Hilton Head Island, SC – March 17, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 6:1-5; Luke 11:37-48
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And he said, “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.” – Luke 11:46 (RSV)
What I am about to say is not, I sincerely hope, braggadocio or arrogance. It is rather, I think, a mere statement of fact. When it comes to addressing the topic of religious excess, you folks are fortunate. Had I talked about this 20 or 25 years ago, I would have taken a different tack than I shall take this morning. I would certainly have been more gentle on religion in general, and even on religious excess in particular. But I have lived long enough and seen enough skewed thinking about religion that I can be more objective about it in my old age. Advanced years have afforded me the opportunity to be candid about the nature and importance and errors of religion.
On Wednesday afternoon when the exhilarating proclamation went forth, “Habemus Papam Franciscum,” and then again on Thursday when we were able to read more about Jorge Mario Bergoglio, I personally was struck by two things. First, Francis I is the first man to be elected Pope in my lifetime who was close to my age at the time of his election. He is just two years older than I. Secondly, I was surprised to learn that I have been ordained four years longer than he. (Jesuits have more years of education before ordination than just about anybody, which is why his process took six years longer than mine.) Thus clerically I am even longer-of-tooth than the Pope. For me that is a sobering thought upon which to conjure, I can assure you.
Since the fourth or fifth centuries, every new Pope has been confronted by a massive religious institution which was always in need of reforming. A slogan of the Protestant Reformation was Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda: A Reformed Church Is Always Reforming. The Roman Catholic Church, like every other denomination in Christendom, needs continuous and strenuous reforming of itself. That always is very hard, because all large institutions are conservative by nature, and they resist change. The same is true for most human beings; we too are usually personally conservative, and we do not like to try to alter who we are, even if we know alteration is definitely in order.
Some of what I shall say about our new Pope you have already heard, but it bears repeating. (And by the way, I obviously wouldn’t be talking about Cardinal Bergoglio if he had not just been elected as the Bishop of Rome, because I was unaware of him until he became the new Pope. And I refer to him as “our new Pope” because, whether we like it or not, the Pope is always the primary spokesman of Christianity, and that is as true for Protestants or Orthodox Christians as for Roman Catholic Christians.) Jorge Bergoglio is a Jesuit. He is the first Jesuit ever elected Pope, which astonishes me. The Jesuits are one of the most noble and independent of all the religious orders of the Catholic Church. I have always admired them. Why no previous Jesuit has been elected to the highest office in Catholicism I can’t imagine, but I’m glad that finally a member of the Society of Jesus has been selected for the top position.
Next, the new Pope is not Italian, which is almost certainly a very good thing, nor even European, which also may be good, in light of who the two past Popes have been. He is the first non-European Pope in history. Furthermore, he chose the papal name of “Francis.” Apparently he did it mainly because of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the poor, but secondarily, perhaps, because of Francis Xavier, one the early great Jesuits. Years ago I spent a ten-day retreat in Assisi, where my admiration for the wonderful and strange St. Francis was additionally nourished. It is incredible that no previous Pope has chosen that name, especially considering the fact that they had nine centuries to make such a choice. But the very fact that the Archbishop of Buenos Aires has long identified with the poor, as did St. Francis, and has literally lived among the poor rather than in the archbishop’s palace, is a portent of good things to come.
I, and probably many of you, and millions of Roman Catholics, most of them in North America and Europe, hope that Francis I will quickly move to allow married and female priests. But we would be well advised not to hold our breath for that exceedingly unlikely eventuality. That almost certainly will not happen, nor will other factors be settled that are burrs under the saddles of countless European and American Christians, both Catholic and non-Catholic.
However, because of the way the new Pope conducted his ministry over the past 46 years, we have good reason to hope he will not be as easily bowled over as were his recent predecessors by the entrenched bureaucracy of the Vatican Curia and the very enormity of the Roman Catholic Church as an institution. We are told he has spent relatively little time in Rome, and that is also a good thing. Rome, the Vatican, and the very complexity of the Roman Catholic Church is a perpetual reality with which every Pope, every cardinal, every bishop, every priest, every nun, and every Catholic must deal. Inevitably there is a huge amount of religion in Catholicism. That shall never change. But how should any Catholic or Pope, or how should the Catholic Church itself, deal with its very religiosity? For my part, I hope and pray that Francis I will be another John XXIII or John Paul I (who represented so much promise, but who lived for only 33 days after being elected in 1978, and who died under what still can only be described as potentially suspicious circumstances).
Religion is probably a necessity for the perpetuation of faith in God. But too many religious people come to believe that religion is more important than faith, when in fact faith is more important than religion. The purpose of religion is not to sustain religion; the purpose of religion is to lead people into a relationship with God.
This is a tension and a dichotomy with which Jesus battled for his entire three-year ministry. Jesus was a tireless advocate for faith in God, but a skeptical if also reluctant supporter of religion. He was raised a Jew, and he believed in Judaism, but the Judaism he believed in was different from that of many of the Jewish religious leaders of his time.
We see two examples of this phenomenon in our two Gospel readings for this morning. In the first, Jesus was walking through grainfields with his disciples. Along with the disciples, he picked some of the wheat, and they separated the grains of wheat from the chaff with their hands. We spent a summer one year in Canada at my Grandmother’s home when we were moving from Kansas to New York State and before we could move into our home in Ellicottville, New York. My cousins lived out in the country. In back of their house was a wheatfield. We would take ears of the wheat, rub them between our hands, and eat the raw wheat. It was wonderful, and we knew George Nagle didn’t mind. George was the farmer who had planted the wheat, and we spent many hours every day playing in his barn and eating cookies baked for us by Lou Nagle, his wife. That summer I learned more about farming than in all the rest of my life put together.
