Weedy Wheat and Wheaty Weeds

Matthew 13:16-30; 36-43

July 20, 2014

Our need for certainty is insatiable.  Human beings.  All of us.  We have such a deep-seeded need for certainty.  We want to know what is right and wrong, good and bad.  We want to know we are doing the right thing, making the right decision.  We really want to know that we are a good person.  We want to know who the bad people are. 

I’m painfully aware of this in the realm of parenting.  I think in our best moments we can all agree that it is not always clear what the best way to parent is.  There’s a lot of grey area…a lot depends on the child, the personalities of the parents, the context.  All too often, we know, there is no perfect way – no perfect choice or perfect path.  

But Oh Boy!  Just spend a little time on the internet reading interactions between parents who are sure they have it right, and are sure you are ruining your child if you are doing it wrong.  It’s ugly.  We can’t stand complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty – especially when it’s something as important as parenting.  It almost feels like the less clear something is, the more clarity we claim.

Well, in this parable we do have some clarity – at least at the beginning and end.  At the beginning we know that the farmer plants only good seeds and an enemy brings the bad ones.  At the end we know the reapers sort out the good wheat from the bad weeds, putting the wheat safely in the barn and burning the weeds up entirely.

And Matthew, human that he is, gives us a “clear” understanding of what that all means.

Jesus is the farmer – he’s pretty clearly good.  The good seed are the good people.  The enemy is the devil.  The weeds are the bad people.  And at the end of time, when Jesus comes again, the angels will sort out the good from the bad – leaving the good people safely in the world and the bad people burning while being forced to listen to weeping and gnashing of teeth on their i-pods.  That’s pretty straightforward.  Pretty black and white.

But notice:  these things – these really clear things – are out of our control…in Matthew’s thinking anyway.  These are things that basically happen outside the human realm, at the beginning of time and at the end of time.  He says that the evil one introduced the weeds – whoever the evil one is. There’s nothing we can do about this.  Good seeds didn’t make bad choices, thus turning into weeds. 

And the future, when wheat and weeds will be sorted out, is also outside our control.  Matthew and his community believed Jesus was coming again.  The author believed he was coming soon, to judge between the good and the bad.  But he also knew that there was nothing people could do to affect that coming – to hasten it.  It would happen when it happened.  And only when Jesus returned would things be once again clear.

In the meantime….in the meantime.  The question for Matthew was always about the meantime.  Matthew and his community thought Jesus should have come by now, and so they were stuck in this odd time – stuck trying to figure out the messy world in which they lived.  And this parable, for Matthew, is a meantime parable.  

Jesus’ parable turns on the weeds that appear in the good field of wheat.  The workers are distressed by this, and want to take care of the problem immediately by pulling them out and getting rid of them.  What the wise farmer knows is that this particular weed that is popping up among the crop looks an awful lot like wheat.  You can’t know for sure, and, as he tells the workers, “In gathering the weeds, you would uproot the wheat along with them”.  The time when you can’t tell the difference between the good and the bad is muddled; and the muddled middle is exactly where the author found himself.

While there might be a time in some future end times when all will become clear, the farmer is telling us we can’t really tell the difference, so sometimes it’s best to just not do anything at all.

We can’t control whether there is evil in the world, and we can’t force Jesus to come again to reveal all truth.  In the meantime, we are where we are – weeds and wheat tangled together, sometimes indistinguishable from one another.  It is, for Matthew, the state of humanity…the state of the world.  We have wheat and weeds, and we can’t always tell the difference.  Or, more accurately I would argue, they are both both.  In other words, wheat can at times have the properties of weeds, and weeds can have the properties of wheat.  What we have is weedy wheat and wheaty weeds.  That’s why you can’t pull out one without pulling out the other.

