October 17, 2004
The Well Church:  Where the rules are flexible.
Riley E. Jensen

Some of you will remember that movie of a few years back in which Robin Williams starred as an iconoclastic prep school English teacher in “Dead Poets’ Society”.  As a popular first-year teacher he quickly gains a reputation for his creative and sometimes unorthodox forms of teaching.

An early scene sets the stage for the controversy and conflict to follow.  The title of the class is “Introduction to Poetry” and the assignment has been to read the first chapter and come prepared to discuss it.  As one would expect, the first chapter sets forth the rules of the road.  In it the basic rules of rhyme and meter are explained and the obvious thesis is developed that if one follows these rules then good if not great poetry will result.

However, when they attend their first class, they are shocked and unbelieving as their new teacher gives his first instructions -- to literally tear out the pages of the assignment from the book and throw it in the waste basket.  As they begin to recover from the drama (and for some the horror of that moment), their teacher drives the point of the exercise home to them which is that great poetry does not come from mechanistically following some set of rules.

Last week we began this series on “The Well Church” by making the point that when a church is healthy and spiritually alive, it will have consciously staked out its turf and marked it as a place where we are trying to realize the ideals of the Kingdom of God -- with all the tension and imperfection that implies.

That prescription is not easy but it is at least obvious.  This morning I submit to you that the second step is less obvious and considerably more controversial.  Whenever it is suggested that rules be flexible, people of our stripe begin to get uncomfortable.  We have a low tolerance for ambiguity and a high need for clarity.  Say what you mean and mean what you say is our motto.  The rules are there to live by and exceptions just lead us down a slippery slope.

That is why to really engage the scripture passage before us will no doubt create more than a little discomfort among us.  Nevertheless, we are dealing with the wisdom of Jesus here, and while the presenting issue of Sabbath observance may seem a bit arcane, its implications are as contemporary as this morning's newspaper.  Therefore, to more deeply probe the wisdom of Jesus in this matter is to raise certain questions that I am calling the question of authority, the question of morality, and the question of justice.

I.                 The Question of Authority

Here we find Jesus breaking the law, pure and simple.  Certainly he had a good reason, but I thought I had a good reason too when I was pressing a little hard on the accelerator early one Sunday morning last spring.  I know you don’t like to think of your minister as a law breaker, but frankly there is that speed zone on Lake Michigan Drive between Grand Valley State University and the outskirts of Walker where the speed limit has to be interpreted more as a suggestion than a requirement.  However, the policewoman who stopped me didn’t agree even when I tried to flash my halo by telling her I was on my way to church.  People always want to know where sermons come from, and this may be why I feel some kinship to Jesus the law breaker.

Let’s try to reconstruct the situation.  Jesus knew that he was being watched carefully by the Pharisees.  He knew that his every word and action were being scrutinized for any hint of inflammatory impact.  He knew that one false move would give them the opportunity to discredit him.  One can almost feel the electricity in the air as the man whom he called, rose to his feet and stepped to the front of the synagogue and stood before Jesus.

Then Jesus posed a question to his adversaries, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or destroy it?”  This was a stroke of rhetorical genius because it placed the Pharisees in a bind.  They could not answer his question without condemning themselves -- for even they made exceptions to the Sabbath law in order to help someone who was in danger of death.  But is God interested only in keeping people from dying or does not concern about life extend to the quality of life as well?  And if the Sabbath was made to glorify God, is it not a proper use of it to bring help to one of God’s children as well?

After looking them in the eye, Jesus claimed a higher authority as he restored the man’s withered hand.  In this way, he was showing in action what he later put in words when he said, “All the law and the prophets are gathered up in love to God and one’s neighbor.”  These two laws -- the love of God, and the love of neighbor -- take precedence over all lesser laws.

Let’s take the side of the Pharisees for a moment.  This is a risky thing to do because in church, Jesus always comes out the winner.  I learned this lesson in the third grade when I realized that whenever my Sunday school teacher would ask a question, I only had to respond with an answer that included Jesus or God and I would always be at least partially right.

If we can get past an imagery which has all the good on one side and all the bad on the other side, we will find that the Pharisees who are so often pictured as the enemies of Jesus were actually good, moral, hardworking folk who felt a deep obligation to protect the traditions and beliefs which had been delivered to them by their forebears.  Does that sound like anyone you know?  They were concerned about what was happening around them because they saw authority being eroded and traditions being challenged.

They had nothing personal against Jesus.  In fact, many of them were attracted by his message of care and compassion.  You see, these were not unfeeling people whom we can paint with too broad a brush.  But it was not the truth of his message that concerned them as much as what they considered to be its dangerous implications.  For you see, they operated on a kind of “beard philosophy” -- one which asks the question -- how many hairs can you pull out of a beard and still be able to call it a beard?  It wasn’t that Jesus did not have some good points about healing people on the Sabbath, but if we let down our standards, we are in danger of having an erosion of authority cascade into a full-scale avalanche.

