Text: Luke 6:1-11
Speaker: Joel Miller
In the year 1693, a group of concerned ministers and elders wrote an open letter to Anabaptist congregations, calling for a meeting. These leaders were concerned about the lack of clarity in what it meant to be a church member in good standing. Specifically, the three named issues were 1) whether lying was cause for excommunication 2) whether to shun those who had been excommunicated for whatever reason, and 3) if people the church referred to as “the good-hearted,” those who supported the Anabaptists but wouldn’t officially join the church by being rebaptized, would be saved. The letter-writers feared the church was too lenient on all accounts.
For a bit more context, this point in time is about 1/3 of the way into the 500-year history of Anabaptism. Persecutions had scattered the early generations into more tolerant areas. Other Christian groups had a history of violently persecuting dissenters, while showing little interest in disciplining poor behavior of those who stayed in the church. Anabaptists, on the other hand, especially in these areas of Switzerland and France, refused physical violence against anyone, but were ready to excommunicate, to temporarily remove from fellowship, unrepentant members who had sinned.
But where and how to draw these lines, in a way keeping with the gospel of Jesus Christ? This was the energizing question prompting this letter and the meetings that followed. The frequency of communion, the practice of footwashing, and whether to have dress codes were other peripheral issues.
The letter-writing group appointed a small committee who met several times with other ministers. At their final meeting, the ministers requested more time to consult with their congregations. This unwillingness to give a definitive answer greatly irritated a lead member of the concerned committee. On the spot, he pronounced excommunication on those ministers. The name of that leader pushing for stricter practices was Jacob Ammann. The ministers excommunicated by him eventually returned the favor and excommunicated Ammann and his group.
And that is how the Amish and the Mennonites parted ways.
I hesitate a bit to tell this story. With the number of Anabaptists in Africa currently outnumbering us in North America, one more story from Europe can make this seem more like an ethnic enclave where none of us are sure if we actually belong rather than a continuously renewing renewal movement joining with the resurrected Christ for the liberation of all creation. But even the most liberated liberation movements take a certain shape around practices, and guidelines, and even rules. Whether and where and how to draw these lines is an ongoing question for any community. Plus, if you ever tell anyone what church you’re part of and they ask you if that’s related at all to Amish, it’s good to be a little prepared for what to say after “Yes, but….”
These questions raised in that letter about rules and their purpose have been around for a long time.
Today’s reading is composed of two stories Luke puts back to back. They are held together by the theme of Sabbath. Held together further by the theme of Jesus pushing up against the rules of Sabbath law. In both cases he is accused of being overly lenient.
In the first instance, Jesus and friends are going through a field of grain, picking kernels and eating. This is in Jesus’ home region of Galilee, north of Jerusalem, predominantly rural. Nobody in Jesus’ group owned this particular grain field. In our minds, programmed to uphold the sanctity of private property above all else, Jesus and his followers are trespassing, breaking a rule.
But the Torah had generous laws about gleaning from other people’s fields. It instructed landowners to not harvest the edges of their fields and to not go back over their fields a second time to get grain they’d missed. They were forbidden from maximizing bushel per acre efficiency. The land was ultimately the Lord’s. The grain was a gift of abundance. And some of it was to be left for those who didn’t have their own land. It was a social safety net. It was a living food pantry, mandated by law.
This practice is prominent in the biblical story of Ruth. During harvest season, the foreigner Ruth goes out daily to glean for herself and her mother-in-law Naomi in the fields of Boaz. She catches Boaz’s eye, makes a few moves herself to show Boaz she’s interested, and the rest is history. Ruth and Boaz have have a great grandson named David who becomes a king. Many more greats down the line was Jesus of Nazareth. By gleaning Jesus is channeling the free spirit of his great, great, many greats grandma Ruth. And that’s all good.
