Lamentations 3:19-26, Psalm 137, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, Luke 17:5-10
What are the obligations that you have in your life? You have obligations to your spouse, to your children, obligations to your job, to your employer, obligations to your landlord, or to the bank that financed your apartment, or to the bank that holds your student loans, obligations to the Park Slope Food Coop, if you choose to shop there, obligations to your pets, if you choose to have pets, and obligations to the government in which you have no choice, and if you don’t pay your taxes you can end up in jail, unless you’re President.
Do you see your obligations as burdens, as enforced inconveniences, as constrictions on your freedom, or do you see them as valuable, helpful, giving you guidance, helping you be moral? Take your friendships. If you want to maintain your friendships you respect the obligations of friendship.
Obligations are actions and relationships you get no credit for fulfilling. It’s rather the other way around: if you don’t fulfill them you get sanctioned or punished. For most of Christendom, belief in Christ was considered so obligatory that if you didn’t do it, God was only right to punish you in the flames of hell forever. Obligations can be better enforced by fear than by law!
In the Reformed tradition of Christianity we took a different slant. I refer you to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, that anchor of Presbyterians and early Congregationalists. Question # 1: What is the chief end of man? Answer: The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. In other words, just by virtue of your being human you are obliged to glorify God. And if you don’t do your human duty, you should be punished—and though they interpreted the flames of hell as only metaphorical, they still believed in eternal conscious punishment for unbelief. (Which I do not, as you may know, although I am not a universalist.)
Do you regard your Christian faith as an obligation? Or as your choice which you are free to make or not? I doubt that anyone here was compelled to be here, that you would get punished if you were not here, or risk your employment, or be subject to the sanctions of your family’s expectations. Indeed, the resistance is more likely against your being here. Should you not get some credit for it, for giving up some of your precious leisure time for church? Do you have an obligation to praise God, or are you free to hang your harp up on the willow tree when you don’t feel like praising God?
Isn’t this what Jesus’ parable is getting at, in our Gospel lesson for today? Listen again: “We are worthless slaves, we have done only what we ought to have done.” I doubt if this was as off-putting back then as it is now. Back then self-esteem and personal fulfillment were not your obligations in any way, and slavery was not regarded as categorically wrong. But it’s off-putting now, and it would be a sober truth: That your belief in Jesus and his teaching is basically your human obligation, so why should you expect any credit for doing it?
It’s what you were made for. Just as a tree is obliged to the sun, and a horse is obliged to run, and just as a seed is obliged to lose itself in the earth and break open and sprout, so are you designed to live by your faith and you are therefore obliged to it. Faith in God is the obligation of your existence. How does this sound to you, who love your freedom?
You get the sense of obligation in our other lessons. In the Lamentations there is with all that grief and sorrow also the recognition that they deserved it. They had transgressed against the covenant that God had made with them, that covenant with its obligations liturgical and ritual and moral and even economic. For their failure to keep their obligations, even by title, they were being taken off the Promised Land that God had given them precisely to be the garden of those obligations.
In the Second Letter of St. Paul to Timothy, his protégé, we get words of sympathy and great encouragement, but you can’t escape the undertone of “Buck up, big boy, stop feeling so sorry for yourself, it wasn’t meant to be a picnic, just do your job. Your mother and your grandmother stood fast against the odds, and their gift of faith to you is now your obligation.” And dearly beloved, if you think about it, isn’t every gift that you’ve received also in some part an obligation?
So too with the Gospel lesson. You have been given the gift of faith, and now your faith is an obligation that you have. You think of your faith as something you freely chose, your choice to add meaning and fulfillment to your life, but the gospel says that it was your duty anyway, your faith is obligatory, you owe it to God, you are accountable for it. That which you have freely chosen is only not to be delinquent, not to have defaulted on your obligations, and what credit is that to you? You are only doing what you are supposed to do. And if that’s true that is a sober truth.
We think of religion as something freely added on to life or not. But then you come to church, and you hear Jesus saying that you owe your life to God. And he compares you to a slave who is obliged to serve with no reward for your service except another job to do when you’re done with this one. You open yourself to this sober truth. You give it room within yourself. You let yourself get used to it. Even though, because of your enculturation, you can’t help but approach your religion as a consumer, and then the Lord Jesus pushes you off for being a consumer, you come right back at him. “I’m with you Jesus, I’m hanging on to you Jesus, I just need a little more faith to handle some of the things you say.” Especially when you find yourself a little angry or aggrieved or just tired.
You only asked him to increase your faith. And it’s like he made fun of you by saying you should have faith the size of a mustard seed. That’s confusing. Does he mean your faith is so infinitesimal to begin with that just to get it merely tiny would make you a regular superhero, or does he mean the opposite, to get your faith small, so that asking for more is a wrong request?
Then he suggests a miracle which is silly, because why would you command a tree to uproot itself and plant itself in the sea, which would kill the tree? Is the Lord Jesus teasing us here? Is he not teasing our desire for help, or even for spiritual power and success in being good? I think I get it, I’m a performer, I love to do well, I love when it I’m good, and I love approval of what I do. But the gospel says this to me: “Okay, you preached a good sermon—you were supposed to, what do you want, a medal? You want recognition? Go tend the sick, go visit some prisoners in jail.”
How shall you regard this faith-in-Jesus obligation as life-giving and joy-returning and not just one more burden among all the other obligations you have anyway? Two things: first, it is that one great obligation that helps you measure all your other obligations and balance them. It is that one obligation that can free you from other obligations that the world will always put on you—the obligations expected by your family, the obligations expected by polite society, even the obligations demanded by your country. These obligations are now all relative, and for your choosing. So this one is the liberating obligation, the obligation that gives you greater freedom all around.
The second thing is that the burden of this one great obligation is not on you anyway, but on the Lord God who requires it of you. That is the greater gift. The value and strength of your commitment comes from the one whom you’ve committed to, not from you who commits. Like you’re a mediocre short-stop and God is a fabulous first-baseman, who snags your throw no matter how badly you threw it. No matter how well or poorly you’ve fulfilled your obligations, it’s the One to whom you are obliged who keeps your fulfillment for you. No need to be ashamed of your record.
That’s what St. Paul says in his advice to Timothy, which sounds like it could be have been said by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “But I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him.”
This is also taught us by that famous first answer from the Heidelberg Catechism, that older and more lovely anchor of the Reformed tradition: My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but I belong . . . to my faithful savior Jesus Christ. . . . Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now to live for him.
This is love-talk. Lovers who belong each other regard their obligations to each other as the pleasures of their love. Their gifts are their obligations and their obligations are their gifts. So if you are obligated to love God, you do it because God loved you first.
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment