Reformed

The scriptures referred to are Jeremiah 31:31-34, Romans 3:19-28, and Luke 8:31-36.

Kids do many things naturally: learn to walk, to talk, to push your buttons. They do not naturally learn to share, to not hit when angry, to not say hurtful things. They have to be taught. They need to learn the rules. Most of these rules are for their own protection: don't touch the stove, don't run into the road, don't try to pet a strange dog without asking the owner first. Some are rules for living with other people: say “Please” and “Thank you,” don't butt ahead in line, don't tell strangers at the store they are fat, don't discuss bowel movements at the table in restaurants. We teach our kids these rules for their own good and we usually have to remind them a lot when they are young. By the time they are older we hope they have internalized the rules to the point that they don't have to think twice about such things.

So why do we have rules and laws to obey when we are older? Obviously, some situations we encounter as adults cannot be foreseen from childhood experience. Specific and complex situations require specific and complex rules. But a major reason is that a rule, or even a code of law, is not a perfect way to make things right. The major problem is compliance.

For instance, there are some people who apparently have a hard time generalizing from rules like “Don't butt in line” to “Don't try to pass a whole line of cars despite oncoming traffic and then just pull in suddenly without paying attention to the other drivers in the lane you are entering.” Or they can't make the leap from “Don't take someone else's toys without getting their permission” to “Don't steal someone else's lunch from the break room fridge.” A lot of people seem to not understand how a general moral principle applies in specific situations. Often they only see this when the situation is reversed and someone cuts in on them or eats their lunch.

And some people just don't seem to internalize rules, period. It's like they are morally tone-deaf. In some cases it is not that they intentionally break the rules; they take no notice of them. All they take into consideration is their own desires. The law is for others to obey, not for them. If they ever do think about laws, it is only the ones that protect them, not the ones that inhibit them. A mob boss knows his legal rights; he ignores those of others. Psychopaths and sociopaths fall into this category.

Another problem is one you initially see in childhood: people who go by the letter of the law but not its spirit. Laws have a purpose, a desired outcome, for which they are composed but they must be expressed in words and words have limits. Most of us parents have been in the situation where we are on a long drive. The kids are squabbling in the backseat. “He's touching me!” one screams. “Stop touching your sister,” you yell to the miscreant. And so, he obeys the letter of your rule by merely wiggling his fingers mere inches from her face. “I'm not touching you,” he taunts. She screams again. “Stop annoying your sister!” you say, revising your dictum. He retreats to his side of the car and then makes faces at her. She complains again. You tell her to ignore him and you sigh. You son's parsing of the precise words used in your command bode well should he grow up to be a lawyer.

Sadly, it doesn't even matter if the intention of the law is clearly stated. The second amendment to the constitution says, in its entirety, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The first half of that sentence lays out its intention. This applies to a well-regulated militia and the purpose is to maintain the security of a free state. And we know that James Madison proposed this amendment because some citizens were afraid that a standing army in their new nation could be used to oppress the populace. So this allowed states to have volunteer militias to protect their towns, communities or their state. It was not considered an individual right, not even by the Supreme Court, until quite recently. The intention of the law was made quite clear and stated in the first 12 of its 26 words. I sincerely doubt that the founders of our country envisioned our present situation, where there are more guns in the US than there are people, where there are 100 times more firearms in the hands of individuals than in the possession of the military and 400 times more firearms in private hands than law enforcement has, and where just 3% of gun owners possess half of those guns. Are they all in a well-regulated militia and making our states safer? Judging by the 30,000 firearm deaths we suffer each year, you may well sigh.

There is a stated purpose to the laws in the Bible. They are about life. In Leviticus God says, “So you must keep my statutes and my regulations; anyone who does so will live by keeping them.” (Leviticus 18:5, NET) The very first commandment God gives humans is about life: be fruitful and multiply. And it's the only command we have wholeheartedly obeyed! We have multiplied and filled the earth with human life. No slacking on that one.

The next commandment God gives is also about life. God tells the first humans not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or they will die. Without going into it in the depth that I'd like, basically God tells them not to take a shortcut in learning about how to misuse the good gifts he's given them. Yet they do, and that shatters the image of God in them. Thus our relationship with the God who is love is poisoned, as are our relationships with each other, and our relationship with ourselves. Our spiritual life is poisoned. And human arrogance, our attitude of “I know better than anyone else, including God,” continues to poison what we do. And that poison eventually leads to death.

The first covenant or agreement in the Bible God makes is about life. He has just rebooted creation because “The earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was filled with violence.” (Genesis 6:11, NET) After the flood, God reiterates to Noah and his offspring the command to be fruitful and multiply. (Genesis 9:1) And just like you do with a toddler, God lays down the law by telling us what to do and what not to do to keep us from harming ourselves or each other. So he explicitly makes murder against the law. And the reason given is that humanity is made in the image of God. (Genesis 9:5-6) Murder is symbolically killing God. As a bearer of his image, however distorted by sin, every person has inherent worth. Yet we still kill each other. And eventually, we do get around to killing God but this time not symbolically.

Jesus summarized the whole law in just two commandments from the Old Testament: love God with all you are and have (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) and love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18) And indeed the Ten Commandments fall into that pattern. The first 4 are about what to do and not do in loving God and the remaining 6 are about what to do and not do in loving others. And that “what you do to humans you do to God” applies to Jesus, God incarnate. He says, whatever we do or do not do to the poor, the hungry, the sick, the prisoner, or the alien, the least of his siblings, we do or do not do to Jesus. (Matthew 25:31-46) We are to make life better for others. In that way, we are serving Jesus.

