Introduction
In today’s reading from St Luke’s gospel we see one of the first confrontations Jesus has with the religious authorities. He has been busy preaching and healing and telling people about the closeness of God and now the religious leaders start to hit back at him. Those who think they know about what God wants have to make life difficult and declare the importance of lots of little rules and regulations that stifle true spirituality.
The Sabbath
In the Jewish faith God commands His people to observe the Sabbath and keep it holy. From this command various laws grew up to help people understand how to observe the Sabbath. Firstly the Sabbath had to be a day of rest. This was because it commemorated God’s rest on the seventh day of creation. Secondly it had to be holy and this is the day when Jewish people worship – at home and in the Synagogue. So far so good. By the time of Jesus, however, and in Orthodox communities today, lots of other laws had been developed to protect these twin ideas of resting and worship. No work should be done on the Sabbath – except tending livestock and looking after the young, the sick and the dying. In Orthodox households today no cooking will be done, so slow cookers are set up the night before to ensure there is hot food on the Sabbath. Jewish people who are Orthodox will walk to a synagogue because driving a car is now seen as work. In the time of Jesus these laws were held throughout Jewish society and people could be denounced as Sabbath breakers if they worked on the Sabbath.
What the Disciples Did
The disciples broke the Sabbath rules by picking some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands and eating the kernels. This was a natural thing to do, but to the narrow minded it constituted work and so they complained. Jesus quoted a precedent in the Old Testament which excused his disciples behaviour. He went on to heal someone which also infuriated the Pharisees.
Does this happen now?
I grew up in a church which, at its worst, could be very fastidious about the rules and regulations of the faith. We were told to fast for an hour before mass – though in my grandmother’s day one had to fast from midnight. I was told to go to confession at least once a month. There were lots of rules about what happened in worship, who could do what and the like. Now these rules became legalistic. There is nothing wrong, and a lot right, with fasting as a spiritual discipline, but it looses any value if it is forced upon us. Going to confession is wonderful for the soul but is only any good for us if we truly want to make a clean breast of our sins and to talk these through with a priest. Worship needs to have a sense of order, grace and simplicity in it and all churches have rules about how it happens, but if these rules become more important than the actual act of worship then we loose any sense of what we are about.
I left the Catholic church in my teens and started attending an evangelical charismatic church and I was seduced by the “freedom” they talked about. There was freedom to sing up beat music with a rock tempo. There was freedom to be exuberant in worship. There was freedom to learn about and develop spiritual gifts. We felt we were changing the world and the church. Then I found that beneath the veneer of freedom there was as much legalism as in the church I had left. Yes we could sing all the up beat songs but there was subtle pressure to raise your hands in spontaneous worship at certain points! We could be free to experience express ourselves and be exuberant but no freedom to discuss or have a different point of view to the leadership. We could learn about spiritual gifts, but we had to leave our brains at the church door. Any discussion, any divergence was seen as rebellion.
Modern Day Pharisees
Religious people, and religious leaders, it seems to me, need to have laws and regulations to try and make safe the experiences of God that people have. Often this is very good. I was once told of a church that had no leadership, where everyone could do whatever they felt the Lord led them to do in worship whether it was to lead a song, say a prayer, give a testimony, give a prophecy, lie down, stand up, or dance around. The church soon closed because it was chaotic. God’s Spirit is one of diversity but also of order. The worst excesses of Catholicism, like the worst excesses of the charismatic movement can be as legalistic and limiting as the Pharisees were years ago.
So Where does this leave us?
So where does this leave us. We think that some rules are ok but others are not. We want to have relevant worship but we want a sense of order. We think the Pharisees were mean spirited and nasty folks, yet they were only doing their best to keep the Sabbath day holy. How do we live between the tensions of freedom and law?
I think in MCC Manchester we are finding a middle way in lots of things.
