Forming Character

Most of us live with laws. In this area of Clifton, we put the garbage out on Monday and Thursday nights. If you want the garbage collected you have to obey that law. Driving down the street, we come to a traffic light, or a stop sign or a yield sign. For the common good, we obey these laws so that we, or the other driver, does not slam into another car. Every April 15, we have to meet the deadline for filing our taxes. Now while here in New Jersey we always hear of government officials not obeying that law, most of us dutifully file our taxes and most of us comply with the laws that regulate those taxes. If you are a young person living at home, you know full well how your parents regulate your lives with rules to be followed. How many of us have heard or how many of us have said: If you live under my roof you live by my rules.
We all live according to rules, some of those rules are imposed on us by the government, some are accepted as rules for polite society, some regulate our private lives at home. Yet most of these laws do not impact our relationship with God.
It was not so for Jesus and the Jews of his day. Any observant Jew in Jesus’ day would observe 613 laws. The same is true for most observant Jews today: If you want to be a true Jew you must observe the Law, all 613 commandments. Read through the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and you will see laws covering every possible situation in the ancient world. These rules established a system of justice and equality, sometimes to an exacting degree. The law ranked high among the Jews, not only as a way to establish their society, but foremost as the revelation from God and the means of keeping the covenant they made with God.
In today’s gospel, when the lawyer comes to Jesus and asks him what is the greatest law, Jesus knows that the lawyer is setting a trap for Jesus. Everyone knew that the correct answer would have been: all 613 laws are important and all are to be observed.
Now this Lawyer would have known that Jesus failed to observe some of those 613 laws. He broke the law when he worked on the Sabbath by healing the sick. He broke the law when he associated with sinners and those who did not observe the Law. He broke the law when he and his disciples did not follow ritual laws about bathing, hand washing and eating particular foods. If Jesus does not praise all 613 laws, he is breaking down respect for the entire law. If he does endorse all of those 613 laws, he condemns himself and discredits his ministry.
Notice what Jesus does: He turns the question on its head.
He establishes as the highest law the commandment which every Jew would have said every day from Deuteronomy 6: 4-5: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Therefore you shall love the Lord with all your heart and with all you soul and with all your mind.” Then he adds to it a small verse from Leviticus, 19; 18: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. He shifts the argument away from the law to the heart. Jesus does not deny the value of the law, for he quotes the law in his answer. But he makes observance of the Law subservient to the movement of the heart.
For all of us here today, if we are the ones who impose the laws or the ones who observe the laws, or if we are both, I would ask you how do the laws you impose foster the development of love? If we think about the purpose of the laws we impose on our children, or the laws our parents imposed on us, those laws are intended to develop good habits, patterns of healthy behavior that become second nature to us. We do not usually hear much talk about character development, but I think that many of us would agree that laws are in place so that we can develop those habits which we believe to be the mark of a responsible and healthy individual and a person who has developed those habits we call a person of character.
Jesus lays out for us two important areas of character development: love of God and love of our neighbor. I would summarize those gifts as worship and service. Notice how Jesus frames our worship and love of God as engaging our not only our hearts and our souls but our minds as well. We Episcopalians do not shy away from engaging the hard questions and we do not give out predetermined answers to the questions. Episcopalians wrestle with the hard questions about the faith and we form our own answers to the questions. It is not always easy living under a big tent where the answers to the questions are all slightly different.
But we agree on the boundaries to the questions. We call those boundaries the Baptismal Covenant. We agree to a minimum of beliefs which are summarized in the Creed. We also agree to a standard of behavior, we commit ourselves to worship and to respect for others.
As we look at the way we carry out our baptismal covenant, today’s Gospel challenges us to look at our motive for doing what we do. Are we engaged with God and with one another because of love? Are we working with each other because of love? When we come together for worship, do we go from this place with our hearts expanded? When we gather during this week to work on the Rummage Sale, when we cook a meal to share with others, when we prepare a lesson for Sunday School, when we bake for coffee hour, when we sing in the choir, are we doing these things to grow in love? For all of us love because we have been loved, loved with a passionate love by this God who has taken on our flesh, lived our life, suffered our death and in the power of his resurrection opens to us possibilities we have not even imagined.