March 19, 2006 - Frontiers for spiritual territories

3rd Sunday in Lent
19 March 2006
Exodus 20.1-17; John 2.13-22
Frontiers for spiritual territories
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006


My brother and I, when we were kids, played Monopoly with Carl and Johnnie Youngreen. I don’t know who taught us how, maybe our parents. Somehow, we learned the rules.

Well, we didn’t learn the rules, as in, the rules written down by Parker Brothers. We played by the rules of the Wareham & Youngreen Brothers. If you paid a fine, you put the money in the middle of the board. The next player to land on “Free Parking” took the money. If you owned a property, you could buy houses and a hotel, even if you didn’t own all of the same color. The rules never allowed any of this, but that’s how we played. We ignored one rule and made up another one.

That’s how everyone plays Christian ethics, too. You’re not even supposed to admit it out loud, but it’s true. We ignore some things and make up others—not only us, but Jesus, too, but I’ll get back to Jesus in a few minutes.

Now, take the Ten Commandments.

“Remember the sabbath and keep it holy.” That’s one. The Bible is very explicit about this. You’re not supposed to go to work . . . but I go to work. When my kids had part-time jobs, they got scheduled for work, and I let them work, even though the Ten Commandments say I shouldn’t let them. The resident aliens in every town I ever lived in have worked on Sundays, and I never did a thing about it, even thought he Ten Commandments say I shouldn’t let them work, either. Also, you’re not supposed to do work-type things around your house on the sabbath, but everybody I know does stuff at home. So much for the sabbath commandment.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.” I think it happens all the time, people wishing they lived in the house up the street, but that’s not the real problem with this commandment. The problem with it is it continues the list of property a man is not supposed to covet of his neighbor’s—not his neighbors wife or slave or ox or donkey or anything else that belongs to him. That attitude about women is frankly unacceptable, but there it is institutionalized in the Ten Commandments.

You’ll notice, people leave out these uncomfortable parts of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse version they argue about in, well, courthouses. This is exactly the reason, as I’ve said before, that we shouldn’t be imposing them all over the place, whether people believe in our religion or not. For now and then, people look up the unexpurgated version of our Ten Commandments, and they find out what it really says, there. They can see the problems for themselves. They realize we’ve left some things out that we’re embarrassed about, and they start to wonder why we aren’t shooting straight with them about our famous religious laws. When this happens, we don’t look entirely honest, which is a problem, if honesty and integrity is what the Ten Commandments is all about.

But we really have nothing to be embarrassed about, as long as we hold to the Ten Commandments, as we understand them, among ourselves. The world has changed, and our culture has changed, so how we obey the Ten Commandments has changed. Like friends and brothers playing Monopoly, we can all agree on the rules that are rooted in the tradition, hone to the spirit of the rules, and vary from the tradition only to the degree that we all understand and are fair with one another about them. We still hold the basics very closely: No murder, no theft, no adultery, no lying about your neighbor; worship God and nothing else. We even keep the sabbath, in so far as keeping it means we set aside time for God.

So we have some good core rules to live by, and most of them are excellent rules for both Christians and non-Christians alike. Even though Jesus loosens the rules for special circumstances, he still insists on most of them. The apostle Paul carries on at length about our freedom not to follow religious laws slavishly, but he clearly believes in limits. Some of his limits are a little dumb, like the one about women covering their heads in church. (So what? Really!) But most of Paul’s limits still mean a great deal to us: Don’t get carried away with drunkenness; no gossip, slander, malice, selfishness, conceit, jealousy or abusive language; don’t horde all the food to yourselves, while others are going hungry; do not be conformed to this world; and the one that maybe all of the other limits add up to—do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God. Limits.

There are limits, and it’s good for us to know them and keep them. The spiritual life is by its nature ethereal, elusive and fraught with ambiguity, so we are helped a great deal by having some frontiers marked, in the sense of boundaries that mark where we belong and don’t belong, limits that have served the faithful well over many generations. Things are difficult enough in the spiritual journey. It may be hard to know what prayers to say, to know what Jesus means some of the time, to know when we’re insisting on enough Christian training for our children or when we’re forcing more on them—or perhaps just the right things but at the wrong time—than is good for them. So many things about the spiritual life are hard, but laying out certain frontiers can be relatively simple. It’s a comfort to have them. This is the conservative side of any coherent religious community life.

Now, there are also times when a new limit, or a nearer boundary, has to be set. Strange to hear it from me, I suppose, but sometimes we have to decide to be more strict than before. That’s what Jesus decided the day he stormed into the temple courtyard and started throwing things. They’d made a shopping mall out of the one little patch of earth reserved for the faithful to gather and be with God. People had come to believe, and not for the last time, that faith in God and faith in the free market is the same thing. Jesus saw this as a problem. There’s nothing in the Ten Commandments about it, but there was something wrong.

