A boy is selling fish on
a corner and to get his customers’ attention, he is yelling, “Dam fish for
sale! Get your dam fish here!” A pastor approaches and asks, “Why are you
calling them ‘dam fish?’” The boy
responds, “Because I caught them at the local dam.” The pastor buys a couple fish, takes them home
to his wife, and asks her to cook the dam fish. The wife is surprised, “I’ve never heard you talk
like before.” So he tells her about the
story about the boy. At the dinner
table, the pastor asks his wife to pass the dam fish and takes a bite. The wife asks, “How are your dam fish?” “Why
this is the best dam fish I’ve ever tasted,” he replies. Their teenage son, observing all of this is
quite perplexed and says, “I don’t know what has gotten into the two of you,
but will someone please pass me damned potatoes!”
There is a growing sentiment that religion is ruining
our world. All the ammunition you need to
make such an argument is right there on the evening news. Rabbi Harold Kushner, one of the best known
Jewish authors of our time, says this: “The problem today is not religion. Life is the problem. Religion is the answer.” Religion, he says, can teach us how to find
the hidden rewards of holiness in the world, and how to cope with life’s
uncertainties and disappointments. He
contends that true religion shows us the most direct path to being
authentically human.
This, I think, is what Moses was getting at in today’s
first reading. He says that if God’s
people follow God’s commands then others will look upon their example of living
and see that it is rooted in wisdom and understanding. The commandments that Moses delivered are
called the ‘Torah,’ a word which is often mistranslated as ‘law’, but a more
accurate rendering is ‘teaching’ because it is God’s gift to all people so that
we will know how to live. Maybe it
would be better to call them the Teaching Commandments because they show us how
to love God, nurture our spiritual nature, revere life and all created things,
treat others with dignity, value fidelity in primary relationships, tell the
truth, and respect the rights and properties of others. God intends for these teachings to open up
life in all its fullness.
Kushner writes of his own faith tradition that it is
meant “to convey a sense of exuberance to
life, a readiness to enjoy the pleasures of the world. It removes from wine [for example] the taint
of sin and self-indulgence and invites us to look at all God has created and
find it good.”
There is an old sage that suggests some day every one
of us will have to give an account for all the good things God created which we
refused to enjoy. This is what religion
is meant to be like – a wise and understanding teaching that points the way to
genuine living – but it can easily disintegrate into a collection of irrelevant
customs and unconnected prohibitions stemming from ancient times.
This is exactly what Jesus encountered in today’s
reading from the Gospel. Religious
leaders confront him because they have grown accustomed to wringing the life
out of life. They complain that his
followers fail to observe suffocating rituals.
You can almost picture them walking arm-in-arm with worried looks on
their faces as they say over and over again, “Pots and pans and dirty hands, oh my!” Can you imagine how frustrated Jesus must
have been with them? Is it any wonder
that a central feature of his proclamation is “I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.” We thirst, we pant, we long for religion that
points the way to life.
But this was the farthest thing from the minds of
Jesus’ critics. They had lost their
bearings and transformed religion from being the answer to life to being at odds with
life. Have you ever known someone who does
this? Have you ever been in a church
like this? Probably not for long! If we are honest with ourselves we will admit
there are times when we ourselves have been a wet blanket on the flame of
life. It is so easy to fall into this
trap.
I remember reading Garrison Keiler’s book Lake Wobegon Days where he traces the
history of all the Baptists churches in his mythical town. Second Baptist split off from First Baptist
over whether believers would be raptured into heaven before or after the great
tribulation. Third Baptist split off of
Second Baptist over ladies wearing pants suits to church instead of
dresses. The True Baptist Church had its
origins in a dispute that erupted at a Third Baptist pot-luck supper. It seems that two families brought he exact
same dish, prompting cries of recipe stealing and other ugly accusations. There were several other Baptist splits in
town, but you get the idea. It is hard
to find much wisdom and understanding in such disputes. So often these differences are little more
than pots and pans and dirty hands, oh my!
There is a saying in the Episcopal Church that we seek
to major in the majors and minor in the minors.
This is to say we seek to make important the things that are important
while not getting sidetracked by those things that are unimportant. A 17th century English theologian
by the name of Richard Hooker labeled what was unimportant as being ‘things
indifferent.’ If it makes no difference
whether you do something one way or the other, then by all means don’t treat it
as if it is a matter of ultimate concern.
His famous phrase that guides the churches of the Anglican Communion is
“unity in the essentials, latitude in the
non-essentials, and charity in all things.”
Jesus proclaims that religion is about finding answers
to the problems of life and He makes the bold claim that he himself is the
answer. His critics complain about pots
and pans and dirty hands. Each of us
must decide for ourselves what religion is meant to be. Kushner says, “Religion should open the doors to passion, to holiness, to deepening of
life’s joys, and to a fearless confrontation with life’s sorrows.” Jesus, like Kushner, was a Jew and doesn’t
this sound a lot like the religion he offers to us in himself? Doesn’t this sound like a wise and
understanding way to live life?
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