Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 30, 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.

First of all let me say again what a pleasure it is for me to be here this morning. Over the last two years that my wife has served as your pastor I have gotten to know some of you at least a little bit. I have come to appreciate your care for my beloved Jane and even your care for me, expressed in cards and gifts of your amazing fruits and vegetables that are so much better than anything we get over on the grey, rainy coast. Thank you.

When Jane and I decided to do this pulpit swap this morning I started thinking about what I could say to you that would be true to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and that might be helpful to you and to me. And what brought me up short, frankly, was the denominational difference between me and most of you. Maybe that means I’m getting too comfortable in Monroe, but the truth is that I, like Jane, am UCC-ordained in the UCC and committed to living my faith life within that tradition. Indeed, I’m even more UCC than Jane is. I serve a church in Monroe that is only UCC, and I grew up in the UCC, or rather in one of the predecessor denominations of the UCC, the Congregational Church, back before the UCC was formed in 1957. Most of you are faithful members of the Church of the Brethren, with its great traditions of simple living and peace, the rejection of war grounded in the teachings of our Savior. That, by the way, is a belief I share even though the UCC is not one of the historic peace churches the way the Brethren are. And so I got kind of hung up on what I could say to you good people of Sunnyslope church.

Then I read the Gospel passage from the lectionary for today that we just heard. There Jesus yet again denounces the scribes and the Pharisees, his favorite targets, especially in the Gospel of Matthew. What struck me was verse 5: "They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long." What struck me particularly about that verse is that Jesus is talking about religious people, leaders of the Jewish people of his day, who flaunt their religious practices and boast of their piety. You see, phylacteries and fringes are things used in the spiritual and religious practices of the Jews of Jesus’ time and of Orthodox Jews in ours. A phylactery is a little box that holds a tiny scroll on which is written a verse from the Torah, often the Shema, the creed of Israel: Hear O Israel! The Lord your God is One. You shall worship the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. The devout Jew wears it on his wrist or forehead. It is supposed to keep the person wearing it mindful of God. The fringes Jesus is talking about are the fringes of a prayer shawl. At prayer a devout Jew covers his head with the shawl. The fringes are to remind the wearer of the Law of God.

Now, Jesus is not attacking the use of phylacteries and prayer shawls that, when used properly and in the right spirit, do indeed help put us in touch with God. He is attacking only the abuse of these practices. When used properly the size of a phylactery doesn’t matter. It’s significance isn’t material but spiritual. It’s not for external show but for the inward, spiritual use of the person wearing it. Likewise with the prayer shawl. It’s not for show. It’s not a fashion statement. It’s a sign of humility and of the person’s respect for the holiness of God in Whose presence one covers one’s head.

Phylacteries and shawls point inward to the spirit of the person at prayer and to God. Yet because they are themselves external objects they are easily abused. We humans are so vain, we so want to impress people, and we so like to puff ourselves up that we often turn the external signs of an inner devotion into objects of show, of ornamentation, that draw attention not to God but to ourselves. We make our phylacteries broad and our fringes long to draw attention to ourselves, to boast of our piety, to prove our wealth and our worth. Objects intended to remind us of our need of God get perverted into signs of God’s supposed need of us. We pervert them from symbols on the path of wholeness in the Spirit into items of rank ego gratification. That’s what Jesus is talking about.

OK, but in the Church of the Brethren and in the UCC we don’t use phylacteries and prayer shawls. We use very few objects in our prayer and in our worship at all. I’m wearing a stole with a fringe (not much of a fringe, but a fringe nonetheless) , but I understand that in the Brethren tradition most preachers don’t even do that. So do Jesus’ words have any meaning for us? I suppose it won’t surprise you that my answer to that question is a resounding yes. You see, I think we have our metaphorical phylacteries and fringes; and we are subject to the same temptations to which the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day succumbed. I think we need to ask: What are our phylacteries? What are our fringes? In other words, what are the external signs of our piety, of our faith? Do we abuse them the way Jesus’ adversaries did? Do we make our phylacteries broad and our fringes long?

