In Clay Jars

6-3-18 (Proper 4/Ordinary 9B, Semi-Continuous)

2 Corinthians 4:5-12; Mark 2:23-3:6

In Clay Jars

This may come as no surprise to anyone in the congregation, but when I was in college, I hung out with a lot of people who were into pretty nerdy things - we regularly got into heavy discussion over various aspects of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and superheroes, and a significant number of us were into various tabletop games, from collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, to the quintessential favorite “Dungeons and Dragons.”  Among this group of friends, there were two young men in particular who I’m pretty sure knew just about as much as it was possible to know about the Dungeons and Dragons game - they had spent so much time reading the various rulebooks and source materials that, had our college offered a class in Roleplaying Games, they could probably have taught it.

The thing about Dungeons and Dragons, however, is that it’s not a game that’s meant to be entirely constrained and governed by its own rules - it’s a complicated game that gives players a lot of room to do different things, sometimes even going into territory that the rules simply don’t account for.  And when a game would get into these territories as we continued to think outside the box to surmount different challenges that our Dungeon Master would throw at us, these two guys would quite often get into arguments over whether the rules would allow something like what just happened to happen in the first place.

I think we’re all at least somewhat familiar with folks like these - you might call them “parliamentarians.”  These are folks that are so passionate about whatever organization, whatever hobby, whatever career they work in, or whatever their particular interest may be, that they know it inside and out.  They know exactly how things are supposed to be done, and they’re usually quick to point out when you’re not playing according to Hoyle.  These are the kind of folks that you get pretty frustrated playing Monopoly with, let alone more complicated games, but at the same time, when it comes down to the important things, like an organizational meeting where controversial topics may be being debated, it’s these same folks who have Robert’s Rules of Order completely memorized that are also important to have present so that things don’t go entirely off the rails.

It’s these kind of “parliamentarians” that Jesus and the disciples encounter in today’s passage as they’re walking down the road on this sabbath day and begin gleaning wheat to satisfy their hunger.  In Jesus’ time, the parliamentarians were better known as Pharisees, and they were men of faith who had devoted pretty much their entire lives to the study of the Torah and the roughly 613 laws that it lays out for the life of the Jewish people.  The pharisees played a critical part in the lives of their people - as Pheme Perkins explains it in the New Interpreter’s Bible, “The Pharisees, scribes, and other religious authorities performed a socially necessary function of interpreting the Law so that people could use it to shape their lives. Disputes over proper interpretations of the Law are as necessary a part of their social and religious landscape as are Supreme Court decisions in the United States.”  And as I think anyone who’s paid any amount of attention to the debates in the Supreme Court over the last several years can agree, these discussions and deliberations are important.  We need to have people whose passion it is to dig into the specifics of the laws and to tease out the more subtle details to help us determine as a people what it means when we say we have things like the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and more.

And, in defense of the Pharisees to at least a certain extent here, the text doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on as to what was going on that led Jesus and the disciples to glean the heads of wheat on the sabbath.  Jesus cites scripture to the Pharisees, engaging them in their own debate and stepping on a few toes in the process as this up-and-comer from Nazareth presumes to lecture the legal experts on the subtleties of the law - but the passage he references about David taking the holy bread in order to feed his starving troops while he’s on the run from Saul is arguably a much different situation than disciples just picking wheat on the roadside because they’re feeling a bit peckish.

Where I think the situation gets more interesting, and where Jesus really begins to drive his own point home more strongly, is when they come upon the man with the withered hand in the synagogue.  Here we see a person who is in need of healing, and Jesus has the ability to do so - and yet, because it is the Sabbath and it would be considered a violation of the law, Jesus sees nobody even thinking to lift a finger to help their fellow neighbor.  In the years that have passed since the commandments were brought down from the mountain with Moses, there have been many interpretations of the law. Some are adamant that nothing, absolutely nothing, including in an emergency, should be done, while others allow for that little bit of leeway in the law. Think of it this way, there are some who believe if a house is on fire on the sabbath, they aren’t able to put it out at all, because that would be work and not showing homage to God. While others see the necessity of needing to put that fire out so that the owners have a place to live, so that they are able to eat and survive.

For Jesus, the question comes down to his initial answer to the Pharisees as they question the matter of gleaning wheat: is the Sabbath made for man, or is man made for the Sabbath?  Is it more important that we follow the letter of the law, or is it better to follow in the broader spirit of the law?  Does God desire more that we adhere to the specific principles laid out in Scripture, or do we live into our duty to God more fully by understanding the principles that undergird those laws in the first place?  Can we still honor the Sabbath and keep it holy by loving our neighbor and reaching out to help them in times of need or emergency, or does our neighbor simply have to wait till Monday when we return to normal business hours?

To be honest, it’s a difficult tightrope line to walk - the Pharisees aren’t entirely wrong in calling people out for not adhering to Sabbath laws and following the guidelines that God has set forth for the Jewish community, but Jesus calls them out because they let the necessity of following the letter of the law get in the way of God’s deeper calling for us as people of God to show compassion, love of neighbor, and our own understanding of why God called us to live lives that are set apart and holy in the first place.

Jesus tells the Pharisees that “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.”  Too often, we take the opposite understanding and find ourselves in the same place as the Pharisees - throughout the history of the church, and even still today, the idea that “Humanity was made for the sabbath” continues to be a wildly popular theology: we follow this idea that God created the law and humanity needs to live up to it or else we are lost. In that theology, God is chiefly known as holy, and humans have to achieve a certain level of holiness – through following laws or practicing purity rituals - to be acceptable to God.  And yet Jesus teaches us something different - that God is chiefly known as love and the laws and purity rituals are for humanity’s own good. In this way, Jesus offers a different idea: that these rituals are offered as a means by which we can respond to the grace that God freely and unconditionally offers us with a profound measure of gratitude.

Paul tells the church in Corinth that “we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”  God gives us incredible grace and a calling that should leave us in awe, not because we are worthy of such things, but because God loves us, fragile and unimpressive as we are.  And so we clay jars are entrusted with this great treasure and encouraged to go out and live out our lives in gratitude in the best way we possibly can.  We won’t be perfect - we’ll slip up, we’ll stick to our own misunderstandings from time to time.  We’ll be tempted to deny grace and compassion to those who need it most because they don’t fit into our ideas of what repentance is supposed to look like, or because we let our own prejudices get the better of us, and yet God still continues to proclaim that message of love to us and to nudge us ever forward, ever more toward love and grace.  Paul says that, as we carry this light of Christ within us, “we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.  For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.”  Paul and Jesus alike both show and tell us that the journey will not be an easy one, but they also offer us encouragement that as we continue to strive on, as we continue to seek out that love of God, we will ourselves continue to find opportunities to put our old selves, our old ways, our old hangups to death as we continue to become more and more like Christ.  May we be willing to be open to that transformation, and may we continue to be challenged and astonished by the ways in which God is continually at work in our lives.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.