“Shoulds, Oughts, and Musts – Oh My!” Vance L. Toivonen
READING Luke 13:10-17
Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day." But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?" When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.
READING Gerald G. May M.D., Addiction & Grace
Often, of course, we do not sense the constancy of grace-giving love. In many situations God may seem unloving or even completely absent. Sometimes this is because we are blinded by our attachments; we are so preoccupied – our attention is so kidnapped by our compulsions – that we tune out the background of God’s love…We may want to notice divine love, but we ignore it like we ignore our own breathing, in favor of things that have captured us.
SERMON
One of the reasons my wife and I took a vacation to the Black Hills of South Dakota last month was that my first congregation, Dovre Lutheran Church in Osnabrock, North Dakota was celebrating their 125th anniversary. I had always held this community in the fond places of my heart and memory, and I wanted to honor them by being present. So we did. On July 15th we celebrated with the people of Dovre Lutheran.
Driving to Osnabrock, observing the landscape, and finally arriving there all congealed into this striking impression that this was not, and could never again be, home to me. I think my spouse shared this same feeling. While traveling those desolate prairie roads I recalled the many trips we would make from that little town of 200 that was our home for three-and-a-half years, a town only fourteen miles from the Canadian border, driving 85 miles south to Grand Forks for shopping and such.
When we first moved to Osnabrock we did not make shopping trips on Sunday afternoons, because there was no shopping to be done. It was Sunday, and in 1985 North Dakota stilled maintained blue laws, a mandate that no business could be conducted on what the state, I assume, presupposed to be the Sabbath (even though technically the Sabbath is legally a Jewish holy day and runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday). It does kind of make me wonder still what society would be like if the wheels of commerce were shut down for 24 hours once every seven days. Would this be a good thing? Can we imagine such a society?
This is the Sabbath mentioned in today’s first reading. No work could be done on the Sabbath, not even healing, which would make hospital work sort of complicated, I suppose. The Jewish leader says this quite plainly, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day." One might say this was the conventional wisdom of Jesus’ day. But Jesus was never about conventional wisdom.
As you probably already know, there was much written about Jesus and his life that didn’t make the cut. The Bible that has been passed on to us was culled from a variety of literature, whittled down to a manageable format, a format that served the church well. This whittling down occurred in the fourth century of the common era.
Some of the literature that did not make the cut involved the childhood of Jesus. The four gospels say very little about the child Jesus. He is born and then suddenly 12 years old, and then a young man. Infancy gospels were written to fill in this gap. One of my favorites is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. It was probably written in the 2nd or 3rd century at a time when the Christology of Jesus had come to define him as God incarnate.
The story I will read for you now takes place when Jesus is 5 years old, and already shows us Jesus’ disregard for the conventional laws of his culture; for he was, after all, a young Jewish boy.
When this boy Jesus was five years old he was playing at the ford of a brook, and he gathered into pools the water that flowed by, and made it at once clean, and commanded it by his word alone. He made soft clay and fashioned from it twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when he did this. And there were also many other children playing with him. Now when a certain Jew saw what Jesus was doing in his play on the Sabbath, he at once went and told his father Joseph: “See, your child is at the brook, and he has taken clay and fashioned twelve birds and has profaned the Sabbath”. And when Joseph came to the place and saw (it), he cried out to him, saying: “Why do you do on the Sabbath what ought not to be done?” But Jesus clapped his hands and cried to the sparrows: “Off with you!” And the sparrows took flight and went away chirping. The Jews were amazed when they saw this, and went away and told their elders what they had seen Jesus do.
You didn’t know Jesus was such an insolent child, did you? There’s another story just a few paragraphs after this, one where a kid bumps into the boy Jesus accidentally in the village. Jesus takes offense and says, “You shall go no further on your way”, and the kid drops dead in his tracks. I suppose this was a carry over from the God of the Old Testament, a God who tended to smite people occasionally. Jesus being God by this time according to the church, it followed that even as a child he could, like the God of old, smite whomever he wished, whenever he wished. But I digress.
That first story about the sparrows on the Sabbath reminds us again that Jesus called conventional wisdom and social norms into question. Joan preached about forgiveness last week and asked us to wonder where our boundaries might be. As I chatted with folks at coffee hour I heard some who honestly said they struggled with the concept of forgiving someone as criminal, and a crime as heinous, as the one perpetrated by the Nazi soldier who locked people in a house and then burned it down, shooting those who escaped. Jesus taught his followers to love their enemies. What do we do with this?
In the middle east we still hear of people being stoned to death for their sinful behavior. The old laws dictate the norms for such punishments. Here in America some states still invoke the death penalty. Is this what Jesus would do?
Gerald May writes about the unconditional, and unconventional, love of God. He reminds us that there are differences between human and divine love. He writes:
…human love is always prey to selfishness and distractions bred by attachment…When this happens, we can feel possessive of our loved ones or jealous or even vengeful if they do not meet our expectations. We can see our loved ones as extensions of ourselves, wanting them to make good impressions on other people so we ourselves will look good. We can want them to live out our fantasies, conform to our desires, meet our needs, provide us with our security and sense of worth…It is not so with God’s love. God goes on loving us regardless of who we are or what we do. (Gerald G. May M.D., Addiction & Grace).
I think this is why my more traditional faith, my second-naïveté faith, is so precious to me. I experience conditional love all of the time. It is therefore essential for me to believe in a God that loves me so unconditionally that I can love others without condition. I do not always succeed at doing so, but it is in my heart to desire this love within myself. Knowing that I am loved like this by God energizes my spirit and empowers divine love within me. This makes it possible for me to do the impossible, namely love even my enemies.
Jesus attempted to show humankind that there is certainly more than one way to go about the business of living life together. He lived in a world that was just as rife with destructive behavior as our own, except for the fact that there are billions more people on this planet now than there were then. If we took the approach of loving our enemies, what would our so-called war on terror look like? If we disregarded social convention, and worried less about what people might think, might not we tend to give more of our attention to the disenfranchised and marginalized of our culture and community? Imagine us being demonized by others for the company we keep. This was true of Jesus.
Shoulds, oughts, and musts create in us a fear of what happens when we digress from expectations. If we do not abide by these rules and roles we may be ostracized, judged, or deemed unworthy of the attention of others. The conditional love that swirls all around us scrutinizes us, running us through its filters of conformity and security. Jesus, Buddha, the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, MLK Jr., and other human beings who have shown us a greater than average dosage of divine love, span human history reminding us that we can become more fully and richly human by loving beyond our fears into unconventional territory. How can this love transform us both as individuals, and as a community of faith? I believe that the transformation is in process. God’s spirit works quietly in each of our hearts. But we seem to have so far to go. My impatience haunts me, impatience with myself, mostly, but with my family, with you and with others too.
There is no place like Hope, as churches go, when it comes to religious communities that wish to stretch the boundaries of conventional wisdom. I have often heard it said around here, “Why not? Why can’t we do that?” We have a good foundation from which to confront our fears and anxieties. And when we ease on down the road together, no matter what we encounter, our love will be just that much stronger, and our witness to others that much greater. The Sabbath was, after all, about freedom from bondage. Let’s be free, free to love unconditionally, and free to empower one another to live beyond our expectations, and to be whomever God’s spirit inspires us to be.