23
Pentecost 26B November 04, 2012
Deuteronomy
6:1-9 Psalm 119:1-8
Hebrews
9:11-14 Mark 12:28-34
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.
