law – Page 2 – Salvaged Faith

How Should We Love?

Posted on April 10, 2011Leave a comment

Last week, we talked about a little place on the southwest side of Jerusalem… does anyone remember what that ugly and awful place was called?

Ghenna!

Ghenna is a trash dump… it is a valley of garbage… it is a place for filth and waste… a place to burn and destroy the refuse of our lives…

And this smelly, disgusting, ugly, awful place is translated in our modern bibles as “hell.”

We spent all of last Sunday talking about ghenna so that we could prepare ourselves for a conversation today. Because that word – ghenna – shows up three times in our passage this morning. One third of all the times Jesus uses the world we now think of as “hell” show up right here.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

And let’s start by getting out the trusty whiteboard and doing some brainstorming…

We are going to assume… although that might be a dangerous thing… let’s assume that none of us wants to live in ghenna – in the garbage dump – in hellish conditions… is it alright if I start with that assumption?

That leads to a question… What kind of a community do you want to live in?

(whiteboard)

Photo by: Jon Wisbey

What makes this community liveable… what makes it desireable… is that love is the center of each of these relationships.

I believe that this ideal is based on what we find right here in our scriptures for this week… it’s based in the summary of the law we find in Deuteronomy and in Matthew… love God with everything that you are and love your neighbor as yourself.

We know, somewhere deep inside of us that this is what we should strive for.

We know, that this is how we were made.

And, we know, that this is where we are headed…

This is the Kingdom of God. Love. Trust. Forgiveness. Honesty. Faithfulness. No more tears, no more pain.

But the question is… how do we get there?

As Jesus walked and talked and lived among us, everything that he did pointed to this reality. As he spoke with people he told them that the Kingdom of heaven was already here… that we have glimpses of this reality… but it is not yet fully here.

And we look around us and know that to be true.

There is death and murder. There is violence and anger. There is lust and revenge and envy everywhere.

It isn’t fully here yet.

I know that.

You know that.

Jesus knew that.

But right here, in this sermon to the people, he refused to let the people off the hook. In this section, Jesus tackles some of the toughest situations we face in our relationships and in the scriptures: murder, adultery, divorce, oaths and promises, revenge…

All of those things that turn this reality into a garbage dump.

In each and every single one of these verses, Jesus challenges us.

Not once does he give us an easy out.

Not once does he justify our actions.

Not once does he say we can ignore the wisdom of earlier days.

No. In every single one of these verses, Jesus takes a simple law and makes it harder.

Don’t just restrain yourself from killing that person… Jesus says – don’t even be mad at them

You’ve been told not to commit adultery, but I say to you – don’t even look at someone who isn’t your spouse with lust.

Divorce has become as simple as writing a letter when the spark has gone – but I say to you unless your spouse has broken the fundamentals of the covenant, and committed adultery, don’t give up on your relationship… and even then give it another try.

Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t make oaths that are more than just yes and no.

Don’t seek your own revenge but love your enemies, pray for those who seek to destroy you. Turn the other cheek.

And he ends this whole section by saying what I think are the hardest two words in all of scripture: Be perfect.

What?! Be perfect? How do we do that? How can we get there?

There are two main theories about what Jesus is trying to do here.

The first, is that Jesus takes the old testament law and turns it into SUPER law… that to be Christian really requires more morality, more legalism, more demands. To be Christian, you just have to follow all of these new laws, along with the old ones. There certainly are brothers and sisters out there who do just this… who make perfection and holiness and morality the substance of their very being and heap law upon law upon law.

The second main way of understanding these passages is that Jesus makes the law so hard that we can’t live up to it. We can’t do it. All of us have anger in our heart. All of us think our brothers and sisters and idiots sometimes, all of us break promises. This second perspective teaches us that we are utterly helpless when it comes to the law and therefore, we need Jesus to save us from our own downfall. And we all know folks out there, brothers and sisters in Christ who help us to hold our lives up against the law, see our failings, and our guilt and our shame. In this perspective, the law convicts us… but in many ways, the law ceases to matter. As long as we have Jesus to save us, it doesn’t matter if we make mistakes.

I’ve never been a black and white girl. I’m not a fan of either/or choices. So, I want to share with you today a third option… a both/and.

And so what I see happening here in the sermon on the mount is that Jesus is challenging us to be perfect.

He’s telling us we can’t do it, and telling us we need to do it all at the same time.

He’s pointing to this future Kingdom reality and he’s inviting us to live in that reality now.

He knows we are helpless to do it, but he wants us to try.

