The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

24 June 2007

Proper 7

The Rev'd Lloyd Prator

New York City

One of the great landmarks in a child's growing up is the moment you get your first drivers' license. It is really a landmark event. There is an object involved, a symbol, the small piece of laminated paper, which is the entrée to a huge world of adult things. Eventually it will get you a beer. Right now, it gets you into more movies than used to be the case. When accompanied by a car, it gets you out of the house, on your own—it is a sign of freedom.

I remember mine. We lived about forty miles from downtown, and in those days there was no subway or any rapid transit that went into the city. I think there was a bus, but you had to plan an all day trip, take a sandwich, and leave for home before eight o'clock. Having a car was the way to get off to the city alone, and I really took advantage of it. I soon discovered inexpensive restaurants, the discounts available at the two legitimate theatres in town—places where they had real actors on real stages doing plays that had once hit the boards in—dare I say it? —Broadway. What freedom it involved.

There is another part of growing up which is a landmark, and that is a subtler, but somewhat related marker. In the days when I grew up, I was expected to let my father know where I was going and what I was going to do. And I did. But as the months passed, I began to notice that he was not much listening. He spent much more time listening to may descriptions of what I had seen the next day when I sat down to breakfast with him.

There was a subtle shift, and while we did not talk about it, I think it was clear. My father began gradually to lose interest in approving what I was proposing to do, less interested in checking it out or setting limits, and more just interested in chatting about the play or the movie or the restaurant.

There had been rules and standards, but as time passed, trust replaced close observation. And that was a big step in becoming an adult. Maybe it was the same for you.

I would like this morning, to draw a rough analogy to that kind of adolescent move toward maturity, and the distinction that Paul draws between Christianity and religions of law in the second reading, the letter to the Galatians.

Paul was writing to some Christians who were interested in a return to Jewish law. And he says, no, don't do that, Christians live in a different way. Our God is not a god who insists upon legalism.

What counts for Christians is not law, but relationship . What makes us different is that we are in Christ. We have put on Christ. Religions that are based upon legalism are religions that are primarily based on authority from the outside. And such religions, like Judaism and Islam, are religions that have their place. After all, we all need rules and laws from time to time, because rules and laws are part of being instructed in the faith, part of being brought up in to relation with God. And we began, as Jews, with a religion of laws.

But in Christ, the faith took a somewhat mystical turn. We have been taken into Christ. We have been given a relationship with God that is like that of a parent for a child, a relationship that works on faith —or if you prefer a less theologically loaded word, trust.

Why is this a good thing?

A few reasons: for one thing, law cannot possibly cover every conceivable exigency. By the time of Jesus, the religion of the day had a huge codex of hundreds of laws that were complicated and indiscernible in some cases.

For another, a legalistic approach to God does not easily allow for accommodation to new kinds of social and cultural reality. It is a happy coincidence that this reading occurs on Gay Pride Sunday. We no longer live in a world where people think that the only gay people around are people who rape heterosexuals, participate in child abuse, or practice strange non-Christian religions. We now know that gays and lesbians are all around us, within our parishes, in our House of Bishops, in Congress, teaching in our schools, helping to care for our children, caring for and curing the sick in our hospitals. Faced with his level of reality, it is silly to insist on following religious laws that call such folks unclean.

Fortunately, 2000 years ago, Christians sowed the seeds of a different religious tree, in whose shade we live today. We took a look at the old feast of Pentecost, which used to celebrate the giving of the law on Sinai, the thanksgiving for the Torah. And we Christians put a new twist on it. From now on, in our religion, it would be a festival of the gift of the spirit. Part of the gifts of the spirit is the gift of mature discernment, because the Spirit binds us in Christ. Because we are a community in Christ, we can examine the laws and traditions of our faith and adapt them to new historical circumstances, informed by new learning. As one hymn writer put it, “New occasions teach new duties.”

Paul's conviction that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, could be the banner proclamation for this commemoration of Gay Pride Sunday. By proclaiming that inclusive vision, Paul takes us back to the time of Abraham, before the giving of the law, when one's encounter with God happened deep in the soul, where a proposition of love was offered, and we, as God's people were moved to say yes.

The same proposition is offered today by a God who no longer deals with us with reference to a law, but in terms of a human life like ours, a life lived in faith, and a faith which is open to us the moment we say yes to that offer of love which knows neither boundary or terminus.