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!
