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The Myth of Our Right To Life
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 7, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jeremiah 31:31-34 II Corinthians 3:1-11; 17-18
In this the sixth Sunday of our series on the Commandments, we again turn our attention from the “first and right hand tablet of Moses” concerning “what it means to have a God” to the “other and left hand tablet of Moses…in which we are taught what we owe to our neighbor to do or to leave undone.” In our turning last week and this, we find ourselves standing at the intersection of “Scripture and ethics, of faith and righteousness, of wisdom and responsibility.” Who are we to be in the face of life’s moral complexity, and exactly what are we to do here? Or as Paul Lehmann framed the essential question of the Christian before the neighbor: “What am I, as a believer in Jesus Christ and as a member of his church, to do?” The question need not be asked idly this morning, for the Presbyterian Church once again has done business with the commandments on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times. At least we are dealing, this time, not the seventh but the sixth! In what some have construed as an attempt to ask what we are, as believers in Jesus Christ, to do in the face of the killing that continues between Israeli and Palestinian, our church’s Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee has decided to “press four American corporations to stop providing military equipment and technology to Israel for use in the occupation of the Palestinian territories.” They have voted, as well (some would say only for the appearance of balance), to press one company—Citicorp—for its “alleged connection to a bank accused of having a role in funneling money from Islamic charities to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.” People of the book and so of the Commandments-Jew, Muslim and Christian alike-are deft at justifying revenge taken for the sake of God’s righteousness restored or God’s side secured by way of the other’s demise: so goes our bloody religious reasoning down the long, dark corridors of human history! No doubt the violence addressed by the committee’s resolution as well as the violence done by the resolution to our relationship with the Jews will find its way into the same history! But bracket for a moment the headlines and first consider how you and I daily occupy the territory of Scripture and ethics, on the left hand of the Decalogue, as believers in Jesus Christ and members of his church. Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth that as Christ’s church, they were a “letter of Christ…written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of the human heart…a new covenant, not of the letter but of the spirit.” “Where the Spirit of the Lord is,” he goes on to say, “there is freedom.” Where the Spirit is not, he implies, we are as good as deaf to God’s command. In the deafness that is our post-modern take on the commandments, I think we have heard license in the freedom Paul’s verses proffer…and we have taken it with little regard for the neighbor’s humanity or hunger or need! How, then, are we to understand the left hand of Moses’ tablet where the issue of our neighbor is up, and where we cannot help but feel the pinch of ancient constraints? “Lo” is the word in Hebrew and it chisels an unrelenting line in the stone: no killing, no adultery, no stealing, no lying, no coveting! What is a modern corporation, the nation-state, the media to do? “Think of it,” says Walter Brueggemann, “as a line of defense against nihilism!” Nihil: nothingness. More intimately than the intersection of Scripture and ethics, faith and righteousness, wisdom and responsibility, we know this place as the place of our so-called freedom! Here nihilism is not a philosophical idea. “Wherever enormous wealth devours [the] poor, where blacks and whites, male and female, Protestant and Catholic, Christians and Muslims go for the throat…” says Brueggeman, but more says Jesus: wherever anger and insults fly, there we dwell together in nothingness. “Sinai intends otherwise,” Brueggemann says, “insists otherwise.” The resurrection, we add, proclaims that God’s future breaking into our present nothingness already is otherwise! Yet we do not believe or live as though death were defeated. So with a deaf ear to the Spirit which would set us free for a glad and grateful obedience, we are left to do business with the letter of the left side of Moses’ tablet. We do so, in a word, by equivocation. Not killing depends on when life begins or on whose side you stand when the first shot is fired or on what comfort you may or may not choose to forgo in the face of a child’s starving but distant cry; not committing adultery turns on what the meaning of “is” is, on love that never lasts forever, on fault assigned concerning a need unmet; not stealing hinges on whether you are talking from a first or third world perspective, talking want or whim, talking mine or yours; not coveting simply poses a serious threat to our market economy, forecloses the acquisitive spirit, limits our choices! In each case, the law remains on the outside of our empty hearts while we cleverly rearrange the law’s letters to reveal a reconfigured and righteous conformity. The truth be told, on our hearts and minds we have only ourselves: our ever-threatened self-image as ethical, righteous, and wise enough Christians. So we become literalists and legalists-albeit mostly liberal ones!