LOVE'S COMPLEXITY

February 15, 1987, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Deuteronomy 30:15-20.
Matthew 5:17-27

“You have heard that it was said. . .,"'You shall not kill;. . .' But I say
to you that everyone who is angry shall be liable to judpment."

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall. not commit adultery.'. But f
say to you that everyone who Jooks at a waman lustfully has already
committed adultery with her." --Matthew 6:21,27 RSV

"That," .the distinguished theologian, Emil Brunner, once said, ‘makes
murderers and adulterers of us all." A friend of mine, as we worked
through this passage in class, turned to me and cracked, a little less
elegantly, “You might.as well go ahead and do it if. you're going to get
blamed for it anyway."

Love's -Complexity... -— You don't-have-to come to chureh to hear that
we are. in the middle of a moral. revolution... You really don't need. the
preacher to remind you that we have ridden out the ethical equivalent of a
storm at sea, and have been.deposited on the shores-of a strange hew land,
with no map and no dependable road signs: ahead, with only the memory of the
maps and signs we used to have before the storm-and with a kind of. wistful,
homesickness, longing that we could go back to that simpler time and place.
You don't need to go to church to hear that. But the fact is that many
people do go to church to hear that the old maps we used before the storm
are really accurate and they will help us find our way through the new land
if we pay. careful enough attention to them even. though the cartographers
never saw this strange place.

There's a wonderful Woody Allen movie in the neighborhood, Radio Days;
which is a delightful slice ef life from the early 1940's: that is, before
the moral revolution happened. The radio programs of that era provide the
backdrop for a series of vignettes from a young boy's life in.a. family,
synagogue, school and community. Those radio programs defined good and
evil very clearly. The Second World War itself was. a moral crusade. on a
grand scale, although Woody Allen can't resist demonstrating the moral
ambiguity even in the midst of that clear cut conflict. The little boys
are on the rooftop, full of patriotic zeal, with binoculars, watching: for
German bombers over the coast of New Jersey. What falls into their line of
sight and rather commands their attention however, is a particularly
attractive young woman seen-through her bedroom window.

The movie is a gentile reminder of the fact that we are in a new and
different place now. It is also a reminder that those of us who are
middle-aged or older, formed our moral convictions and made our ethical
assumptions in that time and place. The movie reminded me of an eloquent
paragraph William Manchester wrote about the difference between that time
and this time. It is in a memoir of his experience in the South Pacific as
a young Marine in Worid-War Ii. The title is Goodbye Darkness. Near the
end he telis why it was important to him to get up out of a hospital bed to
join his battalion on Okinawa, one of history's bloodiest and most hellish
battles. On Easter Sunday, 1945 the Marines landed on an island sixty
miles long and eight miles wide. Three months later 200,000 people were
dead. Manchester tries to explain what that was about -- and in the
process chronicles the moral revolution through which we have come.

"Debt was ignoble. Courage was a virtue. Mothers were
beloved, father obeyed. Marriage was a sacrament. Divorce
was disgraceful: Pregnancy meant expulsion from school'‘or
dismissal from-a job. The boys responsible for impregnation

had to marry the giris -- there could be no wedding until the
father approved. You assumed that gentlemen always stood and
removed their hats when a lady entered the room. The

suggestion that some of them might resent being called
‘ladies' would have confounded you. You needed a precise
relationship between the sexes, so that no one questioned the
duty of boys to cross the seas and fight while girls wrote
cheerful letters from home, girls you knew were still pure
because they let you touch them here but not there,
explaining that they were saving themselves for marriage.
All these and ‘God Bless America't and Christmas and the
attitude that victory in the war would assure their
continuance into perpetuity - all this led you into battle
:and sustained you as you fell, and, if it came to that,
justified your death to all who loved you as you had loved
Chem... Later the rules would change. But we didn't know-that
then, -we didn't know." (Goodbye Darkness, p. 393-394)

The rules did change in our culture. More accurately, the culture
itself started to change during that war and has been changing ever since.
And an important part of living responsibly, as Christians, is to
acknowledge the dramatic and profound nature of the changes and to try to
deal creatively, Christianly with them.

Pining for the simplicity of the past is not going to help us make
responsible ethical decisions. Rather, our task is to find within the
resources of the faith, the principles, the guidelines, the general
directions which will help us - and our world - in the future.

