October 29, 2023

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15; Matthew 22:34-46

He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Well, given that 90 percent of my sermons end with that, I am not sure where to go from here. Maybe get some bagels?

Well, no such luck.

Jesus was having another exchange with the Temple officials. This time they were assessing how Jesus prioritized the commandments. There were of course the Ten Commandments, but there were many other such religious requirements. One description of them is the Holiness Code, an extended selection from Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers with many shalls and shall nots. And this list expanded over time, reaching beyond the Bible to interpretations and expansions of ideas and concerns.

And this is not what we might call in a modern way the rules of kosher, which developed over the centuries after the life of Jesus. Even though the word “Jew” is used in the Bible, the Judaism in the Bible is far different from modern Judaism with all its permutations. Think of it this way. We bear little resemblance to Early Christians, whose practices were different, whose theology was almost unrecognizable. When Paul is criticizing people in his letters, these are fellow Christians who he thinks have errant ideas about how to interpret what should be done and not done. There was no agreement then just as there is no agreement now.

By that same logic, you can say “Christian” as if it has some core relevance, but then struggle to reconcile the differences between a Catholic and a Quaker, a Lutheran and a Pentecostal, a Presbyterian and the Amish. There are some very broad points of overlap, but otherwise it would be a challenging homework assignment. Even while the Bible was being written, they were disagreeing, so what can we do but muddle along and listen to Jesus. Honestly, that is my answer most of the time: muddle along and listen to Jesus.

This Sunday, I am concluding my sermon series on beauty and its influence on the Christian tradition. And so, I decided to take a look at a piece of literature from the 17^th century. It is The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is a story about a man named Christian who is on a pilgrimage from his hometown, called the City of Destruction, toward another place, called the Celestial City.

Given that most city planners would not have opted for the name City of Destruction, you might have an inkling that this book is an extended metaphor for the spiritual journey of someone, from the material world to the heavenly world. And you would be correct.

There is nothing subtle about the imagery of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The main character is named Christian for one. And he encounters characters along his travels called by similarly blunt and obvious names. For example, two friends who try to dissuade him from his journey are Obstinate and Pliable. Again, not the usual candidates you find in a baby’s naming book. Obstinate quits this task early on, but Pliable continues for a while, only to abandon Christian when the two are bogged down in a swamp filled with the doubts, fears, temptations, and sins of their present condition. If only we had known that Pliable was not a fast friend. Who could have guessed?

The book is by John Bunyan, an interesting man with many divergent phases of his life. Bunyan was a tinker by training, which meant an itinerant tin smith who traveled about fixing pots and pans. He was also a bit of a rabble-rouser, at least by the standards of the time.

He wrote an autobiographical text in which he confessed his youthful indiscretions of dancing, playing with sticks, ringing church bells out of season, and reading a semi-scandalous poem, Sir Beves of Hampton. From a modern perspective, this was not a man drenched in sin, but he would later become a fervently religious man and obviously needed something to repent in public. Lest any of you plan to ring our church bell out of season. And beware the evils of dancing and playing with sticks.

Christian escapes the treacherous swamp with the help of someone named Help—again, not a subtle text. Christian is on his way to a place known as the Wicket Gate. This is a narrow doorway, which name mirrors Jesus’ call for people to be prepared to enter the narrow gate into the Kingdom of God. “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

Along the way to this gate, Christian is tempted off this difficult road by Mr. Worldly Wiseman—fantastic name. Along with Mr. Wiseman are Mr. Legality and his son Civility. They live in the village of Morality, where people struggle under the yoke of the Law. These oddly named fellows are trying to divert Christian from the way of Jesus onto the path of the Law, meaning the pathway that would require them to perform good deeds in the world rather than rely upon Christ as the one and only way to God.

And yes, if any of you were wondering to yourselves about who I might identify with in this tale of obvious moral pitfalls, I find more than a passing personal resemblance to Mr. Worldy Wiseman and his desire to see good works being performed in this world. That is your invitation to go screaming into the streets away from the dark and pernicious influence of the Golden Rule.

You see, John Bunyan had a conversion experience which led him away from being an Anglican toward being a Puritan. As the name suggests, Puritans were trying to purify the Church of England and its Catholic seeming ways and traditions.

Puritans believed in the ultimate depravity of human beings because of their inherent sinfulness, because of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. And just to be absolutely clear, the notion of Original Sin does not appear in the Bible. It was a theological idea thought up by Augustine centuries later and adopted by many but not all Christians. Using that idea, Jesus’ death upon the cross was interpreted as a sacrifice made to God to expunge the pervasive and enduring sin of humanity. And without that sacrifice, no one could be reconciled with God, including the uncounted millions of people who died before Jesus existed or who never knew he lived.

Puritans also believed in the concept of predestination, that whether someone goes to heaven had long been decided by God before any human being was born. We are here upon the Earth following the iron rails of inevitable grace, whether that means we are going to heaven or going to hell. Which also would have been the case before Jesus was born and therefore seems to suggest that his death was not the literal sacrifice some make it out to be. But I digress.

Anyway, I hope I am not spoiling the ending of The Pilgrim’s Progress for anyone when I inform you that Christian makes it into the Celestial City, aka Heaven, though he has a few close brushes with the likes of characters of mysterious influences like Atheist, Wanton Professor, Little Faith, and Ignorance. Fortunately, he came across someone helpfully named Hopeful and they crossed over the River of Death.

As I was researching for this sermon, in my devious efforts to convince people to love one another, I came across a scholarly article lamenting the fact that The Pilgrim’s Progress was no longer being taught in American high schools. This lament was written in 1916 by a professor at Wellesley College, so a wee bit dated. And yet I found the article as humorous as the story. This professor professed that the book was an important text to edify the children and she was concerned that teachers were missing out on a golden opportunity to school the children in the proper ways of life.