Jackie has been working with addicts as a part of his new ministry with the CMA. As we talked about these passages in Sunday School last week, he reminded us that the goal of recovery groups is to help you become clean and sober. It is a community of folks who are all seeking the same end goal. Life and life abundant. Perfection. Love.

At the start of the journey, a life of sobriety is almost unimagineable. It isn’t who they are. But they know where they are going. They know who they are seeking to be. And so they try.

Maybe the church needs to be a little bit more like a recovery group. We need to be a group of people, banded together, helping one another get over our addiction to sin and death, and trying to live into this whiteboard reality.

And in order to do so, we have to start letting go of some of the garbage in our lives. We have to throw it out… because in the end, it just won’t do in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus calls us in each of these situations to love. Not mushy gushy love – but real, genuine, difficult, honest love. Love that forgives wrong. Love that seeks peace. Love that refuses to fight back with violence and hatred. Love that is strong enough to overcome.

How do we do that? How is it possible?

Last year, a friend gave me this album and in particular this song – Forgiveness – spoke to me.

I want to share it with you today, because it speaks to the heart of what Jesus asks us to do….

(show video)

Is it easy? No.

Will we get it right on the first try? No.

Are we supposed to try anyways? Yes.

Again, and again and again.

We are supposed to try to live our lives here in the Kingdom… and not out on the garbage dump.

Live into the Kingdom of heaven… where love is our first and not our second impulse.

Where forgiveness is our first and not our second impulse.

Where relationships and not rules determine our actions.

You can go ahead and throw your past and your mistakes and the failings of yesterday on the trash heap. The question is… how do you want to live today? And are you going to let Jesus Christ help you to do it?

Ghenna

Posted on April 3, 2011Leave a comment

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One of my favorite things to do as the weather warms up is to get outside and play some disc golf.

A week and a half ago – before winter decided to come back and pay us another visit – I was able to play my first round of the year at Jones Park in Cedar Rapids.

We always begin our rounds at Jones on tee 15. The parking is better by the hill top pavilion, and there are convenient bathrooms there for when you are waiting for other friends to arrive.

That’s where I found myself on that Wednesday afternoon. The sun was shining, the air was warm, and as I waited for a friend to join me, I sat on the grass and soaked in the warmth for the first time of 2011.

Looking out from that hill, you can pretty much see the whole park. The pond, the golf course, the playground and the pool, and oh yeah, just over the tree tops, Mount Trashmore.

For a while, I thought Mount Trashmore was simply the name my friends and I affectionately called this heap of trash. But apparently, the city’s former mayor coined the term decades ago and “Mount Trashmore” has remained as this landfill’s unofficial name.

It is located on the southwest side of town, and was officially closed in 2006 as work was being done to cap off the heap of waste… allowing green grass and vegetation to grow over it. But all of that changed in 2008 when flooding necessitated the use of the landfill for all of that flood debris.

Three years later, dump trucks are still making their way around the landfill and it keeps growing and growing and growing, high above the city’s treeline.

That heap of garbage reminds me of another dump – one mentioned in our scriptures for today.

Unfortunately, due to some poor translating, most of us don’t know about this lovely little waste pile that was once located on the southwest side of Jerusalem….

Will you pray with me?

Today, we begin to look at the third section of the sermon on the mount contained in Matthew. Here, Jesus moves from our attitudes and our witness to the world, and he dives into some teaching about how we behave – how we act – and in particular, how we treat one another.

This whole section actually contains Matthew 5:17-48. Jesus talks about what we should teach one another, talks about anger, and adultery, divorce, promises, revenge, and how we should treat enemies. And we are going to get to the meat of that text – the relationships – next week.

Before we get there, however, I think we need to spend some time with a certain four letter word.

In most of our English translations of the New Testament three greek words are translated into one English word – Hell. These three are hades, which refers to the greek place of the dead, tartaroo – which shows up only once in 2 Peter 2:4 and refers to a dark abyss within Hades where the supremely wicked are punished (again from Greek thought), and gehenna – a word used 11 times by Jesus throughout three of the gospels and once in the book of James.

That word, gehenna, shows up three times in Matthew chapter 5 alone.

Each and every single time it shows up, Jesus warns us that unless we change our ways, unless we do something, we are going to end up there.

So – before we look at those relationships in our lives, I want us to think about what “there” is…

The greek word gehenna is actually made up of two Hebrew words… one meaning valley or son (as in child) and the other is a proper name. So this word gehenna means either the son of Hinnom, or the valley of Hinnom.

The Valley of Hinnom is a real place just on the southwest side of Jerusalem. It is mentioned multiple times in the Old Testament – both in the setting of borders for the tribes of Israel and also in describing the religious practices that took place there. The Valley of Hinnom was in most cases the site of despicable actions. Pagans and even some of Israel’s kings had made child sacrifices there in the valley by offering them up in fire. As time went on, the Valley of Hinnom became not much more than a garbage dump on the edge of town.