In the meantime, between the origins of the universe and the end of time, clarity disappears.  And humans…well, we don’t like that.  In fact there is a great irony in this passage – one the author did not intend.  It actually makes me smile and wish that I could be friends with the author of Matthew.  In this great parable about clarity being unavailable to us most of the time, Matthew provides a neat, tidy, clear interpretation of the parable for his readers. 

You see, the explanation Jesus gives the disciples is, we can pretty well determine, not really Jesus’ explanation.  It’s the author’s.  Parables, Jesus has already assured his disciples, are not meant to be clear…they are meant to confound – to be hard to figure out.  But Matthew can’t resist taking a parable and making a perfect one-to-one analogy.  Field = world.  Farmer = Jesus.  Reapers = angels. Etc.

And I, of course, stand before you as living irony as well.  It’s why I want to be Matthew’s friend.  I can’t help but try and figure out what this means.  I can’t help but try and figure out what the whole bible means.  This parable sends us down a little bit of a rabbit hole that way.  And in doing so, it proves its own point.  In trying to find a definitive meaning, we’ve already missed it.  But, this is a rabbit hole I just can stomach going down…I suspect that might have something to do with my job J. 

We don’t like ambiguity.  In fact, often we try to pretend it’s not true.  We happily pull things out of the ground we are sure are weeds…even when we can’t tell the difference…and willfully ignore all the wheat we’re pulling out in the process.  Just ask Gail Greenwald how hard it is to tell a weed from a valuable plant.  She’s working on the landscaping at the library, and it turns out there can really be quite a few different opinions about what actually constitutes a weed.

We just don’t have to look far for examples of this rooting out the weeds problem.  There’s plenty of hatred in this world, and hatred itself is predicated on the idea that I am good and you are bad.  I’m talking about hatred…real hatred.  Not just disliking someone, but Israeli – Palestinian hatred.  ISIS – US hatred.  Each believes they have a claim to the truth – to the moral high ground.  And so each seeks the complete destruction of the other.

We can see this in ourselves as well.  We try to get clarity about ourselves, and in doing so we oversimplify the complex human beings we are.  We try to figure out what in us is good and what is bad.  And we try to slice out all the bad stuff.  But often we find that in slicing out what we think is bad, we lose some of what makes us human…what makes us who we are and what we are meant to be.  Anger must be bad, right – so we repress any inkling of anger we feel, and in the process, out goes anger at injustice; out goes the passion to address injustices in our world. 

Some of the best things about us as individuals can become our great downfall.  And some of those things we think are so ugly, and we hide them out of shame, are revealed later to be the leaven of compassion and creativity.  That muddled mix of weedy wheat and wheaty weeds, that whole mix is what makes us who we are.    And maybe this parable is telling us we shouldn’t work so hard to be something we’re not.

In fact, the parable indicates that, at least sometimes, we should do nothing.  This is not our strong suit either.  We are fixers…even when there is really, truly, no solution, we try to fix anyway – often making things worse. 

Now, this passage is but one in a giant collection of passages we call our scriptures.  This parable doesn’t answer all questions.  It is cautionary, but not absolute.  We know the gospel message is not “Oh, the world is so complex so just throw up your hands, sit back on the couch and relax.”  We do have to act in the midst of the complexity.  For one thing, we know that inaction is often itself action – an affirmation of the status quo.  We do have to seek justice, love others, embrace the enemy.  What those look like will never be as clear as we would like it to be, but we are called to this nonetheless – and sometimes that does mean action. 

But we are cautioned here that action is not always the best thing.

In the context of our complex world, here are my take aways from this parable.  First, it’s a “take a breath” parable.  When you think someone is not parenting correctly and needs to be told so, take a breath.  We do need to make decisions.  We do, at times, need to call people out and name the truth of injustice.  We certainly need to stop abuse when it’s happening.  But each time, when we think we’ve got it right, and we’re ready to take action, we should take a breath – probably a couple of breaths – and wonder if maybe this is one of those times when the best action is no action at all.