The issues which demand our attention would be simply
“incomprehensible a decade or more ago. Two of the most critical issues
have to do with life threatening epidemics. A terminal, deadly disease,
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is loose among us. It is transmitted
sexually. [It affects homosexual and heterosexual people. The way people
contract the disease offends conventional morality and so we don't talk

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about it much in polite society, and certainly not in church in other than
judgmental terms, Time Magazine equates it with the deadly plagues of. the
Middle Ages. Modest estimates are that it will become ten times worse
before it gets better. That means many, many, many people are going. to die
of it. Our children, encouraged by our culture to establish casual
intimate sexual relationships are going to get it, the doctors are telling
us. In the meantime, incredibly, we are still debating whether or not
products which will minimize the risk of contracting AIDS may be advertised:
on television. Words like propriety and taste are used to rationalize not
including that advertising. Ponder the irony of ‘people who engage’ in prime
time erotic voyeurism on the major networks, paid for by American business,
objecting to a commercial for a product that will prevent people fro
dying. What we have geing of course is a profound. inability to recognize
that the storm has already happened, and we are, in fact, already standing
on the shores of a new land,..and the old maps don't apply. What we have,
often, is religion.- up-to its old tricks, insisting that the old rules

are still valid, that the old road map must: be followed, even though we are
standing on the edge of a new and uncharted wilderness.

Thank God for C. Everett Koop, the Surgeon General of the United
tates, a Presbyterian layman, a devout Christian, evangelical in fact,.a
political conservative, and the one man who has the courage to teli-the
truth and to point out the. moral. hypocrisy of. the television networks and
the religionists who support them.

The other deadly epidemic is teén-age pregnancy. You have reéad the
numbers. Teen-age sexual activity is not much different in America’ from
the other Western nations. .Teen-aged pregnancy in America, however, is the
highest in the world: It is increasing. And when it increases so does a
whole sequence of societal tragedies with which the schools and courts and
police and welfare system cannot begin to cope..The. reason American: teen-~
agers get pregnant is that they don't.use birth control devices. And, one
has to assume, at least part of the reason they don't use-them is. that it

isn't always easy to get. them. Our response to that tragedy is, .as-of last
Wednesday, a Bill before Congress that would reduce éven further, funding
for family planning organizations.. What we have going, again, is the
cultural unwillingness or inability. to acknowledge that we are.in'a new and
dangerous place, supported by conservative religion.

Does traditional morality have anything to say about these new
situations, other than “don't?” - Jesus confronted that issue 2,000 years
ago... In his culture, goodness, morality, righteousness, was defined. by
the law of Moses, the Ten Commandments, the First Five Books of the: Bible
and the Commentaries on the Law.. The people who took.the Law most
seriously were the Scribes and Pharisees. . They obeyed it to the letter.
They organized their lives around it. They were good and admirable people.
They are often demeaned and used as unflattering illustrations of mean,
self-righteousness. Actually they were. solid, good, moral people. I've
always. thought of them.as the Presbyterians of their day...upright,
generous, public-spirited, orderly, law-abiding people. They took the
retigious law - which was also the civil law in Israel, very seriously.

- To them - for them - Jesus one time said - "I have not come to
abolish the law. . .. whoever does and teaches (the law) shall be called

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: great in the Kingdom. of Heaven." And the Pharisees smiled and nodded their
humble acknowledgment at the compliment. he had paid then.

And then, in a reversal so stunning it is nearly incongruous, he
added.—- “Unless your. righteousness. exceeds ‘the righteousness of the Scribes
and Pharisees you will never enter the Kingdom.” The simple fact is that
if righteousness means obeying. the religious rules, you can't exceed the
Scribes and Pharisees.:. You can't bat more than a thousand per. cent. You
can't. refrain from stealing or murdering or committing adultery. more than
another person is refraining. The Scribes and Pharisees were the
recognized moral superstars. . You can't exceed them --unless — there is a
new definition of righteousness, morality, a definition which is bigger
than obeying the rules.

Jesus then.used six examples: -murder, adultery, divorce, oaths,

retribution. and. love of neighbor. In each he used the formula: "You have
heard that it was said ~ but I say to you." In each he refers to the old
law,-a moral rule; "thou shalt not kill,".and then deepens it, probes
beneath the surface, the behavior - to the very heart of the matter: “I

Say to you, everyone who is angry is liable to judgment."

Now it seems to me. that one of the things we Christians ought to
learn from our Lord is that when the Christian religion comes out as a set
of rules it has missed the mark. It's not that the rules are bad, or
harmful. In fact, sexually transmitted diseases are making the old rules
look pretty good. It's just that rules often grow out of particular
circumstances, and when.the circumstances change, the rules aren't always
quite as relevant, and if religion is merely a compilation of the oid
rules, it's not going to meet or help people where they are.

One New Testament commentator put it nicely. “If any criticism: (of
the Scribes and Pharisees} is to be made it is that they were too
conscientious: that in their zeal for the minutest details of the Law and
traditions they were apt to lose sight of the larger moral purposes which
the law as a whole was meant to serve.” (T. W. Manson, The Mission and
Message of Jesus, p. 454) There's a wonderful line in the play The
Elephant Man, when the Doctor has fired a hospital employee for staring at
the Elephant Man, John Merrick. Merrick objects: the Doctor explains that
the. employee broke a rule which was-established out of compassion for him,
the Elephant.Man. Merrick says: “If your mercy is so cruel, what do you
do for. justice?" ;

