Sermon preached at St John’s Bexley for A Seat At The Table LGBTQ+ Inclusive Eucharist: 12th June 2024: 1 Kings 18:20-29; Matthew 5:17-19
Ross and Rachel (Remember them?), spontaneously and drunkenly get married in Las Vegas and the rest of the Friends are in shock… Apart from Phoebe:
“What’s the big deal, y’know? It’s not like it’s a real marriage… If you get married in Vegas, you’re only married in Vegas.”
Phoebe’s completely wrong about this, as Monica tells her ‘If you get married in Vegas you’re married everywhere.’
Phoebe’s first reaction is shock, which processes through a realisation… Then an acceptance: “Eh, well!”
Someone whose understanding of the definition of marriage is completely flipped over, and after the initial shock, finds it all very easy to accept… There’s probably a modern-day analogy for that somewhere…
Life is full of laws, rules, regulations, legalities… If you get married in Vegas, you’re married everywhere; If you drive at over twenty outside this church, you’re exceeding the speed limit (not many people know about that one either)…
Laws and rules tend to be put in place with reasons behind them, some of them are put in place for our own safety (Never eat yellow snow) or the safety of others (Never let the Sunday School use the paper shredder… Anyone else have that one in their church?), they may be to stop people doing jobs they wouldn’t be able to do without causing damage (Works on church buildings under list B require permission of the Archdeacon…) and some exist to keep administrators busy (Works on church buildings…).
Sometimes a law exists for reasons many can’t fathom, or most haven’t given thought to: For example the Church of England can’t perform Weddings at night, and that’s in order to stop couples eloping under the shadow of darkness. Some rules we follow simply because we’ve always followed them… When that happens they lapse into habit – following rules purely because that’s the way we’ve always done them, like the Prophets of Baal with their repetitive rituals.
This is where jurisprudence comes in… We can see what the law says but what does it mean? Why’s it there? -Particularly when it says something we don’t like… That’s why lawyers get paid so much… To find ways of interpreting the law to their clients’ advantage.
Likewise with the Law of God: We may see a list of prescriptions, a sacrifice here, an abomination there, dos and don’ts all the way down – and that can be a big help if we want to live an unexamined life: A neat ethical template for us to abide by with no real need to ask why – It’s what God wants – that’s enough…
It’s also a big help if we want to exert control over others: How many of us have known people who will all too willingly tell us to love our neighbour when we’re not meeting their expectations, but not factor in that we’re their neighbour too?
And don’t we need to believe that religion is something deeper than that?: That there’s something stronger, more intense, far more beautiful about our faith than simply being told what we can or can’t eat, or who we can or can’t fall in love with – that the Law (capital L) is something to be found the heart of God.
And so if our lives are consistent with what’s going on in the heart of God, synchronised with the pulse of the eternal as it resounds through creation: Isn’t that what it means to live under the Law?
So what if we, like Christ, heal the sick on the sabbath or lunch with lepers – how does that square with the Law? Christ’s fulfilment of the Law was about discerning what the Law really intends…
But working out reasons for things can be a lot of work, and as, in any communication, much of the meaning comes from the receiver – so we end up establishing our own interpretations and rationales which allow us to feed in our own biases, conscious and unconscious.
Like the Prophets of Baal limping between different opinions we too breeze an inconsistent path of discernment: Limping between ideas and principles that suit our own interests and prejudices: For example, should marriage be defined by love, or by anatomical plumbing? – Looking at you Church of England…
And when we do that, we find that we too end up burning sacrifices on altars – real, living, vulnerable people… And we can all too easily look around and see exactly who is being sacrificed at present – and for what end? Power? Popularity? Validation? Votes?
So much pain being caused to people who are just as marginalised in our communities today as those Jesus actively prioritised in His Earthly ministry: The very activity of making God’s Love too narrow by false limits of our own.
And this focus on those who society would lead to the slaughter for its own appeasement, that comes from Christ’s jurisprudence, the pulse of the Law of God which He fulfils consistently throughout the Gospel: The heart of the Law must be Love. Christ makes it so patently obvious: Love the Lord your God; Love your neighbour as yourself; Love one another as I have loved you; Love is a many splendoured thing (…sorry, that last one was someone else…).
If God is Love, and Christ is the incarnate God, and if Christ is the fulfilment of the Law, then to live faithfully to the Law is to embody that Love.
And if our interpretation of the law, our jurisprudence, our dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, leads us to denigrate, to vilify, to hate, to subjugate, to slaughter and to burn the least of God’s children then surely our understanding of the law is way off the mark and as devoid of God as the rituals of the Prophets of Baal.
But if our understanding of the commandments leads us to a life of love: greeting the long-lost prodigals; washing the feet of those who have walked dangerous paths; giving a seat at the table to those who have waited so long outside the door; feeling, in an encounter with another, the turn of the Universe and hearing the resounding laughter of God delighting in every cell of their being, whomever they are, and seeing the holiness of them… Then maybe, just maybe, we’ve gotten it right and, like a Vegas wedding, we’ve identified the Universally applicable Law of God.
Fr. Edward 