Dr. Dale Miller, January 21, 2007

Rules: Kept, Broken and Divine

Luke 4:14-30

When I was a child I remember playing "soldier" with my father's sergeant's cap from World War II. I don't ever remember him talking about the War. Decades later my father started writing down memories from his past. In the beginning the stories were about his childhood and his family. During this last Christmas he concluded his writings with several chapters on his experiences with the 78th Lightning Division of the United States Army. All of the stories I had missed in childhood were now down in black and white for all of posterity.

One of his stories is about how he came to be wounded. Dad was a part of a mortar company. Enemy mortar fire chased his outfit to the safety of a nearby house. Even as a part of a mortar company there was one very important rule that soldiers in the infantry needed to obey. Never abandon your rifle. Seeking safety, dad managed to forget his rifle.

In his words, "As soon as I got to the house I realized that I had left the carbine on the hillside. I ran out to get it, got it, and started back. The next thing I knew I was on the ground and was trying to get up but couldn't make it. My buddies ran out to get me and brought me back to the house. The medic was right there and that shot of morphine he gave me helped to ease the pain." In other words, in trying to retrieve his rifle he was wounded. He obeyed the rules of war and was wounded as a consequence.

Sometimes rules do that to us. They help us. They hurt us. They get us through life. They get in our way of living. This may seem odd to hear. After all, doesn't following Jesus mean that we obey God and try to live a life that gives us a sense of direction and meaning?

Jesus went to the synagogue in Nazareth, the synagogue in his hometown. It was his time to speak. He was given the scroll from which to read, and he stood up to read. This was a matter of respect. Then, having read from Isaiah, Jesus gave the scroll to the attendant and Jesus sat down to speak. He had read from the Holy Scripture and now, when he is going to discuss it and give his understanding of it, he sits down. The action of sitting down to declare with authority what the scripture meant is the origin of the phrase, "the seat of authority."

Our Saturday morning Men's Study Group is reading Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis. In his discussion on rabbis, Bell writes: "The ancient rabbis understood that the Bible is open-ended and has to be interpreted. And they understood that their role in the community was to study and meditate and discuss and pray and then make those decisions. Rabbis are like interpreters, helping people understand what God is saying to them through the text and what it means to live out the text."

"A rabbi would essentially put actions in two categories: things the rabbi permitted and things the rabbi forbade. The rabbi was driven by a desire to get as close as possible to what God originally intended in the command at hand. Different rabbis had different sets of rules, which were really different lists of what they forbade and what they permitted."

"Rabbis would spend hours discussing with their students what it meant to live out a certain text. If a student made a suggestion about what a certain text meant and the rabbi thought the student had totally missed the point, the rabbi would say, "You have abolished the Torah," which meant that in the rabbi's opinion, the student wasn't anywhere near what God wanted. But if the student got it right, if the rabbi thought the student had grasped God's intention in the text, the rabbi would say, "You have fulfilled Torah."

"Notice what Jesus says in one of his first messages: 'I have not come to abolish [the Torah] but to fulfill [it].' He was essentially saying, 'I didn't come to do away with the words of God [the rules]; I came to show people what the rules look like when the Torah is lived out perfectly. I'm here to put flesh and blood on the words.'"

Jesus took the words of the Torah and proclaimed, "Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your own hearing." Across the centuries, we have read Isaiah and heard the statement that God will give us a leader at a certain time. And that leader is going to proclaim the good news to the poor, proclaim the release of the captives, the recovering of the sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and this is going to happen now. It is not in the past; it is not in the future. It is now.

Life is like that. It does not mean that now is the only time that is important. But if we wait for something to happen, we will probably miss it. And if we try to go and find what has taken place, we probably cannot discover it. So, this is the year of the Lord, yet one thing we are inclined to do in religion is decide God acted long ago. God created the heavens and the earth. We talk about it as if it is only in the past tense. Isn't the creative process still going on? We speak of a biblical time as if God were closer to humanity at the time of the disciples or Jesus or the Old Testament prophets. The Bible is canonized as if we had never heard from God since.

That is the way we often see history. It is not the way God is. We glorify history that we admire, and we are filled with anxiety for a future that frightens us. God, however, is in the present, surrounding us with the mystery and wonder of life.

Now when Jesus said, "It is fulfilled today," the people thought, "Wait a minute, he's Joe's kid. He grew up here. He's one of us. Who does he think he is? With all of our problems, how in the world can this man solve them? And he is telling us that he is the one."

