Break the rules?

     Our readings for this week are once again giving us a lovely conversation starter: is it better to follow the rules or to put relationships first?
     Last week with the parable of the good Samaritan, we saw that the rules don't always work.  When the priest and the Levite followed the rules, they were not loving their neighbor, and so we had an 'exception to the rule'.  We discovered in conversation that the hard part is knowing when the rules don't work anymore.

Photo from http://blog.consumer-knowledge.com

     In this week's gospel lesson, we have a similar scenario, though the two texts are hardly ever compared in such a way.  This week we continue in Luke 10 with a story about Jesus visiting Mary and Martha.  Typically the story has been interpreted that poor Martha just misses the boat - she puts daily tasks above loving Jesus.  The moral of the story, then, is not to get too distracted with daily life so that you miss Jesus in your midst.
     This is a fine interpretation, and it impacts my life all the time - I tell myself not to get too caught up in the little details so as to miss five minutes of playtime with my daughter, or the quick chat with a neighbor on the sidewalk.  However, given where the text is placed in Luke, I think there is more to just paying attention to Jesus.
     Recall that Jesus, when we sent out the 70 disciples on their mission at the beginning of chapter 10, instructed them not to take anything with them and to rely on the hospitality of those whom they met along the way.  Jesus himself was reliant on the hospitality of his friends and acquaintances since he was a traveling teacher.  Martha, knowing the hospitality laws, was both fulfilling the law and fulfilling what Jesus had earlier commanded.
     There is also precedent for Martha serving honored guests.  In Genesis 18, our other reading for Sunday, the Lord appears to Abraham when three men appear outside his tent.  When he sees them, he invites them in, tells Sarah to make cakes, and prepares a calf for them to eat.  This was the tradition of hospitality, and the men gave permission for Abraham to prepare them a meal.
     It would seem then, that these two texts are at odds with each other.  In Genesis, Sarah is expected to be doing the 'traditional hostess role.'  In Luke, Martha expects that her sister Mary help her in the 'traditional hostess role' and Jesus chastises her by saying, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."
     Perhaps rather than focusing on the fact that Jesus is praising Mary for choosing to sit at his feet, we might think about Jesus praising Mary for not letting the rules get in the way.
     Think about it.  Why do we do what we do?  Who made up the 'chores' list for your house?  I once heard a story about a family pot roast recipe.  The recipe had been in the family for at least three generations - and it was a prize-winning, always-requested dish and source of family pride.  To begin, you had to cut one of the ends of the roast off and place it in a smaller dish, while the rest of the roast went into the roasting pan.  One day, however, one of the youngest generation family members asked, "Why do you have to cut it?"  No one knew, it was just because that's what the recipe said.
     After doing some investigation into the matter, one woman discovered that in the generation the recipe was perfected, the cook didn't have a roasting pan large enough to hold a whole roast.  So you had to cut the end off and cook in two batches.
     We often do things just because, without giving it much thought.  Jesus, in his interaction with Mary and Martha, is not necessarily only praising Mary because she is sitting and listening, but perhaps more because she has given the matter thought and decided that the rules of playing host to Jesus weren't as important as simply being with him.
     That is the freedom we have in Christ - we are totally freed from the 'rules' and can choose to live where the Spirit blows, rather than being confined by the rigid boundaries of societal pressures and unwritten rules.  For me, however, the sad reality is that I am often like Martha, unhappily confined by the invisible chains of living up to made-up expectations.
     While it is important not to live too distracted and therefore miss God's presence in your life, it is also important to live in Christ's freedom by surrendering all of yourself, including your expectations, and be willing to become new in the Spirit.  It is a challenge to throw all the rules out the window, trusting that God's Spirit won't let you go astray, and confidently stepping forward in faith knowing that living in Christ's freedom sometimes means breaking rules.

Live love?

The Good Samaritan by Paula Modersohn-Becker

     The gospel lesson this week is a well-known story, and even gets several pop-culture references (though I'm not sure anymore if people know the root of the reference or if they just know the idiom).  It is the parable of the Good Samaritan.  It is the story of a man, who on a journey, is stripped, robbed, beaten, and left for dead.  The first two people who come upon him are people you might expect to stop and help - a priest and a caretaker of the temple.  These two, however, knowing that their religious law prevents them from touching naked sickness without themselves being made ritually impure.  So the two likely suspects walk on the other side of the road.  The twist to this story comes with the third person who comes along.  This third person doesn't even belong to their religion, the third person is never clean and people who live the 'right' way don't associate with them.  Yet they stop.  And they go above and beyond the 'call of duty' for someone they don't know.  They pay for the victim to recoup at a local inn, promising to return and pay whatever else the man uses to care for this stranger.  We are all fairly familiar with the story, and we are familiar with its common usage now to mean someone who does something nice for another person they don't know.
     What we may be a little more unfamiliar with, however, is the reason Jesus told this parable to begin with.  In Luke 10, the parable begins with a lawyer questioning Jesus about eternal life.

'Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ Jesus replied, 'There was a man...

...and the parable of the Good Samaritan ensues.

It would seem then, that loving the Lord means more than just following the rules, since in the parable the two Jewish men did follow the rules but the non-Jew got it right.  This makes following Jesus all the more harder - are we supposed to follow the rules in the Bible, which are good, or are we supposed to break them and hope that doing so results in love and eternal life?  If we can't look to the scriptures to figure out what to do, how are we to know what kind of life is okay to live?  This conversation between Jesus and the lawyer seems to muddy the waters of salvation by grace through faith, if for the lawyer inheriting eternal life comes from reading in scripture that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.  For those of us who have been brought up knowing that we are absolutely not good enough to do this, that our sinful self gets in the way and messes it up, that Jesus came to die for us because we fall short, let me point you to the first lesson from Deuteronomy 30.
     It would seem that Jesus is having a conversation with scripture, that he is taking the teaching from Deuteronomy and reinforcing God's promises with a twist.  In Deuteronomy 30 we read,

 Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

Sometimes I think that we use grace as a crutch, blaming our sinful selves on the fact that we didn't do what we knew we should.  As much as I loathe the so-called 'Lutheran guilt,' and joke that we have 'overactive guilt glands,' I sometimes think it is a healthy slap from the Holy Spirit.  After all, we have the word in our mouths and our hearts to observe - 'it is not too hard nor is it too far away.'
     The gift we have in grace and faith is that we aren't alone in living out our faith.  Christ who has faced every temptation we will knows what it is to know what is right and yearn to not do it.  The Holy Spirit who rushed in like a violent wind and set the world on fire knows what it is to be pulled in different directions, the right one the hardest path.  And that is where the grace and faith come.
     As gifts right when we need them most, to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  The mystery for me this week is how God can strengthen me (who I know to not want to do what is right all the time) to live out my life of faith in love - toward God and toward neighbor.  How is God calling you to live love?

How has Jesus sent you?

     Our gospel lesson for Sunday comes from Luke 10.  It is the first mission trip coordinated by Jesus and is actually two parts of the chapter - the sending and the return.  This is a text with which I am very familiar.  In seminary I took a class on 'missional church' my senior year and we had the privilege of starting EVERY class time by reading this scripture and spending the first 10-15 minutes in discussion around what the Spirit revealed to us.
     The interesting thing was that over the 16 week semester, while there were certainly themes that trended, there was always something new, some insight or some new understanding that made this scripture come alive in a new way for me.  Have you ever spent that long on a single text?  What would you think if your pastor preached the same text for a whole year?  (That might be a fun experiment!)  So when I come to this text again, three years later, it comes as an old friend with its familiar lines, sounds, and flavors.  Yet even old friends can surprise - and this old friend does not disappoint. 
     Since I have been thinking back to my seminary course, the missional church part of this text really stands out.  However, missional church might not be in your vocabulary, so here is a short, succinct video that does a good job of describing missional church:

Ok, now that you have an idea of what missional church is, here is where our gospel text comes in.  In our gospel text, which is all about the work of the church before 'church' existed, I see a mirror of what we are called (and only by the grace of God succeed) to do. 
     Jesus names and claims us in the waters of baptism, we are each given a mission in the world, with our 'hand to the plow' as we heard last week, and then we are sent into the world to proclaim that the kingdom of God has come near.
     How we do this depends on who we are, what we are doing, and where we are doing it.  Young people are called to be Christ's presence at school, on the bus, at their place of child care.  Older youth are called to be Christ's presence in the weight room, locker room, and on the sports field; on stage, in speech/drama club, and online playing COD.  Even older of us are called to be Christ's presence at work, at the unemployment office, out with friends at the local restaurant (Odie's in my town),  at our children's sporting events, in line at the grocery store, etc.
     Even though we gather in our church building once or more a week for worship, fellowship, and learning, we are church every moment of every day.  And, as it says in the gospel lesson, we often make way for the work of Jesus, "After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go."
     Just as John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus' coming into the world, just as these seventy others prepared the way for Jesus coming after them, we too prepare the way for Jesus to work in the hearts and lives of those we meet.  I myself have benefited from someone coming to me ahead of Jesus.  One of those times was in the months prior to a mission trip to Guatemala in 2005.  I met Pastor Katherine in the fall of that year, and then in January attended a retreat on baptism.  Five months later I found myself in Guatemala and it was in that time I discerned my call to ministry.  Now, 8 years later, I have been a pastor for almost 3 years, and all because Pastor Katherine came to me and proclaimed Jesus.  This prepared my own heart and life for the work the Spirit would do in Guatemala and in the months and years after that.
     This is just one story, and while there are many others, I still ponder how Jesus sends people ahead of him and the Holy Spirit so that people are ready to hear a word of good news, or a call to ministry, or receive much needed peace and forgiveness.   An even greater mystery is how Jesus sends me ahead of him - for whom am I preparing the way?

