MORALTTIES - OLD AND NEW

June 23, 3991
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Mark 2:23-3:6
"...[s it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or
to kiji?" -Mark 3:4 (NRSV)

Time was when keeping the Sabbath was a matter of very major
significance. In the motion picture, "Chariots of Fire," Scottish
sprinter, Eric Liddel], refuses to run an event in the Olympic Games for
which he has trained and competed with everything in him, because it is
scheduled for Sunday. It won't be long until people will no lenger know
what that's about. We have, a Presbyterian scholar, Benton Johnson
observes, dropped the subject. of Sabbath Observance altogether.

But there was a time, not so very long ago, when what one did or
refrained from doing on Sunday, was thought to have major moral
Significance. Sunday activities were restricted by law not so long ago.

IT recall the heated debate which occurred when movie theaters were finally
allowed to apen on Sunday.

But mostly I recall with a fair amount of dread, what it was like on
a hot summer Sunday afternoon.

The rules were unwritten but clear nevertheless. Anything fun was
suspect. My own family was not overly pious so my oppression was nat
nearly as thorough and religiously mandated as my chums' who were confined
to the front porch, in their Sunday clothes, and allowed only to read
books. Even Monopoly was forbidden. I can even recall the signal we had
to indicate that their parents had dozed and that it was safe for me to
bring them the comics from our Sunday paper. I suppose the frivolity was
regarded as offensive to God. Or maybe it was the color. Our rules seemed
to have something to do with exertion and perspiration. Bicycle riding was
allowed, but basketball was not.

There was a time when the name "Presbyterian," both in Scotland and
in this country, was synonymous with stern sobriety and, in particular,
with Sabbath rules which seemed to have no point except the suppression of
joy and spontaneity. The celebrated agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, was raised
a Presbyterian and despised the denomination all his life. “No church has
done more to fill the world with gloom than the Presbyterian," he said.

[see Reantoa Johnson, On Dropping the Subjeet: Presbyterians and Sabhath
Observance in The Presbyterian Predicament. p. 91]

Forty years after my Sunday confinement | have come to appreciate the
notion of a Sabbath, a sacred time different fram all other time. But from
the time | first thought about it until the present, I have known that
there is something missing from a religion whose focus is oheying rules and
that there jis something not adequate about a definition of morality which
focuses excJusively on nat doing particular activities. I became something
of a situationist, an advocate of what would later be called the New
Morality, that is to say, at the age of ten, suffering through hot Sunday
afternoons. But I continue to believe the broader topic of what
constitutes moral behaviar and wha defines what is and is not moral is a
consistent motif in the life of Jesus.

The relationship of keeping the Sabbath according to the rules, and a
living faith in Jesus Christ, is a provocative microcosm of a very
relevant issue.

Early in his public ministry, Jesus bumped into the legalistic
morality of the Scribes and Pharisees and the issue, which seems innocent
enough, was the Sabbath. It's the Fourth Commandment - "Remember the
Sabbath Day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your

work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lerd your God: You shall
nat do any work.’

Now there is unassailable wisdom here. We know that time away from
work makes us healthier and happier and better workers. We know that a
sabbatical is a time of creativity and refreshment and that its result is

often professional longevity and effectiveness. We know the wisdom of a
rhythm between Jabor and rest.

And it can be argued that a society requires something approximating
that rhythm as well. To live here, on this vortex of hyperactivity, is at
times to long for the confinement of the front porch!

Anna Quindlon wrote a wonderful editorial last week, “Suddenly No
Summer," which lamented the passing of summer's traditional lazy emptiness.

"Summer isn't what it used to be," she wrote.

“Children are never allowed to be bored. Boredom was
once the backbone of summer - long afternoons spent
gazing sightlessly into the depths of the refrigerator,
complaining in a high voice, 'There's nothing to do!:
Sir Issac Newton, Leonardo daVinci, Frank Lloyd Wright
- I am convinced that they began to germinate their
most important theories during summer vacation, over
Kool Aid and a comic, taking a break from tormenting
their younger brother." .

Parents are terrified of boredom, she observed, because they think
it leads to drugs, sex, and low SAT scores. So children go to camp to get

stimulated. Her parents' idea of stimulation was a trip to the Dairy Queen
once a week.

6/23/91 | ~

Summer, she concludes, is the time children need, when nothing much
should happen. [New York Times, 6/16/91}

There is uncient and contemporary wisdom in the notion that there is
time different from all other time, a time ta be kept holy and distinct, a
time which in a very real sense redeems the rest of the time. The notion
of a Sabbath, some have suggested, abandoned totally by the church during
the last generation, should be revisited and revived for the general health
and well being of our culture.