I think that both the UCC tradition and the Brethren tradition have their own phylacteries and fringes, but let me talk mostly about the UCC. It’s my tradition after all, and I know it well. What external signs of our tradition act like a phylactery and a fringe for us? In other words, what do we brag about? What do we show off. What makes us proud rather than humble in the presence of God?

The thing that most comes to mind for me in answer to that question is our tradition of social justice. We brag about it all the time. We have a national UCC identity campaign going that you may have heard of called God Is Still Speaking. The campaign has its own web site, stillspeaking.com. One of the things on that website that a lot of us refer people to is a list of UCC firsts. Here are some of them: A Congregationalist minister wrote the first anti-slavery pamphlet in America in 1700. In 1785 we ordained the first African-American pastor in any Protestant denomination. In 1852 we ordained the first woman pastor in any Christian church since New Testament times. In 1959, at the request of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the UCC Office of Communication won a court ruling that ended segregationist control of the public airways in the South. In 1972 we ordained the first openly gay minister in any mainline denomination. In 1976 we elected the first African-American head of any integrated denomination. We think of ourselves as the social justice denomination par excellence; and, frankly, we are.

And it probably sounds to you like I’m bragging about all that, and I suppose that if I’m honest I have to admit that I am. Which illustrates my point. It is so easy for us to become prideful about our own faith. It is so easy to make things about the faith that should point to God and to the work of the Holy Spirit in the world point to us instead. Things that should remind us of God’s word and God’s will, of God’s kingdom of peace and justice for all people, speak to us instead of our own virtue. We use them to puff ourselves up and to make ourselves feel superior to other people. We turn what is nothing more than simple faithfulness into broad phylacteries and long fringes.

So what are we to say? That we should do and say nothing because anything we do or say can become a point of pride? Certainly not. After all, God calls us to faithfulness. While our different traditions may understand faithfulness in slightly different ways, still, it is proper for us to pursue faithfulness as we understand it to the best of our abilities. And we don’t need to keep quiet about it. We are called not only to faithfulness but to share our vision with all people who seek to find their way to God. The path of social justice is some people’s way to God. If the UCC keeps silent, those people may miss their way to God. Nonviolence and simple living are some people’s way to God. If the Church of the Brethren keeps silent, those people may miss their way to God. So no, we are not called to keep silence. We are not called to give up our phylacteries and prayer shawls altogether. We are called both to faithfulness and to humility about our faithfulness.

But with pride in our faithfulness, in our spiritual accomplishments such a temptation, how are we ever going to do that? Let me suggest that the answer lies in something I hinted at a few minutes ago. It lies in the reason we undertake lives of faithfulness in the first place. I’ve often been told by people who claim to know that most people who go to church do so because they seek the fellowship of community and a chance to serve their community. And every time I’ve been told that I’ve thought: Yeah, but they could get that at the Rotary Club. There must be a reason that people choose precisely church.

And I think that a least a big part of the reason church people choose church is because we recognize at some perhaps subconscious level that we have a need in our lives that the Rotary Club, worthwhile as it may be, cannot fill. We choose church because we need God. We need connection with God. We need spiritual food. We need God because we know that in ourselves we are incomplete. We need spiritual food because we know with the Apostle Paul that we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. We need God because we know that we are not God. We need God to mend our brokenness and make us whole.

The way we avoid the kind of pride in our spiritual accomplishments that Jesus condemned, it seems to me, is continuously to remind ourselves of our need for God, of our brokenness and our incompleteness. That’s not to beat ourselves up but merely to acknowledge reality. It’s not being morbid, it’s being honest. When we remind ourselves of our need for God, it’s hard to be proud, even of those things about our faith traditions that we value most. When we continuously remind ourselves of our need for God we can see the accomplishments of our traditions not as our works in which to boast but as the work of the Holy Spirit in the world, before which we can only stand in awe and humility.

So let us be faithful. Let us be faithful to God within our own traditions, calling ourselves and our traditions to ever greater faithfulness. Let us wear our metaphorical phylacteries and prayer shawls, fringes and all. But let us do so always in the attitude of prayer, prayer that recognizes our brokenness, our incompleteness, our need for God. That attitude alone can narrow our phylacteries and shorten our fringes. Amen.