I was once a guest at a family’s dinner table, when they were talking about people they knew. And when the name of one particular person came up, the tone became sharply negative, critical. The matriarch of the family looked up with surprise and a little bit of confusion. Apparently, she had not received the memo: this person is on our bad list now.
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.
