Love Is the Way.

Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9

I.

            The book of Deuteronomy is kind of a summary of the Israelites’ time in the wilderness of Sinai, where they camped for 40 years after being miraculously liberated from slavery in Egypt.  God was preparing them for the time when they would go infiltrate and occupy the land of Canaan, wresting it away from the corrupt and oppressive kings who ruled there.  God is building them as a nation during this period, and God gives the people very specific ways to live.  I have said before repeatedly that the point here is that the people not live in the kind of situation involving injustice and violence, which is what they were liberated from in Egypt.  Their society is not to look anything like the centralized, unequal, hierarchical, oppressive regime they left.  God does not set them free so they can just become another nation where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and where problems are addressed (but never solved) by violence.

            So God gives them a law.  And the law means that only God is in charge.  All of Israel’s leaders are subject to God’s will as it is presented in God’s law.  God is the only sovereign among the Israelites.  Not even Moses is beyond criticism.  God will provide inspired leaders for the people.  Moses’ son does not take over for him.  Neither do they elect their leaders.  Israel is supposed to be a theocracy in the best sense of the word: a place ruled by a loving God and no one is above anyone else.

            It is interesting to me what God does not do.  God does not give them a vision of a perfect society as a goal towards which they are to strive.  Then, with this goal in mind, they are allowed to figure out any way they like to get there.  God does not say, “Here is a picture of the end, you guys decide on the means to that end.”  As if how they got there didn’t matter, but only that they reached the preferred destination.

            This is a very important distinction because I find a lot of people claim to want to reach lofty, ideal, perfect, and even divine goals… but don’t seem to have any problem using “any means necessary” to attain them.  The more rarefied and wonderful the goal, the more they seem willing to compromise in order to attain it.  And often these means – policies, practices, strategies, tactics, plans, and behaviors – become very nasty.  We readily fall into the trap where we end up saying things like, “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!”  Which works well, as long as you’re not one of the eggs.

II.

            The idea that we simply have to do evil in order to make a good result is deeply ingrained into the human heart and mind.  We know that in many cases it is absolutely true that we have to do what may appear to be unloving things to people to show that we really love them.  We discipline our children; we have to make difficult interventions when people have lost their way; curing an illness often means doing something painful; learning a skill often requires hard struggle and sacrifice; we may have to take seemingly harsh actions on behalf of infirm parents, and so on. 

            There are things we place under the category of “tough love” that we have to have the courage to do even against the other person’s will.  We have lots of examples of these, and people who can’t do them wind up doing greater harm to people in the end.  Sometimes extremely harsh measures are absolutely required to ensure that a greater good is accomplished. 

            But when we do these kinds of things we proceed out of the knowledge that the result is likely to be good for everyone.  When we sever a gangrenous limb it is to save a person’s life.  When we take away grandma’s car keys it is so she doesn’t endanger herself and others on the highways.  When we give our 4-year-old a time-out for hitting it is so he doesn’t become a bully or tyrant who thinks hitting people is an effective way to get what he wants.

            And the “evil” we are doing that good may result is always temporary, situational, extraordinary, limited, necessary, and the absolute last resort after everything else has been exhausted.  As parents we know that the often ridiculed rationale is true: “This hurts me more than it does you.”  That excuse is justly ridiculed because so often it is a lie that people with power over others use to justify their own self-righteous and sadistic brutality.  If it’s just too easy to do such things, we should not describe them with the self-congratulatory title of “tough love;” they are really simple, nasty unnecessary roughness.  “Tough love” is only “tough love” when it breaks your heart and scars you to carry it out.

            In service of what they perceive to be a lofty goal, people do find themselves all too ready to do unspeakable evil.  Even in the face of a mountain of evidence that these approaches don’t work, we still do them.  We still imagine that torturing people somehow leads to the truth.  We still imagine that war has ever solved anything.  We still think that throwing people in prison will “correct” or “rehabilitate” them.  We still have this fantasy that making life even more difficult for the poor will make them less “lazy” and more “responsible.”  We remain deluded that doing all of these evil things will result in a better society full of better people.

III.