That is presumably what it was at the time of Jesus. A place of trash and waste. A place to throw unwanted things. Continual fires burned there in the dump to consume the garbage and to prevent pestilence. In John Wesley’s notes on the Matthew 5, he reminds us that if any criminals were burnt alive as punishment, it was there, in that horrible place.

As I researched this valley, this place called Gehenna, I read that some think the poor, the unwanted and criminals were actually buried here, rather than in nice and expensive tombs that a good burial would have entailed.

Gehenna is a place for garbage. It is a place for that which is unwanted. It is a place to destroy waste and filth.

Let’s forget, for just a moment, that for two thousand years we have translated this greek word Gehenna into little tiny four letter word like hell. Let’s instead put ourselves in the shoes of the first century Jews who might have been sitting on the hillside listening to Jesus teach – as he does here in Matthew.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, pretend that they can see that valley of garbage, gehenna, somewhere off in the distance… much like I could see Mount Trashmore from the hill top in Jones Park.

Maybe it is just the rising smoke from the smouldering fires. Maybe it is just the faint smell of burning garbage that lingers on the air. Maybe you can actually see the heaps of trash, even from far off, just outside the gate of Jerusalem.

Imagine you are there… and then hear again these words from Jesus.

21“You have heard that it was said to those who lived long ago, You shouldn’t commit murder, k and all who commit murder will be in danger of judgment. 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with their brother or sister will be in danger of judgment. If they say to their brother or sister, ‘You idiot,’ they will be in danger of being condemned by the governing council. And if they say, ‘You fool,’ they will be in danger of gehenna (fiery hell). 23

…And if your right eye causes you to fall into sin, tear it out and throw it away. It’s better that you lose a part of your body than that your whole body be thrown into [gehenna]. 30 And if your right hand causes you to fall into sin, chop it off and throw it away. It’s better that you lose a part of your body than that your whole body go into [gehenna].

Do you hear those passages differently, knowing about this burning garbage heap just outside of Jerusalem?

As Jesus used this word, gehenna, with his followers, their minds immediately drifted to this valley where the waste of their world was destroyed.

Time and time again, Jesus uses everyday and common things to help the people understand some ultimate truth about God. He talks about flowers and yeast, seeds and vineyards, buildings and rocks and even garbage.

Each of those common, everyday things used in his parables are more than what they seem.

And so when we hear about this continually burning garbage dump… we put a word to it – hell.

But before we add layer upon layer of meaning – before we take two thousand years of church tradition and meaning and pile it all up on that little four letter word, let’s look at what Jesus is using it for right here.

First, Jesus never says that those who break the commandments go to hell. He doesn’t even refer to it anywhere in Matthew 5 as a place of punishment.

No, Jesus is talking about garbage, waste, unwanted things. Useless things.

Jesus starts by talking about our attitudes and continues on with the witness we bear forth in the world and then Jesus starts talking about the law and the kingdom of God.

As he speaks, he tells us: As long as heaven and earth exist, neither the smallest letter nor even the smallest stroke of a pen will be erased from the Law until everything there becomes a reality… unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the legal experts and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

All of it is about the kingdom. Kingdom attitudes, Kingdom witness, Kingdom behavior.

In this whole next section, Jesus is talking about what is useless, unwanted, cast out of the Kingdom of heaven…

Not about eternal punishment in some fiery place… but about what cannot, will not, be a part of the kingdom.

He’s talking about the garbage that has to be cleared out of our lives in order for us to be a part of the kingdom.

He’s talking about the trash that gets in the way of us truly living like Kingdom people.

He’s telling us that unless we are willing to throw those behaviors and attitudes and feelings away, unless we are willing to clean house and transform our lives… we might as well just throw our whole selves out there on the garbage dump – because we are useless to him. We are useless to God. We are useless to the kingdom of heaven.

If we are not honest about our failings and our missteps then we are throwing ourselves out with the trash. By refusing to examine our lives, we live out there in the dump all of our own free choosing.

What does it take to live differently? What does it take to be a part of the Kingdom of God?

You have to be willing to let go of that thing which is holding you back from God’s transformative grace and love. Cut it off, throw it out, put it where it belongs… on the trash heap, out with the garbage, never to be seen again.

God wants you to be a part of the Kingdom.

You.

Not the garbage of your past that you cling to.

You.

Fully redeemed, made clean and whole by his love and grace.

Are you going to hold on so fast to the sin of your life so that you can’t enter?

