She looked around and said, “Oh, we don’t like them anymore?” She
shrugged. “Okay.” And that was it.
The unwritten rule in the household was everyone had to think
alike, because disagreeing led to conflict. And “our family,” they would say,
doesn’t have conflict.
To be fair, all families desire agreement, want harmony in the
home. Even if we are willing to harbor some disagreement, we pick our battles
carefully. We don’t want conflict for the sake of conflict; if we are going to
suffer conflict it should be over something worthwhile. Because most of us see
conflict as suffering. It becomes more than simply disagreement. It gets
personal. It becomes threatening to our sense of who we are.
We talked at our Wednesday study last week about what it is like when
your community disagrees with you. When you find yourself standing in the
minority, perhaps even alone, you can try to argue your case with the others.
You can try to convince them to come around to your position. But when you
fail, what do you do then?
You can decide to go along with the others, change your position
to be in sync. You can continue to argue, of course. And you could decide to
part ways with the community. And that is often the most painful choice of all.
I think of the ways it can happen in churches. There are some churches
that are governed by a top-down structure, a type of pyramid where there is one
person at the top and levels of authority below, who answer to the top. Other
churches, like the Presbyterian Church, are governed by a bottom-up structure.
Members are elected and ordained to hold positions of leadership. It starts at
the grassroots level and goes upward.
But even in the bottom-up governance style people often feel
disenfranchised. They feel that the ones making the decisions that affect them
are too far removed from the daily lives of people like them. Some conflict arises
as a result.
We’ve seen it come and go in the church. Almost every time our
General Assembly meets, some conflict arises because not everyone agrees on the
decisions they make. Sometimes, congregations make the decision to leave the
denomination because the conflict seems too big to overlook. They may decide to
join a different denomination that feels like a better fit. Or they might
decide to go it alone. Stay independent.
I met a woman once who told me she belonged to an independent, not
affiliated with any denomination. In her words, “We don’t follow anyone else’s
rules.”
This fact seemed important to her. I imagined the history this
congregation might have had, a history filled with conflict that felt
unresolvable. The differences they experienced felt irreconcilable, so they
parted ways. They stood alone, formed their own independent church, and made
their own rules.
Which, often times, turn out to be much stricter, much narrower, than
the rules they walked away from.
In another conversation recently, my sister told me about a friend
who belongs to what is called a “free will” church. Maybe you have seen that
term on church signs. When my sister asked this person what it meant to be
“free will,” they began to list all the rules restricting certain behaviors. My
sister listened and replied, “From what you’re telling me, there isn’t much
freedom there at all.” The person didn’t disagree.
The Apostle Paul writes, “For freedom Christ has set us free.
Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” He was
writing to a church that was suffering because of rules. When the church moved
out across religious and cultural borders, questions and tensions arose about
what exactly was expected of these new converts. We know from the book of Acts
that this was a period of figuring out who they were as followers of Jesus,
what rules defined them. There needed to be a critical re-assessment of the
rules they had known.
But that critical re-assessment did not begin with the apostles;
it started with Jesus. Much of his teaching we read in the gospels was a matter
of questioning the rules and how they were imposed on people. Had they become
too burdensome, he was asking. Were the rules becoming more life-draining than
life-giving, he wondered.
Very dangerous work he was taking on because people who question
the rules are usually seen as a threat by the ones who rule. In Jesus’ day that
was the Roman Empire, and the Jewish leaders who collaborated with the empire.
Jesus was on their bad list because he wanted to unbind the people, set them
free from structures that burdened them, that kept them from living their lives
authentically.
His teaching brought a new perspective: that God is love and love
does not wish to place undue burdens on us. But neither is love indifferent to
how we live our lives. Love’s desire is for us to live into our real identity
as the image of God, to grow into the people we were meant to be.
This growth is possible only if there is enough freedom to explore
and experience the new.
In this story of the raising of Lazarus we are presented with a
climactic moment in Jesus’ ministry. In a rather dramatic scene, he gives new
life to someone who was dead. Lazarus, who was four days dead and buried in the
tomb, is called out into resurrected life.
Jesus was not supposed to do that.
This marvelous thing he did was a pivotal point for him. It was
quickly downhill from there.
The religious authorities still did not regard him as one with
authority to do powerful things. They were not awestruck by this act of
resurrection. This is like what we saw in last week’s story about the man who
was born blind. In that case, the Pharisees seemed angry about the young man’s
healing because they didn’t want to believe that Jesus had that power in him.
In this case, they seem weirdly underwhelmed. A man has been raised from the
dead. But their only apparent thought was that such extraordinary things cannot
come from such an ordinary person. He was completely out of his lane;
therefore, he should be condemned.
It took little time for those wheels to be set in motion. Soon
there was a plan to arrest, charge, and convict him of some unforgiveable sin.
Jesus would have to die because he came to set people free.
It’s like this: When Lazarus stepped out of that tomb, he was
bound up tightly in his burial clothes. Jesus said to those around him, “unbind
him and let him go.” Lazarus was set free. And here is the message:
Jesus came to set us free. He is the Liberator.
There will always be resistance to that notion. There will always
be something in us that doesn’t want to let go of the familiar bindings, no
matter how burdensome they become. The journey of faith invites us to look at all
these things with new eyes, the eyes of the resurrected, and ask: is this
life-giving or life-draining?
God is love and love does not wish to place undue burdens on us.
But neither is love indifferent to how we live our lives.
Let us hear the call of Jesus to be unbound and freed to grow into
the fullness of our humanity, created in God’s image.
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