24 January 1999
St. George’s Episcopal Church
Le Mars, Iowa
Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher
The Rev. Karen Wacome, Celebrant
Amos 3.1-8 Psalm 139 1 Corinthians 1.10-17 Matthew 4.12-23
When I was a child my parents practiced a division of labor when it came to crime and punishment. Misdemeanors were handled on the spot by my mother, while felonies had to await my father’s return from work: “Go to your room and think about what you’ve done! When your father gets home he’s going to lay down the law!” I remember that awful sense of hopeless doom as the day waned and I waited for my father to come home, hear the bad thing I’d done and punish me for it. That ominous phrase “laying down the law” summed up the well-deserved fear and foreboding of guilt incurred and righteous punishment meted out.
I didn’t know it at the time but having parents ready and willing to lay down the law - so long as, like my parents - they do it with patience, fairness and love, is something to be grateful for. Of course, it’s not just children who need some regulation - some law - in their lives. More than at any time in recent memory it seems obvious that someone needs to lay down the law for people in general; that we need to shape up and act like decent, responsible human beings.
Many of you are, I assume, aware of the phenomenon of Dr. Laura Schlesinger. Dr. Laura, as she is called, hosts a daily radio show where people call in in quest of moral advice. Dr. Laura firmly, confidently - some would say dogmatically - lays down the law, berating her willing victims on the importance of character over happiness, on integrity, honor, fidelity, on being responsible parents and spouses. She scolds as selfish women who have abortions and even mothers who go to work. She attacks the childishness of parents who put their own personal fulfillment over the needs of their children. She ridicules moral relativism, feel-good psychobabble, concern for self-esteem; she tells her audience that we need to grow up, do our duty, and honor our commitments. Marry the person whose moral character you respect, not the person you’re in love with! She lectures her listeners and callers on loyalty to one’s religious roots. Raised a secular Jew, in adulthood she embraced orthodox Judaism. Now she lambastes interfaith marriages. (Her own husband left the Episcopal Church, converting to Judaism to marry her.) Indeed, her rediscovery of her faith lies at the core of what she’s doing. She says that one day, after she rediscovered her Jewishness, she was reading in Genesis about the covenant between God and man when, she says, “something clicked, and I realized that I am a priest with a mission to help God perfect the world.”
Currently hers is the number one talk show in the country, boasting 20 million listeners. Upwards of 50,000 people try to call in each day. Obviously, Dr. Laura has a message people want to hear. There is widespread frustration with the moral anarchy of contemporary American society. Many of us are looking for someone to lay down the law.
Whatever we might make of Dr. Laura’s hectoring, hyperbolic, sometimes abusive, style, it’s hard not to appreciate what she’s trying to do. People are now, at least as much as they ever were, a moral mess. The most natural thing in the world is to think we need to do something about it, and that God wants us to do something about it, since he is, after all, in the business of getting people to be good.
I have, on several occasions, listened to Dr. Laura with fascination, because what she has to say stands in such stark contrast to the good news that Jesus preached. The Dr. Laura message is, as Martha Stewart, another, more low-key and possibly more insidious expositor of the law, would say: “a good thing.” Yet it is not the thing we most need to hear. It is not the word that saves us. I realize though that most people would see the good doctor and God as being more or less on the same side. The idea that faith in God amounts to getting on board a divine program for the moral improvement of humanity, of getting human beings to obey some law or other, is taken for granted almost everywhere.
In today’s gospel lesson we hear that Jesus, after John baptized him, began his career as an itinerant preacher proclaiming: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” It’s fiendishly easy to turn this into something that makes sense in this world’s terms, into a message that would make sense to Dr. Laura. Something like: and Jesus started telling people: you’d better stop doing the lousy things you’ve been doing all your lives and shape up because God, who isn’t happy about your behavior, is going to show up soon. If you don’t change your ways, you’ll be in for it once God arrives and lays down the law. But this has nothing to do with the repentance that Jesus calls for. In fact, it’s just about the very opposite of it.
You’ve probably heard along the way someplace about the term that’s used here, the word that makes its way into our English text as “repent:” it’s the Greek word “metanoia,” which literally means something like “to think again,” and gets across the idea of radically changing your mind, of totally reorienting your whole self. The word connects to the idea of turning around, to stop moving in one direction and start moving in the opposite direction. To repent is to start believing things that once seemed the complete opposite of how things are, to start acting in ways that once seemed the complete opposite of the right way of doing things.