Biblical law stated that people could eat wheat at the corners of the wheatfields. That is what Jesus and the disciples were doing. Thus it was okay - - - except that it wasn’t. They were threshing by hand the little bit of wheat they had taken, and it happened to be on the Sabbath. Other biblical laws insisted no one could work on the Sabbath, and removing the husks from the wheat was considered work. Only religion could come up with such a cockamamie idea.
This was one of the earliest instances where Jesus clashed with religious leaders over their interpretation of the religious law. Jesus was a Ginsburg or Breyer or Sotomayor, and the Pharisees were Scalitos and Thomases and Alitos. When the Pharisees went into a snit, Jesus reminded them that David had eaten the bread of the Presence from the tabernacle when he and his men were hungry, but only the priests were allowed to eat the ritual bread. “The Son of man is lord of the Sabbath,” Jesus snorted, also in somewhat of a snit.
People for whom religion equates to religious laws misunderstand what religion is. Religion is not intended to hem people in; it is intended to free them. Laws are good, but slavish adherence to them is a mistaken commitment to God. This Jesus proclaimed on many occasions.
We see several other examples of how Jesus attacked the Pharisees and the interpreters of the religious law. A Pharisee invited Jesus to dinner in his home. The host expressed surprise when the guest did not ritually wash his hands before eating. Not showing himself to be the always-diplomatic guest, Jesus said, “You Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of extortion and wickedness.” Wow! That wasn’t very diplomatic. But its meaning certainly was very unmistakable. Following ritual laws as the first priority of the religious life is to miss the point. “You Pharisees tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. Woe to you lawyers also! For you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.”
Many years ago I heard someone say that Jesus’ religious adversaries “majored in minors and minored in majors.” That is always a problem for any approach to religion which puts too much stress on religious laws. People who focus too heavily on various aspects of sexuality or personal purity tend to overlook what is the primary purpose of religion. And that is, as I said previously, to promote faith in God, and consciously to live one’s life within and on behalf of His kingdom.
More than any other branch of Christianity, Roman Catholicism has the longest and most complex system of religious rules. It is officially called “canon law”: not “c-a-n-n-o-n,” but “c-a-n-o-n.” The Church carefully trains experts in canon law, just as did the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. That is good --- up to a point. But when canon law, rather than God Himself, determines how the Church operates, the ecclesiastical cart gets placed before the spiritual horse. Pope Francis might note that as he assumes the reins of the highest religious office in the entire world.
Today is St. Patrick’s Day. The Irish love their patron saint, about whose actual history surprisingly little is known. The Irish Catholic Church has always been a bastion of faith, up until the last generation. Now, because of widespread allegations of clerical pedophilia, tens of thousands of Irish have stopped going to church. It is because religion protected religion instead of protecting children. And in Northern Ireland, for generations Protestants and Catholics have battled one another in an unending and lethal religious war. Thankfully it is quite calm now, but a few years ago it was very dicey throughout Ulster, especially in Belfast and Derry (or Londonderry, to the Orangemen).
A very good friend was telling me about a new acquaintance of hers. The new friend was raised in England as a member of the Plymouth Brethren. They are a very strict group, for whom rules govern practically every aspect of life. There are many admirable factors about the PBs, but there are other things which give most of us pause. This lady became an atheist, and now she is an evangelical atheist, trying to entice Trudy into the expanding fellowship of non-believers. Sadly, the nouveau atheist seems to have chosen one form of religious excess over another.
Every religious institution should see its primary mission to be the offering of support to individuals and congregations to deepen both their spiritual life and their commitment to the needs of others. “Doing church” should mean “doing good,” and not “doing religion.” Religion should issue in transformed lives, not in the stronger life of institutions. Every institution of every sort, secular or sacred, should exist to enhance its particular mission, not to enhance itself. Bankers should work for the benefit of their customers, lawyers for their clients, clergy for their parishioners. They should not seek first the good of the bank, or the practice, or the church.
It is really extraordinary that a 30-year-old man so clearly understood these things. In that, as in many other ways, Jesus of Nazareth was unique among all the people who ever lived. Such wisdom normally comes only after years within an institution, slowly realizing that too much effort is put into promoting the institution and too little into supporting the institutional mission. Many people never seem to figure out that people must always be foremost and the institution itself secondary. This, incidentally, is the primary reason the US Congress is so ineffective. Its members put politics and party above people, and the people inevitably suffer because of the institutional excess of their politicians.
We began with the election of Francis I, and with him we shall end. Our new Pope has an enormous task on his hands. He must keep the huge enterprise of Roman Catholicism going forward from strength to strength, but he must also make it more receptive to the many needs of the human race: not just Catholics, but everyone. No one is up to such an impossible task, but someone is nevertheless always elected to the task. We shall hope and pray that Jorge Bergoglio is the man God most wants to fill this singular religious position. Viva il Papa’!
The answer to religious excess is to focus on what is the primary purpose of religion. No one ever did that more effectively than Jesus of Nazareth. And what is the primary purpose of religion? It is to help establish faith in God, and to enable people to maintain a strong relationship with Him. Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda. And that goes for every religion and every religious body. The answer to religious excess is to diminish religion and to
expand mission.