Will you let it hinder you?

Or will you throw it out where it belongs?

On the southwest side of town there is a garbage heap… take out your sin and leave it there… and come join us in the Kingdom of God.

The Gift of Love

Posted on June 20, 2010Leave a comment

This week, my husband and I had two houseguests… our niece and nephew. They had the distinct honor of being able to have a sleep over at our house and boy, were they excited!

For the most part, I think that excitement came from hanging out with their favorite aunt and uncle. But a few hours into their visit, I got a hint of a different reason for their joy.

Our nephew loves to play with the wii. They have one at his house, but he is limited to 20 minutes per day of playtime. We were attempting to enforce that rule, but he stood up and looked at us very seriously and said: But this isn’t my dad’s house. His rules don’t work here!

Every rule that governed their lives at home – about bedtime, playtime, what they had to eat, what they could wear – these two assumed went out the window when they came over to Aunt Kaky and Uncle Spicy’s house. We were going to love them and spoil them and let them get away with anything and everything… or so they thought.

I think that many times, in our Christian faith, we too believe that rules go out the window when we believe in Jesus. More than a few times in my life, I have heard people say that all of the law and judgment of the Old Testament is done away with when Jesus comes. It’s like we magically are transported to a new world where all the tired rules from the past are done away with. We didn’t like all of those rules about not wearing poly-cotton blends, or staying away from shellfish, anyway. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth sounds pretty barbaric in our minds. And really… how can we be expected to not covet our neighbor’s possessions when their new car looks so nice and we want one just like it?!

It doesn’t help that Jesus says things like “I have come not to do away with the law but to fulfill it,” but then in the next breath he is breaking some Sabbath law by eating grain out in the field and saying things like “the law is made for man, not man for the law.”

How do we know what rules to follow? How do we keep ourselves from being too legalistic, without slipping in the other direction and becoming too lax in our moral compass?

It’s simple. We keep at the front of our minds the standard by which all laws are held: love.

The mixing of materials like polyester and cotton has nothing to do with love or how we treat our neighbors… we consider laws like this to be ceremonial by the standard of love we aren’t too concerned with them in our daily lives in the 21st century.

But there are many other laws that have everything to do with love. Like the ones Paul reminds us of in Romans: don’t commit adultery, don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t covet… in each of these laws, we are faced with relationships. And love is the absolute standard for how we are to behave.

In Romans 13:8, Paul writes that we should owe no one anything, except to love one another. In saying this, he teaches “that our highest obligation toward men is our obligation to love them.” (Bob Deffinbaugh). More than our obligation to do the right thing, we are to love.

Of course, when love becomes your highest priority… the right actions naturally follow.

Because Love fulfills the law. When we act in love towards God and our neighbor, we are already living out the law. An act of love is never to commit adultery or murder. The love of Christ that should rule our hearts would never steal or covet.

Each of these acts would be unloving because they harm other people. Adultery destroys lives. Coveting is “desiring my good and my gain at my neighbor’s expense.” (Deffinbaugh)

Murder not only takes the life of another, but rips away from family members the life of a beloved. Stealing harms the economic wellbeing of our neighbors.

Bob Deffinbaugh summarizes what Paul teaches us in Romans 13 by saying: “We are to view our neighbor from the perspective of love. When we do, we will seek his good, avoid doing what is harmful to him, and thus fulfill the law.”

Love seeks the good for another. It doesn’t matter who they are – whether rich or poor, friend or enemy, neighbor or stranger. Love always seeks the good for others… even at our own expense.

That is the love that Christ showed us. Unconditional love. Self-sacrificial love. Love that bends down in service to others. Love shown to the stranger, to the sinner, to the rich and to the proud. Love that gives life.

Love like Jesus loved.

Love as if people, not laws, were more important.

Because the truth of the matter is, there are days when we will face a conflict between the laws of our fathers and the needs of humanity.

St. Thomas Aquinas once said that if a family is starving and the rich will not share their abundance with the poor – it is justified for a mother to steal to feed her children.

I think that Aquinas was able to make this bold and radical claim, because every time Jesus faced a conflict between the laws of the righteous and showing compassion and love to a sinner – he always came down on the side of love.

One of the most recognized examples of this is when Jesus came across a woman who was about to be stoned to death. In John, chapter 8, Jesus was confronted with one of the 10 commandments: a woman who had been caught in the very act of adultery.

Now, the first thing I wonder when I hear this passage is where the other offender was. If she was caught in the very act… certainly there was a man around somewhere who was also deserving of this same sentence. According to the law, both were required to be stoned.

