Playing By the Rules

Proper 18C, Deut. 30:15-20; Luke 14:25-33; St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC 9/8/2019

Jim Melnyk: “Playing by the Rules”

The story is told about a group of children playing the age-old game of hide and seek. Most of us have probably played the game, either as children or with our children. Perhaps we’ve played the game with others who don’t believe in playing by the rules. At least that’s the case in this story.

            It was Chris’ turn to be it and the rest of the children scatter. Imagine everyone playing by the rules except for Chris’ best friend Jesse. After a while Jesse was the last one out. Chris looks, and looks – but with no success. Imagine the frustration when Chris returns to the big tree that is home base and finds Jesse sitting back against the tree and grinning from ear to ear.

            Jesse claims victory, but Chris isn’t ready to concede defeat. “Where were you hiding?” asks Chris. “Under the porch,” Jesse responds. “I looked there.” “Well, Dad called me in for a snack, so I went in for a couple of cookies and some milk. But I came back out.” “But you weren’t supposed to go inside. That’s against the rules and it’s cheating.” Jesse responds, “Dad called, so I had to go inside. That makes it fair.” Finally Chris shouts at his friend, “I might not know everything – but I do know the rules!”

            Rules. Where would we be without them? Can anything be more frustrating and paralyzing than rules? Humanity has a love/hate relationship with rules. Our society has rules – laws. Our nation and our Church both have constitutions and laws. We appreciate them when they help, and denigrate them when they chafe.

            From the very beginning our faith tradition has had rules. The Book of Deuteronomy, from which we read earlier this morning, is devoted to the teachings and the commandments from God to God’s people. As The Rev. Dr. Lorraine Ljunggren writes, “These commandments, or rules, help us distinguish between good and evil. They help us decide between right and wrong in our relationships with God and with one another. They are rules given by God as a gift of love to God’s people. They are intended by God to encourage and empower us to love God and love one another so that the divisions which so often come between do not, in the end, destroy us.” In the end, commandments are about more than rules. Commandments are about relationships – about how we relate to one another in compassionate and respectful ways – and about how we relate to God. Keeping the commandments of God is about how we respond in love to God’s love for us.
           To the author of Deuteronomy, loving God means acting loyally toward God and honoring the commitments of the covenant by choosing good. The same can be argued for the Apostle Paul, who, in writing his letter to Philemon, Apphia, and Archippus, reminds his readers that we are bound in Christ to treat one another with grace – being faithful, loyal, followers of Christ, and choosing good in our daily lives. Paul points out that even the one-time slave Onesimus is to be treated by Philemon as if Philemon was actually receiving Paul. Onesimus is to be treated as a brother in Christ – no longer as a slave.

            Concerning the choices between good and evil, Cold War Soviet Dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “It [has gradually become] clear to me that the line dividing good and evil does not run between states, classes, or parties. It runs through every human heart.”[1] Solzhenitsyn’s insight concerning the human heart gives understanding to the words attributed to Moses in today’s reading from Deuteronomy. “See I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…. Choose life so that your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying the Divine, and holding fast to the Holy One….”

            If Moses and Solzhenitsyn are both right, then God has given us hearts which can, with God’s help, choose life. These are then words which challenge each of us to action; words which name our responsibility toward one another as children of God. They are also words which challenge us, as a corporate body, to choose life for all of God’s creation, not just for our own selves. This is as timely a challenge today as it was in the first century – perhaps even more so when we face the ultimate challenges of climate change and the dangerous environmental path we tread today – or the struggles society seems to have with treating every human being with dignity and respect.

You see, like a kid’s game of hide and seek, just knowing the rules isn’t enough – it’s what we do with that knowledge – it’s how we live or don’t live with that knowledge – that makes a difference. Our knowledge of what it means to live in faithful relationship with God must be applied to our own lives, and to all the interactions we have with the whole of creation – meaning our relationships with the land, the sea, the air, and every living creature – including the whole of humanity.

            So apparently we get to choose. Moses tells us to choose life over death. Paul tells us to choose freedom for others over slavery. Jesus tells us to choose good – to choose God – and to count the cost when it places us in opposition to those whom we love but who stand in opposition to the dream of God for all creation.

            One of the greatest challenges facing Christians today – and throughout our long history for that matter – is an obsession with heaven and the next life instead of how we live out our faith in this life. In fact, Christians throughout history have used that obsession with heaven as a way of keeping people in line – people like the slave Onesimus in today’s epistle, and those who were made slaves in our nation’s past; people who live in poverty or those in this age who do all our menial work none of us want to do ourselves; people who have no voice or have no power. We tell them to take heart – there will be justice and equality for all someday in the great by-and-by. Meanwhile, don’t rock the boat. Don’t push too hard. Be content with your place in this life and God will reward you in the next.

            That sentiment doesn’t ring true with the Jesus of the gospels – and especially with the Jesus of Luke’s gospel. This Jesus gives us Mary’s Magnificat, “[God] has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. [God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; [God] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”[2] Luke’s Jesus also gives us teachings such as the blessings and woes from the Sermon on the Plain, where those who are poor, those who hunger and weep, and those who are hated are vindicated – challenging those of us who have to share with those of us who have not.[3]

            Author Abraham Joshua Heschel tells us “The teaching of Judaism is the theology of the common deed. The Bible,” he writes, “insists that God is concerned with everdayness, with the trivialities of life.”[4] We see this same teaching in Jesus as we know him in the gospels. Jesus who teaches with parables about the everydayness of life. Jesus whom we meet in the most everyday gifts of bread and wine – the common – the ordinary – made holy – the body and blood of Christ given for the world.

According to Heschel our greatest challenge does not lie in organizing beautiful and solemn liturgies, “but in how we manage the commonplace.”[5] Both Heschel and Jesus would agree that our “field of concern [should] not [be] the mysteries of heaven, [or] the glories of eternity, but the blights of society, the affairs of the market place,”[6] and how we can work to bring about healing and wholeness for the world – and once again there’s that idea of repairing the breach.

Both Judaism – if we are to be faithful to the teachings of Moses, and Christianity – if we are to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus, are about how we live with one another in the here and now – how we choose good and life over evil and death. Heschel posits, “A good person is not [the one] who does the right thing, but [the one] who is in the habit of doing the right thing.”[7]

So perhaps it is in some way about playing by the rules – with the goodness of God as our guide – loving God with all our heart and loving our neighbor. Perhaps Alexander Solzhenitsyn was paying attention to the same Spirit that guided the words of Moses when he wrote, “the line dividing good and evil does not run between states, classes, or parties. It runs through every human heart.”

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[1] Synthesis Commentary

[2] Lk 1:51b-53

[3] Lk 6:20-26

[4] Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology, 117-118

[5] Heschel, 118

[6] Ibid, 118

[7] Ibid, 119