            And we know these things are evil because we don’t want them done to us, ever.  Jesus’ Golden Rule kicks in here.  We have lots of excuses why such tactics should never be used against us; and we have at least as many justifications why these are the only tactics that will work on those other people.

            Knowing this about us, God does not give the people a fine and glorious vision of the way life should be, and leave them alone to figure out how to accomplish it.  No.  God gives them detailed laws about how to act today.  There is no “end” to which our actions are but “means;” there are only the means.  The means are the end.  How you act now is the goal of your life. 

            The great pacifist leader, A. J. Muste once famously said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  We could extend that reasoning to just about everything.  There is no way to justice, righteousness, equality, goodness, and healing; those are themselves the way.  There is no way to Jesus; Jesus is himself the way.

            In other words, there are no excuses.  We do not work for good by doing evil; we work for good by doing… good!  Duh!  God does not say, “Do what you want, as long as good results.”  God says, “Do good, and that will be itself the good that results.”

            You cannot use slavery to build a free society.  You cannot use war to bring about peace.  You cannot use economic injustice to accomplish prosperity.  You cannot use illness to bring about health.  The key words here being “you cannot use.”

            Never does this work when the suffering is imposed on someone else.  Other people are never to be used as means in accomplishing our goals, no matter how technically ideal those goals may be.  The only way evil ever results in good is when the evil is something you choose to take on yourself as a matter of self-sacrifice. 

            Tough love only works when there is trust based on a shared identity, so that the receiving person knows in their heart that what you have to do really does hurt you more than it does them.  Our tough love only works when it involves suffering in which we share.  The only kind of evil that can ever result in good is evil we willingly take on ourselves, just as Jesus takes on our evil in his death on the cross.

            That is the only way to understand what is happening on the cross.  It is not the Father cruelly demanding blood from the Son as the price of forgiveness.  No: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.”  What we see on the cross is the God of love choosing to give his life for us.  People are the ones who demand Jesus’ blood, who decide that this evil act is necessary for the greater good, that is to say, to protect their own power and privilege.  In Jesus Christ, God is the one on the cross, whose life-blood is shed for the salvation of the whole world.

IV.

            When God gives the law to the people, God is inviting them into God’s own life, so they may live God’s life in the living present, together.  They are not to think of themselves as being on their way to some goal, even the destination of the Promised Land.  Note that the Torah only comprises the first 5 books.  The people don’t reach Canaan until Joshua, the 6^th book.  This is to remind the people that getting to Canaan is not the point.  How they live together under God now, even in the wilderness, is the point.  If they can live God’s life now, they will be worthy of continuing that life in the Promised Land.  The Promised Land is but an extension of the blessing, goodness, justice, and peace – shalom – that they will have embraced on the way.

            When Jesus comes, he who is himself the fulfillment of the Torah, makes a further distinction.  He realizes that the letter of the law has not been sufficient.  People figured out how to break the spirit of the law, while keeping strictly to the letter.  So there is a spirit of the law that is distinct from the letter.

            Jesus shows us that the spirit of the law is love… not just love as we choose to define it in our own self-serving and even lustful way, but love as he demonstrates it in taking up his cross and giving his life for us.

            Jesus says, in effect, if it isn’t costing you your life, it isn’t love.  If it isn’t a path of wall-to-wall transformation, it isn’t love.  If it leaves you where you are, in your own comfortable self-righteousness; if it doesn’t hurt, if it doesn’t cost you anything – indeed, if it doesn’t cost you everything, it isn’t love, and therefore isn’t what the law is about.

            In the case of our Gospel reading for today, Jesus is faced with religious authorities who are hysterical about regulating what people eat, according to the letter of the law.  Jesus says, that what you eat doesn’t matter.  What matters, he says, is love, the inner spirit of the law.  If your actions are not loving, it doesn’t matter what you eat.  But if love determines your actions, then even your eating will be an expression of that love, and that love will be expressed in everything you do and say.  But saying that love is the spirit of the law does not mean that the law is just the means to get to love.  He says we are only truly keeping the law when we love.

V.

            What defiles us, what separates us from God, is what we do.  And Jesus lists several intentions that lead to practices that separate us from God, several behaviors that are contradictory to love: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, [and] folly.”  These are unloving actions, and it doesn’t matter if you say you are only doing them in the service of the greater good or a higher goal. 