Where they are pushing the bounds is that this was a Sabbath, a day of no work. There was vigorous debate among leaders about what all constituted work. Harvesting was strictly out, but is this a gray area. In his own defense, Jesus cites something that David once did, while he and his companions were hungry. They went into a shrine and ate some of the holy bread that only the priests were supposed to eat. The point: satisfying a basic human need supersedes religious, legal, restrictions.
Luke follows this up with a second Sabbath story. This one takes place in a synagogue. In the congregation there is a man with a withered hand. Jesus is being watched closely to see whether he will heal on the Sabbath. During the sharing of joys and concerns Jesus calls the man forward. He comes forward. Jesus holds the mic closely to his mouth so everyone can hear this question he’s about to pose: “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?” Nobody says anything. Nobody risks a word. It’s a time of reflective silence. I think the long and awkward kind. What is Sabbath for? What are rules for? Luke next says this: “After looking around at all of them, Jesus said to (the man), ‘Stretch out your hand.’ Which he does. Hand restored. Which, Luke continues, infuriates some of those watching.
Before situating these stories as a triumph of free-spirited Christianity over legalistic Judaism consider these words by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, published in 1951, in his book The Sabbath. This was written soon after 6 million of his own people had been exterminated by a “Christian” nation. Written soon after another “Christian” nation, our own, had unleashed the colossal power of the atom on civilian populations in two Japanese cities. With those traumatic memories thick in the air, Heschel writes this:
To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature – is there any institution that holds out greater hope for (humanity’s) progress than the Sabbath? p. 28.
Rabbi Heschel and Rabbi Jesus agree. The purpose of rules – like the Sabbath, like determining how we will be community together – the purpose is for freedom. And freedom, like the freedom to glean in other’s fields, like the freedom to be safe and experience healing within one’s own community, is protected by having good rules.
Freedom and rules don’t exactly pair well in the liberal Christian mind. Many of us can recite a litany of religiously-inspired rules we’ve been liberated from. And thank God for that. A good portion of this church is made up of people recovering from church.
When you center love, as Jesus sure seemed to do in action and when asked about the greatest commandment, a lot of rules fall away. Or, put another way, rules are revealed for their true purpose. Not ends in themselves, but structures in service of love and liberation.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Jesus, and Paul and many of our Anabaptist forebears would have us be free within the bounds of love.
But I do wonder sometimes about our freedom. I don’t often interact with the Amish, and I have no intention of glorifying their community, but when I do, for example, pass a horse and buggy on the road, I can’t help but wonder who is crazier. These distant cousins confined to their pre-modern transportation methods, or me and my fellow drivers speeding off to God knows where pumping greenhouses gases into the air that’s slowly warming our planet. If there are any sins that are cause for excommunication from the church of Jesus Christ, then destroying God’s good green earth seems pretty high on the list of possibilities. I call to mind that the question the Amish ask isn’t whether technology in itself is good or bad, but how, if the technology is adopted, will it affect the community. How will this affect the community? It’s a question we’ve largely lost in our angling toward individual freedom.
There’s an epilogue to the Amish/Mennonite split. Less than decade after that fateful meeting, Jacob Ammann and his co-ministers removed the ban from those ministers they had excommunicated. They un-ex-communicated them. They hadn’t changed their mind about their own convictions, but they stated publicly that they had acted too rashly and “grievously erred” when those ministers had asked for more time to discern matters with their congregation. They confessed they should have granted them more time. There was some reconciling of personal relationships, but the groups continued to go their separate ways.
I wonder if we could see an opening in that story for us? What if the matter of what the good rules are is still up in the air? Could we creatively re-institute the gleaning laws? Could we re-embrace Sabbath practices? What if were granted just a little more time to consider that question of the Amish. Is it good for the community? There’s no way back to the 1st century or the 17th century, but the resurrected Christ always meets us in the present and beckons us to come follow him.
In Christ, love is lord and we are free. In Christ we are free do what is best for the community. Thank you, Jacob Amman, for recognizing we need a little more time and a lot of wisdom to see what this means for us.