Was Sadaam Hussain bad?  Yes.  Was he horrific?  Yes.  Would people be better off without him?  Yes.  He was pretty clearly a weed.  And we thought we knew exactly how to pull him up in order to let the wheat thrive.  But we didn’t stop to breathe.  We didn’t stop to ask ourselves if our method of extraction would take down a heck of a lot of wheat with the weed.  We didn’t stop to ask ourselves about the complexities – was there anything good about him or his rule that would be lost in the slash and burn?  We knew right from wrong…and he was wrong.  So we started yanking up the weeds, and now the field is full of carnage. 

Second, I think this is a parable about humility.  It’s a reminder that we ourselves are rarely all wheat or all weed.  And in that lies the all-too-important reminder that everyone is a glorious mix of wheat and weed. 

That national discussion about the kids at the border seems to turn on figuring out whether they are wheat or weeds.  Either the kids are completely innocent victims, or they are conniving, scheming foreigners who know just the right thing to say to game the system.  We need them to be all one or the other so that we can be perfectly clear on what the right solution is.  But that kind of thinking tends to lead to the wrong solution…or at least one that lacks the nuance the situation demands.

Weedy wheat and wheaty weeds.  It’s hard to tell the difference – at least in the world as it stands now.  Matthew tries to offer clarity even as he struggles with how to live in a world of ambiguity.  We look for clarity where there is none.  So, we take a breath.  We resist the temptation to always try to fix things that can’t be fixed.  And when we do act, we do so with some combination of courage, conviction and humility.  We make our best guess remembering the wisdom of the farmer; In gathering the weeds we might uproot the wheat as well.  So when we head out to farm the fields of the world we need to weed very, very carefully.  Amen.

Good News…For the Poor

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

July 13, 2014

I have some good news and some bad news.  I’ll start with the bad news:  The bad new is, there is no good news.  Those who would like to leave are welcome to go have a nice brunch. 

You see, the thing is, if we take the parable today seriously at all, it looks like about 75% of us don’t understand what God is saying to us.  And depending on who the “us” is, there’s a chance that the 25% are all outside these walls.

In the parable of the sower, the seed that the sower scatters, Jesus tells the disciples, is the word of the realm of God.  That’s kind of an odd turn of phrase I know, but it’s really saying the seed is the truth…the truth about the realm of God; what it is, who is there, and how it works.  It is the truth about what God intends for this world.

And the parable says that word – that truth – is scattered about generously.  But, most people won’t get it.  Most people.

I certainly have to admit that I can quickly come up with ways I identify with the first three types of land in the parable.  Times I have been like the path and not listened to the word at all – “Love your enemy?”  I’m sorry, I didn’t have my hearing aid turned up.  Times I have been rocky and only listened to the stuff I could handle, but when things challenged my faith, I let it go in one ear and out the other.  “The Lord is my shepherd?”  Then why haven’t you led us out of this broken mess we call war.  And, like the weedy soil, there are many comforts in my life that choke out the truth of the gospel message:  “Sell all you have and give it to the poor.”  Um, no thanks.  I’m pretty happy with my wealth and security, thank you very much. 

I have been all of them at one time or another.  I’m guessing you all can resonate with one or two of these as well.  We’re all arid, rocky, or weedy at some point. 

Now, this is the part where I’m supposed to talk about how we can become the good soil, right?  Three steps to weeding the soil of your heart.  For those of you who are out there wishing that just once in nine years it would be nice to have a sermon with three steps to anything, your waiting days are not over. 

I’m not sure there are three steps, or thirty-three steps, that will move us from where we are to being the soil that, planted with God’s word, will bring forth fruit that yields 100-fold.  I’m not sure Jesus did either.  In the verses that we skipped over, he pretty much writes off the people who just don’t get it.  This parable is not about helping people like you and me change – it’s merely describing what we are like.  Jesus only explains it to the disciples.  The rest of us are left wondering what in the world he was talking about.  In fact – again in the part we skipped – Jesus says he speaks in parables so that most people won’t understand.  So, like I said, kind of bad news – at least for the 75%.

