Reformed Scripts

Matthew 5, selected verses; Isaiah 58 … choose life

February 16, 2014

As most of you know, I was asked to resign from the first pastoral position I held following a sermon I preached on same-sex marriage 13 years ago last month. Being decent and orderly Presbyterians, we don’t do anything with undo haste, so between the Martin Luther King Day Sunday when I had the temerity to suggest that, were he alive, Dr. King would have been concerned with the rights of gays and lesbians, and the Sunday in late February when the congregation voted to dissolve the pastoral relationship, there was a weird and awkward interval when the entire congregation of more than 600 members was talking about me but very few of them would talk with me.

There were a few exceptions, and one, in particular, that I will never forget. A mother of two teenagers came to talk with me, and share her concern that too much positive regard from the pulpit for homosexuality might turn her son gay. She pointed to the various scriptural texts – you know the ones – as “proof” that God disapproved of same-sex relationships.

I recall trying to do some rudimentary Bible study, at which point she asked, “why do we have to interpret anyway?”

Indeed, why do we have to interpret, anyway?

As we approach the season of Lent, during which we will focus on the roots of our Reformed faith, this question, raised in relationship especially to our text this morning from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, seems like a fine place to begin.

Why do we have to interpret? Well, to begin with, to read is always, already to interpret.

Some of us are old enough to remember newspapers, and, if you do, you know that you bring a different lens, a different interpretive schema, to the funny pages than you do to the front page – even here in metro DC. You come to Harry Potter with a different expectation than you bring to Facebook. We read the psalms differently than we do the letters of Paul – or, at least, we should.

The context of the reader also changes the meaning of a given text. That may be a bit harder to grasp, as a general principle of hermeneutics, but you really don’t have to look any further than the district court ruling from last Thursday to understand that new times give us new understandings of ruling texts. The judge might well have written, in her opinion, “you have heard it said that the rights of same-sex couples are of no concern to the United States Constitution, but I say to you ‘we hold these truths as self evident that all people are created equal.’”

Scripture is no different in that regard. The type of writing tells you a lot about what your reading should be like, the context for the writing provides some of the necessary framing for understanding, and the context of reading provides the rest.

Jesus’ interpretive moves in the Sermon on the Mount provide the template for Reformed theological reflection.

When he says, “You have heard it said … but I say to you,” Jesus is saying to his followers – that is to say, to us – “you have to get a new mind for a new time.”

The script that you have followed thus far will not take you where you need to go.

We all follow scripts. We begin learning various scripts for our lives from the moment of our births, and we learn additional ones all along our ways.

We learn what it means to be little boys or little girls – and, sometimes, those basic scripts, which will work for many, do not work. Our very souls tell us that the script is wrong. That’s part of the script for transgender persons: “you have heard it said that because your body is this way, so therefore your gender is this way … but I tell you, that ain’t necessarily so.”

We learn early scripts at home, from school, in neighborhoods, at church, through media. These scripts are not necessarily negative by any means. For example, the script about what it means to be an America reminds us of the fundamental value and dignity of human individuals. That is, of course, only part of the American scripture, and it is, like every script, always shaped and determined to varying degrees by culture and context.

For example, the script that most of us learn today about race is not the same racial script that was imparted to our grandparents. To take another example – and one that Jesus speaks to directly in Matthew – the script about divorce is also not the same one our grandparents learned.

My mom told me years ago that early in her marriage to my dad, my dad’s mom told her that she knew within a month or so of her marriage to my grandfather that she had made a huge mistake. But that was in 1920, or thereabouts, and the script about divorce was pretty clear: you didn’t do it.

Frankly, while I feel sadness for my grandparents’ unhappiness, I’m pretty darn glad divorce was verboten because otherwise I wouldn’t be here!

We learn so many other scripts, and we follow them throughout our lives – scripts about money and work, scripts about addiction, scripts about religion.

At certain points in our lives, though, we want to holler, “get me rewrite!”

That’s what Jesus is saying to his followers in Matthew. It’s the same thing that Isaiah was pointing at, as well.

The people of Israel had learned a script about fasting and prayer, but they had missed something deeper – a script that, while never outside of context, helps us understand better how to frame context, how to understand it, account for it, and live along its shifting borders and boundaries. That script is about justice and love.

I was reading Isaiah in the library on a kids and moms’ morning a couple of weeks ago … why do we fast but you do not hear our prayers? The baby cries and his mom hears and feeds. That script is as old as time.

The people of Israel have fasted a couple of months each year for 70 years – kids have been born, grown up, lived pretty full lives and died – and the prayers of their people for deliverance from their exile and their oppressors have not been answered.

God, it seems to them, is not following God’s part of the script. After all, upon hearing the cries of the oppressed and enslaved Israelites, didn’t God send Moses to liberate them?

Now the people have lived in the darkness of exile for seven decades. Why doesn’t the God of Exodus hear their cries? Why doesn’t God acknowledge their fasting and faithfulness?

Isaiah tells them, and he makes no bones about it. Fasting must be about aligning human priorities with the will of God or it’s just religious show, false piety. So Isaiah calls for a fast, but not a traditional abstaining from food. Rather, the prophet says that Israel must abstain from the worship of affluence, it must fast from privilege, it must turn away from turning away in indifference to suffering.

Isaiah’s prophetic voice offers an insider’s critique to his own tradition. He calls for a return to core principles, on the one hand, and an acknowledgment of fundamentally changed historical context on the other.

That’s what Jesus does, as well. Throughout his teaching, Jesus is clear that the love of God and love of neighbor are core principles. They are the core because they are life giving. Rooted and grounded in this love we choose life.

Love of God and of neighbor are the principles through which we understand ourselves as people of faith, but the way these primary commandments are received, understood, interpreted and lived out changes with changing historical context. You have heard it said … but I say to you.

Later on Paul will do essentially the same thing with Jesus’ teaching, saying, in effect, you have heard it said that the Messiah will come for the Jews, but I say to you that he has already come and it was for the whole world. You have heard it said … but I say to you.

The pattern is the same: a call to core convictions but lived differently for a changed historical context.

As we have witnessed the great bending of the arc of justice around marriage equality over recent months, I have thought back a time or two to our days in Pittsburgh. There is, of course, a smidge of ego for me that does sneak in every once in a while to whisper, “I told you so.” But when the better angels of my nature are in the saddle, I am more prone to wonder what it is that I am missing? Where am I choosing death instead of life? Where do I need to get a new mind for the present time? Where am I stuck in the rut of time- and tradition-bound readings of texts? Where do I need to hear Jesus say, “you have heard it said … but I say to you”?

We have to get a new mind for a new time, all of the time for time is never fixed and unchanging. It’s not that the mind no longer matters. It matter immensely, but it must always be open to being changed as new circumstance and the movement of the Holy Spirit demand.

That is exactly how I would translate the great watchwords of the Reformed theological tradition of which we are a part. We say, in our tradition, that we are ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed and always being reformed.

I can easily imagine a conversation between Jesus and the leaders of the Reformation. Jesus would say, “I have heard you say that you are Reformed, and that is good; but I say to you ‘you stand in need of being further reformed.’”

That’s who we are. We have been given scripts and, as a people of faith whose faith is shaped and formed according to a long tradition and according to the sacred texts of that tradition, we have been given also scriptures.

We’ve also been given minds to understand and hearts to love, such that we are able, through the long struggle to follow the way of Jesus more fully and closely, to rewrite the script, to get a new mind for a new time, to be the church Reformed and always being reformed.

May we be that church, for in being so we choose life. Amen.