Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 4, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It sure is easy to get the idea these days that Christianity is all about rules. So many churches have so many rules. They’re usually rules against something, and they most often have something to do with gender or sex. The Catholics, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, and many smaller evangelical or fundamentalist denominations have rules against ordaining women. The Catholics have a rule against priests marrying. Some very conservative churches have a rule against ordaining divorced people, and some even have a rule against divorced people being members. Most churches have a rule against homosexuals. For so many churches and church people, being Christian is about obeying rules.

It doesn’t stop with the churches. We’ve all heard the controversy about whether or not government entities can display the Ten Commandments in public buildings. Some crazy state supreme court judge in Alabama a while back got himself removed from office because he refused to obey a federal court order requiring him to remove a display of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court building. He’s developed quite a political following in Alabama for, as these folks see it, his courageous defense of the faith. Some of us see it quite differently, but never mind. The U.S. Supreme Court recently split the baby in two Ten Commandments cases, ruling that Texas could keep an outdoor display but that Tennessee could not keep an indoor one. The Court tried to explain that the difference is whether or not there is a religious intent in the display. Still, I have to wonder why so many courts fail to understand that the point of the story about Solomon splitting the baby is that splitting the baby is a very bad idea; but again, never mind. My point here is not about public display of the Ten Commandments. My point rather is about what all the passion over this issue says about how people see Christianity. It’s about rules. The Ten Commandments become a symbol of people’s understanding of their faith, a symbol of the faith as a set of rules. That’s why the issue about public display of the Ten Commandments generates so much heat and so little light. It’s about the nature of people’s faith.

And here’s the thing. Christianity properly understood, that is, Biblically understood, isn’t about rules at all. The general thrust of the New Testament, and a great many explicit passages in it, make that very clear. The way the New Testament discusses the issue is to talk about the law. When the New Testament uses the term "law" it means the Jewish law, Torah law, also called the law of Moses. There are supposedly 613 individual laws in Torah law. They’re found in the first five books of Hebrew Scripture, mostly in Leviticus. The Torah was the religious rule book of Jesus’ day, and of Paul’s.

And they both rejected it. Jesus rejected it in virtually everything he said and did, or a least he rejected the mechanical, absolutist, literalistic way it was understood by the religious authorities of his time. He summed up his rejection of religion as a set of rules in the famous Great Commandment: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength....You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." Mark 12:29-31 Love, not laws or rules, is what the Christian live is all about. Jesus leaves no doubt about that.

For most of its history the church hasn’t gotten it. The church is forever trying to turn the faith back into a rule book. Paul, however, got it. We see one of the places where he gets it in the passage we heard this morning. In the key part of that passage he says: "Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law." Romans 13:10 This is Paul’s formulation of Jesus’ Great Commandment. Live in love, understood as the self-giving love that seeks the good of the other rather than one’s own good, and you will fulfill the law. St. Augustine got it too. He famously said: "Love, and do what you will." All of the laws, all of the rules to which people are forever trying to reduce our faith disappear in the bright light of the law of love.

The church by and large doesn’t get it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t. So let me close these brief remarks with a suggestion. Whenever you hear anyone saying that there is some law, some rule, that you have to obey in order to be a Christian, or worse, in order to be in good with God, ask yourself: Does this law, this rule, further love? Is it grounded in love? Is it calling me to greater love of God, of my fellow humans, and of all creation? If so, then the law is good not because it is good in itself but because it furthers the law of love. If not, then no matter what Scriptural text is trotted out in support of it, no matter how hallowed it is by tradition, no matter how sternly you were taught it as a child or how vociferously other people demand compliance with it, the law is bad. It is bad because it contradicts the greater law of love. If you love, you fulfill all law. So: Love and do what you will. If you truly act in love for your fellow creatures, you cannot go wrong. Amen.