FIFTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

Deuteronomy 30:10-14 | Colossians 1:15-20 | Luke 10:25-37

Oh God, who show the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all who, for the faith they profess are counted Christians, the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ and to strive after all that does it honor.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This particular set of readings goes into something so essential, so basic to our understanding of our relationship with God, with ourselves, with our neighbor.  It delves into the very interesting and dynamic place where we everyday make decisions about how we’re going to act, what we’re going to do, what we’re going to say.  It’s fascinating if you look at the way in which God has continually worked with people.  He started his relationship with them in a garden, and the garden is so important in terms of setting the tone for what’s to come later.  And to me it’s not a place of condemnation of the human race, saying there’s something deeply evil and wrong with them.  I think that’s a misunderstanding.  I think the truth is it’s something about revealing who God is and who human beings are and what the relationship is going to engage the humans in.  It was a question of who is going to determine what is true, what is real, and God, from the very beginning, planned to bring human beings into the world at a stage in their development, which is way, way different than most any other creature that God has created.  Human beings come into the world completely incapable of living without a human being, some force outside of them sustaining them and taking care of them and feeding them and nurturing them and then teaching them, training them on how to live.  And we have this long period of time between when a child is considered to be an adult, someone responsible, someone fully formed, and then I guess, in a way, we think of it as age 18.  The more I think about it, and I’ve lived a very long time, I think that kind of full adulthood, meaning being fully who you are intended to be, comes much later than 18, 19, or 20.  Our brains are not even fully formed in terms of discerning what ramifications come from our choices until we’re in our mid-20s.  So let’s just imagine that we need some kind of outside guidance for a very, very long time before we’re able to, in a sense, make our own decisions.

So law, regulations, statutes, rules are essential to our development, to our growth.  So we see in that first encounter with human beings that there is something in human beings that is God-given that is intentionally placed there, and it’s something that resists the law, because the law is not to be the core of how we end of living our lives.  We’re not to be told what to do, how to think, how to decide things from outside of us, but it has got to come ultimately from inside of us.  And that inside of us is divinity dwelling in union, in sync with who we are.  The movement is from an autonomous human being who needs rules and regulations and statutes and a person who is motivated by some force that is so incredibly mysterious and personal that we can’t even make a distinction between divinity and our humanity, so co-mingling and so perfect.  It’s not like just God lives in me and then I go and find him in my heart.  No, he is me, and I am him.  That’s what spirituality leads us to, and in a sense, we need to not outgrow the need for rules and regulations but to somehow make sure that they are not the thing that motivates us, that guides us in making all of our choices.  So the main thing that we learn from the Garden of Eden is human beings do not necessarily like being told what to do.  But yet even in that moment, it wasn’t so much they didn’t want a rule or a law, but they didn’t know who to follow, which rules and laws, because in a way, they were told they were going to follow a law that was God’s law, that was not to eat of it, but then along comes this other force that says, “No, no.  No, the other law is — no, if you — God doesn’t want you to eat of this tree, because it’s going to have a negative impact.  So basically he’s jealous, and if you eat of this tree, you’re going to be like God.  And God kind of likes to be the boss.”  I’m really exaggerating right now, but it’s fun.  Just imagine it went some way like this.  Anyway, something logically in them said, “No, I’m not going to follow that law,” and they broke it.  And then God said, “Okay, it’s clear to me that you need to be out there in the world.  That’s what you want.  You want to go out and make your own decisions, choose your own rules and regulations.  Go for it.”  And so he let them go, made clothes for them before they left and put an angel at the door saying, “Don’t come back here to try to eat of wisdom, the tree of wisdom, because you’re going to have to learn what wisdom is.  You could have eaten it from the very beginning.”  But the story is human beings were not made to go right to the fullness of who they are, but they started where they were in terms of their development and consciousness.

So we have this beautiful, then, image of this God who is a God who takes care of his people, and one of the ways in which he does it is he finally forms a community through Abraham.  And then they get into trouble.  Then they’re enslaved, and then they’re on this journey.  And that journey is towards freedom, towards finding the place that is their place, their place of milk and honey.  Now, if you can feel what I just said in terms of your own journey, you’ll know that, whenever we go back to these stories, as we do over and over again, they’re not — it’s not curiosity that brings us into these stories to wonder how God worked in the past.  No, all these stories are loaded with an experience that people had that is our experience.  We’re experiencing these things.  So these are images that should stimulate in us an awareness of our own personal journey with God — with God to places in this world.  We have a family of origin.  A family of origin has certain statutes.  The difference between a commandment and a statute: a commandment is a law that comes from God that is universal, always applicable, and the Ten Commandments are pretty simple.  It’s all about right relationships with God and with human beings.  First three, very clear, God is the only God.  There aren’t other gods. There’s only one, and he wants you to spend time with him, so keep holy his Sabbath day, a day where you listen to and reflect upon what he teaches and who he is and what he’s doing in your life and in the world.  And then the last is don’t ever use his power in a way that he would not approve.  Don’t take his name in vain.  Then the rest are about our relationships with each other, with those who give us life, with all our dealings with each other in terms of being truthful, being honest, caring for the rights of others, not taking life away from people.  Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t allow corruption, don’t let things be adulterated with corruption, and then stop envying other people.  So it’s a beautiful, simple description of a law that is described then in the reading from Deuteronomy, because that commandment that I just described to you is already in our very being.  It’s not up in the sky.  It’s not somewhere else we have to go get it.  It’s not anything other than you know it.  It’s in your mouth, meaning they’ve memorized it — you’ve memorized it, everything.  You didn’t have a book to go to.  They memorized the commandments, and this is a foretaste of what will come later in the Old Testament where it’s clear that this law that is written on a tablet of stone will one day be written on your hearts.  And that’s where we start this set of readings.