I have to admit, when something in the bible seems to me, at first glance, like bad news, my habit is to fall back on my belief that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is, by definition, good news…always, no matter what.  That’s the whole point, right.  In fact, it’s my job:  proclaim the good news!  So even if it’s not immediately apparent, when a passage seems a bit hopeless to me, I think and think, study and study until I find something in the passage…some kind of good news that will speak to us all. 

But maybe I need a new habit.  I still need to look for good news, but maybe the question needs to be:  what is the good news in this passage…for the poor; for the vulnerable; for the oppressed? 

We’re talking about God’s word after all, Yahweh…the God of the enslaved Hebrew people, the God of the prophets who cried out for justice, the God who came as a poor man.  Our God is prejudice.  We don’t like to think of that, but if you read the scriptures – Hebrew bible and Christian scriptures both – this God is constantly, primarily concerned with the poor and oppressed.  Even when God is concerned with the folks of relative status and wealth, it’s because they have power over the poor and oppressed and need to learn how to treat them right.   

And then there’s Jesus – God incarnate.  Jesus makes it painfully clear what God’s word is and who it is for:

Jesus came to preach Good News to the poor.  He came to proclaim the kingdom, or realm, of God for those most in need.  It doesn’t say that Jesus came to preach good news to the poor, restore sight to the blind, release the captives, and ensure wealth and prosperity for those who work hard.

In other words he, his life, brings the word of the realm of God, but that word will only sound good to the poor, the blind, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the despised and outcast – because God’s realm will be incredible for them.

If I believe this at all – that Jesus came for the poor and vulnerable – I have to at least entertain the question of whether I, privileged…safe…secure, can ever be the good soil.  Can I, oppressor…consumer…wealthy, ever be the good soil?  Can I really take in the word of God - truth about the realm of God – and not distort it in some way in order to protect who I am and what I have?  In the realm of God, I have everything to lose.

We hold the bible dearly.  And we should.  If we have chosen to seek a life that reflects God as known in the life of Jesus, then we need the bible.  Desperately.  We need to read it, study it, probably commit the whole stinking thing to memory. 

But sometimes we hold it dearly only because of what it can do for us…for how it speaks to us.  We hold it dearly because it gives us comfort, or shows us what to do when we’re confused, or touches us with its beautiful poetry.  But the truth is, it is not always speaking equally to everyone.  Jesus has different audiences and he doesn’t say the same thing to everyone.  The one thing we know for sure is that when he is speaking about good news, he is speaking to the poor.

Every so often, we have to stop and remember that the authors of our gospels were not writing to the Romans about how to be a Christian.  They were writing to the early church community:  small, scared, oppressed.  If the gospel writers had any message for Rome at all it was not:  Here’s how to become a Christian.  It was:  Our God desires all power like yours to cease.  This was not good news for the Romans. 

And every so often, we have to stop and remember that, for the most part, most of the time, we are probably the Romans.  Sometimes the good news God has for the poor is not such great news for us.

Of course obviously I’m over simplifying.  Sometimes we are the hurting ones, the suffering ones, the outcasts, the ones who can identify with those Jesus healed, ate with, fed, and protected.  Being in this church does not mean we aren’t or never will be poor.  Being in the United States does not protect us from oppression or grief, illness or death.  I know what many of you have been through, and wealth, freedom, health are not words I would use to describe some of those experiences.

But I think that this parable is a chance for us to admit that, as a group – from a bird’s eye point of view, the highest likelihood is that we are not the good soil.  That we cannot be the good soil. 

Now, old habits die hard.  The tape that plays over and over in my head – that tells me all are loved, all are invited to be part of God’s realm, grace is a gift for all of humanity – really can’t be shut off, and I hope it never does.  So, I did try to ask what the good news is for us in this.

