2nd Sunday after Pentecost

 

Mark 2:23-3:6

    Welcome to Ordinary time, the long green season between Pentecost and the start of Advent.  Now when we say Ordinary Time, we don’t mean boring or uninteresting, though I guess it may start to seem that way about 20 weeks in, but Ordinary in the older sense, like ordinal as in numbered or counted because we number these Sundays 1 through 26 and count them off one right after the other until the end of November.  But what we do during this time anything but ordinary.  This is the time of year where we sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to what he has to say.  For you see the church year is divided into two roughly equal parts, one Advent through Pentecost, that focuses on the life of Jesus, the events of his birth, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension and one Ordinary time, that focuses on his teaching.  We are now entering the teaching half.  Where we will listen closely to the teachings of Jesus in Mark (and a bit of John) all the way through the fall.

    And so, it is good that we go back now almost to the very beginning to start this journey.  All the way back to chapter 2 in Mark to the start of Jesus’s ministry where we begin with a test of priorities.  And the first thing to notice here is that Jesus was never popular.  There is no golden age of Jesus’s ministry.  Yes, Jesus always drew crowds and he always had devoted followers but he was never universally beloved.  His was never a message that would be easy for everyone to accept.  Jesus was attempting to bring about radical change and radical change almost always comes with resistance.  We make it like 3 pages into this gospel, 79 verses to be exact, and folks are already becoming so incensed that they are looking to destroy him.   Nothing about this was ever going to be easy.

    And the second really super important thing here is that Jesus is really easily misunderstood.  The big misunderstanding today centers around the meaning of the Law, the purpose of the Torah, for Jesus, for us, for the Jewish people and how it is so quickly and so easily misused and misappropriated.  When Christians read this passage, it is easy to set up this false dichotomy in our heads.  Where the Jewish teachers are bad and Jesus’s teachings are good.  It creates this thread where the Law is bad and the Gospel is good, the Old Testament God is mean and vengeful and Jesus and the New testament God is gracious and loving.  It is an idea started all the way back in the Paul’s letters, was expanded by the early church fathers and then really taken to extremes by Luther and some other reformers.  But it is heresy. And it has come at a terrible cost and now in this time of rising anti-Semitism it is time to stomp it out.

    Because in this is not how Judaism works and it never was.  The law always gives life.  Its literal purpose is instruction for life.  It represents a better way of organizing life in order to live in harmony with God and one another.  In Jesus’s time, it was literally life saving instruction with purity codes that prevented the spread of disease and moral and legal codes that protected workers, families and communities so that everyone could flourish.  It also bound the community together in common practice and life in a time of great cultural instability during the rise of the Roman empire.  And while many practices seem outdated today, Jewish law in Jesus’s time was actually quite progressive for its day. 

    Take for instance the practice of observing the Sabbath.  In the Roman world, which not so unlike today, put and outsized importance on work and productivity (especially for the less privileged), it was a radical and life-giving act to take a day for rest, to make our relationship with God, with our families and communities, and with our bodies, more important than our work for one day a week at least. 

    But there is danger when our obedience to the practice starts to take precedence over the purpose.  And in this way the practice of Torah may have more in common with our Christian traditions than we like to imagine.  Because here in the church, especially in the Episcopal church, we are a people bound by tradition and practice, by the sharing of our holy table and common practices of worship.  These common practices bind us together with our brothers and sister through history and around the world.  These common practices, the instruction found in the Book of Common Prayer, have seen us through many trials and schisms, through tumult and wars, through global expansion, through changing centuries and changing cultures.  They are not to be trifled with.

But as we see in our Gospel reading today, slavish devotion can also become a stumbling block to human flourishing.  As we saw with Jesus, it is not always an easy balance.  The traditions that bind us as a people and structure our community are important, but so are our neighbors.  And sometime those two things will rub up against each other.

    And so Jesus gives us a frame today. “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” The law gives life.  That is its purpose.  Jewish law, Christian law, all our traditions and practices, all that we do as a community is meant to bring us life.  And when it strays from that purpose, it must be questioned.  Jesus could no more leave someone hungry or in pain or excluded from the community on the sabbath than he could on any other day.  Life, human flourishing is always more important.  Jesus allows his hungry disciples to collect enough to eat and he heals on the sabbath, not because he means to disregard the law but because he means to fulfill it, by bringing life to all he comes into contact with.

    And he means for us to do the same.  To use our sacred practices and traditions, our holy table, our ancient foundations, our abundant love, to bring life and wholeness to all we come in contact with.  And ironically sometimes that means allowing traditions to change as well.  It has meant allowing women and members of the LGBTQIA community into leadership and into your pulpits.  It has meant taking stances against racism and gun violence and hate speech that have not always been popular.  It has meant altering the way we worship to meet the needs of people during and after the pandemic.  And it will mean more changes we probably don’t yet even imagine in the future.  Some that won’t be popular.  Because change is hard, and holy change is harder.

    But our charge our practice is to give life, to support human flourishing.  And following the example of Jesus, a change that gives life, that feeds, heals and strengthens our community will always be truly following God’s law.  Amen.