Notice what it doesn’t say here: Jesus doesn’t say “Repent, because you’ve been behaving badly.” The focus isn’t on what they’ve been doing; it’s on what God is doing and will do: on what the God at that moment fully present right in front of them in Jesus has determined to do, no matter what. He calls on them to turn around to face the God who is coming to them, the God who is coming to their rescue whether they think they need to be rescued or not. Notice that John the Baptist, who started this preaching about repentance, started out pretty indiscriminately: he aimed it not just at the riffraff who might reasonably be seen as needing to clean up their acts, but at last as much at the pious and righteous Pharisees and Saducees; it was them, recall, that John called a brood of vipers.
All of them, good, bad and indifferent, have it wrong and need to change their minds. All of them are heading the wrong way and are admonished to turn around to face their savior. What’s so bad about their way of seeing things, the path they’re following, that Jesus calls out for them to stop, think and turn around? Nothing that isn’t the most natural and obvious thing for all of us. It’s living by the law, living under whatever the scheme of scorekeeping that we think really matters, in terms of which we are, by our efforts, acceptable to ourselves and to God. Whatever the system of judgment and control we’ve internalized, that’s the law for us. Whether we convince ourselves we’re making it and that we’re good enough, or whether in our hearts we’ve given up in despair, what sticks to us like chewing gum is this urge to justifying ourselves, to be right and in the right by our own efforts. And all the while regarding God as the judge, the one who lays down the law and who we must try to please. This is the way of thinking - and feeling and acting - that Jesus calls us to give up. Jesus offers himself - the perfect sacrifice for the sins of the whole world - in place of all this.
Christians of course know what’s what. We realize that we are saved by grace, that God accepts us in Christ, that the sacrifice of Jesus, not the ways we might improve ourselves, is all that matters in making us perfectly acceptable in God’s eyes. But I think we forget this almost all the time. It seems to me that unless we’re getting a knock on the side of the head by hearing the outrageous good news, we turn back to the old way, to the hopeless task of trying to satisfy the demands of the law, instead of putting our faith in Jesus, God’s answer to the human condition. We’re all too ready to add a little “Yes, but...” after the good news so it doesn’t really say the shocking thing it says: that we’re all made right in God’s eyes by what Jesus did, not by what we do.
In the epistle this morning we heard St. Paul reminding the Corinthians, divided into factions each claiming to be unique in getting things right, that Christ sent him to them to proclaim the gospel, but not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. We need always to check that in our thinking we’re not letting that cross be emptied of its power. The authentic message of the cross, the genuine call to repentance, is not one of eloquence and wisdom; it’s not a message that sounds good or makes sense. Surely Dr. Laura would hear it as a dangerous invitation to get away with murder. Robert Farrar Capon, in his book The Parables of Judgment, sums up our natural attitude toward it: “no matter how we give lip service to the notion of free grace and dying love, we do not like it. It is just too...indiscriminate. It lets rotten sons and cheating tax farmers and common tarts into the kingdom, and it thumbs its nose at really good people. And it does that, gallingly, for no more reason than the Gospel’s shabby exaltation of dumb trust over worthy works”(p.109). Heard in a serious way, it is a message that goes against the grain. The way to which God calls us is a way that seems risky and disreputable. We don’t trust it. In fact, I’d say that unless what we’re preaching makes good folk suspect we’re all too willing to let people get away with something then it’s not the message of the cross, not Jesus’ call to repentance, that we’re preaching, but some law of human making; maybe a fine enough thing in itself, but not the way that leads to life. Look, if you need evidence, at how often and how easily the Church of Jesus has become - of all things - a club for the good people instead of a community where all are welcome just as they are because of God’s love for them.
Jesus called James and John to repent and follow him. They were working hard in the family business, doing what was right and proper for young men of their day, but Jesus called and they dropped everything, scandalously left their father there with the boat, setting out on the way that leads to the cross and the resurrection. As Karen put it last week, they began the telling of their own gospel stories. They lay down their nets and they lay down the law, putting themselves in the hands of Jesus. Yet for them, as for us, the temptation must have always been to turn back, to head back to be entangled in the web of a law that will never save but always condemn. Our faith is that the power of the cross still works:
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and buried,
He descended to the dead...
Christ continues even now the harrowing of the hell of lost human lives, finding and suffering with the refugees and fugitives, the unsavory and the unworthy. The great light breaks in the darkness, bringing grace and freedom where there was only condemnation and control.
On the third day he rose again.
Jesus in dying completely forever for everyone has satisfied the demands of the law, taking to himself the sins of the whole world. So we are called to lay down the law, to put it aside and put our confidence in Christ. Where the law brought only death - judgment and alienation from God - God’s grace, given unconditionally to all, brings life. God give us the grace to lay aside the works of the law and hear the call of Jesus. Amen.