Not proper behavior or ethics, mind you, heavens forbid. Though I honestly have no idea what you are supposed to do if everything is predestined.

Martin Luther once said you were supposed to sin boldly but trust in Christ more boldly. Honestly, I have no idea what to do with that message. Maybe, sin mildly? Sin blandly? Maybe ring some bells and whack a few sticks around? And feel free to go dancing. Lots of dancing.

This professor in 1916 wanted to have the Pilgrim’s Progress taught as a sort of a generic ode to good old-fashioned Christianity. She did not want to get bogged down with details, but just generally get the kids to pay attention to this journey toward the Celestial City. And, by the way, she also expected those high school teachers to do their best to gloss over certain pesky concerns about teaching from this book.

The professor wrote, and I quote: “Of course pupils should be told how exclusively Bunyan read the Bible and Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and that he was singularly intent upon problems of faith, but why shadow the initiation of young readers with ponderous allusions to fanaticism and dogmatic theology?”

Fanaticism and dogmatic theology? I can only hope that when someone is defending me in the future, they would use slightly more positive terminology to describe my work than fanaticism and dogmatic theology. Why spoil a good read with the meaning behind it? Why try to understand something more deeply and accurately when you can simply adopt the interpretation of someone else? Skip over all that confusing critical thinking. Sarcasm alert.

 

There is more than simply dogmatic theology at work in this book. That book Bunyan was reading besides the Bible? It was called Fox’s Book of Martyrs. That book details all the terrible things the Catholic Church had done to Protestants in England and Scotland. So, with the generic story about Christianity came an anti-Catholic message against morality. Similarly, the reference to Mr. Worldly Wiseman and his distractions of morality is a direct attack on the Jewish tradition.

We heard some reference to that today with the exchange between Jesus and the lawyer. When asked about the commandments, Jesus greatly simplified everything. Not only did he not invoke the Ten Commandments, as someone might have expected, but he also sidestepped the many commandments, ordinances, and statutes that had become the Law under many centuries of Second Temple based religion. The Law that went well beyond the simple lesson from Leviticus about loving your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus was trying to simplify the rules people needed to follow. But unlike the Puritans and many other groups that came out from the Reformation, Jesus was not teaching people that they should stop doing good things for one another. That they should stop being moral and ethical people and simply rely upon faith and faith alone to find their way back to God.

There are many ways to respond to this question about how we are saved. Most religions around the world believe that we are called upon to act morally based upon the teachings of the tradition in question. And by most, I mean pretty much every religion except Protestantism. That includes Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many others.

Even most Protestants gave up on the image of salvation painted by the Puritans and by John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Some like the Unitarians decided that they needed to cultivate moral character through education and self-discipline. That is where this church developed its ways. Others like the Universalists stuck with predestination and Original Sin, but they changed the ending of the story to include everyone being saved. Everyone is saved.

But the majority of American Protestants, I would suggest, followed yet another path forward. To be saved you must accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. And once you do that, once you turn your face toward God, then you are saved. It is not predestination, unless you think that God made all those people turn their faces toward God. Which defeats the purpose of accepting Jesus when the choice was already made for you.

So, with all those choices flying around, which one is the correct one, the true one? I have no idea. None whatsoever.

And, to be honest with you, none of those people have any idea either. Not John Bunyan and not Augustine. None of them know the answer of what God wants. It does not matter how negatively you describe Mr. Worldly Wiseman or how nice it sounds to follow people named Help and Hopeful. No one knows the answer. No one can know the answer. Everyone from Paul the Apostle down to me can at best give you a vague checklist for the afterlife. I take pride in the fact that I am at least up front with you about that lack of certainty.

 

Which is why I am simply offering to you my best guess when I tell you that I believe that God takes everyone back. Everyone. We all go back to God.

And when we get there, the story of our lives joins together with the stories of countless others, like a web tied together at last. Those we knew, those we loved, those who loved us, and yes those we hated, and those that hated us. All back together. We all lived lives writing different stories throughout our days. Stories that explain to some degree why we did or did not do things. Stories that only made sense to us or maybe not even to us.

But we all go back. We are all jotted down in the Book of Life, adding into that book another story of loves and hates, successes and failures, hopes and dreams, joys and sorrows. And whether telling that story to God will seem like heaven or hell to us, I do not know. And whether over time we will reconcile ourselves with ourselves and others and God, I also do not know.

But I hope. I hope that is what happens.

Because I believe that God is good. I believe that God will not punish us for a lifetime of sin with an eternity of suffering. I believe that heaven is a place of rest and peace and forgiveness, no matter how long it takes us to forgive and for others to forgive us. That is what I hope.

But I cannot tell you if it is true. I cannot tell you that this is the ultimate truth etched with an iron pen into the bones of the universe. And neither can John Bunyan or Martin Luther or Billy Graham or Pope Francis. No one can tell you that for certain.

But here is my logic. If I am wrong about the need to love and care for those around us, then the worst thing that will happen is that we spent our years loving and caring for those around us. We wasted all that time being nice to each other. We wasted all that time feeding the hungry and tending the sick. Oops.

I think the alternative version of not loving or caring for others, not loving our neighbors as ourselves, that is the worse guess to make. It is the worse guess because it means we are ignoring what Jesus said because of what others said. We are swapping out the more difficult path of loving and caring for the easier path of having faith in heaven while letting the world go to hell. I cannot put my faith in that.

And I will add to all of that guessing and supposition that I have offered up this morning that as a follower of Jesus, I did not sign on to follow John Bunyan or Martin Luther or Paul or any of the rest. Following Jesus is good enough for me.

And now, I invite you to figure out who you might follow on your way to the Celestial City. Hint, hint – I would bet on Jesus.

Amen.