A Mix Tape for God
By Robert Francis

Have any of you ever made a mix-tape or CD for your someone special?  I’ve been known to make a few in my day.  I remember being in junior high – the era for me of that first girlfriend – and spending hours picking just the right songs (which – by the way – took a lot longer in the days of cassettes with all that fast-forwarding and rewinding).  Each song was scrutinized, each line analyzed for its meaning.  Only those perfect songs made the cut.  But as you know, simply picking the songs was just the beginning – of utmost importance was the order, a carefully thought through sequence, blending the songs into one another and setting the right moods at the right times.  And then the ultimate question – where to place that rock ballad that perfectly crooned how I felt about that first church camp sweetheart, with whom I’d obviously be forever?  Ahhh, yes.  (I know Yonce knows what I’m talking about.)  I’m sure Kim what’s-her-name she still listens to that tape, looks wistfully out the window, and wonders what became of Bobby Francis.

Our Psalm today is Psalm 119, the longest Psalm, and a love song of sorts as well.  Except, it’s an ode to God’s law.  The word “law,” unfortunately, doesn’t generally conjure up warm fuzzies for me, so I find it a little hard to relate to the notion of writing a super-long love song about God’s law.  And the other synonyms used for “law” in today’s translation – statutes, commandments, decrees, precepts – bring to mind images more related to a law school seminar than that one of those crooning rock ballads.  How is one to really love God’s law?  I have an attempt at an answer, but first, I’d like to explore the other passages with you.

The Ezekiel and Matthew passages today both have in common that they involve confrontation.  In Ezekiel, God calls the prophet to do, well, what prophets do.  The unspoken rule of being a good friend and neighbor in our culture is that we maintain proper boundaries and don’t meddle in other people’s affairs.  But here, God calls Ezekiel to do just that: he is to speak out God’s unpleasant warnings to others.  The language in this passage is rather extreme – lots of talk about wickedness, death, blood, and sin – good ingredients for a Jonathan Edwards sermon but hardly the stuff of relational boundaries.  I guess we get some reassurance that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but it seems that the point of this lesson, at least for our purposes, is the responsibility of the prophet to be faithful in speaking truth.  We cannot control how others respond, and as the passage makes clear, the final judgment is up to the wisdom of God.

In trying to think of modern-day parallels to this prophetic charge, I immediately thought of the time I just spent at both the Democratic and Republican conventions.  The scripted events broadcast on TV were just the tips of the icebergs of all the activities that buzzed in those cities.  At every hour of the day or night, there were a myriad of events, meetings, and parties.  Parts of it felt like high school again, in that everyone was trying to leverage the most connected people they knew to get into the coolest parties and events.  One night, the coveted ticket was the GQ/Maker’s Mark party.  (What could be better than combining pretension and bourbon?)  At least that’s according to JoJo, who – thanks to her Google connections – had much more access than yours truly.  (I guess the Lutherans aren’t as powerful as I was led to believe when I took this job.) 

But one didn’t have to have special credentials to see all those who felt that they were taking on the call of Ezekiel: abortion activists staked out every public place with large banners displaying pictures of aborted babies, and pro-choice activists stood feet away and shouted them down; folks preached that the kingdom of God is near and that all needed to turn or burn; some decried homosexuality as an abomination; others marched against the war in Iraq or the treatment of detainees; some simply wanted Nader included in the upcoming presidential debates.  Free speech was certainly on display, and I suppose who was being prophetic and who wasn’t is in the eye of the beholder.

While I know that our community – given our activist bent – is no stranger to that sort of call, I think the Matthew passage might seem a bit more relatable to many Christians.  Our Gospel reading from Matthew comes from a longer block of Jesus’ teachings, consuming much of chapters 18 and 19, which some scholars call the fourth of Matthew’s discourses.  The focus of this discourse is how to be a community of believers.  The brief portion we read today contains the familiar instruction about how to redress a grievance against you.  Jesus proposes what seems like a logical sequence of events if one believes they have been wronged, or “sinned against” – one commentator describes the steps Jesus proposes as confrontation, then negotiation, then adjudication.  That seems straightforward enough, right?  Well, I don’t need to tell you that – in practice – these few verses have been the “biblical” basis for doing great harm to others with whom one disagrees.