Keeping the Sabbath holy, not working on the Sabbath, was ane of the
foundations of society in Jesus! day. That heing the case, the keepers of
religious traditions, people identified in the Gospels as Pharisees and

Scribes, defined Sabbath and what constituted work on the Sabbath and what

“~ Keeping it holy meant soa carefully that there were pages upon pages of

Sabbath rules and exceptions to the rules. Inevitably, obeying the rules,
keeping the Sabhath according to prescription, came to be the way people
defined themselves as faithful, and when Jesus challenged that, not so much
by what he said, as by the way he lived, he stirred up a lot of trouble.

Walking through a grain field one day his disciples plucked a few
kernels and ate them. Six days a week that was allowed. Hungry travelers
- Were permitted to help themselves. But on the Sabbath, hungry or not, the
act of picking and plucking out the kernel technically ran into the
prohibition against Sabbath harvesting and threshing. So the Pharisees -
criticized..." Why do you allow your disciples to violate sacred law?"
Jesus' response was to cite an occasion when King David did the same and
worse, a comparison the Pharisees surely found presumptuous, and then added
a telling caveat, that the purpose of Sabbath was the welfare of peopile.
"The Sabbath is ours. We are not the Sabbath's," he said

When he entered a Synagogue they were watching him to see if he would
further violate the law. And there is a sense in which the mood changes
radically as Jesus enters the Synagogue and sees the Pharisees following
him, watching, and sees the people inside, common people, reading and
praying. What happens next is, in fact, an act of defiant civil
disobedience. There is no urgent need such as hunger to warrant what he
did. There is a man with a withered hand - his hand had been deformed from
birth. His need was not immediate. He had lived with his condition all
his life.’ It would be the same in the morning. The man didn't come to
the Synagogue to be healed, at lease consciously: He knows that healing
is forbidden on the Sabbath. He doesn't ask for anything. It's Jesus who
takes the initiative - addressed the man who I assume was simply sitting
there in the congregation minding his own business, participating in the

reading and the praying. "Stand up," Jesus said. "Come here" — shattering
the peace of the Sabbath service. Turning on them, the ones who had
earlier raised the Sabbath issue, he said: "Is it lawful to do Pood or

harm, to save life or to kill on the Sabbath?" The silence was deafening
now and, Mark says, “he looked at them with anger, at their hardness of
heart," which one scholar translates “obstinate stupidity." “Stretch out
your hand,“ he said, and the hand was restored. The law was broken
deliberately. And to document the fact that what transpired is no trivial
discussion of peculiar religious rules, Mark tells us the Pharisees left

(6/23/91

the Synapopue and went directly to intimate friends of Hernd, The
Herodians, people with whom they had absolutely nothing in common except
their fear of Jesus, to discuss ways to get rid of him.

Tt would seem at first like a bit of an overreaction, until you
understand that beople always become very upset when someone questions
their moral certainttes. Nothing, it seems, makes us more nervous.

There is a frequently quoted passage in The Brothers Karamazov,
Dostaevski's great novel. Jesus has returned toa earth and has heen
arrested. In the dark of night the Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell
to tell him that what people want is security, not freedom. "If you really
love people," he argues, “you will make them happy, not free. People want
Jaw, not respousibility." Christ, he Says, must not start again all that
cid business about freedom and grace and commitment and responsibility.
"Let things be: let the church with its laws handle them. Will Jesus
please go away." [see Ethics in a Permissive society, William Barclay]

Anglican Joseph Fletcher set off a storm of controversy with his
book, The New Morality, Situation Ethics. Fletcher argued that Christian
behavior is always situational, that God calis us to be responsible and
free and faithful and that there are no rules which consistently prescribe
what that might look like; and furthermore, to insist on the moral
certainty of rules is to miss the responsibility to be faithful and obedient
in each situation. Fletcher and others suggested that a disciple of Jesus
brings to every ethical quandary - not a neat rule — but the Scriptures,
the traditions of the church, the preat commandment of Jesus to love God
and neighbor and self, and the particularities of the situation.

It sounded to many people as if the advocates of a new morality were
promoting moral laxness and relativity, a baptizing of the secular notion
that “if it feels good, do it." Just as it seemed to the Pharisees that
Jesus was promoting moral laxness. Nothing could be further from the
truth, of course.

What Jesus did was to teach that moral behavior is always
Situational, always new, and that faithful discipleship requires individual
responsibility. His law was simple - lave God and neighbor as self. So
when he sees a man with a withered hand he heals him, even though that
means breaking a venerable religious law. Love is the law: people are
important: human life is the supreme value.

