Laying Down the Law

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.09.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 5:13-20

Rules change.

We’d like them not to, because they can be comforting and part of the pattern of our lives, but they do nonetheless.  Like, say, the rules for how we watch our shows.  It used to be, back in the paleolithic entertainment era, that if we wanted to be entertained, we’d do so at a particular time and in a particular place.

I can remember how I used to watch shows, way back in the 1980s.  I’d climb onto my brontosaurus, and go over to a friend’s house.  Back then, shows were a social thing.  We’d bring soda and chips and snacks, and sit around a large room staring at a vast 19 inch cathode ray tube.  “That’s a screen?” we might laugh now, but yes, it was, and in color, too!  We’d be watching the A-Team or Knight Rider or Manimal, the kind of quality entertainment that reminds you just what a high point in our culture the 80s really were.  

Now, the rules have changed.  We ingest it, not here and there, but all at once. You find a show and you binge on it, streaming episode after episode, often squirreling yourself away with a tiny little screen or a laptop to crank your way through a show you’ve heard about but never quite gotten around to seeing.

Lately, the show that’s been binge-watched around my household has been been Parks and Recreation, a delightful little comedy with Amy Poehler about the parks department in a small town.  It’s filled with entertaining characters, but perhaps the most entertaining of the characters is the director of the department, Ron Swanson.

He’s amusing for a range of reasons, but the most singular of those reasons is that Ron Swanson is perhaps the most overtly libertarian character in any show you can see today.  Here you have a character on a comedy who tends to give firearms as office birthday presents, whose favorite food is a turkey leg wrapped in bacon, and whose idea of staying hydrated is putting an ice cube in his scotch.  And even though as a vegetarian I’m not quite so sure about the bacon and turkey, I can’t help but enjoy him, because he’s just so very himself.

Maybe it’s that peculiar relationship that we Americans have with rules and the law.  On the one hand, there’s still a strong cultural memory of our frontier days.  The values that make us self-sufficient, capable, and resilient as individuals and as households still hold significant sway over our sense of our own identities.  We like our freedom, and our ability to be autonomous persons.

On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of us.  When you get three hundred and thirteen million rugged individualists, they have to figure out how exactly it is they’re supposed to live together and function. We need rules for that dance, and ways we can simultaneously preserve our freedom and respect the freedom of our neighbor.  We know the truth of that, because we know that there are always those folks who will use our God-given liberty to oppress others and prey on others.  We protect our neighborhoods, we protect our kids and our environment, and we’re comfortable with that.  And yet still we struggle and chafe against the rules we set for ourselves, particularly when those rules impinge on us.  We don’t like people telling us what to do.  We don’t like having to worry and fret over every last regulation, about whether or not we’ll need to get a special permit to sell bottled water or whether we’ll get hit with a ticket issued by some unblinking eye of Sauron robot camera for being in a hurry to pick up our kid from preschool.  Hey, 87 seemed an appropriate speed for the road conditions.

It's that strange tension between law and liberty that Jesus is taking a good hard whack at in today's portion from the Gospel of Matthew.  Today's reading comes to us out of the deepest heart of Christ's teaching, as we're starting to roll our way into the Sermon on the Mount.  Here in Matthew chapters five through seven, we have the most succinct expression of the moral and ethical implications of what Jesus had been teaching about the in dwelling Kingdom of God.

If you're a Red Letter Christian...meaning you have one of those Bibles where they print the words Jesus said in red, and you for some reason think those words are worth highlighting...these three chapters of Matthew are absolutely the Reddest of the Red Letters.  There are many places of grace you can point people to in the bible, places where the essence of what being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth burns bright.  I’m a lousy chapter and verser, but Matthew 5 - 7?  That you need to remember.  That needs to be part of what you know.

Here, as the teaching is conveyed by Matthew, we Jesus beginning his exploration of what the heart of the Kingdom really means.  Of all of the four Gospel stories, Matthew’s account is most grounded in the traditions of the Jewish people, and so for Matthew, Jesus starts out with a statement about the law.

For the Pharisees and the scribes..the literate and studious Jews for whom life in the synagogue was central..the issue of how Jesus and his message related to the law was absolutely key.   Here, “law” doesn’t mean civil regulations.  It means the sacred law of Torah, the first five books of the Bible.  So much of the essence of the faith of the people of Israel was understood in terms of duty and obedience to the legal system established by Torah.   All of faith as the understood it revolved around their engagement with and discussion of the Law, and so...listening to this strange itinerant preacher/prophet/rabbi person, they would have been hanging eagerly on these words.  What does all of this mean, relative to everything that is important to us?

And so after a series of blessings for those who are suffering and downtrodden, he begins to talk about the law.

What we want to hear, we who tend to prefer freedom and openness, is that with Jesus, we’re free to do whatever it is we want.  Jesus, the one who brings us love instead of the law.  Jesus, the one who sets us free from the fear that God is going to smite us for infractions.  Jesus, the one who shows us grace, and makes it so much easier.

He doesn’t.

He says that he’s not here to destroy the law or to get rid of it or even really to replace it.    He’s here to fulfill it.  Every word, he says.  And to that, the part of us that does not like to be bounded cringes a little bit.  How are we to relate this to our faith?  Are all of the laws of Torah still in effect?  Does this mean that we’re stuck frittering over every last detail of the law, worrying over whether or not our clothes have inappropriately mixed fibers and unable to eat a cheeseburger or anything wrapped in bacon?  Because a Christianity that forbade bacon would make spreading the good news a little more challenging.

If we read further on, though, into the section where Jesus describes what that means, it’s clear that has very different implications for those who are called into following the Christian path.

In the sections that follow, Jesus shows that what matters to God is less about the letter of the law, and more about the degree to which we have taken the intent of that law into ourselves.  If the purpose of the law is restoration, then we cannot retaliate.  If the purpose of the law is to set the world at peace, then we cannot turn our hearts to violence.  If the purpose of the law is God’s radiantly generous love for all of us, then we can’t mete out love only to those who can do for us in return.

In that, the goal of the Christian is to be...as Jesus describes it...like salt.  Meaning, we are the person that God created us to be, down to our very core.

And that, to tell the truth of it, is harder than just following a simple pattern of rules.  It requires us to continually work on ourselves, on our angers and our hungers, on our anxieties and on our fears.  It requires us to challenge ourselves, to be continually engaged in that process of committing ourselves to God’s Reign, allowing that transformation to work in us.

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