Wearing the Law; Living the Law

23 Pentecost 26B     November 04, 2012

Deuteronomy 6:1-9 Psalm 119:1-8

Hebrews 9:11-14 Mark 12:28-34

 Lectionary Link

  Today is All Saints Sunday and in our lessons from Holy Scripture we have read about the law.  We read the charge that Moses gave to the children of Israel.  He told them that when they went into the Promised Land, that the Law was to be the crucial identity of their lives.  Today, we believe with the advent of the T-shirt, clothes became the billboard for textual messages of all sorts.  In our day, a T-shirt allows a person to literally wear their language.  But what is our relationship to the text that we wear.  What textual message could I wear that I could live up to?  My T-shirt could read, “I am a gray and balding older man.”  Well, that would be true.

  Long before textual T-shirts, the people of the Hebrew and Jewish faith have worn their texts.  Part of the prayer costume for Jews includes phylacteries.  These are leather boxes with the text of the Torah written within them.  They are strapped around the head and on the wrist.  They literally are the worn text of the Torah and they fulfilled this command of Moses:   “Bind the words of the commandments as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead.”  In a very symbolic way the writing of the commandments worn on the hand and the forehead state the principle that the commandment can not remain a dead letter upon the page; the commandments has to take control of one’s thought life and the commandments have to be internalized into one hands, into ones actions and body language.

  What can happen instead of the Torah living in our minds and in our actions?  We can replace justice and fairness by devising a series of religious ritual behaviors to stand in place of actually doing justice.  So, it became a practice to make the religious sacrifices of the prescribed animals and that kind of religious behavior was done, while the orphans and the widows went without food.  So prescribed religious ritual behavior became a substitute for living a life of justice, compassion and care.  Ritual behavior is easier than justice.  It is very messy business to try to bring justice to everyone.  Clergy are happy with ritual behavior; the ancient priests of Israel could get some of the best cuts of meat for their own tables with the prescribed animal sacrifices.  Clergy can fund the church and their jobs with prescribe obligatory religious and ritual behavior; okay so you’re not perfect and justice is not realized in society, but just come, give your tithe, make your confession, receive your absolution and go to Mass, and you get a clean slate.

  On All Saints Day, we confess Jesus to be the Saint of Saints.  Jesus is the Law of all Laws.  When one speaks in generalizations about faith communities, one would say that the Torah or the Law is central to Judaism.  But what is central to Christianity is Jesus Christ.  In Jesus Christ, the message of God does not come on stone tablets as written laws; in Jesus Christ, God comes as embracing the entire personhood.  What is greater?  Writing or Personhood?  Even though language and writing are what make human beings the unique creature, the appearance of God in a human being bespeaks a belief that human beings can only access that which is greater than human life, through human life.  Our belief in Jesus Christ is a belief that God does not just communicate through writing on stone tablets; God embraces the entire human experience as a way for us to know and celebrate the fact that being human, also means recognizing that life involves a recognition of life that is more than human.  It is the more than human life of God that comes to us in the Jesus Christ.

And what it reveals to us is that in a world of time, we are always invited to be More than we are right now.  We are always invited to surpass ourselves in excellence.  Believing in God means that we believe in the immensity of the quantity of future occasions of existence and those future occasions invite us to further invention, further creativity, further excellence.

  The future will likely change the details of human law of the past.  Why?  Because love always requires the details and strategies of love to be worked out in new situations.  We write laws and will continue to write laws in new situations because love and justice are not fixed states of what can ever be permanently attained.  Practicing love and justice is never completed; we have to keep at it again and again.  As much as the founders of our country believed in their laws that “all people were created equal” they were blinded to achieve that in their actions as long as they accepted tacitly the practice of slavery and the subjugation of women.  Our founders preached a beautiful law and justice but at the same time, they did not fully realize law as a full completion of the work of justice.

  This never finished work of love and justice is perhaps the chief reason that Jesus settled for the summary of all of the law into just two laws; love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  St. Paul did a similar reduction when he said that love fulfills the law.

  Does this mean that love and law are opposed to each other?  Of course not.  Law is the strategy that love and justice needs to be actually practiced.  We write laws as approximations of what good and just living means in actual practice.  And how do we know?  Well, you ask people; and people will tell you when they think something is fair or just in how they are treated. 

  All of the written laws can be reduced to love because love is not just having the law written as text on a T-shirt.  Love is not placing little boxes of Torah on your forehead and hand.  Love is when my hands perform deeds of kinds; love is when my mind think thoughts of kindness.  When our body language performs and acts deeds of love and kindness, then we become living law.  We become the law of love and justice.

  And who is it who was the perfect example in life of law and justice?  It was Jesus Christ.  He was the living law.  He was God’s law in Person.  He was love and justice personified.  And on All Saints Sunday, who do we call saints?  We call saints those who embodied love and justice in their very deeds.  These were not people who gave us legal texts on how we should live; they were people who showed how to live by the example of their lives.  They were “living laws.”

  So on All Saints Sunday, we are invited to personify the law and the justice of Christ.  We can be articulate and brilliant in legal reasoning but law is most effective when we see it in practice.  Children are perhaps the most impressionable when they cannot speak and when they cannot read.  So in the first three years of their lives they are formed mostly by the people who model what it is to be human for them.  Parents and mentors are the living law for impressionable children.

  But we never lose our childlike impressionability; we forever have this need to be impressed.  And what are we most impressed by?  By the living practice of love and kindness.  We are impressed when we experience justice and fairness.

  All Saints Sunday is a time to celebrate those who lived love and justice with their lives.  It is a time for us to embrace what is saintly in life.  It is time for us to internalize love and justice and let love and justice be lived through every word and deed of our lives.

  Today, we sing the song of the saints of God, and we pray, “God help me to be one too.  God help me to be love and kindness in what I do and say.”  Amen.