Jesus didn’t have a rule to give the traders to make them stop, and he didn’t think he needed one. Something was wrong, and it was time to straighten everybody out. What they were doing was not prohibited by the Ten Commandments, and the religious authorities seemed to be completely content with it all. Nor had Jesus petitioned a court for an order or proposed a piece of legislation. He just said: This is wrong, and it has to stop. Makes you wonder about the megachurches with their beauty salons, fitness centers and coffee bars. We don’t have that problem, here. Not us.

We do have gossip. It’s the currency of choice in the free market of influence in mainline churches, and I suppose that’s why the Alban Institute folk keep reminding churches that, if we stop it, the cleansing effect will have a transforming influence on congregational life. Once or twice a year, typically when we’ve just spent a half-hour trying to solve a problem that refuses to be solved, we talk about how we know about a problem through rumor and gossip but don’t know how to solve it. The problem is always presented by elders who were told something by a few different anonymous people who purport to represent certain other people indicating that someone or other has been doing things wrong.

We talk, at this point, about whether we really want to make decisions based on such data—or not make them, as so often happens with gossip and rumor, when the data is so murky and ambiguous—and we’ve always been unable to decide to lead the church in changing the accepted norm of gossip as a force in church governance. People have the right, after all, to say whatever they want, confidentially, to whomever they want. It’s freedom of speech. If it’s good enough for the Bill of Rights, it’s good enough for our church. Not only that, if dissatisfied people actually talked openly to other, possibly satisfied, people, they might argue. They might find out their disagreements are with each other, not the leadership. They might argue and become upset, and they may not now how to work out their disagreements. We might look like a troubled church.

The problem is, really, simply practical. You get three people each talking to three elders. And those three elders have come to session, not knowing who the other elders have been talking to, because, hey, it’s confidential! So three elders have been talking to three people, which adds up to nine, and the nine, we are given to assume, represent one or two other people. So we’re up to 18, maybe 27.

Now it’s a movement! unless it’s just three people, but how do you know? Well, you don’t, but if you give three people what they want, you may get lucky and make 27 people hysterically pleased. And what’s the harm?! Nothing, unless the three anonymous people want something changed that 50 people like very much the way it is, thank you. The 50 never get represented. They didn’t talk to anybody. Why would they? They’re happy! and happy people don’t gossip. They just carry on, blissfully unaware that their leaders are being influenced to displease them.

So the leaders either proceed as before, distracted and on edge about the displeasure of who knows how many, or they lurch in another direction, hoping they can quell the rumored distress. You can see where it all leads.

Now, your current leaders have been more courageous about all this than any session full of elders I’ve ever seen. They arranged for the three open meetings after worship set up for people to talk about their church with each other—honestly, in the open, and with a disciplined structure to make the conversation coherent, meaningful and safe. What happened? Well, some dissatisfied people talked to some satisfied people, and they found out their disagreements were with each other, not the leadership. Consequently, the conversation got to the point where it wasn’t as coherent, meaningful and safe as intended. People argued and became upset, and they didn’t figure out, not in those particular meetings, how to work out their disagreements.

Well, all right, that was predictable, but what an amazing revelation—in the biblical sense of the word. We are dealing with simple disagreements, which can always be worked out, but only once we know we have them. Either people will finally be able to accommodate each other, if there’s a way to do that, or they’ll figure out a new way to order church life that will give everybody everything they always wanted but never asked the whole church for, or they’ll find out that they were really never meant to all be in the same church, wanting different things.

So that’s a great start, and if we’re ready to stop using rumor and gossip as a way to influence leadership decisions, something truly transforming may happen. And Jesus won’t have to storm in here and start throwing things just to straighten us out. We can probably, on our own, figure out limits worth setting for the spiritual and common health of the church, which is a very satisfying part of being grownups on the journey of faith.

There’s a third thing the faithful do with the frontiers of spiritual territory, which is to press the boundary a little further out. We don’t have time to talk about that part, right now, though it was very important to Jesus, who thought it was okay to loosen up on who was clean or unclean, whom to eat with, how much to forgive, and when a sabbath rule is good for us or just another burden.

The main thing to consider right now, for us, is that if we’re going to hold firmly to boundaries in most areas and tighten up in one or two other ways, it’s worth asking where we can give ourselves some slack without doing any harm. Are we trying to be perfect in ways that would make us feel adequate but are not the measure of our devotion to God? Do we try to enforce rules that have nothing to do with spiritual health and wholeness? Do we demand fastidious social graces but lose our knack for showing Christ-like grace?

It’s a great thing, understanding the frontiers of our spiritual life—both where the boundary lies and where the new vista stretches out before us—which is to say the place where things shift from safety to danger, to look at it one way, or from confinement to adventure, to look at it another way. We are always choosing whether to hold the limits, draw the limits tighter or stretch the limits into new territory. Faithfulness is not doing one of the three all the time but knowing when it’s time to do the right one. Amen.