And I wonder if maybe the answer lies in making a shift from figuring out what kind of soil we are to wondering if we can be seeds.  That probably sounds arrogant: how can I go from saying we are not the target audience of Jesus, to claiming we are capable of being the very word of God?  Well, to start with I have, once or twice been accused of being arrogant. 

But the thing is we are who we are...this is where we start…and we do have some choices.  If we want any part in this endeavor of bringing about the realm of God – of making the field produce abundant harvest for everyone – then we have to jump in somewhere – otherwise we might as well just give up.

Jesus, our faith tradition asserts, is the living word of God – and he calls the disciples to follow his way.  To live as he does in order to scatter that word…to take the good news to the poor.  So, maybe we can jump in as would-be disciples and try to become not the good soil, at least at first, but the seed itself.  And there are three steps to becoming a seed.  Just kidding.

Though there probably is a necessary first step:  accepting the bad news that comes with becoming a seed.  The world Jesus imagines reverses everything – top becomes bottom, bottom becomes top.  So if we’re at the top, we need to hop on the escalator and go down a few floors. 

Now if we’re going to be seeds, we have to get a couple of things clear:  The word of God is not just a bunch empty feel-good words.  And we’re not talking about scattering ourselves around the world to go save the souls of the poor with God’s word.  No.  God’s word, as the author of Matthew points out, is the word of the realm of God.  It is the word that the last will be first, the powerful will become least, and peace is won through nonviolence.  It is that God, in Jesus, is bringing a revolution that will turn the current systems, values, and assumptions on their head.

And we know that revolution isn’t finished…at least not everywhere.  So, if Jesus is the one who shows us what the realm of God looks like – who shows us how to live so that it might be real – then we do need to become messengers of that revolution.  Our lives, by how we live and what values we espouse, need to speak the ideals of the realm of God.

So really, I lied before.  There is good news…it’s just not necessarily for us – at least as we might think of it.  We should see the good news of God not as a personal letter delivered to our doorstep telling us everything will be okay, but as the possibility of an entirely new world, regardless of what that new world requires of us; regardless of how our lives will be changed in the new order of things…in God’s order of things. 

But if we have to sacrifice, if it might be bad/unsettling news for us, why would we do it?  Because this world is broken.  War is seen as an acceptable route to peace.  Poverty and hunger kill every day.  Children are amassed at the border seeking a better life and unlikely to get it.  And our hearts break.  I know you all – I’ve seen it….your hearts break.  We are people whose hearts are stamped with the image of the divine…our hearts break because the very heart of the divine breaks.  And we know that this all isn’t just about us.  It’s about becoming a part of something so much larger than ourselves – becoming a part of the divine movement toward wholeness. 

If we can desire that new world as much as God does, I think we can be seeds.  I think we can give over our comforts, our wealth, our fears, our privilege in service of creating a new world – creating the realm of God.  And that’s good news…for the poor.  In fact, that’s good news… for all of creation.  Amen.

Walking Sabbath

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

July 6, 2014

“Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”  These are beautiful words.  I say them at the beginning of funeral services because they are comforting words, and they point to a part of our faith that says God yearns for us to be comforted, draws us into rest when we are weary from grief. 

This is the God who cares – is interested in our lives and our wholeness.  This is the God that would release us from all our burdens:  Grief, illness, addiction, fear, anxiety…all of us have felt weary at times, and we can affirm that God is with us in that and offers us rest through tender love and generous grace, as we see those in the life of Jesus.  So these are, I believe, beautiful words that can touch us personally.

They are also political words.  When we hear this passage out of its context, it may be helpful for us in difficult times, but it is disconnected from at least a part of the author’s original intent.  These are very specific weary people Jesus is talking about, with a very specific burden. 

We have to remember who is listening as Jesus speaks these words – which we know, because in verse one of this chapter, Matthew writes, “When Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and proclaim his message in their cities.”  And then in verse seven Matthew writes, “Jesus began to speak to the crowds.”  Jesus is speaking to crowds – to people in cities.  And he is not just speaking words of comfort.