-left alone to justify ourselves. At the end of the day nothing is written upon our hearts. It is small comfort, I know, to note that we are joined in this place by every illiberal legalist and literalist within shouting distance, shouting being the main means of communication. Take the commandment at hand and consider the person who opposes abortion for any reason, as well as euthanasia, suicide—assisted or not, is a pacifist and against capital punishment. Here there is a consistency which may be applauded. Still such consistency will inevitably show itself to be the hobgoblin of the little mind before the length and breadth and height and depth of Him whose love knows no bounds and whose law is that love. Called to account for the hope that is in us at the end of the day, we may come with evidence of a disembodied principle perfectly kept or may tick off the laws we have observed mostly in the breach, but in either case we come empty handed asking, “When did we see You naked, in prison, a stranger, hungry?” When did we kill you, nail you to the cross of our comfort and ease? So I ask again: what could Paul have meant when he said the letter kills but that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom? Clearly the intercession of God’s Spirit between the command and what we owe our neighbor transforms the heart, mind, soul and strength of those who would follow Christ…but how? What is it that the Spirit of the living God writes on the tablets of the hearts of them that put their whole trust in God? I think the Spirit writes the other on our hearts [the enemy, the stranger, the outcast, the widow, the little child, the prisoner] lest in killing the other—or in failing to keep the other in life-we destroy the selves we were meant in Christ to be together. Luther said as much in his exposition of this commandment: “If you send a person away naked when you could clothe him, you have let him freeze to death. If you see anyone suffer hunger and do not feed him you have let him starve. Likewise, if you see anyone condemned to death or in similar peril and do not save him although you know ways and means to do so, you have killed him. It will do you no good to plead that you did not contribute to his death by word or deed, for you have withheld your love from him and robbed him of the service by which his life may have been saved.” So the Spirit writes the Palestinian upon the heart of the Israeli and the Israeli on the Palestinian; the dying upon the living and the living upon the dying; the terrorist upon the terrified and the terrified upon the terrorist; the gay upon the straight and the straight upon the gay; the starving upon the sated and the sated upon starving. Together we become a letter of self-emptying love, written with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on the human heart. Now if with the other written upon our hearts we return to the headlines and the sixth commandment, the anger and insults that once distanced us from the other’s humanity or that justified our “going for the throat” are given no room at the intersection of Scripture and ethics, faith and righteousness, wisdom and responsibility. Nor does the language of opposing “rights”--the right of the unborn child or the fetus verses the right of the woman, the right of the victim to revenge verses the right of the convicted to die of old age, the right of the Palestinians who believe themselves to be dispossessed verses the right of the Israelis who believe themselves entitled to the Promised Land. If the humanity of each is held close by all, then together we are responsible for the life we are given by God’s hand. The Reformers spoke not of human rights but of God’s right to all of life—its giving and its taking--and of our responsibility for life. Not “rights” which is out of phase both with the Decalogue and with social reality,” said Lehmann, but “responsibility for life rescues the individual both from solitariness and from the tyranny of conscience by…making room for the freedom to be human.” I think of Jim Wallis’ reframing of the question of abortion: making it safe, legal and rare because of the room we make for women and children “to be human in” through adoption reform, health care and child care, the combating of teenage pregnancy and sexual abuse, the improving of poor and working women’s incomes, all of which create common ground, write the humanity of one on the heart of another. I imagine the statement the Presbyterian Church could have made, not divesting but investing in some common ground where Palestinian Christian and Israeli Jew embrace the human in the other for God’s sake. I think of the decades we have fought in the church over the ordination of gay members, killing the spirits of countless sons and daughters, while the Spirit around this table surely was working to change us into each other, a transubstantiation that finally will make all the difference in the world and the church. “Thou shalt not kill!” commands God’s sixth word. Surely since Cain and Abel we are left in the end to confess that “all are murderers in sheer dependence upon the gift of forgiveness and the grace of life, and all are called to take responsibility for life in the power of the strength that is made perfect in weakness.” Thanks be to God. Amen. |