Jesus has a pretty conflicting relationship to the rules. And for many Christians, you’d think Jesus gave us a mountain of rules to follow. But really there is just one really vague rule and he constantly urges us to look past the rest to see it.
Rule-breaking and rule-making in the love of Jesus
Easter 6B | Acts 10:44-48, John 15:9-17
I don’t remember everything about driver’s ed, but I remember some of the big things: who has the right of way, keeping right except to pass, and how to parallel park. I’m not saying I’m great at all these things, but I remember the basics of how to do them.
The rules of the road are mostly universal and get pretty easily ingrained in us through experience. They make a certain amount of intuitive sense, so when you know them, you keep them. You come to forget that you ever had to learn them; that they weren’t always there.
So in other words, because of these rules, most of us know where to be and when to stop. To yield.
And the main reason this works is that we don’t have to make complicated decisions. When you get to an intersection and the light is red, you stop. If it’s green, you go. And if it’s yellow, you step on the accelerator, er, I mean the break. Right. The break. So you stop.
You’re not supposed to take the time to determine what the proper action is among a variety of choices. It’s supposed to be simple and quick.
That’s why I lost my cool the first time I drove in Newnan, Georgia.
They put yield signs at all these major intersections in town along with all the traffic lights. Just like down at 7th and 41. Now, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do here! Which is it? Am I supposed to yield or stop at the red light and proceed when it’s clear?
And who is in charge? Is it the stoplight or the yield sign? And why and when should a sign override a traffic light? That reverses the hierarchy of authority, doesn’t it? Stop lights are supposed to stop me! And then when it turns green, am I still supposed to yield? Does the yield sign now become subordinate to the light? Does the left turner yield to me or me to them?
I was quite literally asking the cosmos: what am I supposed to do here?
I suspected what I was supposed to do, of course. My gut made sense of it more than my experience. I felt fairly confident of what was supposed to happen here, but it didn’t match what I was taught.
Of course, these signs help with natural traffic flow, helping right-turners move through the intersection more quickly, but these signs have added a level of complexity to the decision-making which wasn’t part of the training many of us received.
They may be designed to help us but they make the intention of the traffic laws harder to see under the additional layers of complexity.
Our Rules
You might not be as obsessed with the hierarchy of traffic laws as I am, but I know you have some rules you’re obsessed with. Maybe we can find some of them together.
I like to eat stuffing whether or not it was cooked inside the turkey. Coke is a kind of pop, but the best brand is Faygo. And real cornbread is sweet and iced tea isn’t.
The ‘80s was the best decade in history for music but grunge and shoegazing saves the ‘90s from being the worst.
There’s no right way to light the candles on the altar, standing is totally better than kneeling, and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is the best version of the BCP until the next one.
Did we find some of our rules just now? Good.
There are laws and then there are those rules that really govern everything. And I expect I’m going to hear all about your rules after church today. Because I know there are some fighting words in there. Hint: that’s the point.
These are my rules. And you have your rules. And within them, there are serious questions. This isn’t just what we call things or how we bake them. It’s something deeper and it’s about how we relate to them. Why is this more important? What is their hierarchy? And for all of them, which is on top? What gets to be most important? And where is the authority?
Jesus Challenges Our Rules
This is the script Jesus is toying with. He knows all these rules and he’s trying to help us do something completely different than we want him to. We want him to sort them out and help us get the hierarchies right. We want him to prove us right.
But instead, he comes and calls our rules trash.
To illustrate what Jesus is doing, let’s talk about cornbread. Up here, we might not pay much attention to the Southern war over the real cornbread. Anne and Gene will tell you all about it if you give them the chance. And that’s on you if you give them the chance.
The Two Cornbreads Example
But the origin of the battle goes back to the 19th century. White southern plantation owners took from their crops the best corn or could afford to buy the best from the market.