            All of these are remarkably self-centered, self-righteous activities, things it is very hard if not impossible to do with humility.  These are things that normally get done because they assuage our fear, anger, or hatred; we do them because they feel good at the time, for one reason or another.  When we do them there is no question that our intention is to hurt the other person way more than we are hurting ourselves.

            The way of transformative love we see in Jesus is not to commit these acts, but to suffer them, to literally bear the pain of their consequences, to be broken by them… and so witness to the redeeming, resurrecting power of the Lord who pulls us through.

            For it is quite costly, you know.  In a world that believes in redemptive violence, we keep the spirit of a law of non-violence and forgiveness.  In a world that believes war, and torture, and theft, and greed, and incarceration, and avarice, and reckless consumption, and destruction of natural resources are all necessary to achieve our goals, we witness to God’s no.  The world hates that.

            We say it is not possible to do evil that good might result.  Doing evil results in catastrophe and disaster, it only compounds the evil exponentially.  If we live like that, we bring down upon us… death.

            Our goals are embodied in our actions.  There is no way to peace; peace is the way.  Justice is the way.  Fairness and equality is the way.  Generosity is the way.  Forgiveness is the way.  Love is the way.  This is what the law of God, accurately understood and practiced, means.  If you want the world to be a better place, be a better person yourself, now.  If you want the world to be filled with love, then love, now.  Love with a love that does not end with you and yours; love as Jesus loves: seeking out the lost, the rejected, the unpopular, the excluded, the blamed, and the broken.

            That’s what the whole biblical story is about, culminating in Jesus.  It is God’s love, welcoming, restoring, redeeming, and renewing creation and all people.  We are witnesses because we know that God even loves us. 

            This is what Jesus teaches and accomplishes.  This is what we are to watch ourselves about, so we never forget it.  This is what we are to teach to our children.  This is what enables us to occupy the land, this very earth, in blessing.

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The Lord (Justice) vs. Baal (Growth).

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18

I.

            At the close of the book of Joshua, all the tribes of Israel gather at the sanctuary at Shechem.  Joshua, who has led them in their infiltration into the Promised Land, knows he is about to die.  So he asks all of them to reaffirm their devotion and allegiance to the Lord. 

            Joshua knows that this is the best chance he’s going to get to have the people make promises to God.  And he reminds them of what God has done for them, culminating, of course, with the deliverance from Egypt and the entry into Canaan.  God was with them doing miracles on their behalf the whole time.

            Now Joshua wants them to choose.  And the people strongly, definitively, and voluntarily affirm their faith in the Lord.  But we know from how the story continues in the rest of the Bible that they really don’t know what this means.  Certainly, they will have no problem worshiping the Lord.  What they don’t get is that Joshua means for them to worship only the Lord.  The Israelites would always worship the Lord.  But they didn’t know they had to worship the Lord exclusively.  They figured they could worship the Lord, and they could worship other gods too, depending on the situation.  There were after all many gods and each had a particular area of responsibility.  It would have been completely normal for the people to imagine that they could worship the Lord as well as other gods. 

            They would never stop worshiping the Lord.  They would turn to the Lord repeatedly for help in what they assumed was the Lord’s divine specialty: politics.  Whenever the nation was in danger from external enemies, they prayed to the Lord with particular fervor.  But when they needed other things, like rain, for instance, they went to the rain god, whose name was Baal.  They would even allow that the Lord was Baal’s superior in the pantheon.  But they still turned to Baal when it was a matter of drought.  To the polytheistic mind, praying to the Lord for rain didn’t make sense.  It would be like trying to buy a hammer at Coldwater Creek.

            It would take centuries for the Israelites to figure out that there really is only one God, and you pray to this God for everything, and this God is the Lord.

II.

            And even though we know this cognitively, it is still a problem today.  It’s not a problem that people are sacrificing animals, burning incense, and prostrating themselves to other deities.  There are no explicit temples of Baal, or Zeus, or other spiritual entities around here.  Perhaps we think that if we’re not carving little effigies of Venus and praying to them that we’re not idolaters or polytheists.

