Keeping the Law

      My sister in law was once married to a Jewish man who kept the law as perfectly as anyone I have ever known.  I once sat with him in his kitchen and he explained to me the way that their plates and glasses were all arranged in separate cupboards so that they could adhere to the laws regulating milk and meat dishes, how they tried as hard as they could to do what the law required;  how it was a solemn duty that they had and how it helped their relationship with God.

While he was explaining all of this to me, there was a knock at the door and he left me to answer it.  I sat in the kitchen waiting for him to return and contemplated all of the things that he had said to me.  I thought about how humble he was and how devout he was in his faith.  He had really impressed me with what he had told me.

After a long time, I got worried about him.  I left the kitchen to see what was keeping him.  I found him on the front porch being confronted by a loud evangelical Christian who was telling him that being Jewish was certainly not an option as far as God was concerned.  When he saw me, he curtly asked me, “Well, are you also Jewish?”  I said  “yes, essentially”, which prompted a round of condemnation for me also.  With my seminary education, I began asking him about the New Testament, about what Jesus said about keeping the law rather than about being examples of the law.  I cited the passage from Mark where the Pharisees were confronted by Jesus about keeping the letter of the law but losing its real meaning.

We concluded that conversation with the missionary leaving the porch and rejoining his compatriots on the sidewalk.  I always have kept in my mind the probability that they put a chalk mark on the sidewalk to keep others of their team from confronting us.

Through it all, my brother in law was the picture of propriety.  He accepted that awful man on his porch with great hospitality and listened to what he had to say intently.  He wouldn’t have violated his welcome of that man for any reason whatsoever.   I think that he was even taken aback a bit by my arguing with him.

Jesus was always clear about what the law meant.  His disciples were chastised for gathering wheat on the Sabbath.  In Mark’s gospel, they are charged with not washing their hands before they ate.  All of these things were required by the law, which the religious establishment kept diligently.  What Jesus had a problem with was that the keeping of the law wasn’t the doing of the law.  He quotes Isaiah to them:

                                              This people honors me with their lips,
                                          but their hearts are far from me; in vain 
                                          do they worship me, teaching human
                                         precepts as doctrines.

He tells them:  You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.

And there you have it.  James is eloquent on this subject when he says simply: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. 

That for me has always been the essence of religion.  My brother in law certainly practiced it.  I hope that I do also.

The Meaning of Family

      We had a awful fright at our house a week ago.  Rosie woke me at 3:00 AM with terrible chest pains.  She was gasping for breath and was afraid that she was having a heart attack.  I gave her an aspirin and called 911.  A cop came a few minutes later, followed by an ambulance that transported her to Allegheny General Hospital.  I followed along, got her registered and we waited until the doctors did a diagnosis and she was admitted to the hospital so that they could do tests.  After all of the medical people did their work, we discovered that it wasn’t a heart attack at all, but a gastro-intestinal problem that caused the terrible pain.  We thought ourselves very fortunate.

A day or so after this happened, our kids were visiting and my oldest asked me why I didn’t call her at 3 AM to tell her what had happened.  She told me that she wants to take care of both of us when we need her and we need to share times like this.  All of our daughters agreed that this was so.  I apologized to them for not calling, but they really hit the nail on the head with their criticism.   Rosie and I are aging.  That isn’t something that we always want to acknowledge, but it is certainly true.  I also know that as a family, we need to include everyone in our experiences, good and bad.  They really want to be a part of our lives.  I am not doing them or us any favor by neglecting to tell them what is going on.  They need very much to share our experiences.   Our kids taught us something by their comments.  I won’t neglect to tell them ever again, even at three in the morning when something is going on.  They need to know.

So what does this thing “family” mean and how far does it extend?  You and I, gathered here before the altar ready to receive the body and blood of our Lord are all family.  We need each other in all that goes on in our lives.  We have an obligation to share our experiences with each other so that we can both help others and be helped ourselves.  Like Rosie and I with our daughters, sometimes we neglect to do this.  That doesn’t mean that it isn’t necessary.  One of the things that binds us together most tightly is the common sharing of experience.  Our prayer lists are more than opportunities for gossip, they are the asking of our compassion and our prayer to our God for what we need as individuals in this congregation.  In any moment in our lives, we are more than individuals, we are part of a family, part of a common tribe, part of a congregation that worships our God and cares for each other.  That is what was being built by the followers of Jesus in creating the church.

In those earliest days, immediately after the resurrection, the apostles were befuddled.  When Jesus came and appeared to them in the upper room when they thought that they were the next ones on the list to be arrested and killed, they didn’t know what to make of this appearance by their leader.  In John’s Gospel, in the sixth chapter, Jesus has a long dissertation on what he calls his body and blood.  He tells his followers than unless you eat of my body and drink of my blood you have no life in you.  When he says this, the gospel records that a number of his disciples were disgusted by this and stopped going about with him.  He asked the twelve if they wanted to desert him also, but they said: Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."

So here are Jesus’ closest disciples, his twelve, who have just heard him talk about requiring them to eat  his flesh and drink his blood, who don’t quite understand what he is talking about, but they are stopped from deserting him because they don’t know where else they could go.  He has the words of eternal life.  That is the bottom line for them.   The crucifixion and the resurrection have not yet happened.  When all of this comes about, Jesus meaning for them becomes much clearer.  It has persisted through the ages and shortly, we will participate in this by receiving the body and blood of Jesus here at this altar in recognition not only of our faith, but of our commitment to each other as the family of God in this place.  This sacrament binds us together as Christians who love each other and promise to share our lives together in common.  That is what is means to be a church and what it means to be a part of a congregation.

