Reformed and Always Being Reformed
About a year ago, a book was published by A. J. Jacobs called A Year of Living Biblically. It is his own story about his attempt to follow all the biblical guidelines for a righteous life for one year in the city of Manhattan. After attempting to live biblically for a year, Mr. Jacobs concluded that it was fairly simple to follow some of the rules for living biblically… for example, do not wear clothes of mixed fibers, let your garments be always white, do not shave your beard, do not marry your wife’s sister, and so on… but he also concluded that it was basically impossible to follow all of the more than 600 rules for daily living that are given in the Old Testament. Some of the laws that tripped him up on a regular basis included do not covet, do not lie, do not gossip, do not invoke the name of another god… which is a difficult to do when something as simple as the name of a day of the week… Thursday… is derived from the name of the Norse god of thunder, Thor… and do not trim the corners of your beard… that same beard that you are growing because you are not allowed to shave.
Where did these six hundred and thirteen (613)… according to one source… rules come from? Where are my Older Youth? It all began when the children of Israel were wandering through the wilderness and they came to Mount Sinai where God delivered the Ten Commandments to them through Moses… which is recorded in the book of Exodus (or Deuteronomy). And those ten commandments were expanded when God spelled out exactly how the children of Israel were to live and to worship God in the book of Leviticus. When confronted by the Pharisees… in this case, a lawyer… in our story today, Jesus draws from those two sources to answer the lawyer’s question. From the book of Deuteronomy (6:5), Jesus quotes “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” And from the book of Leviticus (19:18), Jesus quotes, “…you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus does not propose anything new… instead, he relies upon the Book of the Law itself… the Torah… to come up with an answer for this one who is trying to trap him. And he can say nothing in response, for what Jesus has said is true… and it comes straight from Hebrew scripture.
But wait a minute! Jesus is quoting the law to the Pharisees… and yet, he is one who is known for breaking the law whenever it apparently suits him to do so. Hasn’t he healed people on the Sabbath? Don’t his followers pick grain on the Sabbath? Doesn’t he tell his disciples to let the dead bury their own dead? But, in his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17) How do we make sense of this contradiction?
What hangs in the balance here is law… and love. When Jesus quoted the two commandments to the lawyer, the two that he selected both use the word “love” as the verb. He then told the lawyer… and all the Pharisees who were listening… that all of the law hung upon these two commandments. Why? To illustrate that all of the law is rooted and grounded in one thing: love. The six hundred and thirteen rules laid out for righteous living in the Old Testament were simply an explanation of how we, as human beings, were to express our love for God and for our fellow human beings… those creatures whom God loves. The law was never meant to be a yardstick by which we should judge our neighbor… nor was it supposed to be a hefty tome filled with legalese that we could use to clobber each other… or document various and sundry wrongs. It was meant to be the guideline by which we could express… in the simplest and purest form… our love for our God and our love for our neighbor.
The Pharisees in this story exemplify the corruption of religious law in society that Jesus came to reform. Somehow, in all the biblical interpretation of God’s word, the practice of religion had turned from a simple expression of love of God to an adherence to the rule of law as spelled out by the religious leaders of the time. By the time Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, the law of the Jews had ceased to be a law of love… and had become a millstone around the necks of the Hebrew people. Just like A.J. Jacobs in Manhattan, they too could not follow all of the laws… even if they tried. And the Pharisees were using the law… not to express love, but to control and dominate. They were doing the right things… but for the wrong reasons.
Did Jesus come to do away with those laws and establish a new religion among the Jews? No, he didn’t. He did not come to abolish the law. All he wanted to do was to draw attention to God’s original intent for the children of Israel when the law was given. Jesus was a Jew. He did not want to abandon the Jewish religion. He just wanted to renew it… restore it… bring it back to its true purpose… and put people, once again, in a right relationship with their Creator… a relationship built on love. But the religious leaders of that time would not listen… the status quo was not willing change… and, within one generation, a new religion was born.
