I guess you could say that I am a country boy. In rural Pennsylvania where I grew up, I could look out my bedroom window and see corn and soybeans growing. Cars would go by, but it was mostly pretty quiet. This summer, however, I’m living in Manhattan, on the upper west side, just off Broadway. My bedroom window overlooks traffic at all hours of the day, and I find myself struggling to fall asleep at night because of the noise. The city is an angry place, and my cornfield sort of ways have not quite adapted yet to a world where everyone is in a big hurry to get to whatever miserable place they are headed next. I am evidently the only one around who knows the words “excuse me.” I have heard more racial slurs in a week than in the rest of my life. And I do not find myself wondering why everyone is in such an awful mood all the time. Instead, I find myself wondering how long it’s going to take before I wind up that way.
The reason I’m living in New York is so that I can take some summer courses at Jewish Theological Seminary, which is part of the Columbia University campus. I am working toward becoming a professor in the field of Old Testament, and I wanted to learn something about the Jewish perspective on our shared scriptures. It’s funny, having spent eight years now as a religious professional, and earning two Master’s degrees in religion, and then coming here and feeling like I don’t have any idea what is going on. But then, it’s a totally different tradition then ours, so it’s no surprise that there is a lot for me to learn.
But some of the most interesting learning so far has taken place outside the classroom. Living in community with a bunch of Jewish people—conservative Jews, who take it a little more seriously than some to observe God’s Law—I find myself in what sometimes seems like an alien world, and wondering how my new friends manage to handle all their rules every day, outside in the real world.
The biggest area of my confusion is around food. Rules about keeping kosher are not something I have ever had to observe before. But while my own personal eating habits are nobody’s business, the spaces in which I eat need to be kept ritually pure. Food brought to the seminary building must be kosher, but just to be sure, no outside food can be brought into the cafeteria, a kosher space. Everything that the cafeteria sells is labeled: Some with “Meat” and others with “Dairy.” Of course, nothing can be both. The same rules have to be kept in my own kitchen, since the space is certified kosher, and I share it with a roommate. Dishes in the cabinet on the left are for dairy. Dishes in the cabinet on the right are for meat. Food that has any chance of mixing, or meat that is slaughtered in ways outside the kosher rules, needs to be kept away. Being a gentile, I can have a cheeseburger at Shake Shack down the street, but I can’t bring any leftovers home. I few days ago, I went grocery shopping, and after standing in the store for about thirty minutes, picking up one thing after another, reading the ingredients, wondering what they meant—I left empty-handed, having no idea what was okay.
And so it is proof positive that God has a sense of humor, in that today’s Gospel reading deals with rules about the Sabbath. Jesus and his disciples have two encounters with the religious authorities of his time about the injunction against doing work on the Sabbath. In the first, they are walking through a field, and picking grain, presumably because they’re hungry. The second time, they are in the synagogue for Sabbath worship, but there is a man with a withered hand, and Jesus decides to heal him. According to the Pharisees’ interpretation of the Law, these things qualify as “work,” and are therefore not allowed on the Sabbath, but Jesus does them anyway, and they are shocked. These two stories lie relatively early in Mark’s version of the Gospel, and they serve to explain why the Pharisees were so eager to get rid of Jesus and his followers.
So many times throughout Christian history, we have interpreted these sorts of stories about Jesus to show that the rules of Judaism are misguided, and the freedom we have in Christ should take its place. But we need to be very careful of this kind of thinking, because it doesn’t match either what Christianity says or what it does. In the first place, while we say we get rid of all those “silly laws” that Jews have to follow, we just replace them with a new set of laws of our own. Don’t we? I mean, our sense of what is morally right and wrong is just as complicated as theirs, and the only difference is that we don’t have it written down and codified in the same way. We insist on welcoming the stranger, but only if they act like us in worship. We allow congregations to send extra voting members to our assemblies if their first language isn’t English, but when is the last time someone got up at assembly and preached in Spanish or Chinese? We don’t observe the Sabbath from Friday to Saturday night, but we do expect everyone to show up here on Sunday morning, and not usually because we want to, but because we think we should. This is what God expects of us, we reason. And it becomes as much of a law as the other. I remember, in my old congregation, a woman complaining because the acolytes wore sneakers, and another insisting that the candles be lit in the right order. And the things congregations fight about! As if God cares about what color the carpet is!
I wonder. If Jesus and his disciples came into our churches, and sat in the back with their feet up on the pews and munching on potato chips and freshly picked grain, or getting up and performing healings when the bulletin clearly says he should be sitting down right now and listening to the sermon, would we politely ask him to leave? Or would be be less than polite?
It’s important to notice, too, that Jesus never says, “The Sabbath is wrong and you should get rid of it.” Jesus is Jewish. And he’s a good Jew, too. He does observe the Sabbath. Except when he doesn’t. Which is to say, this story isn’t about the Sabbath, or any of those other rules. It’s really about the reason. What Jesus does say is this: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.”
We spend so much time thinking that the rules we follow, whatever they may be, are the way that we honor God. But we forget that they were not just rules, but gifts, things God gave us for our own well-being. They are not how we honor God; they are how God honors us. Which means that if we follow them for their own sake, we’ve got it wrong. And if we follow them and they crush us, we’ve still got it wrong. God’s instructions to us should lift us up, and bring us life, and fill us with joy. If they don’t, we should stop following them, because they’re not fulfilling their purpose. They’re not for God’s sake. They’re for ours.
One of my classmates invited me over for Sabbath dinner. I had no idea what to expect, but I went. Despite her insistence that there was less food than usual, there was far too much for us to eat. Meatballs and chickpeas in a savory broth, and roasted peppers, and homemade challah bread and hummus, and more. Though a meat dinner, we discovered late in the meal that one of the dairy forks had accidentally made its way onto the table. They laughed as they went through a list of reasons to justify the accident. The rules are not so strict as I was led to believe.
But what I’ll remember most is the prayers before the meal. We lit candles and sang and danced. I watched as the husband spun around with their two-year old in his arms, and the joyful faces as we shared some real time set aside to remember God and the wonderful things God does for us. And I thought, “Oh, this is what the Sabbath is for.” Just as every time I reach into the cupboard and have to decide which plate to use this summer, I am compelled to think of God, whom I love, who loves me.
This is what Jesus wants us to know. It is not that we must follow the rules God has laid out. It’s that God is constantly a part of our lives, loving us and drawing us deeper into joy. Follow rules, don’t follow rules, whatever. If you pick grain, do it with delight and wonder in God’s gift of nourishment and growth. If you heal, do it to bring joy to God’s people and glorify the One who makes us whole. And if you keep the Sabbath, do it as a reminder that God loves us, and is with us, not one but all seven days a week. Whatever rules you choose to keep, whatever rules you choose to break, do them with joy and love in the Lord. Because God’s love is with you in every moment of your life. When you pray. When you cook. When you iron your clothes. When you navigate your way through traffic. When you are scowled at by a security guard on the corner of 121st and Broadway. The sabbath was made for you. The world was made for you. Jesus came for you. Jesus walks beside you, and loves you, so that you may live in joy.
No comments:
Post a Comment