Where are my chains?

     One of my all-time favorite passages is included in our texts for Sunday.  Galatians 3 is a grace-filled, hopeful look into what it means to be baptized into the Christ.  We are reminded that before faith we were under the law but now Christ has come and set us free from the discipline of the law to live as children of God, all boundaries destroyed, all one in Christ Jesus.
     This is such good news for me - to live knowing that guilt (yes - we Lutherans tend to have, as a colleague of mine has said, 'overactive guild glands') no longer need rule my life, but that I am free to live as I am, striving to learn from mistakes, and not letting them weigh me down.
     This is such good news for me - to live knowing that the human boundaries of race, sex, socioeconomic status, ability, employment, etc. have no bearing on how valuable we are.  The boundaries do not exist in God's kingdom, for we are all one.  It means that I need not let human constructed boundaries get in my way, deter me, or in any other way, shape, or form, rule my life.
     What good news for us all!  We are worthy of Christ's love because we are children of God.  We are bound together in community not based on any outward signs or categories, but based on the fact that baptized we all look like Christ.  Our identity is changed, not discounting who we are or our gifts, but to more fully be who we are, we take on Christ.
     Except.  Except while this sounds really good, it is EXTREMELY hard to believe.  I can't just take off my eyes and not see (thereby judge) others based on my own biases.  That person looks _______.  I can't believe they just _______.  Did you see what they are ______?!?  You can fill in your own blanks, but you get the gist.  Knowing something to be true doesn't make it easy to believe.

Photo from peaceofmindministries.com

     And that is where our gospel text comes in.  It is a lovely little story commonly called,"The Gerasene Demoniac" found in Luke 8.  It is a powerful story of healing and the human capacity for belief and fear.  To recap for you, Jesus comes to the Gerasene region, and in that region is a man who has been living with demons possessing him.  He breaks chains, runs naked, and lives in the tombs (considered to be one of the worst places people could live - dead people were against the religious rules of the time).  So Jesus commands the demon to come out of the man, they have a little dialogue, the demons leave the man, enter a herd of swine, rush down the cliff, and drown themselves.

     After this happens the swineherds run into town to tell everyone what happened and the people come out and find the man "sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind."

And they were afraid.

It is common for people, once they discover what they knew to be true is no longer true, to react with fear.  This man, whom they knew as the demoniac, who ran around naked and broke chains, is no longer this man.  He is sane.  He is clothed.  He is sitting with other people.  The norms and stories that had held this community together were no longer true, and it was threatening.

     This is just as true today as it was then.  Think about how you categorize your own life.  Work one way, home another, church perhaps a third way.  When something happens to disrupt your balance, when something changes in any of these categories, the most common gut reaction is fear.  When we found out we were pregnant, we were so elated!  But then as I thought about what that would mean, I began to be fearful.  What will this mean for my sleep habits?  How will people react when they find out I'm a mom?  What sort of world am I bringing this little person into?

     The norms that had normed my life for so long no longer held true and I fell back into fear.  The freedom we have in Christ is like this.  We were under the law - living a certain way, fulfilling certain expectations, saying the right thing, making God happy.  But this is no longer the case any more.  Christ has freed us - our salvation, our worth, our value comes out of Christ alone, not on anything we do or don't do, say or don't say.  

     The fear here is great.  What if Christ isn't enough?  So, to cover our rear ends, we do the stuff we don't have to do and say the things we don't have to say, all the while living in our guilt rather than our freedom in Christ.

     With the Gerasene Demoniac, perhaps if more of us went throughout our towns telling all that Jesus has done for us, less people would live in fear.  Perhaps more people would come to believe and not just know the freedom God gives us in Christ.  Perhaps our communities of faith would begin to be central parts of the life of their wider communities.

     I invite you to ponder the mystery of Christ's freedom this week.  Where are you still living in fear?  Where are your own (or others') boundaries dictating your life and beliefs?  Remember, we are all one in Christ.