Worship:
I don’t know if you saw me on the Heaven and Earth show on BBC1 this morning. They had me arguing with a nice evangelical lad who was trying to uphold the institution of marriage. The problem he has is that deep down he didn’t really believe anything different to me. He has worshipped in MCC New York and loved it, he is trying to find a new way for evangelical Christians to see marriage to encourage them to see cohabiting couples as living in a form of marriage, but he can’t quite get it for gay marriage – though he has no problems with civil partnerships. Talking before the show and in the middle bit when the other guests were on, we found we disagreed very little. I think he would be quite comfortable with our worship here.
This is because we have taken a lot of the best of the evangelical church background that many of us here share and have used it in creating what MCCM is now. We sing the best contemporary worship songs from the evangelical churches. We stress the importance of a personal relationship with God. We encourage you to have a regular prayer time each day and we provide resources to help you do this. We have a high view of Scripture – but not so high that it becomes a paper pope.
But at the same time we are not a free for all. We also take the best from the liturgical, Catholic part of Christianity. We believe that worship has to be essentially well ordered. We believe that God speaks to us as much through the songs as through the Sacraments. There is a simplicity to our worship style which is not fussy or prissy but allows people to experience God’s loving kindness.
Theology:
Some of us in MCC come from very conservative places in theology. We come from churches which have taught us that the Bible is without error, that it has no problems in it and we just have to believe it. Some of us come from churches that have told us that if there are any theological problems in the faith then the Pope in the Vatican will sort it out for us! Some of us have come from places of not having a Christian faith before MCC, others of us have come from more liberal and relaxed places. So when ever any of us get together to discuss anything theological it is as if there are as many viewpoints as there are people.
Lifestyle:
Some of us come from churches where every aspect of our lifestyle was prescribed for us. When I learnt the faith, I was told that before going to sleep at night I should “undress modestly, say my prayers, and go to sleep thinking of the four last things, Heaven, Hell, Death and Judgement”! It never helped get a good night’s sleep. Then I went to a church where I was told that pop music was “of the devil” that I had to be careful about which books to read and where I was encouraged only to on holiday with Christian holiday companies! In MCC you won’t be told how to live your life. We will give you broad principles, love, honesty and integrity to name three, but we won’t tell you how to make the major decisions that you need to make – though as a pastor sometimes I get very tempted to do so!
A Hard Place
Of course all this means MCC can be a hard place. Sometimes we secretly identify with the Pharisees who were after Jesus. We sympathise with the Jewish people who complained to Moses that they preferred their life of slavery than the hard freedom he had brought them to. We would prefer it if there were more rules and regulations – so long as we agreed with the particular ones that bothered us! Some people come along to us and say that worship should be changed this way or that way, others come along and say that we should speak out on this or that issue, others still come and tell us that our theology needs to change – of course in the way that they personally like.
I try and be patient when people tell me this but am not very good at it. After all a Pentecostal pastor wouldn’t react well to a request to have the rosary said before worship and a Catholic priest would be rather bemused to be asked to have speaking in tongues and dancing around the altar in the middle of a Latin mass. So I wonder why people feel they have the right to tell us how to be!
Be Free
MCC tries to live the life of freedom that Jesus showed in today’s gospel reading. This means that within certain broad limits we have found a way to be church that we feel is being faithful to what God calls us to without falling into either Catholic or Evangelical legalism. But that means that those who have not dealt with their inner Pharisee will be very uncomfortable. And all of us have aspects of that legalistic approach to faith still in us.
When I was in my late teens at university I started to explore my own sexuality. I had all the legalism of Rome and the legalism of Evangelicalism telling me that I was wrong. I kept asking God to heal me of my sexuality. Eventually it was as if God was saying to me “stop telling me what to do, but see what I am doing in your life”.
When we get tempted to wish that MCC is more Catholic or more evangelical, more liberal or more conservative, more strong on certain moral issues, less strong on other ones - stop telling God, and me, what to do, and start to see what God is doing amongst us.
Amen.
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.