I can think of an example from just within the last month of how NOT to execute that first step in Jesus’ teaching.  It involved a friend.  Unbeknownst to him, his words and actions were deeply upsetting and distressing someone else.  From my perspective, he wasn’t doing anything malicious or spiteful, and I had no idea he was bothering anyone.  There were ample opportunities for the aggrieved person to pull my friend aside and gently explain her concerns, but she buried them and let them brew.  Finally, in what was a stream of consciousness attack, she unloaded on him without warning.  For 45 minutes, she berated him; she belittled him; she tore him down.  What began as a small concern, once buried and allowed to gestate, exploded into a reaction of disproportionate size and venom.  My friend was left shaken and maybe even scarred, and understandably so.  Even if her grievances had basis, which I actually think they did, it was a good illustration in how to address them in the least constructive way possible.

The Matthew passage is not difficult because it is complex, but because it calls us on us to practice the faith by putting on love and putting off self-righteousness.  This is where the admonition from Romans becomes so fitting.  It tells us simply to love one another.  Love one another.

One thing I am coming to love about Luther and Lutheran theology is this radical emphasis on grace.  For Luther, grace provided freedom from the law, which relieved both the paralysis of feeling helplessly unworthy before God and the opposite futility of working endlessly to qualify as righteous enough.  But for Luther, it wasn’t accurate to then conclude that one was then out from under any law.  We are freed from the law of works to then be slave to the law of love and faith. 

This returns us to Psalm 119.  A love song about God’s law, huh?  Well, true enough that this was written before the new covenant, and far be it from me to disabuse the possibility that the Psalmist really loved the laws against mixing types of fabrics and not eating shellfish.  But it does seem that this could be an appeal to the spirit of the law – an appeal to goodness, justice, lovingkindness, and compassion; a love of God’s shalom.  And for me, even when I struggle to feel much intuitive or personal connection with God, like the Psalmist, I take great heart and find great faith in the sense that there is a way the world ought to be, and like Ezekiel, I can summon great passion to take that message of “ought-ness” to the world. 

But still, maybe the hardest part is getting our own Christian house in order.  Yoder’s most-quoted line is that the church is called to be today what the world is called to be ultimately.  So, I wonder if our first task is not Ezekiel’s task of proclaiming God’s warning boldly and prophetically to outsiders, like the protestors I saw in Denver and St. Paul, but it’s to make sure that within the community of believers we are loving one another and, when necessary, confronting the wayward believer in love.  

I mentioned Luther’s idea of the law of love and faith the last time I preached as well, maybe because – regardless of the lectionary texts – so many complex concepts and seemingly disparate passages really just come down to whether or not I am loving my neighbor as myself.  Is love the overriding force in my interpersonal interactions?  Does it guide my words and deeds?  And as in the Matthew passage, does it govern how I redress grievances and how I receive others who might be approaching me?

I don’t need to tell this church anything about living as a community of faith, since many of y’all have been at it for about as long as I’ve been alive.  But sometimes we all need to be reminded of the simple truths that sit at the nucleus of our molecular faith.

Have any of you ever used the job-hunting book, What Color is Your Parachute?  First published in 1970 and reissued annually since the mid-1970s, it’s been a staple for many folks on the job hunt.  I remember using it in my early 20s when I still had no idea what I wanted to do or how to go about finding gainful employment.  In the epilogue of the book, the author has a more theoretical section about vocation.  It’s there that he fesses up that he’s a Christian.  He talks about several levels of vocation, one obviously being tied into the jobs and careers we have.  But he also talks about our human vocations, regardless of what we find ourselves doing from 9 to 5.  That’s where his faith comes in more strongly.  He says that we can all ask ourselves each day if – through our word and actions – we’ve brought more love, more patience, more justice, and more joy into the world, or if we’ve taken those things away and left the world that day with a little less of those virtues. 

Returning then to Paul: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”  “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”  That is the heart of our human vocation and the core of the law that so enamored the Psalmist.  Maybe that’s something I can make a mix tape about.

Amen.  Let it be so.