            (In fact, a few years ago, when the animated Hercules movie came out, some fast-food places were actually giving away little effigies of the cartoon Zeus to kids with their burgers.  This spectacle of McDonalds or Burger King distributing little graven gods to children, may or may not prove the point I am going to try and make later in this sermon.)

            But the exclusiveness of worshiping the Lord is not just because God is jealous.  God does demand exclusivity, but it is for a reason.  It’s not just capricious and arbitrary.  God is not just a control freak.  It’s because worshiping other gods, especially these other gods, is dangerous.  It is dangerous because it spawns the kind of social injustice that the prophets are always railing against.  And it is dangerous because social injustice invariably puts the people so out of synch with God’s will that eventually something has to give.  Usually what results is a major catastrophe, or a natural disaster. 

            This is what happened to Egypt, and it is why the Israelites are now free.  The injustices of Egypt, culminating in slavery, brought down massive and comprehensive consequences in the form of ten plagues and the subsequent loss of much of their working class across the Red Sea.  These injustices were based on the Egyptians’ worship of other gods.

            These other gods that the people were continually tempted to worship were gods whose portfolios mostly had to do with the economy.  The Israelites were entering into an agricultural society in Canaan.  This meant the most important things to them economically were things that benefitted farming, mainly the growing of grains like wheat and barley.  Logically, then, the gods that were most important economically to these people were the gods who were perceived to govern the weather and fertility.  The most significant and powerful of these gods was Baal, the god of storms and rain.  This is what I mean when I refer to Baal as a “god of economic growth.”  Baal was the god people turned to in order to keep the economy of the time going.

            The land of Canaan was and largely remains urgently dependent upon regular rains.  Without rain, the grain would die and the result was famine, mass starvation.  So the people got into the habit of praying to Baal, the rain god, for rain.  It was just a safer way to go.  Even though the Lord famously and miraculously provided them water when their ancestors were in the Sinai desert for 40 years, the Lord did not yet have much of a reputation for providing rain.

III.

            There is therefore a connection between the economy, religion, and politics.  The agricultural economy of Canaan was different from what the people were used to in Sinai.  Farming communities developed a more centralized government.  The populations of agricultural societies tended to grow, and this growth meant they had to put more and more land under cultivation to feed more and more people.  This meant developing a sophisticated military because the only place to get more land was from someone else… and you were always in danger of the people from the neighboring city wanting your land.  So a big concern was security.  Agricultural societies developed institutions like kings, regular armies, slaves to work the land, weapons production, and so forth.  Social and economic hierarchies emerged, and these naturally merged with religious hierarchies.  The basic tradeoff was that you got a regular, consistent food source… but it was very expensive.  It cost you your freedom. 

            This whole system depended on regular rainfall.  So the god that the people with the most to lose in this system encouraged if not forced the people to worship was the rain god.  To worship the rain god was to affirm your allegiance to the king and the State, the landowners, the army, and the whole establishment.

            If you worshiped Baal it was not just a “religious” choice, no: you were effectively choosing a whole social system, one diametrically opposed to the covenant God makes with the people at Mt. Sinai.  That covenant is about equality and justice, lifting up the poor, protecting the weak, giving due process to everyone.  There is not supposed to be a king, or a ruling class, or a standing army.  But Baal worship was about economic growth, supporting the king, enriching the wealthy, and empowering the military.

            Joshua had just spent several years in war against the petty rulers of these city states of Canaan who made their wealth and based their power on the exploitation and oppression of the common people.  Their cities fell one by one to Joshua’s movement of escaped slaves with their egalitarian law from their God.  He was not about to countenance his people falling into the same idolatrous religion and unjust economics as the rulers they had just defeated. 

            Now God’s law, not some thug who calls himself king, would tell them what they were allowed to do and not do.  God’s law is designed to benefit everyone, especially lifting up the poor and disadvantaged.  So God’s law is a severe infringement on the freedom of the privileged and powerful… but a great advancement in the freedom of everyone else.

IV.

