Monday, October 12, 2015

Sermon for Pentecost 19
Proper 22 B  ~  October 4, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
                                                                                         
Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,

As the Russian armies drove westward to meet the Americans and British at the Elbe, a Soviet patrol picked up a Mrs. Bergmeier foraging food for her three children. Unable even to get word to the children, she was taken off to a POW camp in the Ukraine. Her husband had been captured in the Battle of the Bulge and taken to a POW camp in Wales. When he was returned to Berlin, he spent months rounding up his children, although they couldn't find their mother. She more than anything else was needed to reconnect them as a family in that dire situation of hunger, chaos and fear. Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, Mrs. Bergmeier learned through a sympathetic commandant that her husband and family were trying to keep together and find her. But the rules allowed them to release her to Germany only if she was pregnant, in which case she would be returned as a liability. She turned things over in her mind and finally asked a friendly Volga German camp guard to impregnate her, which he did. Her condition being medically verified, she was sent back to Berlin and to her family. They welcomed her with open arms, even when she told them how she had managed it. And when the child was born, they all loved him because of what he had done for them. After the christening, they met up with their local pastor and discussed the morality of the situation.   
This true story comes from an influential book called Situation Ethics, by the Episcopal theologian, the Rev. Joseph Fletcher.  Right-wingers sneer at the term, but today's gospel makes it clear that our Lord was, Himself, a situational Ethicist. The plain fact is that actions do not occur in a void, but in a context.
Concerning today’s passage, I have previously observed that the law of the time permitted a husband just to sign a piece of paper and throw his wife out.  He was then free to marry someone else.  But Jesus said that although the law permitted this, it was not God's will, and it was in fact adultery. A woman so divorced, though, had very few options.  Unless someone else were willing to marry her, or unless she had sympathetic male relatives to take her in, pretty much her only alternative was prostitution.  Although her former husband was within his rights, according to the law, his action amounted to adultery. In other words, the lawfulness of an act could not be assessed apart from its context – the situation in which it was done. 
Love alone is good in itself.  Love (selfless agape, caritas) is the only thing that is always right, regardless of context. When asked, Jesus said that we are to love God and to love our neighbor, adding that on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  In other words, love is first, and whether any action conforms to God's will depends on whether it is loving, not whether it conforms to a written rule or commandment.  That is what we mean by the spirit of the law as opposed to the letter. Mrs.  Bergmeier certainly broke the letter of the Seventh Commandment, but equally certainly, she fulfilled its spirit by restoring the wholeness and integrity of her family. 
It is supremely ironic that our Lord’s insistence upon the primacy of love in the specific context of our actions has been turned into another law, superior to love, which must be obeyed literally in all situations.  Jesus’s words forbidding divorce in His own historical context have been made into a universal commandment. But our Lord’s teaching is clear to any willing to notice the context of His remarks, and here I refer to the literal context of in the Gospel narrative.  Right after His answer to the Pharisees, He makes children exemplars of the Kingdom. That context is not accidental. Both women and children were considered socially inferior – persons of no account. Or rather, not persons at all, according to the Law. To affirm children as models of the Kingdom right after affirming women as equal in importance to men is revolutionary. Jesus turns the world upside down.
That is the essence of the Good News:  It is unheard of and unexpected. The Kingdom, God’s Reign, the Spirit fulfilling the letter of the Law softening our hard hearts. Paul will elaborate this revolutionary teaching in his comments about spirit and letter, and the new freedom in Christ.
It is not to be confused with antinomianism – the notion that I can do anything I want – because if anything, the primacy of love requires more profound obedience. Real antinomianism would be to think that I can do anything I want as long as I obey the law. If the law doesn’t forbid it, then I can do as I please. NO! If the law doesn’t cover something, I must still act according to love. If I really do put love first, I will love God. If I really love God, I will, as Jesus said, obey His commandments, which are all fulfilled by loving others as myself – in every situation. Then I can’t go wrong.
In St. Augustine’s startling turn of phrase, “Love God and do as you please.”
AMEN
MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!

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