridge to do a unit of CPE, clinical pastoral education, which involved ten weeks of full-time hospital chaplaincy work along with structured reflective practice that was supposed to teach me how to be a better pastor. As some of you on whom I have called in the hospital might attest, my supervisor was far more interested in having a free extra chaplain to work in his hospital than leading me through the reflective practice that was supposed to improve my bedside manner. He didn’t really have time to teach me and, instead, preferred for me to learn by serving as if I were a full member of his staff.

As a member of that staff, part of my job was to take a turn leading Sunday-morning worship in the hospital chapel. Every Sunday morning, there was some form of Protestant worship that included Communion. Two of the other chaplains were Anglicans, but Derek, my supervisor, was some brand of non-conformist—Baptist or Presbyterian, I think. When it was my turn to lead the service, he presumed I would do it by myself, but, when I said to him, “I can’t do the Communion part,” he responded by asking, “Why not?” “Because…I can’t…I’m not allowed…I’m not ordained…yet.” He looked at me and smiled, “What difference does that make? All you have to do is say the words. You think a bishop putting hands on your head gives you some sort of magic power that I don’t have?”

He had a good point. If he was going to come up to the hospital on Sunday morning just to say the Communion part and he hadn’t been ordained by a bishop in apostolic succession, what difference would it make to the congregation if I said those words? Even the Anglicans in the congregation wouldn’t be able theologically to distinguish between a Baptist minister and an Anglican seminarian reading the words of institution and asking God to bless the bread and the grape juice. Would they? He had a good point, but I had a good point, too. If I did it, my bishop might kill me or at least throw me out of the ordination process. Rules are rules, and some are meant to be broken, but some of them aren’t. Or are they?

Today’s gospel lesson is all about religious rules that seem made to be broken. In the first encounter, when Jesus and his disciples were walking through a field on the sabbath, the hungry disciples plucked heads of grain and ate them. Or, if it’s hard to imagine plucking and eating stalks of winter wheat, imagine walking down an alley on a hot summer afternoon and seeing a blackberry bush at the base of a neighbor’s fence. When it came to plucking and eating, the disciples were in the clear. Deuteronomy 23 says that, as long as they didn’t use a sickle, they could take some of their neighbor’s grain if they were hungry, but the one thing that they couldn’t do was to take it on the sabbath: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.” Every seventh day, therefore, all Jewish people, including Jesus and his disciples, were to refrain from any and all work, including plucking heads of grain. The Pharisees who saw them do it had a good point. God’s law forbade it, yet their rabbi was allowing his disciples openly to violate that law.

In the first episode, Jesus was interrogated about something he had allowed his disciples to do, but, in the second, his own actions took center stage. In a synagogue was a man with a withered hand. Since it was the sabbath, the religious authorities watched to see whether Jesus would break the rules and heal the man. If his life had been in danger, the law was clear: Jesus would have been duty-bound to save the man. But, in this case, the man had a shriveled-up hand, and it gave Jesus the perfect opportunity to push the boundaries. Taking the offensive, Jesus asked the witnesses whether, in their opinion, it was “lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” Their silence spoke volumes—not only about their hardness of heart but about the confusing issue that Jesus had raised. Was it lawful? Could a healing on the sabbath be permitted? Actually, the letter of the law suggests that it wasn’t—not if the man’s life wasn’t in jeopardy. This miracle could have waited until sunset, when the sabbath was over. But Jesus wasn’t interested in waiting, nor was he interested in letting conventional wisdom rule the day. “Stretch out your hand,” Jesus said to the man. By stretching it out, the hand was restored, and immediately the religious leaders went out and conspired with their political counterparts to find a way to destroy Jesus.

What is this gospel lesson really about? The fact that the miraculous healing is portrayed almost as an afterthought suggests that, in Mark’s mind, it was more about Jesus breaking the sabbath than working a miracle. But why does that matter to us? I haven’t seriously considered keeping the sabbath since I was ten years old and trying to convince my father that it was against God’s law for me to cut the grass on a Saturday. (That didn’t work, by the way.) As Christians, we’ve long-since given up on trying to keep the sabbath. Most of us don’t even realize that the sabbath isn’t Sunday, the first day of the week, the day we set aside to commemorate our Lord’s resurrection, but Saturday, a day we reserve for ball practice, tailgating, and yard work. And why don’t we care about the fourth commandment? Partly, it’s because we’re willing to take Jesus at his word. Two thousand years later, even if we never went to Sunday school, we know who the good guy in the story is, and we know who they bad guys are. If Jesus said, “the sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath,” that’s good enough for us. But what we may not realize is that it wasn’t good enough for the people who heard him say it.

This was hugely controversial. I’ve spent all week trying to come up with a good analogy in twenty-first-century religious observance, and I still can’t think of one. For a faithful Jew in Jesus’ day, sabbath observance was fundamental. It was one of the most important ways for a Jewish person to be faithful to God. When the unholy Roman Empire tried to force Jews to become secular members of the political state, sabbath observance, along with circumcision and dietary restrictions, was one of the tried and true ways of remaining distinct. A few generations earlier, when the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV began persecuting the Jews, the rabbis taught that, on the sabbath, it was better to be slaughtered alongside one’s family than to fight back. By the time Jesus was born, the rules had relaxed a little bit, but, when he tossed aside the sabbath requirements as if they didn’t even matter as much as his disciples’ growling stomachs, he was, in effect, spitting on the graves of those martyrs. Imagine if Jesus showed up and started teaching that a fundamental religious principle that our grandparents had been willing to die for no longer mattered. How well do you think that would go down? For twenty-first-century Christians, I think this passage has to do with a lot more than keeping the seventh day of the week holy.

This is a hard story for us to wrap our minds and hearts around because of how huge it really is. Jesus teaches us that even the rules we hold most dear must be sacrificed if they stand in the way of an individual’s wholeness with God. Think about that. On the surface, it doesn’t sound too hard…as long as we are the ones who get to decide when and where and how those rules get broken. But what if it’s some radical prophet or crazy preacher or dodgy liberal who tells us what principle, what law, what tradition must be put behind the latest social concern? I think the reason that I have had so much difficulty finding a contemporary analogue is that I cannot even imagine being asked to let go of something as important as sabbath observance was in Jesus’ day.

But, as threatening as that teaching was, it reflects a transcendent truth that all of us can wholeheartedly embrace. No rule, no rubric, no law, no custom, even if it seems to come from God, can be allowed to restrict access to God’s love. Because God is love, that makes sense. At its best, sabbath observance is about reminding God’s people that they belong to their loving Creator who remains active in their lives. Yet, like any religious law, when human beings take control, they twist it into an obstacle to the very thing that it was designed to convey. What other God-given principles have we perverted in the name of religion? Whatever it is, if it is standing in the way of healing and wholeness, if it narrows someone’s access to God’s love, no matter how much we revere it, it must be swept away. God’s love and salvation cannot be governed by human precepts; human precepts must always be subject to God’s love. If we can’t find a rule or regulation that should be discarded, maybe it’s because we’ve got it all figured out. Then again, maybe not.