            Now, we can get somewhat patronizing when we read a story like this.  We hear the vocal affirmations of the people and we might imagine that, making the same assertions, we would surely have a better subsequent track-record.  But I suspect we don’t take any more seriously than they did the real demands of worshiping the Lord.  We have conditioned ourselves to believe that making these affirmations doesn’t have much bearing on how we live our lives together.  We most certainly are very slow to understand that faith in the Lord has anything to do with our economic or political decisions.

            In truth, that’s almost all it has to do with.  Because it isn’t just about your private, personal religious faith.  Following the Lord is not about making a verbal confession of assent to some theological propositions, and having done with it.  It is about how we actually live together.  It is about the quality of our relationships.  It is about how we organize our communities.  It is about how we make decisions, distribute resources, allocate assets, what kind of world we leave our descendants, and what kind of footprint we leave on the Earth. 

            The Torah and the prophets, as well as Jesus the Messiah, are all about living in communities of peace that Jesus identifies as at least a foretaste of the Kingdom of God.  They are characterized by sharing, forgiveness, humility, mutual responsibility, honesty, non-violence, and equality.  They are all about healing and liberation from all kinds of bondage.  In God’s plan there are no kings, there are no wealthy, there are no privileged people or classes.  God’s plan keeps society level, which means always lifting up the lowly and bringing down those who exalt themselves.

            This is what it means to worship the Lord.  This is what the Israelites were taking on when they make their wonderful affirmation of faith.  But worshiping and following the Lord means adopting specific values and practices.  It means living in a certain way.  It means living a life of sharing in which we are more concerned for the well-being of others, especially the least among us, than we are for storing and hoarding resources for ourselves.

            If you want to worship these other gods, these gods of economic growth, that would mean advocating and building a society based not on God’s law, but on selfishness, enmity, inequality, greed, avarice, gluttony, theft, competition, and war.  The consequences for that are not pretty. 

V.

            Jesus reveals and demonstrates the character of the Kingdom of God in his feeding of 5,000 people with five barley loaves and two fish, resulting in 12 baskets full of leftovers.  We read about it in John 6.  In this miracle he is making a spectacular statement about God’s generosity and provision for the people.  He strikes directly at the economic question: How do the people get fed?  But instead of having the people worship Baal and trade their freedom to a king for a reliable source of food, Jesus instead offers a counter example.  He says we need to rely on him.

            Instead of scarcity, Jesus demonstrates abundance.  God made this planet good and perfectly able to feed everyone.  He says that “those who come to me will never hunger, those who believe in me will never thirst.”  If we trust in him, he will feed us.

            Now trusting in him is not passive.  It is not sitting on our hands and daring him to materialize food out of thin air. Trusting him means following him and living according to his commandments.  It means gathering in his name in communities of sharing and generosity.  It means living in the same kind of selfless service, humility, forgiveness, healing, and blessing, that he reveals as the heart of God.

            When Jesus delivers this apparently bizarre teaching about the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he is talking mainly about his words.  “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died.”  In other words, not literal food that we digest in our bodies.  “But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”  “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” 

            Jesus feeds us now by his words.  His words are the bread of life.  And if we follow his words by living together in love and compassion, which is what he commands his disciples to do, then there will also be plenty of literal bread, physical food, to sustain us.  Because if we keep his commandments, we will have rejected systems that keep people poor, hungry, thirsty, and sick.  We will have rejected violence and greed.  We will have rejected idolatry and the injustice it spawns.

            What we witness to whenever we gather, especially when we celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, is the truth of how God feeds us, and feeds the world, in community.  When we participate in the Lord’s body and blood, it is an active way of affirming with the ancient Israelites: “It is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from… slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight.  He protected us along all the way that we went….  Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God.’

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Collect for Labor Day.

I couldn't find a Labor Day collect in the usual resources, so I wrote this one:

Gracious God:

we pray for the work we do

and for all those who work for a living.

Let us know that each one of us

has a calling from you,

and is gifted with skills and abilities

to contribute to the common good.

Bless those who do for us the necessary work

that we don’t want to do.

Be with those who cannot find work

and lead them to that place

where their gifts are valued.

Let all workers be fully compensated for what they do.

And may all we do be done to glorify you.

Amen.