II.             A Question of Morality

I think that we can agree that on one level the Pharisees were just good people who were trying to keep in place those safeguards intended to protect the integrity of their religion.  That is not an incidental cause and ought to be a concern of all of us.  For instance, in the Presbyterian Church there is an ongoing debate as to whether lay people (i.e., those of you who are not invested with the title of Reverend nor enabled to wear this medieval regalia which separates us from the hoi poloi -- whatever superiority I may have felt was punctured one time when a child asked her mother, “Who’s that man wearing the dress?”) should be permitted to administer the sacraments.  At the present time only ordained clergy are invested with that authority though we are quick to point out that this is only a matter of function and not office.  In other words there is nothing in our ordained office which makes clergy more capable of administering the sacraments than a properly trained lay person. 

However, as matters continue to stand, the clergy retain that function exclusively based upon the rationale that we have been elected to act as the guardians of the tradition.  In much the same way the Pharisees saw themselves as guardians of the tradition which had been delivered to them.  Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that Jesus didn’t respect that role which is why he pressed them one step further to consider the question of morality.

Here Jesus goes beyond what is lawful to raise the question of right and wrong.  I had a memorial service not long ago and it was said of this person that the question he would always ask when making a business deal was, “Is it right?”

Let’s understand something here, because the church on too many occasions has been accused of moralizing.  There is the law, and the law represents those agreed-upon standards which society needs to have in place in order to function.  But we know that the law cannot cover every contingency.  We know that there are times when the law must be challenged on the basis of morality.

Down through the ages there have been a variety of laws which have later been judged to have been immoral.  On June 4, our President crossed the Atlantic to join in the celebration of D-Day, the Normandy invasion which is acknowledged as turning the tide in World War II and defeating an enemy intent on extending its genocidal laws.  Closer to home and about the same time we celebrated the 50^th Anniversary of Brown vs. the Board of Education which judged the laws of separate but equal to be immoral for a nation which pledges justice for all.

There is an old saying, “You can’t legislate morality!”  But we can remove legislation and challenge laws which deny or undermine those basic rights with which we have always aligned ourselves as those pledged to the support of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.  We are certainly engaged in such a debate now are we not, as we try to determine what freedom looks like in the face of fear.  We are a fearful society and fearful societies are always in danger of eroding rights in favor of security.

You see, it was a timeless debate in which Jesus was engaged.  What are those special circumstances?  Where is the fine line which draws the distinction between the demands of the law and the higher demands of doing what is right.

III.         A Question of Justice

Finally, this little interchange between Jesus and the Pharisees raises not only a question of authority and a question of morality, it also raises a question of justice.  In the midst of our quest for certainty (where we find only ambiguity) it is so easy to throw our hands in the air and say that it doesn’t make any difference anyway!  But it does make a difference and the difference has to do with justice.

In the story it says, “And then they were filled with madness; and communed one with another what they might do to Jesus.”  We are just in Chapter 6 of the book of Luke and it is not until Chapter 23 that Jesus is crucified.  But we can be sure that the initial seeds of his crucifixion were planted here.

It makes people angry when they feel that the rules are being changed on them.  Some of us get very heated, arguing in favor of uniform penalties in our criminal justice system.  Three strikes and you're out.  Put them in prison and throw away the key.

However, Biblical justice is different from that which is traditionally meted out by our blind lady of the scales.  Biblical justice makes its decisions with its eyes wide open -- open to the special circumstances and influences which might make this case different from the others.

You see when Jesus healed the man with the withered hand, he was arguing for special circumstances.  The Pharisees could argue right back to say that special circumstances had already been taken into account.  If a situation was judged to be a life and death matter, then initiative was permissible on the Sabbath.  By his actions Jesus is saying that we need to be more flexible than that.  Any law which keeps us from doing good, which keeps us from ministering to needy human beings, which takes away rights rather than extending them is the wrong kind of law.

In this respect the church in its institutional reality is not greatly different from other institutions.  Institutions are run by rules and regulations but the fact of the matter is we are different, we are something more.  Jaraslav Pelican of Yale has said, “Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, while tradition is the living faith of the dead.”  Ours is a living faith because it calls us to see what love looks like when it is faced with human reality.

In an old movie Edna Mae Oliver is knitting something that stretches across the floor and out into the hall.  She explains, “It started out to be a scarf but it got away from me.”   Friends, we are the church of Jesus Christ.  We started out as a handful of disciples following an itinerant preacher.  And then that gathering grew as it was infused with the excitement of new life dedicated to the proposition that sacrificial love can change the world.

In our humblest moments of confession we must confess that what we started out to be has gotten away from us.  We have become too concerned about our own survival, too rigid in our outlook, and not concerned enough about the needs of those about us.

This is a simple story, this story about Jesus healing the man on the Sabbath.  We look at it as an obvious act of compassion.  What could be a clearer mandate then to heal the suffering.  Nevertheless, we need to examine ourselves to make sure that the heart of the Pharisee doesn’t beat within us.  We want to do good, but sometimes we spend too much time rationalizing why we can’t.

At the top of your bulletin is Frederick Buechner’s description of the beating heart which is the heart of compassion and love:

The debris of this life continues to accumulate.

The Vesuvius of the years scatters its ashes

deep and much gets buried alive, but even under

many layers, the telltale heart can go on beating still.

Believe me, the telltale heart of this church, that heart of kindness, love, and compassion is beating still, and may it ever be so as we seek to put the needs of people in first place.

Amen.