-It's not that all the rules are irrelevant, nor that we have to be
constantly improvising, accommodating and changing. It's just that the
moral traditions, customs, laws are not an end in themselves. - They are not
Gospel. They are intended to reflect the Gospel. ,

That's first. The second point we Christians ought always to be
learning from Jesus is that our lives are to be lived in a world he loved
very much. That, in itself, is a basic moral posture. We thought about it
last week as we looked at his metaphor of "The Salt of the Earth."
Disciples are to live in the world which often means with moral ambiguity
and complexity...We believe that our individual lives have had dignity and
importance bestowed on them by him. We are, by his grace, responsible

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citizens of this world.. We. are. to be responsible for.our lives and for. the
common life of the community. We are to be followers of Jesus,. disciples
of Jesus and to discipline cur. ethical decisions with our sense of his
will. If there are no precise rules about. “Baby M".and surrogate
mothering, or the artificial] prolongation of life or nuciear war, there are
guidelines and values upon.the basis of which we may make decisions: We
must learn, out of our discipleship, the.values taught. by Jesus and:.then
apply those values, respensibly and-faithfully; to. the. new and complex
moral dilemmas of our time. -Jesus taught that people. are more important
than laws: that reconciliation between people is more important than the
traditional religious custom of going to.the Temple... Far better to. stop -—
even on the way to. Temple .- to be reconciled with another person.

That's a value...people are important...

Children are important. Justice is important... The opportunity. for
every human life to grow and..become. all. that it:can become...that's a
Christian value - on the basis of which we are~ called to make judgment
calls. :

The third. thing.we Christians. should be learning from. Jesus:.is that
the righteousness he expects,--the. righteousness that. exceeds.the-
righteousness of Scribes and.Pharisees, is.a:matter-of heart and-will. and
character.- Jesus Christ wants, that is. to say, more than our. compliance
with the rules: more than our behavior. It's not. just a new. law.

The fundamental. moral. question,: William -Willimon wrote. recently is
not "What should I do?" but."Who do -I.want.to be?" Jesus Christ calls us,
not simply to obey rules but to follow him, to. be converted, changed,
altered, to become new men and women. And that is a process, frankly, of
making decisions, making mistakes, being forgiven and starting allover
again.

The Sermon on the. Mount; by equating. anger.with murder, and lust with
adultery, makes murderers and adulterers out of us .all, the famous
theologian once observed. What:it does; as well.of.course, is tell. us that
the life of discipleship depends on-the grace and forgiveness of God.. What
it does, is point back to this haunting figure of.Jesus who is not’only a
teacher of morality, but more importantly,.@-savior, one: who himself shows
an ultimate truth about God and God's way with us. Even these difficult
moral imperatives, that is to say, are full of the grace of Jesus Christ.

There is a spiritual dynamic set off in our hearts by these hard
moral demands... Toa consider them seriously - to ponder the meaning of
being judged for my emotions — for what we have come to believe are
involuntary and natural responses like anger and lust, is to despair. We
are not up to this.

I recall very clearly that spiritual valley in my own pilgrimage. - I
despaired of myself - the church - or the world -.ever approaching this moral
utopianism. And I was saved from despair and the cynicism which results
when I discovered something the late Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. He called the.
ethics of the Sermon on the Mount — "The Impossible Possibility."... Niebuhr
wrote..."The gospel is something more than the law of love. The gospel

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deals’ with the fact that (people) violate the law of love. The fospel
presents, Christ as the pledge and revelation of ‘Gad's mercy which finds
(us) in our rebellion and overcomes (our) sin." (The Essential Reinhold
Niebuhr, p. 111, Why the Church is not Pacifist.)

Love gets complex at times. Now is one of them. Another bit of
Niebuhrian advice’ that’ I try to remember’ at-election time is ‘that political
and: moral arguments are “between sinners, not between righteous people and
evil people, right people and wrong people.

Love gets complex... Doing the right thing assumes that we know what
the right thing is, and that's not always as easy as it sounds. What the
gospel of Christ promises is not easy answers, but human values which do
not change and moral:directions that must be expressed creatively and
respousibly in every new age and every new land. More important, the
Gospel is the Gospel...Good News about’a Lord who will be with us, and his
grace: to forgive us when we make mistakes.

Ft (is cur vocation to live in a world and at a-time that has become
complex and sometimes very. dangerous. We are called to live in our world,
at this time, as Christ's faithful disciples. May we do so with
conf¥dence, not that we will always be right...but that he will always be
with us; that as we struggle to apply his values, his will, te complex new
situations, he will forgive us when we make mistakes, and renew us and send
us“back: into the fray. :

It is our privilege to be his people in complex times. May we do so
with confidence — and courage - and’ cheerfulness.

Amen.

God of perfect: love; we would do more in your
world than fulfill minimum moral requirements.
When we’shrink: from the complexity of the issues
which face us; push “us back into» their midst.
And: equip us,-0-.Lord, arm us; with that love
which will: never let us go, in Jesus Christ

our Lord. Amen.

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