“To what shall I compare this generation?”  While our passage ends in comforting words, it begins with Jesus asking this question.  It’s our clue that there are two distinct groups of people in these crowds.  Our lectionary skips a bunch of verses, I assume to spare Susan from having to pronounce hard city names like “Chorazin.”  But we learn something very important in these skipped verses…Jesus is upset with these cities. 

“Woe to you!” He says.  He condemns them.  Now, he condemns them as cities, not as a bunch of individuals – much like we would condemn China for human rights violations.  He’s not upset with every inhabitant of the city; these words of woe are for the people responsible for the governance, the powerful ones – the city’s systems and laws are the problem.  That’s one group listening.

When Jesus is inviting the weary to come to him, it is a different audience, and he offers them his yoke:  “Take my yoke upon you…for my yoke is easy,” he says.  The “yoke” was commonly understood at that time to be the Jewish laws of the Torah.  It did not necessarily have a negative connotation – the yoke in and of itself: the law was good…given by God.  But when spoken of as a burden, the yoke – the law – was distorted.  It meant oppression under the law. 

When Jesus derides the cities, he is saying that though they claim to be following the laws of God, the way they are doing so has perpetuated oppression and suffering.  Moreover, he tells them, when he came to their cities and freed people from this oppression and suffering by healing, restoring, and offering a way free of obligation to Rome, the powerful ones did not accept him.  Jesus is taking on the current day practices of the religious authorities…and hitting them at the heart of what they believe – hitting them at the heart of their way of life and way of governance:  their laws.

And in this passage, he takes on one law in particular:  The Sabbath.  Now, we don’t think of the Sabbath as political, but for Jesus it most certainly was.

Come to me….and I will give you rest.  “Rest” is not a minor concept in Jesus’ religion.  It is core – it is core to the very foundation of the universe.  It is at the heart of creation.  It is a part of God…rest is divine.  Genesis 2:2:  “And on the seventh day God finished the work… and rested…”  Rest is built into the rhythm and fabric of creation.  It has a purpose:  Creation and all its creatures need Sabbath in order to be all that God intends us to be.

The commandment that gets the most ink of the 10 commandments is the 4^th – Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.  The other commandments are captured in one verse and read like a list.  The Sabbath commandment goes on for three long verses.  These verses spell out what the Sabbath means.  It is not about resting in the lay-on-the couch and watch TV sense. 

“You shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.”  Sabbath is a systemic concept…and the whole point of Sabbath is rest for the ones who are burdened by the systems of labor:  Sons and daughters, slaves, livestock, aliens.  These are the ones who are exploited and cannot themselves rest without being granted rest by those in charge of them.  And knowing human nature, God grants them rest by making it a law.

The law of Sabbath, from the moment of creation when God rested on the seventh day, is about giving rest to the burdened – whether that is those who toil in the fields, creation which suffers from overuse, or people who live in long term poverty.  Having one day a week when everyone rests means EVERYONE rests.  The people in the fields can only rest if the owner of the fields observes Sabbath.  Just like the people in the factory can only rest if the factory shuts down for a day. 

Sabbath laws in the Old Testament also meant a Sabbath year when the land was allowed to rest – it was to be left fallow.  “Do not overuse the land,” God says.  And then there was a Sabbath concept of Jubilee:  Every 49 years all debts were to forgiven, all fields returned to their original owners.  It was an antidote to long-term, generational poverty, and systems of slavery. – of course, it was also a bit of an inconvenience to those to whom others were indebted. 

In other words, the practice of Sabbath is about as political as it gets, because if you think about it, it is not a law meant to protect everyone – it’s meant to protect some people from those in power.  It is a law for the poor and vulnerable.  But the religious authorities had twisted it so much, that not only did it not protect the vulnerable, it had become a burden on them when they could afford no more burdens.