Now, fast-forward about 1500 years and we find Martin Luther nailing his “95 Theses” to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg… in an act that is now seen as the one that sparked the Protestant Reformation. But in taking this action, did Martin Luther truly intend to create a new division within the Christian faith? Not at all. Martin Luther was a Roman Catholic priest. He loved the church. He loved it too much to let it continue to move in a direction that he believed took it away from its roots… its genesis in a simple love of God. His goal was not to abandon the Roman Catholic Church, but to call it to a more genuine practice of faith. His action of nailing the theses to the door of the church was the equivalent of posting his ideas on a public bulletin board to start a discussion. You see, the God that was presented in the Papal edicts and church council decisions of the day was not the God that Luther had come to know through scripture… in particular, the book of Romans. He wanted everyone to know that God… a God of love and mercy… a God of grace. Instead, the Roman Catholic Church had created a God that could be bought and sold… with money… with armies… with a crown… a God defined by hundreds of pieces of paper written by legal experts in Vatican City… a God defined by a new brand of Pharisees. They, too, had gotten bogged down in rules… in hierarchy… in details that were unimportant to God. They had lost sight of the commandment to love… to love God… to love neighbor. They had lost their simple faith. But the religious leaders of that time would not listen… the status quo was not willing change… and, within one generation, the Protestant church was born.
Now, fast-forward another 500 years or so and we come to our own day and time… a time in which the Christian church itself is torn apart by its own divisions. In this past year, the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth has taken steps to dissociate itself from the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Ordinary people are being asked to take sides… to choose which path is more righteous… a more righteous interpretation of God’s word. Whole churches… entire congregations within the Episcopal Church… have to decide whether they are “in” or “out.” And those in the hinterlands… members of small churches in small communities… are confused… angry… frustrated… and embittered by the process. Sound familiar?
We, in the Presbyterian Church (USA) have our own rules. They are faithfully laid out for us in our Constitution… in our Book of Order and our Confessions. Each time the General Assembly meets, we add more rules to our Book of Order. I am not sure how many rules in our Book of Order now, but would I guess that it is a large number. When my father graduated from McCormick Seminary in 1945, the Presbyterian Book of Order about the size of a pencil. It is now the size of a broom handle… but does that make it better? The content of this book is the source of conflict in our church. We’re fighting over words. Yes, we are fighting over words in a book… and not God’s book… our own book! We’re fighting over words in this book… words that I guarantee you have been thoroughly vetted by modern day legal experts in ecclesiastical circles. Is it making us better Christians? No. I would argue that it is not. The more we attempt to accurately define by rule and doctrine what we believe God wants us to be and do... the bigger our book gets... and the more people walk out of our doors, never to return, because they find that… even with the best of intentions… they cannot follow all the rules in our book.
Do not misunderstand me or misquote me: I am not advocating… nor will I ever advocate… that this congregation leave this denomination. I am an officer of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and I have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of this church… in all its forms: Holy Scripture, the Book of Order, and the Confessions of the church. I love this church… I love this denomination… and it tears me apart to see what is happening to it. While we fight over words in a book, hundreds of people are leaving the denomination to escape the conflict. They are going to other churches… hoping to find the love and grace of God that they learned about in scripture. Do you remember the Pogo cartoon character? Probably his most quoted line, from a strip first printed in 1971, is “we have met the enemy and he is us.” We are our own worst enemy.
You see, God doesn’t want to hear the words in this book. Frankly, I don’t believe that God cares about the words… or all the rules… in this book. There are only two commandments that God really cares about: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” and “…you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Period. Nothing else. No explanations. No justification. No rules. No laws. No doctrine. Just two commandments… and actions that demonstrate a love of God and a love of neighbor.
Today, as I stand here, there are two things I am convinced will happen: God will reform the church… and God won’t do it through us. You see, we love our own book too much. Our denomination is not growing… and, as long as we continue to fight over the rules in this book, it won’t grow. But that does not mean that the Christian church is not growing. It is growing… it’s just not growing here… within our own denomination. How did we lose our roots in a simple faith and a genuine love of God? Where did we go wrong?
There was a time when the only requirement to become a Christian was the simple confession that “Jesus is Lord.” Somehow, from that, we have arrived at this… and this… and this. Are we better for it? If not, then some of these things need to go away… or become much smaller than they are. And we can begin with this book. We can make this book smaller… and practice a simple faith… a love of God that manifests itself in two commandments that are thousands of years old: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” and “…you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”” One of the mottos of the Protestant Reformation was “reformata, semper reformanda”… “reformed and always being reformed.” The third reformation has already begun. You can see signs of it everywhere. We can choose to be a part of it… or we can hold on to our book of rules until we become as obsolete as the Pharisees. It’s our choice. Amen.
Matthew 22:34-40