Fits Like a Glove

Sermon for Sunday, September 13

Luke 11:45-54

When I started seminary, my first class was an Old Testament class, covering Genesis through 2 Kings. On the first day, the professor, Dr. Steve Reid, handed out the syllabus, which had a core of work that everyone was to do and be tested on. If we did everything in the core, and we did it perfectly, Dr. Reid explained, we would get a C in the class. In order to get a higher grade, we would have to build our own assignments to supplement the work that everyone did. Throughout that semester, the class presented our independent work. We reenacted rituals of ancient Hebrew weddings and sacrifices. I got to play the father of the bride, negotiating how many sheep I wanted in exchange for my darling girl. Another student wrote a paper and presented the findings of his research. The idea was that we could design our activities to match our learning style. We were all different and so we all walked away with different lessons. I had never been to a class like that, and I preferred to have all the assignments laid out for us. I wished Dr. Reid would have just tested us on the subjects. I was good at tests, so I thought that’s how you measure knowledge. 

There’s a temptation to treat life like that. We want to grade everyone else on our strengths. If it were up to me, the most important things would be that Christians know their Bibles inside and out. But then we’d never get anything done. Extroverts like to put first and foremost going door to door, knocking on doors and talking to people. Then there’s the rule followers, the patient people, those who naturally have a lot of energy. We all want to make the highest virtue whatever we are best at. Like the Pharisees and the law teachers, we want to make our religion “one size fits all.” But that religion excluded people who weren’t able to follow all the rules the Pharisees set up. In today’s encounter with Jesus, he tells the teachers that they need to reimagine their relationship to the present, the past, and the future. They need to reimagine their relationship with God.

With regard to the present, Jesus encourages the teachers to always keep the people in mind. A few years ago, I heard a story about a sports equipment company. They were trying to market a premium golf glove, and they weren’t getting the volume of orders they expected. They had a beautiful product that was well made and comfortable. Even the packaging was premium. They borrowed design ideas from Apple’s packaging of the iPhone with a nice box. To open up one of their gloves felt like opening a treasure chest. But few people got to experience that; the customers just weren’t buying the gloves. They went to the sporting goods stores and asked them why people weren’t buying their gloves. As it turns out, that very packaging was the problem. You see, unlike phones, people want to try on the gloves they buy. So when people saw that beautiful packaging, they were either afraid to open the gloves or after they did, if they decided they didn’t want the gloves they couldn’t get them back in the package right. Usually people settled for the gloves hanging on the rack, so easy to slide on and slide off. When the sporting goods company heard this, they changed the packaging and their gloves began to sell in the numbers they were expecting. They had to make their glove accessible and show people how well it fit. In order to figure that out, they had to spend time with the people who sold the gloves, to see how they actually went about choosing the product they liked.

Religious instruction is like that. There is no “one size fits all” Christian life. Too many times I’ve heard of preachers encouraging everyone to sit down every day with their Bibles for “as long as it takes” to hear a word from God. Now reading your Bible is important, but how many of you have two or three hours a day to devote to that, and still find time to do the important work of loving God and loving others? To pretend that the Christian life looks the same for preachers and plant workers, single moms and retirees, flies in the face of what Jesus said when he said “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Instead, a skilled teacher will look to the life of the person they are trying to disciple, and show them, or help them to ask, where does the gospel touch my life? That kind of religion isn’t a ball and chain, it fits like a glove.

When we look at the past, what do we see? Jesus criticizes the teachers of the law for sentimentalizing the past. He points to the history of the prophets of Israel being persecuted and killed, and he criticizes their tendency to memorialize the fallen prophets with monuments. We might think celebrating the faithful dead is a good thing, but sometimes it’s a cover for the fact that we’d rather have them out of sight, and not challenging us. The ancients killed the prophets, and we keep them dead. And we do the same to Jesus. One of the things that always stands out to me is the image we have of Jesus. Folks today want one of two Jesuses. We want him in the manger. I can’t ever forget the prayer of Will Farrell as Ricky Bobby in the movie Talladega Nights, praying to “6 pound, 8 ounce Baby Jesus.” That prayer so powerfully sums up American spirituality. We want Jesus in the manger, or we want him on the cross. Sometimes we will allow a portrait of Jesus with a lamb over his shoulders, but we don’t want Jesus teaching. No... we don’t want Jesus telling us what to do. And the messages we put in Jesus’s mouth: as if Jesus was crucified for telling us to be nice to each other. No, it’s stories like this one that got Jesus killed. So the question for us, what sets us apart from the Pharisees and the law teachers, is this: are you willing to listen when Jesus tells you that you’re wrong?

Are we willing to encounter the living Jesus? If he comes challenging us and correcting us? Clarence Jordan said that most of us would “worship the hind legs off Jesus, and never do a thing he says.” We will give Jesus everything we have, except the thing he wants. What he wants is obedience, faithfulness. What he wants is for us to live our lives for him. What he wants is for us to trust his plan.

When it comes to the future, are we willing to accept God’s plan? Jesus confronts the religious teacher, and he says, “you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves and you wouldn’t let anyone else enter either.” The law teachers and the Pharisees had the Bible; they of all people should have recognized Jesus. They should have known who he was, but they couldn’t accept him because he didn’t follow their rules. So they rejected him and they wouldn’t let other people come to him. After this story they are heading toward the final confrontation, and they will send Jesus to the cross. That’s supposed to be the final proof that Jesus is wrong, but in Jesus the Messiah, we see that the key to knowledge is in the cross. And Jesus calls us to take up our crosses and follow him. Are you willing to take up that cross and follow him? Are you willing to let others find their own crosses that Jesus has prepared for them?

Early Mennonite theologian and martyr Menno Simons wrote: “Where Christ is and lives, he bears his cross upon his shoulders, and gives to each Christian his own little cross to bear, and with it to follow him. We should wait for the little cross, and when it comes receive it willingly, with joy and patience, and not choose our own chips and scraps of wood in imagined spirituality, and lay them on ourselves without divine understanding.” We have a choice. We can carry the weight that Jesus gives us, or we can carry the burden we want. We can try to build our salvation for ourselves, or we can accept the assignment Jesus gives. We can load up others with our cross, or we can trust that Jesus knows what he’s doing. What is Jesus calling you to today? What is Jesus calling your neighbor to? They might be different expressions, but they serve the same Lord.

Life for the individual Christian is lived in the interplay between their particular personality and the Lordship of Jesus. It is a challenge, but we have to remember that all of us walk in different ways. What is meaningful for you might not be meaningful for me. What is life giving for me might be draining for you. That doesn’t mean that we only do what is easy. But it does mean that we need to give each other grace. And it means that we need to be remember to be grateful, that when we feel exhausted and at the end of our ropes, there is someone who can come along and do the work where we leave off. And perhaps also in living together we can learn to share each other’s joy.