The Two R's

"The Two R's"
Matthew 23:1-4


I’m going to make a startling statement.  Are you ready for it?  Here it is:  we are human beings.  I know.  I know.  I know what you’re thinking.  “No way.  Not me.  I’m not one of those human beings.”  But, yes, I’m sorry to say, you are.  You are a human being.  You are part of the human condition.

Now, by telling you that you are a human being, I am also going to have to make another startling statement:  You aren’t God.  You aren’t in charge.  Final authority doesn’t rest on your shoulders.  You are not perfect.  You can’t be perfect.  You can aspire to perfection, if you’d like.  But I’m sorry to tell you, you’ll never make it.  You won’t make it because you’re not God.  You are human.

A large part of what it means to be a human being is that we mess up.  We make mistakes.  We blunder.  We make choices and decisions we wish we wouldn’t have.  Time and time again, we blow it.  We will even commit sin.  We understand this about the human condition, so we try to legislate our behavior.  We make rules.  The rules are made in an attempt to force us to become positively human most of the time, rather than become negatively human.  And there are a ton of rules.  Many are written down and put in rule books.  But a lot are not.  Rules are one of the things that separate us from the animals.

Animals don’t make rules to legislate their behavior.  For example, what rules does a lion have to follow and obey in order to be a good lion?  They hunt, they kill, they eat, they sleep, they reproduce.  That’s about it.  They don’t have a bunch of rules.  Like:  Lions can only hunt gazelles on Monday.  Or:  While hunting wildebeests, lions are only allowed to run up to 30 mph.  If they run faster than that, they have to give up their kill to the hyenas.

Animals don’t have rules.  Human beings have rules.  We have rules because we are so afraid of our humanity.  We are so afraid of our human behavior.  We are so afraid of our human condition.  We are so afraid of that part of us that messes up.  So we legislate ourselves and our behavior to the point of the ridiculous.  The problem is, and this is our human condition, if you make rules, that means that you can just as easily break the rules.  When you make a rule, you are finding out not only what you CAN’T do.  You are also finding out what you CAN do.

Are you following me on that?  Here’s an example.  When you tell a child not to take any cookies out of the cookie jar, what are you telling them?  “Hmmm, I could take a cookie out of the cookie jar when no one is looking.”  Or, if you see a sign that says, “Wet paint.  Do not touch,” what’s the first thing that pops into your head?  And what’s the first thing you do with your finger?

If you think that only happens in children, here’s another example.  On the Seattle waterfront, there’s a hotel called the Edgewater Inn.  It’s unique because it’s built out over the water.  When they built it, the owners were afraid the guests would fish off their balcony’s.  So they put up a sign on each balcony that read, “No Fishing Off The Balcony.”

Well, what happened?  People evidently saw the sign and thought, “Hmmm.  Good idea.”  And they fished off their balconies.  The hotel had a huge problem with people, especially those on the upper floors, casting their lines, with heavy weights, and not letting out enough line.  The weights would come swinging back into and crashing through the windows of the restaurant on the first floor.  Imagine enjoying a romantic dinner and having a half pound lead weight come shattering through the picture window and landing on your salmon croquet.

So they hired a consultant.  They paid this firm thousands of dollars to figure out what to do to stop this annoying problem of guests fishing off the balconies.  After the study was done, the recommendation was submitted.  Anyone have any idea what it was?  Take down the ‘No Fishing’ signs.  The hotel did that and the problem went away.

Now, if that doesn’t describe the human condition, then I don’t know what does.  The minute you make a rule, telling people what they can’t do, you are in that same stroke of the pen, telling them what they could, might, or will do.  It’s just the way we think.  Its part of our humanity.  It has always been a part of what it means being human.

In Jesus’ day, it might have been worse than it is now.  Long before Jesus, God had given the Ten Commandments.  They were God’s basic list of guiding principles for human behavior.  But the Jewish Scribes, who were put in charge of the law, the ones who tried to define what the Ten Commandments meant, went overboard in their work.

Let’s take one of the Top Ten as an example.  One of the Commandments says to keep the Sabbath holy; to not work on the Sabbath; to take a day of rest each week, because God rested on the seventh day.  OK.  It’s a great rule.  Very simple.  Very clear.  Hardly anyone follows it, but that’s another sermon.  So the Scribes started looking at the rule, and thought too much.

“What does it mean to do work or not to do work on the Sabbath?” they wondered.  What is resting and what isn’t resting?  They came up with the idea that to carry a burden is part of what it means to work.  OK, so what’s a burden?  The Scribes began spinning out all kinds of rules that were supposed to help people understand what a burden was.  For example, a burden was food equal to the weight of one dried fig; or, milk enough for one swallow; or honey enough to put on a wound; or, water enough to moisten your eyes; or, ink enough to write two letters of the alphabet.  And so on, nearly into infinity.

The Scribes spent hours arguing whether a person could lift a candle and move it from one place to another on the Sabbath.  If a tailor had a needle stuck in the lapel of his coat (which is where tailors kept their sewing needles) and carried it with him on the Sabbath, was that carrying a burden?  Or, if a woman could wear a brooch on the Sabbath.  Or, if a parent could lift their infant on the Sabbath.

To the Scribes who wrote these laws and regulations, and to the Pharisees who had taken an oath to follow each law, this was the essence of religion.  Their idea was that if you could legislate human behavior to the fullest extent, then people would become truly religious.  Maybe, even happy.  When the Scribes were done, they had over 50 encyclopedia sized volumes full of their laws, based on what was originally just 10 simple laws.  Do you also get a picture of God holding his face in his hands wondering where he had gone wrong.