Think of the trouble we have with that. The Presbyterian report on
Human Sexuality prompted enormous hostility and fear by its approach to the
moral complexity of life in the 1990s. Many people were convinced that the
report was fatally flawed by suggesting that there is more that must be
said about responsible sexual behavior than "don't do it." It made the
fairly obvious observation that the simple rule - no sex outside of
marriage —- doesn't begin to deal with the complexities of modern life and
the reality of abusive sex inside marriage, for instance. And while we may
not agree at all with the recommendations the report makes, I believe it is
a critical matter for the church to continue the discussion in the new
moral situation ahead of us.

6/23/91

In the meantime, the weight of tradition is heavy indeed. The issues
are difficult; people of faith disagree; but on them they are precisely the
Situations in which Christian faith has a word to say. No one wishes to
promote abortion as a primary method of birth control. But as of the
Supreme Court decision last month, we are in the irenic and, I helieve,
cruel situation where a thirteen-year-old who has been brutalized and raped
by her mother's boyfriend and goes to a government funded clinic because
she is pregnant must be told, when she inquires about terminating the
pregnancy, that “abortion is not an appropriate method of family planning."

She already lives in a country whose existing policy extends freedom
of choice to people with enaugh money to receive private medical attention,

but denies choices te people who must rely on the county hospital for
health care.

No one wishes to promote indiscriminate sexual relations, but the
reality is that because of a combination of complex contemporary
inconsistencies we are doing just that. In thirty years the percentage of
births to unmarried mothers has risen from 5% to 25%. In the Afro-American
community, 62% of the babies born this year do not have fathers who are
married to their mothers. There are enormous social consequences. Yet we
persist in arguing about the availability of birth cantrol and welfare laws
which actually encourage absentee fathers, in the name of someone's notion
of traditional morality.

Jesus forced the issue of a moral system which had become bankrupt, a
system incapable of doing good because it was so busy avoiding evil. He
did it eloquently in an act of genuine love and caring. He did it because
he encountered human need. That is how we are called to live... on the
basis of an old morality which is always new, always responsive to the new
realities of the world in which we are living.

It is not easy. In fact, it is very demanding to be responsible. It
is the greatest challenge confronting us - to be faithful to Jesus and
responsive to our world. What we have going for us is the assurance that
he calls us to be responsible and forgives us when we make mistakes. What
we have going for us is the example of his life.

I discovered the clue to interpreting this incident in the Gospel of
Mark, not in a New Testament commentary, but in Robert Coles book, The
Spiritual Life of Children. The noted Harvard psychiatrist had asked
children to talk about their religious feeling and to draw pictures.
Henrietta, a nine-year-old black girl from Boston, drew Jesus healing a
blind man. Coles asked what she thought Jesus was saying and feeling when
he did this healing. “He sings a little song," Henrietta replied. “When
Jesus saw someone in trouble, his heart skipped a beat." [p. 178, 179]

Typically when we discuss that tapic, or think about any of the many
incidents in the New Testament which have Jesus in conflict with religious
legalism, we identify with the Pharisees.

Our inclination is to focus on the dynamic between Jesus and his
critics to see if we are reflected in the moralism and self~righteousness

6/23/91

of the Pharisees, to engave ina little self-criticism, guilt and moral
detormination, to be less rigid and more Christ-like

But when atl is sagd and done, the one for whom Jesus precipitated the
crisis, for whom he took on the religious establishment was the nameless
man with a withered hand. Letts not forget him. He's the point. And
maybe he is the mirror in which You are reflected, not the Pharisees
Maybe your situation is not moral certainty and rigid moralism so much as
a week-in and week-out sittine there in the pew, waiting, feeling a little
inadequate, participating in the rituals of your religion but certain that
your limitations, your theologica] amateurism, your spiritual inexperience,
maybe even your moral lapses, keep you on the outside looking in. Perhaps
you are assuming that someday - not today - he will make you whole, wil]
love you ard accept you and restore you

The good word here, ultimately, is that Jesus Christ is not the
author of a new list of rules, but the incarnation of God's love, that he
wants us to be instruments of that love, which is always new, in the world.
But first, he seeks you out - finds you; sees your withered hand - your
withered spirit - his heart skips a beat and he Says, "Come here, stand up, be
whole."

The Good News of the Gospel of Christ is that you — your wholeness,
your peace, your salvation ~ are the point of it all, and the reason for
which he lived and died.

Thanks be to God.

+ Ft t+ tt

Eternal and loving God, as we Struggle with ways to be faithful and
try to make decisions that reflect your gracious love, strengthen us. 0
God, our world is complex and there are times when we long for simplicty
and certainty.

Stand with us: give us courage to be responsible, Forgive us when

we fail and remind us always of your love for us and for all your children,
in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen,

6/23/91