By Pastor Ashton Roberts
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06 Oct, 2024
This is yet another set of difficult texts. Before we go any further, I want you all to hear me say that if you have experienced divorce and been shamed by someone quot ing this or similar passages— that should never have happened to you, and as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by his authority, I promise you that God is not mad at you, you have not violated the scriptures or the law of God, and you have committed no sin. For that matter, if anyone has ever used this passage from Genesis to shame you into submission; or to tell you God designed marriage for one man and one woman; or that God created men and women for certain societal roles to which we must strictly adhere; or that God is somehow offended by people who experience their gender as something other than the sex they were assigned at birth; if you have experienced any of these things, then as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by his authority, I promise you that God is not mad at you, you have not violated the scriptures or the law of God, and you have committed no sin. While we are at it, if anyone has argued from the book of Hebrews that God has been displeased with the Jewish people, has chosen the Church to replace the Jewish people as God’s covenant people, or that our Christian faith is in any way superior to the Jewish faith, then as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ and by his authority, I declare that this line of thinking is dead wrong, antisemitic, and anti-Christ, and should be repudiated in the strongest possible terms. You have sinned, you must confess, repent, and seek reconciliation. God is not mad at the Jewish people, the nation state of Israel is not the same thing as the Jewish people, and our Jewish neighbors are all our siblings in a common ancestry of faith as children of Abraham and therefore as the children of God. Now, with all of those disclaimers taken care of, do y’all remember Fiddler on the Roof? If you aren’t familiar, the show is about Tevye, a Jewish milkman from the Russian village of Anatevka who is navigating life with three daughters for whom he must arrange suitable marriages, while navigating the perils of being Jewish in the pale of settlement in late Tsarist Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution. There are a couple of famous showtunes from this work, especially “Matchmaker,” and “If I Were a Rich Man.” But perhaps less famous is the work’s prologue— I mean who reads the prologue, right?! This song, called “Tradition,” tells of the precarious nature of Jewish life under threat of immanent persecution. Tevye tells the audience, “A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking our neck. … And how do we keep our balance? That I tell you in one word: Tradition!” [1] After the first rendition of the iconic chorus, Tevye continues, “Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many years. Here in Anatevka we have our traditions for everything... how to eat, how to sleep, how to work, even how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and we wear these little prayer shawls. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you— I don't know. But it's a tradition. Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” [2] Sounds reasonable, right? Tevye just wants what most of us want, stability, predictability, a firm foundation, some unchanging constant around which to order our lives so we can weather the storms of chaos and change. So, we take this thinking to the scriptures, this leather-bound volume with its gilded edges and embossing. Surely this is the word of God and surely God will tell us what to do. We see a world in flux, a changing society, the weakening or collapse of once hallowed institutions and we want some unchanging standard to anchor us as the buffeting tide of vicissitude erodes our sense of place in this world. So, we see a rising divorce rate and younger folks choosing not to marry, and marriages that our parents’ generation would never have tolerated, and we presume this is not simply a rearrangement of priorities or a symptom of unsustainable socio-economic conditions, but rather that this is an attack on the institution of marriage, and our own marriage, and an affront to God. “See?!” we argue, “See, right there in Genesis?! See, right there in Hebrews?! See, right there in Mark?! We’ve always done it this way. God said to do it this way. There is no other way.” We want the Bible, the black and white, unchanging Bible to be the last word, the final arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad, so we know who is in and who is out and what God wants us to do so we can get busy adhering to its rigid precepts… Or maybe exploiting its loopholes. But that is not how the Bible works. Believe me; I spent many years trying to make it work, and it does not work. There is no way to take the Bible literally without choosing which texts are literal, and which texts we would then have to ignore and outright contradict in order to take the other literally. This is why Lutherans do not call the Bible the word of God, but say that the Bible contains the word of God, that is, the message about Jesus (who is the Word of God made flesh), and the truth of the Gospel (which is that God is not mad at you), and is the source of our preaching (the proclamation of who Jesus is and the truth that God is not mad at you). Luther said that the Bible is the manger in which we find the babe. In our Gospel reading, when Jesus is confronted with the question about divorce, he turns to the Hebrew scriptures, asking, “What does Moses say?” and he goes on to interpret Moses’ provision for a certificate of divorce to have been allowed because of “[their] hardness of heart.” Moses then uses mercy to interpret the law, permitting divorce instead of trapping women in an untenable situation of being unwanted and only freed by death. Jesus then follows the same interpretive device, superseding the letter of the law with mercy, to say that it was also wrong to throw away a spouse in an age when doing so would have impoverished and imperiled the woman who had no recourse and would have suffered greatly. To do so, Jesus quotes our first reading, but like a good Bible reader, he backs up a chapter, to read the first creation narrative in Genesis one, reminding his hearers first that both male and female are created in the image and likeness of God before then affirming the cultural norm of the husband leaving his family to make a new one. Jesus reminds his hearers that women are equal to men and that the law should not be exploited to privilege the men over the women. Both Jesus and Moses use mercy to interpret the law, and as the book of Hebrews tells us, we might not have seen this truth in the law had it not been for Jesus. But because of Jesus, we are freed as the people of God from the way we have always done things. We are free to practice mercy, to grow in compassion and justice. The unchanging nature of God and therefore the calling of the Church, is to be about the business of change, moving us from the way things are, through change, loss, and grief— effecting and perfecting our salvation through choosing this suffering— until we come to recognize and trust each tiny apocalypse as the revelation of God’s very self— that is, until resilience in the face of apocalypse becomes our tradition. Over the course of Fiddler on the Roof, we see that Tevye’s tradition is often challenged, and it is precisely his ability to be flexible, to love his children, and his faith, at the same time, that helped him survive the tide of unwelcome change. Explaining to his wife that their middle daughter had found her own match and the pair would be moving to Kyiv to make a new life, Tevye says, “Love, it’s the new style.” Jesus, and even Moses, bring us this good news, too. Love is the new style, the superseding Spirit of the Law, that allows us to love our children and our spouses, and our neighbors, AND our faith, and the Church, and the Bible at the same time. God gives us the law so we can know the character of God. And when we practice love and mercy we practice the character of God. So let love be our style, let mercy be our practice, let love and mercy tell us who we are and what God expects us to do. Let love and mercy be our new tradition. Amen. [1] https://genius.com/Original-broadway-cast-of-fiddler-on-the-roof-prologue-tradition-lyrics [2] Ibid.