Stripped Away

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
10.23.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons:  Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 and Matthew 22:34-46

How can we know what is important?

It can be difficult to tell, particularly with all the competing demands and priorities in our society.  But there are little thought exercises we can do that tell us how close we are to getting things right, meaning right in a God sort of way.  One of my favorites is to wondering what my little suburb of Annandale would look like if it were stripped. 

Not stripped of clothing, mind you. First, that would be very unpastorly of me, and I'm afraid my own contribution to that collective event would be rather unsettling.  But rather, what it would look like if the two great powers that define and "clothe" our culture simply weren't there.

I talked a little bit about those powers last week, but in the event things are a little blurry right now, they are mammon and the sword. The sword is coercive power, the force wielded by the state to undergird the legal frameworks of our society. Mammon is symbolic power. It drives the market, and is itself dependent on the power of the sword to establish and enforce the value of currency.

So let’s take a little journey into the Twilight Zone for a moment.  Your bedside radio chirps to life at 6:45 am one bright and crisp fall morning, and you hear WTOP breathlessly announce that there is no longer any law enforcement. In fact, there are no longer any laws. No traffic cops. No courts. No law books.  Nothing. Not only that, all currency is no longer valid. Our plastic is just plastic with random data encoded into a magnetic strip. Our cash is just paper with some, like, serious trippy pictures on it, dude.  It all simply ceased to be meaningful or accepted.

Far fetched? Sure. A bit silly? Undoubtedly. But still interesting.

What would your community look like on the day of that announcement? The answer to that question, I think, is a measure of just how healthy a society is. If the first word that pops into your head is "looting," followed by the word "pillage" and the phrase "everything on fire," then perhaps the place you are is not spiritually healthy. If you immediately think of staging a raid on the nearest Apple Store, then perhaps the you that you are is not healthy.

If, on the other hand, a society could just dispense with those things without batting an eye, then I think it would be in a rather different moral position. Would we still do what we do to fill our days? Would our relationships within our communities remain the same? Would our patterns of consumption be changed? For most social groups, the answer is yes. The changes would be huge and shattering. But if we’re honest about it, the closer we get to modeling the Way that Jesus taught, the less impact this thought exercise would have.

The fundamental essence of that Way is laid out for us in the passage from Matthew this morning.   Matthew’s Gospel continues the story of Jesus being challenged and tested by the religious and cultural authorities.  Last week, the question was about taxes and Caesar.  This week finds the Pharisees again coming to Jesus with a challenge, this one about the nature of the law.

He’s approached by a lawyer, although it’s important to note that this “lawyer” isn’t the kind of lawyer we’re used to.  This isn’t some guy woodenly reading lines into a camera on late night TV about how you might be eligible for compensation if you’ve gotten brain-freeze after consuming a Slurpee due to 7-11‘s straw-design negligence.   This isn’t that $750 an hour litigator from Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld, the one you don’t dare talk to at parties because even saying hello to her will cost you forty-five bucks.  This is a theologian, a Bible scholar, a student of the sacred law of Torah.

That lawyer asks him a question, one that required a knowledge of the sacred law.  The question is simple:  which law is the most important.  This was a non-trivial question, as the law of Torah was not simple.  At the time of Jesus, the rabbis had identified 613 different laws which governed the life of an observant Jew.  These laws were generally assumed to all be of equivalent importance, each an essential piece of the covenant, with not one out of place or irrelevant or less important.  It was a tricky one.  Say none, and you aren’t showing that you know the law.  Choose one, and you set yourself up for an argument that could last for generations.

But Jesus again responded elegantly, providing his erudite and well trained interrogator with a teaching that is at the core of both ancient and modern Judaism.  He first quotes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, a passage from Torah that lays out the essential duty of everyone who stands in covenant relationship with God.   That text, known as the Shema, reads:  “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

This little chunklet of Torah lays out the basic responsibility of everyone who stands in relationship with God to prioritize that relationship, to allow it to be the thing which defines the character and purpose of your life.

The second response comes from elsewhere in Torah, from the Book of Leviticus, chapter six, in a section that lays out the fundamental ethical responsibilities of every human being towards every other human being.  We heard an excerpt from that section read earlier, but the baseline teaching is the one Jesus drew out from Leviticus 19:18.  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In this tight and well structured response, Jesus gets down to the essence of covenant.  If you ditch everything but these things, if you whittle down and strip away everything but the most vital and central elements of what it means to live as a faithful and ethical human being, you end up with this.  This is what counts.  This is where the rubber meets the spiritual road, where it is less about law and more about a way of living.

These two related teachings actually give us a pretty good metric for assessing how we’re doing, both as a culture and as individuals.

As a culture, the Great Commandment asks:  are we as a people looking past our own interests, and to our broader created purpose?  Are we as a community treating every member in a way that expresses our profound care for them?   If we are, or we’re at least trying, then things are probably going to be turning out OK.  If we’re not, if we’re distracted by process and politicking and pursuing power over one another...well...things will probably look a whole bunch like they look now.

As individuals, the Great Commandment challenges:  are we looking past our own biases and the filter of both macroculture and microculture, and instead focusing on the gracious and transcendent purpose towards which our Maker is calling us?  Are we caring for the last and the least and the lost among us, or is our day to day life so focused on our own needs that our neighbor might as well not exist at all?

This essence of our connection to God and to each other is a touchstone, a foundation, the clear and basic measure of the value of our every corporate and individual action.

If we’re followers of the Nazarene, we know what is important.  He can’t have made it any clearer.  Hear it, and live it.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.