Good corn is sweet all by itself, so a good cornbread made from good corn doesn’t need sugar and natural starchiness holds the bread together. So to 19th Century white southern landowners, cornbread wouldn’t have sugar in it!
Because the better corn went inside the house or to the white market, slaves and freed persons under Jim Crow usually only had access to cheap corn which lacked the naturally sweet flavor. So the cheaper corn needed added sugar to make up for its lack of sweetness, which also made it stickier and more cake-like.
These two cornbreads go back to the 19th Century, so which one gets to be “real” cornbread depends not only on history but where you sit in relation to that history. It relies on one’s station and what kind of corn one has access to and what adaptations you make to achieve the “right” taste. Both become real.
And this is where Jesus pushes us to see these sticky situations. That our rules don’t only create and reinforce a just order of things: they can also maintain injustice and split realities.
So I think if Jesus were to use this example, talking about cornbread, he’d probably point out that the better predictor of your feelings for cornbread is not some objective truth about cornbread, but whether or not your family felt the burden of Jim Crow. And perhaps ultimately, to help us see what makes cornbread good and we can all eat and enjoy cornbread.
So when we look at all these ingrained rules governing our lives, we are invited by Jesus to wrestle with looking deeper toward a true law below the rules. He invites us to look deeper, specifically at how we are to one another. When we do, what do we see?
What is at the heart of the rules which govern our lives?
The Law of Love
Jesus tells us that it’s love. At the center of it all is love. That’s The Law.
Not the rules we’ve created to prove what love looks like or to judge one another. Not You don’t love enough or you aren’t loving the right way, but learning to love, here at the center of everything. And to look at our ourselves in relation to this deeper law. Is this about love, or is this about my rules? Is this about me and how I feel more than it is expressing my love for you?
This gospel story gets taken as if Jesus is making God’s love dependent on our love, but it’s based on the very notion that God is love. Love is our work. It’s how we express our very nature as children of God.
And we see that love nature in the epistle. And more importantly, we see it in our first reading, in the love of Peter with the Gentiles. The rules were getting in the way of love. The hoops were inhibiting the spread of love. Acts shows us the Spirit-led boundary-crossing rule-breaking love of God. Do we dare follow?
Do we dare see that the question isn’t about which is the “real” cornbread, but how life, wealth, and freedom made two different cornbreads?
And do we dare recognize that cornbread is a metaphor? And therefore not get so caught up in our own preference and understanding that we avoid seeing the deeper truth Jesus is revealing?
The Love Barometer
Peter can baptize uncircumcised Gentiles and stay with them because he felt the Spirit call him to that. But first Jesus taught him over and over that the one thing he needs to remember is to love God and neighbor above everything else.
Above the rules, above the ego, and above being right. Love.
Above the certainty, the tradition, and the scripture. Love.
Above the culture, the history, and the teaching. Love.
This is the barometer. Love.
The Jesus followers who wanted to circumcise the Gentiles first were following the rules. They thought they were following Jesus. And maybe they were. But above that is love.
“What is to stop me from being baptized?” Nothing.
Love. All the rest are the rules we use to protect…I don’t know what. God? Jesus? Tradition? Our own egos? Jesus calls us to push past that and ask Is this full of love?
Ending With a Question
A lot of preachers would put a call-to-action here and send the congregation out with a bunch of actions or something to go do this week. Maybe try on a practice or pay it forward. But that goes against Jesus’s very argument. That would just make new rules and new ways to evaluate whether our neighbors are loving each other the right way.
Sometimes Jesus invites us to look at everything we know and take for certain — take all of that — and ask ourselves a question.
Like the time Jesus asks (Luke 6:9):
“I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?”
He asks the question and then heals a man. On the Sabbath.
One simple question with two very different answers. But he’s hoping you’ll choose the one, to see how the love of God is in the one. That healing on the Sabbath is saving the man’s life.
So he might ask us, is it good to follow or break Jesus’s command to love one another, in order to grow love or destroy it?
I and God love you.