Who do the crowds
say that I am?
The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
LAW AND FAITH
June 20, 2004, 7-C, Calvary Church
Zechariah 12:8-10; 13:1
Psalm 63:1-8
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 9:18-24
I
have always liked the "Peanuts" comic strip, and though I don't look
at it as much as I once did, I still find myself checking it out from time to
time. But I also have a few episodes in
my file, and there is one that I particularly like. Lucy comes up to Charlie Brown, who seems to be enjoying himself
doing not much of anything, and she says to him, "Charlie Brown, what is
the meaning of life?"
Without
batting an eye Charlie Brown answers with two little balloons of
moralisms: "Be kind, don't smoke,
be prompt, smile a lot, eat sensibly, avoid cavities, and mark your ballot
carefully; avoid too much sun, send overseas packages early, love all creatures
above and below, insure your belongings and try to keep the ball
low." To this Lucy retorts: "Hold still, I'm going to give you a
sharp blow on the nose!"
I
like the episode for a couple of different reasons, and one of them is that I
can relate to Charlie Brown's predicament in having such a global question land
on him. I'm at a Christmas party, for
instance, having a nice time; and sure enough, someone will come up to me and
say, "You know, I've always had a hard time with the Trinity." (As if that were unusual.) "How do you look at
it?" (There are always those
people, you see, who think clergy can't talk about anything except
religion.)
For
years I actually tried to answer such questions, shouting over "Rudolph,
the Red-Nosed Reindeer." But
retirement is a very freeing event in one's life, and I now say to persons who
ask such questions at inopportune times, "You know, this is really an
inappropriate time to talk about that.
But I'll be glad to talk about it at another time." Of course, when the bourbon wears off, the
person isn't quite so concerned about the Trinity after all, and I never hear
about it again.
But
if I were to change Lucy's question just slightly so that she said,
"Charlie Brown, what's the meaning and purpose of the Christian
Faith?" Charlie Brown might still answer the same way, "Be kind,
don't smoke, be prompt, etc..."
That,
I fear, is about as far as many people get with their understanding of the
Christian Faith, that it is a set of moralisms. For them the Faith amounts to rules and regulations laid down,
sometimes without seeming to have much basis, in order to keep people in
line. But even more than that, in order
to make God happy. For them the
Christian faith is a dour undertaking, with rules against most everything in
life. If you enjoy, STOP IT. It must be wrong.
How
do you suppose things got that way? Why
do you suppose something as profound and important as the Christian message has
become for many people nothing more than a set of dos and don'ts? How did the Faith turn into a bunch of
legalisms again? And I say "again,"
you see, because a reformation was fought over that issue, among others. A reformation in the 16th C. was fought over
the issue of law vs. grace. So how did
the Christian Faith once again get reduced for so many people to what I have
been talking about? Surely "the
faith once delivered to the saints," surely the faith for which the
martyrs died, is greater than that.
For
many people, believe me if you don't know it yourself, Christianity is not much
more than that. When they search for
something deeper, like Lucy's original question, they only think of the Church
as a rule-setting organization, and not the life-giving, direction-setting,
freeing faith that it proclaims.
Years
ago in another parish, in another community, a person to whom I had dropped a
note of thanks for some nice thing she had done for me told me that she had
feared to open the envelope with the church's letterhead because she thought
she must have done something wrong. A
pathological reaction, to be sure. But
it made me wonder how many people look at the church that way. Not at Calvary, I hope!
I
know that there are persons (perhaps some of you here today) who think the
Church does not do enough to set standards or to lay down guidelines or to
enforce moral rules or however one wants to put it. In a sense they are right, but the Church is no longer the force
it once was in our society and it doesn't speak from the position of power and
influence that it once had.
That,
however, is not the issue that I would bring to you, but rather it is the issue
of the tension between law and grace, between rules and freedom, which is so
central to the Christian Faith. Or to
put it crassly and simplistically, for many people the Christian Faith is a
rule-laden, joyless enterprise with the idea that God will get you if you don't
measure up.
In
the New Testament it is St. Paul who has much to say about law and grace in his
letters. His writings are usually
difficult, seldom something to be read in a hammock on a hot summer
afternoon. They often are closely
reasoned, sometimes confusing and contradictory, and almost always meaty.
In
his Letter to the Galatians from which our Second Reading comes today, St. Paul
says,
Now
before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith
would be revealed. Therefore the law
was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by
faith. But now that faith has come, we
are no longer subject to a disciplinarian...
I
know no one who does not hold that there is a moral standard of some kind to
which Christians are called. The
Scriptures amply indicate that. The
question always seems to be, however:
Is that what makes a person a Christian? Is obeying laws the heart of the Christian Faith? Is that how we please God?
St. Paul would say, I am certain, that of course there is something else, and that something else is faith, or trust, in God's redeeming love shown in Jesus Christ. What a difference that could make for any of us! You see, so much of religious rule-making and rule-keeping has about it the whole matter of trying to please God, to win God's approval. It is always so sad to see how the Christian Gospel has declined to that level as it has in so much of what passes for Christianity.
We
think we can have God's love by being good, and then fearing its loss when we
aren't. But that isn't what God wants.
God does want us to live good, responsible, caring lives; but
that is not why we receive God's love.
If we have even a rudimentary understanding of the Christian Faith, we
know that we do not buy God's love in any way -- even by being good.
We
are meant to mature in the Faith to the point where knowing how much God loves
us is the motivation for living good, responsible lives -- not rules. Our obedience comes out of gratitude, out of
the knowledge that, when we fail (as we all do), there is a God who loves us
nonetheless, a God whose love for us is greater than anything that we might do
to alienate ourselves from God.
The
mature Christian lives a good life, shaped by the law, but also shaped by
freedom, and that is quite different from a religion of petty moralisms, sour
on the world, afraid to enjoy life, and often hypocritical.
Charlie
Brown does need a good bop on the nose!
That isn't what life is all about!
It isn't what Christianity is all about! Christianity is, first of all
and most of all, about a loving relationship with a God who in some way has
shared life with us in Jesus of Nazareth, and because of that love shown
through Jesus we are called, not to a set of life-denying rules, but to live
lives of responsibility and love. It is
in the certainty that God loves us,
that we are free then to live and love ourselves.
Richard
H. Humke