But the man is nowhere to be found and the crowd is angry and ready to enforce the law to its fullest extent. But when Jesus enters their midst, he talks the crowds down, and helped her back on her feet. And then he spoke these amazing words to her: I do not condemn you – go and sin no more.

In his short and simple statement, Jesus shows us how love and the law fit together. God’s laws have been given to protect us. They are given to show us the good and holy ways to live. But love is always the standard.

When he says, “I do not condemn you – go and sin no more.” He is not saying that what she did wasn’t wrong. And he’s not saying that she isn’t responsible for her actions… because he asks her to live differently. He isn’t even saying that he accepts her apology, because nowhere in the text does this woman say anything, much less beg for forgiveness.

No, he simply forgives her. He loves her. He accepts her – no matter what she has done. When it comes to the law, the first thing Christ does is love. And then he asks her to respond to that love that he has shown by allowing him to change her life. (based on work by Gary DeLashmutt)

Yesterday, I drove to my cousin’s wedding in Iowa Falls and along the side of HWY 21, I saw a sign that said: “Hell is for deadbeat moms”. This being Father’s Day, it could have just as easily said: Hell is for deadbeat dads. All across our nation, all across the world, the first impulse of many Christians is to remind folks of their sin and to condemn them for it.

Most of these images are pictures not of love, but of anger… of hate… of judgement.

It is easy to do these things.

It is easy to point out the speck in the eye of our brother and ignore the log in our own eye.

It is easy to hate. It is easy to give up on someone and tell them they are going to hell… maybe even easier
still to send them to hell for their sin with a few stones or a firing squad.

But Jesus looks down upon the one who has done wrong and says – I do not condemn you…. Go and sin no more. Get up… let me help you.

Loving our neighbors is hard.

Loving the Lord with all of our heart, and soul and mind and strength is hard.

And unlike my niece and nephew, who thought they were getting a free pass to do whatever they wanted, we know that abiding in God what is asked of us may actually be harder than simply following the rules.

We will fail. Constantly we will fail in this charge to love.

But when we do, Christ will bend over and look us in the eye and say: I love you, I do not condemn you… get up… go…. And sin no more.

Amen.

law or grace?

Posted on March 7, 2009Leave a comment

i was talking with a friend tonight about guilt and its absolutely pervasive impact on our lives. She was talking about something that is a normal and healthy part of her life and yet there was still residual guilt from societal standards that come up afterwards.

Guilt is such a terrible terrible thing. And I think I feel that way because I’m troubled by the fact we just can’t figure out how to live as people under grace…. we still think we are under the law and that we are constatnly being measured up against something.

I know I do it all the time. I neglect to spend an afternoon visiting church members and instead spend it connecting with colleagues online and I feel guilty. I don’t practice my guitar, and I feel guilty. I look at the dishes piled up on my counter, and I feel guilty. And those are just simple things. Guilt pervades our lives.

And it pervades my church. I think my biggest uphill battle in this congregation is trying to get people to stop talking about hell and the law and having to “straighten up and fly right” (they say this ALL THE TIME!) and to just focus on loving one another and loving ourselves and loving God. I think it comes down to Paul’s own struggle with the law that he had lived with his whole life. He wanted so much to live by grace, but was constantly seeing his body in the light of the law.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but there is a guy I visit with who wants to know why I don’t talk about hell more, why I’m not preaching for people to flee from the wrath to come. I don’t see our faith that way. My faith and my salvation is about restoring my relationship with God, not making sure I don’t spend an eternity burning in hell. And in relationships, we are constantly growing and changing and we make mistakes, but it is the willingness to keep being in the relationship that matters. I think that is why the idea of covenant is so important and why God, no matter now many times Israel was unfaithful to the covenant, found ways to bring them back into relationship. the problem wasn’t that they did bad things. the problem was they neglected their relationship with God and put something else in God’s place.

I’ve been married for only a year and a half – but even in that short time, I know what that is like. We make mistakes all the time. We treat each other like crap somedays, and sometimes we make poor choices like putting work or down time or making dinner before each other. It happens. But if we were to let the past and all of the ways we have not fulfilled our marriage covenant determine our future, if we were to carry all of those mistakes with us and bring guilt into the present, we would never be able to forgive and love one another. The biggest piece of marriage advice I got was to never go to bed angry with one another. On the flip side, never go to bed feeling bad about something you have done.

What if we lived that kind of relationship with God? Where inspite of our failings, we went to bed leaving the past behind us and with a renewed commitment to be in relationship for another day? Covenants are not about prescribed standards and boxes to check and things we have to do – it is about a choice to be in relationship. And in a healthy relationship, there can be no guilt.