After the temple was destroyed and they were taken into exile in Babylon, the Jews became serious about obeying God's law. In fact they went overboard and elaborated and added onto the law. They often got so focused on the law they forgot what its purpose was. Jesus took his critics to task on that. Ironically, by the time Martin Luther appeared, the church had done the same thing. It had come up with an elaborate system of laws, many of which were not even found in the Bible. And like the lawyers and Pharisees, they had found loopholes and ways to get around the ones that were inconvenient, even if it meant people would get hurt. Because they too had lost sight of the purpose of the laws.

Luther was brought up in this system and was a creature of it. His problem was he took it seriously. And it was driving him crazy. He couldn't keep 100% of the law 100% of the time. And he thought that God would only accept 100%. He didn't love God. He hated him.

But when Luther was assigned to teach the New Testament, he found in Paul's letters the key to this problem. He found the gospel, the good news that Jesus brought to us and bought for us with his blood. Basically, the good news consisted of a few basic facts.

First, God is loving. God doesn't hate us. He loves us. Enough to die for us in the person of his son Jesus. And like any loving parent, he wants us to grow and become better people. After all, we are created in his image. So he wants us to grow to be more like him, again as seen in Jesus, God expressed in human form. And he lays down laws for our spiritual growth and health.

Second, God is wise. He knows we are going to fall short of our glorious potential. Any parent who believes their child will always obey them, or even always act in their own best interest, is in for a rude awakening. God is a wise parent. That's why he sent Jesus, not only to teach us with words but with his life and to free us from our slavery to sin.

Third, God is gracious. He is favorably disposed towards us. We don't have to earn his favor. In fact doing that to the nth degree 100% of the time would be impossible. But being loving and gracious, God will forgive us and then give us help in living up to our potential.

We just have to trust him on this. Trust is the underlying basis of all relationships. To work with someone there has to be trust. For God to work with us, we have to trust him. Trust is built on one's history and we know we can trust God because of what he has done for us in Jesus. And when we trust him, then he can accomplish what he wants to. He will anoint us with his Spirit to help us become what we were created to be, children of the God who is love.

The problem Luther ran into was the same Jesus and Paul ran into: people so obsessed with the law that they didn't realize the law cannot actually make people good. You can post a speed limit but you cannot make people observe it. The whole 7^th chapter of the book of Romans is Paul explaining how the law not only cannot make you good, strangely enough, it can tempt you to evil. Like the fruit of the tree of good and evil it can open your mind to other ways in which you can act that go against the law. It's like telling a kid not to do something. Suddenly that's all they focus on. Why can't I drink? Why can't I smoke pot? Why can't I have sex with my boyfriend or girlfriend? What other good things are the grownups keeping from us? It's the serpent in Eden's argument all over again.

At best the law acts like a diagnostic tool. It's like saying your fasting blood sugar should be below 100, or your blood pressure should be below 120/80. It's good to know that and to measure yourself against that standard and to shoot for that but by itself that information cannot lower either number. To achieve that there needs to be an internal change.

We need to be reformed, literally, remade into a new form. In our passage from Jeremiah, God says that in his new covenant, he will put his law within his people and write it on their hearts. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus, the author of the new covenant, said to his disciples, “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.” (John 14:15-17) That is how God's law, the expression of what he wants us to be, will get within us. We cannot do it ourselves. We can only do it with God's help and only by letting God come into us and change us.

After my accident I could not heal myself by just living by the rules of healthy living, eating right and getting exercise. I couldn't walk. I needed to trust a surgeon to cut me open, get his hands inside me and fix what was broken and torn. Parts of me had to be replaced. That's what we need to let God do to us: get inside us, fix us and replace what is beyond repair. We need to be remade. Jesus said it was essentially being born again.

When we talk of the Reformation, we think of it as historians do: the reformation of the church. But we are the church. We need to be reformed as individuals or else the body of Christ and the structures and rules we have built up will never be reformed. You can have the best rules and laws in the world but if people don't follow them, nothing will change.

Luther didn't want to start a new church. He wanted to reform the Roman Catholic Church of his day. It wouldn't let him. It excommunicated him. But people had read his writings and wanted change even if they had to go outside the official church. And Luther had to rethink everything he had been taught in the light of the truth of the gospel found in the Bible. And it required him to reimagine what the church should be and could be.

Today the church is again bound by rules and traditions that may have served it well in the past. But the world has changed. All branches of the church are shrinking, at least in the West. Numerous factors have contributed to this but I want to focus on the one that I think is key. Can people see the Spirit of Jesus at work in the church? Do they see the one who welcomed and ate with sinners? Do they see the one who set aside the rules when it meant that otherwise someone wouldn't get healed or helped? Do they see the one who asked disturbing questions of the rich and those in power and those who loudly proclaimed their religious orthodoxy and holiness? Do they see the one would was willing to be condemned by those in authority for speaking the truth? Do they see the one who was willing to give up everything and take up his cross and die to do the right thing and save the world?

We need a new reformation, not of institutions so much as of people. If we let God make us new, from the inside out, it will change the external world. But it has to start somewhere. It has to start with someone. And that someone can be you.