Dont Let Religion Get in the Way of Your Faith (Luke 13: 10-17) 5/6/12

 If I do this a thousand more times, it will never get old for me, because every time I bring a message, there is a point when I become a listener, an observer, right in the middle of delivering the message.  As my heart opens, I can see it happening to others. There is a point where it does not belong to me. In every worship service in every church gathering, hearts open to God’s message. Lives change as the Gospel finds its way into our consciousness and miracles become a way of life. That is God in action.

 Look with me at a portion of chapter 13 of Luke’s gospel.  Jesus is teaching in the synagogue. By now he is being watched very closely by Jewish authorities. They are looking for an excuse to arrest him, for he is a major threat to their way of life. This man is preaching revolution, and the status quo is severely threatened.

Jesus is teaching on the Sabbath. A woman is there, and one would have to be blind not to notice her. One translation describes her as crippled and bent over. Another describes her as so twisted and bent that she couldn’t even look up. Luke tells us that she had been this way for 18 years. Jesus calls her over, and says: “Woman, you’re free! He lays hands on her, and suddenly she is standing straight for the first time in 18 years. Luke says she praised God. That has to be the understatement of the day. I bet she praised God, probably at the top of her lungs. Meanwhile, the synagogue president is indignant, furious, because Jesus has broken God’s law. Jesus is working on the Sabbath, therefore breaking the Fourth Commandment. You know, the one about remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy.  The Jewish leader says to come and be healed on the other six days, but not on the Sabbath. He does not confront Jesus directly, but rather quotes the law to the congregation. The Message says that Jesus “shot back” his answer. I get the impression that it was not done tactfully, but with force and even indignation. Jesus calls this man and his cronies “frauds.” He says essentially that if you can water an animal on the Sabbath, but you can’t help a person in distress, then the law values animals over people and any law that comes to such a perverted conclusion is just plain stupid. Jesus refers to the woman as a “daughter of Abraham,” meaning she is Jewish. Even so, his message is lost on the Jewish leader. He has a program to keep, a system to uphold. “come and be healed on the other six days,  but not on my Sabbath.”

Like most exaggerated claims, there is a grain of truth in the Jewish leader’s argument. In this case, Jewish tradition held that only life-threatening diseases could be treated on the Sabbath. Since the woman had had this condition for many years, the Jewish leader deemed it not life-threatening. It didn’t seem to matter that someone had been healed. A rule had been broken and that must be sin.

I’m thinking that the real law that was broken was the law of “Don’t Rock the Boat.” It comes in different versions, but the bottom line is always the same. “We’ve always done it this way” or “We might lose some financial support” or “How would that look?” are some of the most familiar.  

 Fast forward to present day. In session meeting after session meeting the worry is church growth. “We have to have more members in order to meet the budget.” Discussion turns to ways to attract people. Use door hangers. “Too impersonal.” Advertise. “Not enough money budgeted for that.” Go door to door. “People will slam the door in your face.” Invite people. “Everybody I know goes to church” and, of course, “We’ve never done it that way before.”

In a Sunday school class I once attended, there was an ongoing debate about whether it was appropriate to go to a bar with a friend to talk with him about Christianity. By bar, I mean a pub where you can buy beer, but not a meal. There was concern that the presence of a Christian in a bar would be sending the wrong message to those who saw him there. The class could never decide that it was okay. It was concerned with appearances. “How would that look?”

In another church, a Sunday school class adopted a family at Christmas. The class was generous and opened its pocketbooks to fill the family’s stockings with food, clothing and gifts for the children. The family attended the church Christmas service. Their children were loud and unruly. They talked during the service and moved around noisily. It was hard for the people around them to hear. Finally, a couple members whose grunts and groans had failed to illicit the “proper” response, turned around and asked the parents to get better control of their children or take them out. They did, and they never came back. “They’re not our kind of people. They wouldn’t be comfortable here.” Can you imagine making those arguments at the feet of Jesus? Those pious church members were so intent on the ritual that they couldn’t apply the message.

 Jesus faced this kind of misplaced piety. Remember Jesus eating at the house of Matthew the tax collector; overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple in Jerusalem? And Jesus healed on the Sabbath more than once.  Jesus was not a person to stand on ceremony. Jesus ministered. He ministered to the outcasts, the strangers, the invisible among us. He had no temple; he had no home church; he had no central organization; no network; no website.  He went to town and found the tax collectors, the beggars, the paralytics, the lepers. He went down to the shore and found the fishermen and the net repairmen. He went for walks and talked to people he met. He went to where the people were. He didn’t wait for them to come to him.

If we’re not careful, we can be like the synagogue president; we can let ceremony dictate over circumstances; we can let religion get in the way of our faith. What is religion? Think about it. Religion is a diet, a steady stream of what you do regularly and to which you assign great priority. You’ve heard the saying: He or she does such and such religiously. Some people wash their hands religiously. Some people eat salad religiously. When we think about belief systems and religion, we think about what church we attend, what denomination we belong to. When we get involved with a particular church, we get involved with another system, a system of building maintenance, worship services, special events, budgets, grounds care and the list goes on. When we are elected to church office, we get responsibilities. We look at last year’s calendar to see how to build this year’s calendar. We go to committee meetings. We become managers.

What did I just describe? Was it your Personal Elder or the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce? If one were to hear only the job description, one might think it had nothing at all to do with the church.  In Gilbert Rendle’s book Leading Change in the Congregation, he says that “congregations that have active evangelism committees tend to grow…at a slower rate and with more difficulty than congregations that do not have such committees.” Wouldn’t you think just the opposite?  The research proves that with a committee, the responsibility for meeting strangers, for inviting new people, has shifted. Everyone else in the church has lost their motivation. We have shifted the burden to a committee. Our desire to organize can be our undoing.  It’s not a bad thing to be organized, but you have to be careful. Otherwise, organization can become your goal, and that misses the mark entirely.

 George Barna conducts many surveys on trends in Christianity. His studies show that in the workplace, the great majority of people cannot tell Christians from non-Christians. We get very busy with this business of religion. It’s easy to develop a severe case of tunnel vision. We can’t see the forest for the trees. Our religion, more specifically our religious system, has gotten in the way of our faith. Theologian William Barclay says that the worship of systems (and that is precisely the problem the synagogue president had that Sabbath day with Jesus), commonly invades the church.  Tragically, more trouble and strife arise in churches over legalistic details of procedure than over any other thing.

In the Presbyterian Book of Order, the very first chapter outlines the Great Ends of the Church. Number One on that short list is “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind…” (F-1.0304). Even before that, the Church’s Calling is characterized by 4 tenets: to be a community of faith, hope, love and witness (F-1.0301). Membership is characterized as a commitment to participate in Christ’s mission (G-1.0304). The Book of Order is a couple hundred pages long and it has enough rules in it to choke a horse. But the major premises upon which it is built are the ones we just outlined. Don’t lose sight of the forest just because those trees are poking you in the ribs.

 Several years ago, one of our children, Emily, spent a year in Mombassa, Kenya as a missionary, where she established a youth center in an area where Christianity was in a heavy minority. Before she left for Kenya, she was advised to make her primary goal to “just be” a Christian. This advice seemed vague and without direction to our goal driven daughter. When she came home from that year and her story began to unfold, she realized it was the best advice she had received. She did make goals, and the people she served are the better for her having been there. But by her own admission, the programs she established there may not survive. PCUSA determined that the area had no support base and could not sustain a viable Christian mission presence, so she was not replaced. Were her efforts in vain? Hardly! Emily found out that she could “just be” a Christian and in doing so, her daily acts of Christianity had an effect on the lives of the youth she served. No hospitals were built, no schools were erected, no operations base may survive. But dozens, perhaps hundreds, of youngsters in Mombassa now look upon Christianity in a different light. For them, Christianity is the white American girl who just acted out her belief by giving them water, by administering first aid, by letting them talk, by hearing their voices and by not judging them.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus said he came not to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them. His fulfillment came in the form of love and servant hood. Jesus summarized the law as loving God our Father with all our heart and soul and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves.   Here’s the thing. Don’t hide behind the rules. Don’t distort that which we call religion, because religion is nothing more than the way that we practice our Christianity. John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, called religion “…the best armor a man can have, but it is the worst cloak.” I think he was saying that we need to wear our Christian values like armor to fight off the sin in our lives, but not to provide us with warmth. That warmth comes from the spirit, not from the system.

I learned new terms this week for yesterday and tomorrow. For my three year old grandson, they are “last day” and “next day.” I like the way my grandson puts it. It makes sense to me. So the question today is the same question as “last day” and “next day” and next year. It is the same for you and me and for every church in God’s kingdom. What is the will of God for you? What is the will of God for this church? Each of you has to discern what your love act to God will be, what form it will take, the degree to which you will commit. That discernment must grow out of a continuous conversation with our Creator. It’s not about form or rules. It’s about substance, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, as the writer of Hebrews so eloquently teaches us.  Act on your faith.  Each of you has different talents, different levels of energy, different seasons of life. Each of you has a ministry to fulfill, not just for this church, but for Jesus Christ. Never, never be like the church leader that dayin the synagogue.  Be like Jesus. Come, heal and be healed seven days a week. Healing never takes a holiday. In my daughter’s words, “Just be a Christian.”