Exodus 20:1-17 I Corinthians 1:18-25 John 2:13-22
Watch the news, read the paper, talk to your friends…
it’s not a surprise to any of us that the world is in a particular state of
disarray. Instinct tells us to build walls between ourselves and the people who
are different than us… religion, political affiliation, race, even our schools
of choice would have us associate only with people who are just like us.
At first glance, it seems like walls would make us
safer… our worldview is affirmed and we can stay protected in cocoons of our
own making. Unfortunately, our self-imposed walls tend to make us lonely and
unchallenged. What if there was another choice? Of course, there is. Bridges are
built to connect things, to bring us closer to places once considered
unreachable, and to open up the possibilities that surround us.
The scriptures for today beg the question: Bridges or
Walls? Are there more things in our lives that separate us from people than
draw us to them? And where do we start if we want to tear down the walls
between us and build more bridges instead?
I remember a story in Guidepost magazine about a
family that retired to a friendly WV community, maybe a little too friendly. The
shortest walking route to town went right through the middle of Fred Nicholas’ backyard.
At all hours of the day, his family was greeted by young people riding their
bikes up the driveway and through the grass as a shortcut to town. Many nights
they found strangers waving at them through their kitchen window as they were
sitting down for supper.
I guess you could call Fred irritated. No one ever
asked – they just assumed it would be OK. And the more worn the yard became,
the more irritated he got until finally one day he could take no more. He put
up a sign -- “No Trespassing.” When that didn’t seem to make an impression, he
began to speak to people as they passed through.
“Please don’t
walk on my grass.” All he got in return were giggles, salutes, and blank looks.
And they kept on walking. “Enough is enough,” he said. “I’m going to keep these
people out, one way or another.” His solution? Erect a wall. Well, it was a
fence... a barbed-wire fence. And you know what? It did the trick. People
learned pretty quickly that “Nicholas Pass” was no longer the best way to town.
Walls do a good job of blocking out the things that we
don’t like or don’t want to know about. Walls enforce the status quo. But if we
build them high enough, walls also keep us from seeing what’s on the other side.
They keep us from experiencing life in new ways. And in the end, it often turns
out that the walls built to protect us do more to chain us than they do to free
us.
Bridges, on the other hand, connect things. Yes, they
are sometimes scary… if you’ve ever been on a long bridge on a windy day, your
hands stay tight on the wheel until you make it safely to the other side. But
bridges open up the world in ways we never imagined. Think about all the new
friends, new foods, new places, and experiences that came to you when you took
advantage of a bridge.
So, what does this have to do with our lessons?
Today’s Old Testament lesson was taken from the book
of Exodus. We think of the 10 commandments as an ethical code. But that was not
their primary purpose. Verse 1 sets up everything that comes after: “I am the
LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” As a whole, they don’t just
tell us how to live. They tell us in whom we must live -- The LORD our God.
If we don’t understand that, then we use 10
Commandments as a wall… to keep ourselves in line, to judge others, to stay
safe from the unknown, and easily identified as members of the “family”.
But what would happen if we use these commandments as
they were intended, as a bridge between God and us, to establish common ground among
people whom God created and called?
Throughout time, the Hebrew people and their
descendants have been interpreting God’s law as a law of exclusion rather than
a law of inclusion. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are filled with
rules and regulations for how God’s people will behave. But Jesus was able to
boil all of those laws down to two: “You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your
strength.” And “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31). This
is what the commandments are about.
No wonder Jesus was so upset when he entered the
temple that day. “Get out of here. Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
Jesus was railing against a people who were more concerned with the purity of
their sacrificial doves and cattle than they were their own hearts. With this
act of holy anger, Jesus says, “You cannot worship the God of money nor the God
of purity and be faithful in my Kingdom.” He wasn’t just mad about people’s bad behavior
– at that moment he witnessed the Law being used as a wedge or wall between the
people and God, especially the poor.