One year at Christ Church, I had twenty-seven funerals.  Most of them were pillars of the church, people whom we couldn’t afford to lose, but lose them we did.  I grieved throughout that year for each of them and for the loss that these deaths meant to our common life.  I preached at each funeral, but I never cried.  After one of these services, late in the year, I was leaving the church and one of the altar guild members met me on the stairs.  She put her arm on my shoulder and said, “And how are you doing?”  I broke into tears at that moment and cried for all of those beautiful people whom we had lost.  That wonderful altar guild woman was expressing to me the whole concept of family, how we share our joy and our grief with each other as members of the Body of Christ.  I have never forgotten that moment.  It is a constant reminder to me of the need that we all have for each other all of the time.  In most of the moments of my life, I am like those apostles of Jesus.  I don’t understand much of it either, but I know my need for other people.  We are family.  We are Christians.  We are together.  Thank God for all of that.

The Bread from Heaven

       The wisdom of Solomon is legendary.  It’s hard to forget the story of the two women who came to him each wanting him to give each of them a disputed child.  It is a wonderful testimony to his wisdom.  He told them that he would cut the child in two and give each of them half of it.  This aroused the true mother to great grief and she relinquished her claim to the child.  Solomon then gave her the child because of her obvious love.   In First Kings, we get the story of the conversation that Solomon had with God about what he needed.  He didn’t ask for great riches, or anything for himself .  He asked for wisdom and God gave it to him.

      Wisdom is a remarkable gift.  Paul asks the Ephesians to live not as unwise people, but as wise, because the days are evil; so he tells them not to be foolish, but to understand what the will of the Lord is. It is certainly also necessary for us, like the Ephesians to live as wise people, because these also are evil days.  Read the newspaper or listen to television and you certainly get the sense that there is little cooperation among the politicians to remedy the things that are so desperately wrong in this society.  The rich will certainly get richer and the poor poorer.  That is almost a given.  Wisdom is of the greatest necessity to get us through these times.

Paying attention to the outcast, the poor, the neglected, the unemployed, the homeless is what you and I are called to do by our Lord Jesus.  Understanding the will of the Lord is what we are called to use our wisdom to determine.  The problem is, that goes against the grain of the desires of those who regulate our commerce and determine the rules of the culture in which we live.  Making our way through that maze requires the utmost wisdom.  It isn’t easy.  Being an advocate for the impoverished calls down the wrath of wealth on us.  When we talk about tax loopholes or anything that seems to call for the regulation of commerce, we can get into powerful trouble.  That is why Martin Luther King was chased all of his life by people of power.  I don’t really want to challenge any of them.  They can hurt me.

Jesus was speaking to power when he talked to what John’s Gospel calls “the Jews” about himself being the bread from God.  He said to them:   This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.   The powerful people disputed about this saying, “how can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  But Jesus told them that his flesh is the bread that comes down from heaven and that whoever eats of it will live forever.

We continue to talk about that to this day.  Every time that we celebrate the Eucharist, we create again that moment in Jesus’ life.  I don’t think for me that there is a more powerful moment in our liturgy than when I hold the bread of the Eucharist before you and say, “The body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven”.  If that is true, it binds us all together as one and also to the commandments that our Lord gave to us:  to love God and to love one another absolutely.  That sets the tone for how it is that we treat the poor and the outcast in our community and it sets the bounds for how it is that we use the wealth that we have been given by our God for the good of all of us.  Remembering that we are not the author of goodness is an important step to keep us in tune with the needs of those around us.  What our God has given to us, we need to use for the comfort of everyone.  As we do that, we increase the welfare of all. 

Killing and Our Inaction

     We had another mass killing this week, this time at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin with a number of people killed and more wounded.  I wonder when we are going to do something to rein in the assault weapons that are so easily obtained by anyone who has a serious hatred and a desire to kill.  There is so much of it anymore.  People with a screw loose and a bigot’s heart roam free in this country and aim their hatred where they will.  Sometimes it is a Congresswoman speaking to her constituents, sometimes it is people in a crowded movie theater, and this time it is in a worship space for people whose worship is perhaps different from the norm in this society, but perfectly rational and certainly protected by the First Amendment of our Constitution.

How do we deal with the grief that comes from this, with the compassion to help the victims get on with their lives?  It doesn’t really help that the gunman perished along with his victims in the slaughter.  That only makes the picture more murky and difficult.  We would like to know what was motivating this man to do this terrible thing, but that will be forever out of our reach.

  Is this simply going to be another event that grabs our attention for a little while and then fades into the background as other things come along, or will it spur us to take some action not only for the victims of this slaughter, but for this country that has made guns a priority over rationality and justice.   Certainly it is not too much to ask our congress to put aside their allegiance to the National Rifle Association and pass some laws that make it possible to get rid of assault weapons, which are of no use whatsoever in hunting, but only have the use to which they have been put in these terrible encounters with the people who have been killed.  What on earth is the matter with us?

The story in Second Samuel about the death of Absalom and David’s grief over his death is a profound story.  David had told his commander Joab and his staff to “deal gently” with Absalom, but when Joab heard that Absalom had been found stuck in an oak tree, he not only struck him with a javelin, but his followers also struck him and he was killed.

When David heard of Absalom’s death, he was filled with deep grief, wept and cried:  O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!

The evil of Joab in defying David’s orders and killing Absalom is evident.  David’s grief is also more than understandable.  Which of us wouldn’t be stricken with grief under similar circumstances.

The killing of the Sikhs is a similar situation.  There are absolute laws against this, but evil people with manifest hatred ignore the laws and like Joab, march to their own drum.  Perhaps these terrible killings will inspire some kind of work to ease the grief of communities that face such evil and make all of our hearts respond to the needs not only of the victims, but of all of our people.  I know that God weeps with us over these tragedies and over our inability to cope with them.