So, when Jesus talked about how the Scribes and Pharisees were piling heavy burdens on the people, that’s what he was talking about.  And notice, the word “burden” is key here.  Remember, the Scribes tried to define the word “burden” as they looked at all the work-related laws they developed to legislate human activity on the Sabbath.  But the burdens weren’t sewing needles, brooches, or even a little baby.  The burden became the very laws they were making about burdens!

Too bad they didn’t define burdens as guilt, sadness, worry, depression, anxiety, or loneliness.  It would be really nice to get to put those burdens down one day a week and not have to be bothered about carrying them around.  Maybe we should try that and see how it works.  Maybe we could lay those kinds of burdens down more than one day a week.

As I mentioned earlier, when you make a law, then you are also creating the opportunity and possibility of breaking that law.  The more laws you have, the more opportunities and possibilities you have for law breaking.  I think that’s the trap the Scribes and Pharisees got themselves into.  If you make a law, then you have to follow it.  And, you have to have someone designated to police all those laws.  But when you try to make laws for every possible human activity, there’s no way you can keep or police them all.

Those who make all those rules eventually find themselves in positions to break them as well.  Certainly the Scribes and Pharisees, in their attempt to keep all the laws, blew it from time to time.  They are, after all, as we have established, human beings.  If you’re trying to portray yourself as perfect, and have defined perfection as “keep all the rules,” then you are bound to come across as hypocritical, when you break a rule.

My brother in Minneapolis told me one time about an older couple he had read about in the paper up there.  They were found frozen to death in their little home.  They had had the electricity shut off because they didn’t pay their bill.  They were apparently eating dog food out of the can for their meals.

There were two ironies about this frozen couple.  The first was that in the closet was found a suitcase containing over $60,000 in cash.  The other irony was that this couple volunteered at the local community health clinic, teaching the poorer people in the Minneapolis area about proper personal hygiene, food preparation, and basically how to take care of yourself.

What it comes down to, apparently, is not what you teach.  You can still be an effective teacher spouting information, Bible verses, theology, rules, or whatever.  But how much more effective is the witness of living the same as what you teach.  Integrity is that quality where what you believe comes together with how you live.

There is something worse that can happen.  Those who make the rules begin to see themselves above the law.  As creators of the law, they think they have some kind of special privilege or status.  They fall into the trap of sanctimoniousness.  Holier than thou.  Above the law.  Makers of the law don’t necessarily have to be keepers of the law, becomes their thinking.  I think some of that must have been going on in Jesus’ day, also.  The Scribes and the Pharisees forgot they were human beings.  The began to think of themselves as Creator.  Ultimately, if you start thinking like that, you become bad examples both of humanity and divinity.

So, where is Jesus going with all this?  What, in Jesus’ mind, is he trying to get us to see about what true believing and faithful living is all about.  And what is faithfulness not about?  Clearly, Jesus is trying to get us off the kick of thinking that Godliness is next to legalism.  Rule making only results in finger pointing.  That’s not what belief in God is all about.  That’s not even what God is about.  True religion is not a list of laws, do’s and don’ts, codes and restrictions.

For Jesus, a true believer is someone who lives according to the fundamental things he/she believes.  They do what they believe.  There is no, say one thing, and do another.  You talk the talk and you walk the walk.  Again, for Jesus, simple integrity is the most profound way to be human.

For Jesus, that integrity is defined by two things.  They were the same two principles behind the Ten Commandments.  Those two qualities were the two R’s:  Reverence and Respect.  All rules boil down to two:  Have Reverence for God; and, have Respect for your fellow human beings, as well as yourself.

Reverence for God comes when we most understand God--when we most know God.  The more you know of God, the more you realize God is a God of compassion, acceptance, love and grace.  When we are being most human, that is, when we are falling on our face the hardest, making the worst mistakes, making poor choices, being sinful even, God is the one who comes with powerful grace, offering the tenderest and most understanding hand to pull us to our feet, accepting and embracing us completely, dusting us off and sending us on our human way, renewed and ready to keep on living.  The more we realize this about God, the more reverence we have toward God.  The more we are in awe of God.  The more we want to honor and draw close to that God.  We don’t have reverence for God because we are afraid of God, a God who is just waiting for us to break a rule so he can smack us up the side of the head.  No, we have reverence for God because of our understanding of the understanding love of God.

Respect for other human beings comes from the realization of just that:  that we are all human beings.  That we aren’t perfect.  That we are all struggling with what it means to be human.  That we can act towards each other just as God acts towards us.  That we can look for ways, not to smack each other on the back of the head with one of the 50 volumes of the rule books, like some uptight Pharisee.  But, instead, we can look for ways to respect each other, accept each other, embrace each other; ways to look out for each other with compassion and grace.

When Paul wrote to the Galatians, he listed the kinds of behaviors the Holy Spirit leads us into:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Paul then says, “There’s no law about behaving in these ways.”  You just do them, not because you have to, but because that’s what it means to be truly faithful.  And, that’s what it means to be truly human.  To be human in the best sense of the word.  To not be over burdened with a ton of rules and regulations, but instead to be guided by the two supreme human values of Reverence for God and Respect for all other human beings, including yourself.  That’s all you need.