| Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67 | ||
| Psalm 45: 11-18 | ||
| Romans 7:15-25a | ||
| Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 |
Sometimes it feels better not to
know, doesn’t it? Reading the newspaper or watching the news can be dangerous
to one’s happiness. I was happier before I knew about those immigrant children whose
dreams for a better life are propelling them into the desert to die. I was
happier before I knew the nasty and inhumane conditions in which most of my
favorite chicken meat is raised. I was happier before I knew that companies in
my investment portfolio take advantage of child laborers in Bangladesh or spill
oil in pristine seas. I’ll never forget
the day when, as a teenager, a friend’s parents drove me back to my nice home
by a new and different route, returning from the airport after a wonderful,
amazing, expensive trip to Europe. The freeway overpass took me for the first
time over the dilapidated shacks hidden in one of Houston’s many “wards,” or
barrios, and guilt spread through my veins like poison. I was definitely
happier before I saw the underbelly of my hometown. As a Christian, I want to
follow Jesus, and yet finding solutions to any of these problems is totally
overwhelming and fraught with costly re-evaluation of the values by which I
like to live. How do we live with the burden, once we’ve seen? “Who will rescue
us from this body of death?”
St. Paul was once a happy Pharisee
named Saul. He immersed himself in God’s Teaching, in all of the wisdom and
insight of the Torah, the first five books of our Old Testament. For Saul, the
Torah was a glimpse of God, a light to those in darkness, and the place to find
the rules by which human beings can live in blessed relationship with God. For Saul
the Pharisee, the renegade rabbi Jesus lived the life of a sinner. Jesus broke
the Torah’s rules time and time again, flouting the holiness of God and hanging
out with criminals and prostitutes. His death on a Roman cross was good
riddance, a death cursed by God himself. But then--after Saul the Pharisee experiences God also in Christ and becomes Paul the Apostle, he is able to use his own experience of cognitive dissonance as a way to explain to others the grace that he found on the Damascus Road. For Paul, the effect of the law on our behavior is like the effect of the news reports on
my own life. It can make me
aware, but it is powerless to change my heart. The law can tell me that I am supposed to love my neighbor as
myself, but it can’t force me to change my unloving behavior. Only the power of the Holy Spirit can change us, says Paul.
Right before Paul describes our common
human bondage to the grip of sin in today’s Epistle, he uses the example of the
sin of covetousness to explain his point. To covet is “the need to have,
possess, or acquire in order to secure being and worth.”[1]
It is the pervasive, human “desiring disease,” and it is a stealthy sin, born from the God-sized hole in each of our hearts. When
you kill someone or steal from someone, the evidence of your act is visible to
the world. Yet you can hide your covetousness quietly inside your heart.
Covetousness is insidious—so much so that, like Saul the Pharisee, it can be manifest in you as you
covet God’s favor by leading a scrupulously upright life![2]
Several years ago, Eastern Area
Community Ministries gathered the pastors of the area to take a stand against
the “payday loan” companies that are proliferating in our area of town. In my
privilege, I had never heard of payday loan companies, yet there are two payday
loan storefronts in this country for every Starbucks, plus you can find even
more online.[3] I
learned about people like Susie, a working single mom who borrowed just a
little money to get her children some Christmas presents. When she couldn’t pay
it back, the company began to garnish her wages and to apply huge rates of
interest on the unpaid debt. Two years later, with the debt still churning and
no end in sight, she and her children were holed up in her sister’s basement
and relying on temp work to pay off the loans.[4]
They had become slaves to their mounting debt.
Payday loan companies lure the poor
by appealing to our human desire to possess instantly and magically the things
that we cannot afford, the things that we think we give us worth and happiness. These companies entice us to covet. Yet we who invest in these companies
and allow them to flourish in our communities without regulation are also
breaking God's law against covetousness, for we also greedily desire the profits that we
can make on the backs of the poor. We covet the power that these companies give
us over other people’s lives.
For me, the payday loan scandal is a
perfect metaphor for the all-pervasive power of Sin that Paul is lamenting in
our Epistle—Sin not as individual infractions but as a destructive power in
which we all participate against our wills. It is a power that entraps us, that
enslaves us, that garnishes our hard-earned wages of virtue and creates an ever
and ever larger debt toward God. When we start to incur the debt, we tell
ourselves that we are managing our lives just fine, that we have this thing
under control. But the more we “manage,” the more our lives spiral out of control.
Moreover, like the owners of the payday loan companies, we’re constantly trying
to control the gift of Life that God freely pours out on God’s Creation.[5] We
try to control God’s reaction to our behavior by claiming: “Hey, God, I obeyed these
five laws, so I get a reward.” Or “Hey, my neighbor broke this law over here,
so he is going to hell.” Like the hypocrites that Jesus addresses in our Gospel
lesson, we are still sitting like clueless children in the marketplaces, calling down
judgment on one another, except now the marketplaces are online. “He has a
demon,” we type, when our political opponents offer a solution to the world’s
problems. “He’s not following scripture!” we whine, when our religious opponents
take a stand. All the while, our own guilt and powerlessness churn in our guts,
as we drift further and further from the gift of love that God offers us. “Who
will rescue us from this body of death?”
There is
perhaps no place as guilt-inspiring to us rich Americans as the slums India. One
of my seminary professors used to be a Roman Catholic monk and worked for a
short time with Mother Theresa there. One day, he saw a young nun bathing and
massaging the decaying bodies of the beggars who were dying on the streets. She
would clean the maggots from their wounds, rub shriveled limbs with oils and
soothing medicines, and change dirty rags, all while speaking softly to the
dying and holding their hand. The young nun committed herself each day to a
routine of seeing Christ himself in the slum dwellers, loving them as she loved
Christ. She worked not to rack up points with God, but saw herself as God’s
slave, her existence itself shaped by a pattern that she had seen in the life
of Christ. One day, a law-bound visitor challenged Mother Theresa on the wisdom
of seeing Christ in sick Hindus who were not part of the Kingdom of Heaven. Mother
Theresa pointed to the young nun who was standing there holding a beggar’s hand. She answered
that when that beggar died and stood before Christ at the gates of heaven, he
would look up right away into Christ’s loving face and say in awe,
“Hey, I know you! You were just washing
me and loving me as I was dying. I want to go with you. Please take me into
your Kingdom!”
As the young nun served God, taking
on the gentle yet all-consuming yoke of Christ, she was transformed. She was in
Christ, free from a life bound by the sinfulness of the world, free from guilt,
and her transformation opened the way to the kingdom of God, not just for her,
but for all those whom she touched.
St. Augustine writes in his Confessions that his conversion to
Christianity happened when he heard God’s voice saying, “You will not change me
into yourself like bodily food: you will be changed into me.”[6]
“Who will rescue
us from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” That is news that brings the only true and lasting happiness.
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