Sermon

March 19, 2006

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on March 19, 2006, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

Robert Wuthnow, who teaches Sociology of Religion, talks about how our ethical norms are transmitted from one person to another. He tells the true story of Jack Casey, a rescue squad volunteer. When he was a child, Jack had to have some teeth extracted under general anesthesia and he was terrified. One of the nurses working with him said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be here right beside you no matter what happens.” When he woke up from the surgery, there she was, just as she had promised, still right beside him. Jack never forgot how important that promise kept was for him. Twenty years later, he was on the rescue squad crew called to the scene of an accident in which the driver was pinned inside his overturned pickup truck. Even though gasoline was dripping into the cab and there was a serious danger of fire, Jack crawled inside to try to free the driver. The driver was crying out about how scared of dying he was, and Jack kept saying, as the nurse had done so many years before, “Don’t worry. I’m right here with you. I’m not going anywhere.” Once the driver was free, even he said to Jack, “You were an idiot. That truck could have exploded and we’d both be dead.” To which Jack just said, “I couldn’t leave you alone.”

That, says Wuthnow, is the way ethics work. First we have the experience of being cared for, then we shape our lives around the values of that experience. The experience of a nurse staying with you when you’re terrified is acted out by a man willing to risk his life because he simply cannot abandon another human being in need.

That is the pattern of all the ethics in the Bible. All the “shoulds” and “oughts” of the Bible are “therefore” commandments—from the Ten Commandments, to St. Paul . All of them begin with a compelling experience and ask us to pattern our lives around the experience. In the statement of the Ten Commandments we read this morning, for example, the rules are not dropped on us like a lead weight out of the blue. Instead, they begin “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt , out of the house of slavery.” Everything that follows is shaped around that statement: “I brought you out of the house of slavery.” Therefore, you are free to ignore all the other idols you encounter. You are free to take the Sabbath off. When you get angry, you are free of the compulsion to murder. When you see your neighbor’s possessions, you are free to rejoice for her and do not have to amass everything you see. Why? Because I brought you out of the house of slavery and set you free.

The question for each of us as we recall the nature of our relationship with the God who brought us out of the house of slavery is “How are we going to keep that freedom alive?” We’re free now. What are we going to do to act that freedom out? For some of us, the answer will be found in the world of exterior action. Jesus was moved to strike a blow for freedom in this morning’s Gospel, getting rid of all the economic requirements that would keep people out of God’s house of prayer. We might be moved this Lent to take action, standing up for those who need free access to clean water, or doing something for those who need the joys we have ourselves.

We might act out the freedom God has given us in interior ways, by claiming freedom for ourselves. We might claim freedom from slavery to substance abuse by making a commitment to a 12-step program, or we might claim freedom from slavery to the god of success by spending more time with our families.

I recently read of another, pretty off-beat form of claiming freedom that really appeals to me as a Lenten discipline. Rita Smith, who writes for the Toronto Globe and Mail had an experience as a teenager that still shapes what she does for Lent. Her family had always taken very seriously the practice of giving something up for Lent. Then she went out with a boyfriend who didn’t see the point in it. When Rita asked what he was giving up, he replied facetiously, “Getting hit by busses. There will be none of that this year.” Smith says this got her thinking and made her search for more meaningful things to give up. A few years ago, she reports, she hit on a discipline that really works for her. “I gave up grumbling, griping, and whining of any kind,” she says. I made the public commitment on Ash Wednesday, and proceeded to spend the next six weeks studiously resisting the urge to join negative conversations and whining sessions…Over those weeks I was involved in a number of very complicated, contentious, stressful meetings. All progress ground to a halt as meetings disintegrated into whining sessions. ‘I’m very sorry,’ I was forced to apologize on several occasion. ‘I gave up grumbling, griping, and whining of any kind for Lent. I’d love to join you in this conversation, but I’m afraid it’s against my religion.’” So there is another of us claiming freedom: freedom from whining.

What freedom are you claiming for yourself? God set the pattern, set us free from the house of slavery, and promised to stay with us always. God cares for us. All that we can do in return is to pass it on: to go on caring for others and for ourselves. AMEN