God has given you a commandment that is part of your very nature, and as you evolve and change, you’ll grow into it.  But then we also have something else going on, and that is we have this sense of when we are engaged in any kind of community, like the Jews were engaged in a community — they had regulations called statutes.  And that’s the — to make a distinction between rules, I mean, laws and statutes, laws are commandments that are so fundamental they can never be broken.  But statutes change, and they’re the ways in which some corporations, some institutions, some family system will say, “These are the rules and regulations.  If you live in this, this is how you act.”  And those are statutes, and don’t confuse them with the laws that are written in your heart.  But the statutes are interesting, because they are constantly calling us to a kind of disciplined life, and that disciplined life is something that is really important to understand, because the disciplined life can be an excuse for not doing the work that we are called to do.  And that is to enflesh or allow the commandments, the Ten Commandments to become a very intimate, integral part of who we are, and statutes can get in the way, and statutes can take the place of the rules and laws.  By statutes, I mean we have all these regulations, and the Jews had 613 rules and laws.  And if you paid attention to all of those, you maybe had a sense that you were doing everything that God was wanting you to do, but the commandments got sort of lost.  At least they seemed to be lost by those who ran the temple, because the Ten Commandments are about love, and the statutes are about control.  And there’s a big difference.

And so what you see in the gospel is someone coming with this — and it’s a scholar of the law — who is to test Jesus.  Jesus was the one who supposedly broke the laws.  He wasn’t breaking laws.  He was breaking statutes, and so he was keeping the laws.  So basically Jesus said, “Well, what’s the law?”  And he said — he gives them the commandments, and he says, “You’re right.  Live by those.”  But here’s the things that the statutes really get in the way of us being who we’re called to be, because statutes are not based in a truth that comes from God but in a need that the person whose running the institution has in order to keep order.  So when you start living by statutes, you’re in trouble, or at least you can be in trouble, because the idea is, if you are going to be a part of this group, this company, this religion, whatever, and all these statutes are there, if you don’t follow these statutes, you’re kicked out.  You’re separated from this operation.  Now, when you think about that, if you substitute the Ten Commandments for statutes, things that are not really basic and core to human nature, and you start living in those, you’re living in a world that is extremely dangerous.  And what it leads to is allowing statutes to stand and follow them even though they are destructive and harmful to human beings.  That’s the danger. 

So what Jesus then goes on to say, “Well, if you take all those Ten Commandments, you take them all together, there’s something they’re based in.”  It’s called love, but I’ll use another word, mercy.  So mercy is an ingredient that is in the law, that has the right and the responsibility to override statutes.  What does that mean?  It simply means that God has a rule, a law that is based in how things impact people, and things like statutes can be very comforting and give everybody a sense of where they stand.  It makes things flow, and it’s the way business works.  That’s the way the bank works.  That’s the way the IRS works.  Those are all statutes.  Okay, we’ll follow them if you want to live in this country, blah, blah, blah.  All that kind of stuff makes sense, except it comes at times when those statutes cause enormous pain in someone, and they simply almost destroy them, and they’re in pain.  And so Jesus said, “There’s something based in that law, the Ten Commandments of love, that is mercy.”  And you’re going to feel it once that law becomes integrated into who you are, and the feeling is compassion, because the Ten Commandments are fundamentally about honoring the dignity and the value of every single human being.  And when that person is honored and held in esteem and something is taking that esteem and that value away from them, when they are causing them enormous pain and suffering and sickness and death and all that, there’s something in human beings who understand and have made the Ten Commandments part of their life, they’ll cry out, and they’ll say, “No, that can’t happen.”  And they do that by not so much destroying the regulation or the statute, but they care for the person who’s suffering.  That’s at the heart of the law.  It’s all about caring for people, and the oil that he pours into the wound is the oil of anointing someone to be their fullness and to honor their own dignity, and the wine is forgiveness.  It’s a beautiful image of what can happen to a human heart when it moves from regulations to the heart of the law, which is love and compassion.  And you know what?  When you feel that compassion, you see it in someone else, it’s so easy to start making the distinctions between what is core to human nature as needing this kind of rule and law of love and how dangerous and destructive statutes and regulations can be.  And it gives you wisdom.

Father, your heart beats one with our heart.  Your longing for those that you brought into this world will find fullness and life here, and when that becomes part of our heart, we are filled with this great gift of mercy.  Help us to understand how to turn it into those ways that can help people not only endure the pain that they’re in but change a world that causes that pain.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.