Before It Forgot

Well, good morning again, my fellow encouragers.

It’s our monthly potluck today, and I suspect some of you have been thinking about lunch since the processional hymn. That’s all right. The lesson of our gospel this morning begins at a meal too, though it’s a very different kind of meal from the one waiting for us in the Parish Hall. Christ sits down at a table set for scrutiny, and he answers the silence of the men watching him with mercy. And before we’re through, he’ll turn and ask us whether we can still say out loud what our own customs are for.

St. Luke tells us the Lord went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the sabbath day, and then he adds a small phrase that changes the whole feel of the room: they watched him. The word St. Luke uses means to observe narrowly, to keep a close eye on someone, and the lexicons file this very verse alongside passages where the watching is done with evil intent. So the table was set for scrutiny long before it was ever set for fellowship. Christ sat down to eat bread with men who’d already made up their minds to examine him.

And St. Luke says, behold, there was a certain man before him which had the dropsy.

You know, the readers of this passage have never quite agreed about him. John Wesley thinks the man came hoping for a cure. Calvin thinks he was more likely placed there on purpose, a test laid out on the table for Christ to fail. Luther sees a man of faith who’d heard of the Lord’s kindness and came near because of it. Read it whichever way you like. On any reading, the malice belongs to the watchers, and the man with the dropsy is simply standing there in need.

A law is usually made for a good reason at the time. Keeping a thing exactly can go on for years after anyone remembers why it was set up in the first place. And then the careful observer looks straight at a suffering man and sees only a test case.

Since today is potluck, I want you to picture something. It isn’t true, so don’t go looking for it in the vestry minutes, but just imagine it. Some years ago the members decided that only parishioners of two years or longer may bring a dish to the potluck. Nobody today can say quite why the rule exists. Perhaps someone once brought something unsuitable or unsafe, and the rule rose to guard against it. Now suppose a woman, whom we’ll call Doris, new to the parish, arrives with a casserole anyway. She doesn’t know the custom. She only knows she’s lonely and she wants to belong. Watch the faces at the door. Every one of them is thinking about the rule and whether it’s being kept, and not one of them is thinking about Doris. See, the rule was set for someone once and for good cause, and somewhere along the way it stopped serving anyone and started only the watching.

So let me ask you, and let me ask myself: what was your rule for, before it forgot?

Then the Lord speaks. He turns to the lawyers and Pharisees and puts to them the plainest question he could ask: Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day? These were the very men trained to answer exactly that kind of question. It was their profession. They’d spent their lives sorting out what may and may not be done on the seventh day. And St. Luke gives us their whole reply in five words. And they held their peace.

They could still recite the rule. They could no longer give its reason. Let me say that again. They could still recite the rule, and they could no longer give its reason. And a rule you can’t explain has quietly stopped serving its purpose, however faithfully you keep it.

So the Lord answers for them. And he took him, and healed him, and let him go. Three verbs, and no argument. Mercy answers the question the experts wouldn’t. Luther draws the lesson plainly in his Church Postil, where he teaches that love is to be the interpreter of law. Love is the interpreter. The law was never meant to be read without it, and the man who reads it without love will keep every letter and miss every point.

Then comes a second question, and it cuts deeper than the first. Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day? Every man at that table knew the answer. They’d have done it that very afternoon for their own animals and never thought twice. And St. Luke says, they could not answer him again to these things.

That’s the second silence. They found the mercy in the law quickly enough when it touched their own property. They couldn’t find it when it touched a stranger standing in front of them. The ox was theirs. The man with the dropsy wasn’t.

And Jeremiah speaks to the whole scene this morning: Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud: for the Lord hath spoken. Theirs was the pride of men who’d rather be silent than be corrected. They held their peace because an honest answer would’ve meant admitting they’d been wrong about the man in front of them. The prophet says his soul shall weep in secret places for your pride, and I reckon something of that grief sat at the table with Christ that sabbath.

Our own Articles take up the Reformers’ old question about how far the ceremonial law still binds. Article VII draws the line carefully. It teaches that the ceremonies and rites given through Moses don’t bind Christian men, and it teaches just as firmly that no Christian man whatsoever is free from obedience to the commandments which are called moral. The ceremonies were given to serve. The command to love God and neighbor stands over them all.

Now, beloved, we encouragers love our order, and we’re right to love it. The kneeling, the rubrics, the vestments, the words of the Prayer Book said the same way week after week have carried this parish through a great deal. I wouldn’t trade them. They’re gifts. And gifts are exactly the things we ought to be able to explain. So if the Lord stood in this aisle and asked what a custom of ours is for, could we tell him? Could we say it aloud, or would we hold our peace?

This gets uncomfortably practical. When a newcomer sits in the wrong pew or stands at the wrong time, do we look, or do we welcome? If a custom is keeping a hurting person at arm’s length, somebody ought to say so over coffee after service. Be that somebody.

St. Paul writes as the prisoner of the Lord, and he beseeches us to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love. Forbearing one another. That includes forbearing the person who hasn’t learned our ways yet.

We’ve been blessed with new used pews, and I want you to consider where they came from. Perhaps at one time there was a small brass plate screwed on the side rail, engraved with a family name from a generation past, and an understanding, never voted on, never printed anywhere, that this pew belonged to the Hendersons. Imagine that only elderly Mrs. Henderson remained, and that she came to church only at Christmas. Suppose a young father named Tom slides into that pew some ordinary Sunday, his little girl half asleep against his shoulder, and he has no idea the plate means anything at all. Watch the usher hesitate at the back, weighing whether to lean in and whisper that this is the Hendersons’ pew. Watch two or three heads turn. They turn gently enough, but they turn. The plate was screwed in once to honor a man who gave the pew, gave his years, his tithe, his grief and gladness to the church. Somewhere along the way the honoring became only a claim to defend, long after the one it honored would have wanted a tired father and his daughter to sit down and rest.

What was the plate for, before it started keeping people standing at the door?

You know, the honest question was never how do I try harder at keeping the order. We can’t keep it rightly on our own strength, and we certainly can’t love rightly on our own strength. I’ve knelt at that rail more than once knowing I’d been the one watching instead of welcoming, and trying harder never once fixed it.

That’s why the Collect this morning asks that God’s grace may always prevent and follow us, going before us and coming after us, so that we’re continually to be given to all good works. Article X says the same thing plainly, teaching that without the grace of God going before us we can’t even will the good, much less do it. And the Psalmist promises that the meek are the ones the Lord will guide in judgment and teach his way. It’s a gift long before it’s ever a demand. Grace all the way down.

And St. Paul reminds us whose table this is. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Doris was baptized into that one body. So was Tom’s little girl. Nobody’s pew and nobody’s two years in the parish can make that body any smaller than God made it.

So the sermon comes to rest where every Sunday comes to rest, at this altar. Here’s a table where nobody watches Christ in scrutiny, because here he’s the host. And he’s the one who comes down the length of the table to the guest who sat in the lowest room and says, Friend, go up higher. For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

If the law was given for mercy, then come and receive the mercy it was given for. If your customs have forgotten what they’re for, then bring them here and let love interpret them again. If there’s someone standing at the door of your life with a casserole or a sleeping child, then go from this table and make room, because he’s already healed you, and he’s already let you go.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.