The Hebrew Bible story is filled with evidence that
God’s people don’t learn from their mistakes. Over and over, walls were built,
when finally, God gave them the ultimate bridge. It became clear to God that
the laws and the warnings of the prophets were not enough to convince the
people to change their ways for very long. What else could he do to convince
them of his love? What bridge could be strong and long and high enough to carry
the people away from certain death and bring them to the God of grace and mercy?
Jesus is the answer to all of those questions, but not
in the way that anyone imagined. The Messiah was supposed to bring back their
former glory, not get crucified for his trouble. Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians says it well: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to
those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Only a bridge as radical as the cross could get our attention, for it is not
what we expect. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s
weakness is stronger than human strength.”
I think this is the hardest part of us, for Christians
of almost every generation. Power is so alluring. It is so hard to remember
that we are the ones called to speak truth to power, not to conform to the
conventional wisdom of the day. Our real challenge as Christians is to be brave
enough to stand up to the injustices of the world. We are called to put Jesus’
and his call to love God first in all the ways we live.
Only bridges allow us to go from place to place. Sometimes
they are scary. Sometimes they go into unknown places, but ultimately they help
us to reach out to the world, taking God’s peace, and the knowledge of our
forgiveness with us. God’s best bridge, the cross of Jesus Christ, sends us out
to proclaim the love of Christ to all the world.
Through the cross, we are all redeemed. Through the
cross, we understand the real meaning of sacrifice. Through the cross, we hear
Jesus calls us to challenge the way things have always been and build a
bridge that connects us more fully to God. What was once an instrument of death
became a symbol for an abundant, new life.
God’s love cannot be bound by walls, no matter how
tall or thick we build them. God’s love can’t be diverted by church politics or
racism or sexism or financial difficulties or discrimination of any kind. God’s
love cannot be diluted by laws and regulations which serve to keep people out
of the family instead of welcoming them to God’s loving, forgiving arms. When
we place our trust in Jesus, that’s when we can build the bridges needed to
spread God’s love – to speak God’s truth.
So, whatever happened to Fred Nicholas and his fence? Eventually,
someone came and asked him why he built the fence. “What are you figuring on
keeping in there -- cows or sheep?”
“Neither,” Fred answered testily. “It’s to there to
keep out, trespassers.”
“Trespassers, huh? We ain’t figured anybody in the community
as a trespasser before. We’ve always felt like neighbors.” And when his
granddaughter wrote him about a grumpy, old man in her neighborhood who yelled
at people for walking on his grass, saying “I’m glad you’re not like that,
Granddad…” Needless to say, the fence came down. (Guidepost 1994)
My father and brother were scouts. My husband was a
scout. And I am fortunate to have spent almost 30 years working with scouts and
other young people on religious emblems and merit and activity badges that
promote the development of the self and the building of community. One of the
things I love about scouting is the emphasis on service before self. Scouting absolutely
teaches skills for self-growth, but it also helps young people understand their
connectedness to the world around them and teaches them the skills to bring
about real change, good change, necessary change, in the world. Studying
everything from financial preparedness to ecology, youth are reminded that is
always more to learn and always more ways to make the world a better
place.
Scouting teaches young people and their leaders that
the things that draw us together are more important than the things that make
us different. The older we get, the easier it is to fall back on the practice
of building walls – we mistakenly think that will keep change from coming.
Scouting challenges that perspective. I feel like one of the best skills that
young people bring away from the scouting experience is the importance of and
practice in building bridges as a life-long practice.
Robert Fulghum wrote a book, Everything I Need to
Know I Learned in Kindergarten. We’d all be well advised to remember these
lessons - When you get to the nitty-gritty, this is what bridge-building is all
about:
Share everything. Play
fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own
mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you're sorry when you hurt
somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush.
Warm cookies and cold
milk are good for you. Live a balanced life - Learn some and think some and
draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day - some. Take a
nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the
world, watch out for traffic, Hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of
wonder. (Fulghum, Everything I Need to
Know I Learned in Kindergarten, 1986)
Now those are some great rules to live by. Let’s be bridgebuilders
together. Amen.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
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