Jesus angered his hearers as he told them they weren't the only ones God cared about. He was going elsewhere, to persons of others nations, so everyone could be included in God's love. The Israelites wanted a military leader who was going to deliver their nation from Roman captivity. Instead they were confronted with a revolutionary leader who was there to offer a life of faith propelled by self-giving love.

Our faith life is not contingent upon who wins and who loses. There is a unity of faith, a wholeness of life, to be gained from following this man from Nazareth.

Several years ago I ran across this story about heaven. "Every morning," so the parable went, "St. Peter found in heaven a horde of undesirable aliens, whom he was certain he had never admitted at the regular hours. Some had never been baptized, some were ignorant of the Bible, and many were soiled and damaged souls who really had no right in the celestial precincts. He decided to discover just how this leakage occurred. So in the darkness he prowled about the ramparts of Heaven."

"At last he discovered a dark corner where a few stones had been removed from the wall. A crowd was stealthily creeping in. He rushed at them with indignation, but was amazed to find the Savior there, helping some of the cripples over the wall. 'I am sorry, Peter,' the Lord said, 'I know it is against the rules. These poor souls are not all they should be. Some were never baptized. Some of them are not quite orthodox in their opinions of me. And all of them are miserable sinners. But they are my special friends and I want them here.'" (Originally told by Halford Luccock, "Riffraff," The Christian Century, 1955.)

When I was a junior in high school I entered a local oratory contest sponsored by The Optimist Club. In that brief speech I used a poem that was introduced to me by my mother. The poet is Edwin Markham.

He drew a circle that shut me out -
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.

Jesus was just beginning his life's work, but with his first sermon he drew a circle of love that took everyone into God's grace. There has been a long sad list of do's and don'ts that has beset the church in every age. Jesus made himself the rule and challenged us to live by faith.

Charlie Brown of Peanuts fame sits under a tree with Peppermint Pattie. She asks: "Do you know any good rules for living, Chuck?" Charlie proceeds to answer her question: "Keep the ball low; don't leave your crayons in the sun; use dental floss every day; don't spill the shoe polish. Always knock before entering; don't let the ants get in the sugar; always get your first serve in." Pattie is mystified. "Will those rules give me a better life, Charlie?"

What we learn from Jesus is that there are rules and there are rules. There are a great many laws that will not give us a better life. And there are laws, which we can ignore only at our own peril. The rules Jesus focused on cut through the maze of regulatory confusion and said: "Love God - love your neighbor." And so, from the beginning in Nazareth we have as clear an understanding of the importance of law as we find in the Scriptures. Jesus himself is the law. The rules we follow are personal and relational. Rules were never designed to put chains on God's people. Rules were to set us free.

• The rule of Christ frees us to care for the poor. Our question is not: What about my benefit? Our question is: What is good for all? The circle of love is enlarged by love of Christ; the poor are always included.

• The rule of Christ frees us to heal the brokenhearted. This was different from the old rules where a child who cursed a parent could be put to death (Lev. 20.9). These rules had to be broken into pieces so that the new law of love could reach out to whatever hurts and tears there were.

• The rule of Christ frees us to proclaim release to the captives and a setting free of all that are oppressed. Here is a word for captives of culture and the oppressed in every age. It is a word for people who feel chained down by everyday life. In whatever ways we can, we free the chains of broken spirits and broken hearts.

• The rule of Christ frees us to share sight with the blind. Jesus said that the gospel task is to help people see clearly. Annie Dillard calls this "exploring the neighborhood." For the lens through which we view life determines what we see.

• The rule of Christ declares that the year of the Lord's favor is open to all. None are left out. All are included. Jesus does not deal with the petty and nonessentials of life; he deals with the essence of the fabric of our being.

What does all this mean? The little boy was right. "There are ten kids in our family and one bathroom. You gotta have rules." But we are to be careful of the rules we follow. We must distinguish between the laws that hurt and the laws that help.

We are all born with the limitations of life. We are also born in the image of God, with the smallest spark of the divine in us, a spark that may be fanned into an incredible flame. We are born to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.

That day in Nazareth Jesus pointed the way. We see it operate every day of his life. There is a law, a fulfilled law, and a divine law - Jesus Christ - that really can change our lives. God help us to rule out everything that doesn't lead us into a life of grace and joy. God help us to follow the genuine ruler of our lives, Jesus Christ.