The author of the gospel gives perfect examples of what Jesus meant when he talked about rest for the weary – when he talked about his yoke - the law of Sabbath.  The next two stories  - that come right after our verses – are Sabbath stories. 

In the first, the disciples are hungry.  Though it is illegal to gather any grain on the Sabbath, they began to do so.  The Pharisees were angry and accused Jesus of violating the Sabbath laws.  But of course, being hungry is not a Sabbath experience.  The day of the week was not the point – Jesus gave Sabbath to those who needed it, whenever they needed it. 

In the next story, he cured a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath.  It is not lawful to cure on the Sabbath, the Pharisees told him.  Jesus disagrees.  What good are Sabbath laws if people have suffered without a rest for years.  To deny them rest, finally, in the name of God is a complete distortion of the law.

I think in offering his words of comfort, Jesus is offering himself as the walking Sabbath.  As he walks throughout the countryside, he heals, feeds, loves, releases people from pain and suffering.  He is the walking Sabbath for those the law failed to protect.  That is Jesus’ yoke.  And that is why it is light and gives rest.  He embraces the law, fully.  Sabbath is essential to God’s kingdom.  But his understanding of Sabbath provides rest for those most burdened.  For the oppressed, ostracized, hungry. 

The whole Jewish system of laws – of commandments given by God – are meant to protect those God most favored…the same ones Jesus most favored:  The vulnerable ones.  If, in the practice of those laws, the vulnerable are being hurt, then the law – the yoke – has become a burden, not a gift from God. 

We, of course, face this reality all the time.  All of us grab on to the laws of our country – to the constitution and the thousands and thousands of laws out there – and try to wring out of them every advantage for ourselves that we can.  My right to pursue happiness is twisted into laws that protect my fortune against the needs of others.  My right to make money is twisted into the right to rig the system so that wealth can grow for some even when it comes at the expense of others. 

My right to freedom is twisted into foreign policy that allows us to kill others in the name of our own freedom. Think about where we find ourselves now in Iraq.  We entered into a war in the name of protecting our “freedom,” and not only did it kill many people, it has now become a yoke so heavy we can’t get out of the cycle of violence there.  We feel obligated to use violence to curb violence.  No one is free in that.  We are slaves to the idea that peace can be achieved through violence.  Peace and freedom are good, but our understanding of them has become a burden to us and the world.

Our laws become supports for those who make profits their gods, and require endless, cheap labor from people who are at their mercy.  We call it “free markets” and don’t intervene in the name of that beautiful concept of freedom, even when free markets means anything but freedom for those at the bottom.  Even our understanding of Sabbath, which is a far cry from the Jewish understanding, is a twisted picture of what religion is meant to be.  Sabbath has become an optional goal for those who can afford leisure.  Which means if the powerful opt out in the name of increased productivity, Sabbath is not an option for anyone who works for them.

Jesus invites us to a different way…a way where the spirit of the law is embodied in our actions and systems.  Maybe it’s inevitable that laws will always be turned into protections for the powerful, even if those laws look good on the books.  So, maybe Jesus invites us to become the living law…the law of God that finds fruition in a relentless pursuit of justice and rest for the vulnerable. 

What would it mean for us to take seriously the fourth commandment – for us to become walking Sabbath?  Who are the ones who can’t find rest – who suffer under the weight of the wonderful laws of the greatest country in the world? What does “freedom” really mean when looked at through the lens of Jesus’ understanding of the law?  Who needs to be freed, and from what? 

I love the idea of Sabbath – I love the idea of finding harmony with a creation that has the rhythm of work and rest built into it.  A collective breath for all of creation once a week.  A massive restoration of the land and air after seven years of production.  A cancellation of all debts once every generation.  Think of the freedom that would give.  Think of the hope that might offer.  Think of the healing and health we might find.  And think of the justice – justice for those most in need of breaths, restoration, and relief of debt.  That’s not too bad of a law.  Amen.