The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
September 7, 2008

Proper 18-A
Ezekiel 33:1-11
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 18:10-20

I’ve read more of A. J. Jacobs’ book The Year of Living Biblically and have decided to share a little of it with you today. What Jacobs discovers is that trying to keep all the law literally as it is found in the Bible is not easy, and that it causes no little discomfort for his family and friends and for those he meets on the street in New York, especially when one has grown a long beard and unruly hair and is dressed like a Old Testament prophet with the commandments taped to his forehead as the Lord commands in Exodus.

Try, for example, to get on an airplane dressed like that. “I woke up early to make my pilgrimage to the Holy Land,” says Jacobs. “That is, if I can get through El Al security at Newark. The security officer – a feisty, olive skinned Israeli woman – grills me good. I don’t fit into any of her categories – a beard, but not the traditional black hat or coat? This commences a half hour of questions: ‘What was you mother’s maiden name?’ ‘Kheel,’ I tell her. ‘Why do you have such a big beard?’ ‘I’m writing a book about the Bible, and [I’m trying to keep all the laws as carefully as possible].’ ‘Hmm. Did you celebrate Purim?’ ‘Technically, it’s not mandated by the Bible, so no.’ ‘What does “J-R” at the end of your name stand for?’ ’Junior,’ I tell her. ‘Why are you a Junior if you are Jewish?’ ‘My parents weren’t so observant.’ ‘Did you have a bar mitzvah?’ ‘Uh,...no.’ By the end, my mouth is dry, my palms are damp, and I feel like I have just been on the worst first date in history – but for some reason, she lets me board.”

And consider trying to obey the dietary laws among a people who don’t keep kosher. “The problem is, forbidden foods are hiding everywhere. Bacon lurks in salad dressing. Gelatin is sometimes derived from pig bones.... Typical is the exchange I had with a waitress at a midtown restaurant,” Jacobs explains. “‘Do you know if the pie crust is made with lard?’ ‘I don’t think so, but I’ll check.’ ‘Thanks. I can’t eat lard.’ ‘Allergies?’ ‘No, Leviticus.’ It’s a conversation stopper, that one. It’s hard to trot out the Bible at a New York restaurant without sounding self-righteous or messianic. But the [Book of] Proverbs say[s] I must tell the truth, so I told the truth.”

While trying to figure out what fruit he could eat, Jacobs learned that according to Leviticus (19:23-25), one may not eat fruit “unless the tree that bears it is at least five years old,” but when he called the fruit company to try to find out the age of the tree that had produced the oranges he bought, he merely drew an incredulous silence. He was stymied on the fruit front until he found out that cherry trees do not produce cherries until they are at least five years old. So cherries are safe.

Jacobs did discover that most of the dietary laws were easy for him to follow personally. He doesn’t eat bacon anyway, because of his cholesterol. And the biblical prohibition against shellfish presented no personal dilemma because most shellfish, especially lobsters, remind him “too much of something you’d kill with Raid.”

In trying to connect with his biblical ancestors through food, however, Jacobs decided he needed not only to avoid prohibited foods, but also to try some of the food they actually ate. “The Bible is so full of Thou-Shalt-Nots that I’ve started to take advantage of anything the Bible does allow,” he says, ”even if said allowed activity isn’t so alluring. Which is how I ended up eating a bug.”

“Of [insects] you may eat the locust according to its kind,” Leviticus allows, and “the cricket according to its kind, and the grasshopper according to its kind,” and Jacobs discovers that bugs for human consumption are readily available. “The internet is teeming with edible insects, or ‘microlivestock,’ as they are called. There are chocolate wafers with ants sprinkled in. And beetle toffee bars. And larva cheddar cheese snacks. And plenty of crickets, [which are] high in protein, low in fat....” Fluker’s Farms “describes its crickets as ‘oven roasted to perfection’ and sends you “an ‘exclusive’ I-Ate-a-Bug-Club button.” When Jacobs gets his box of crickets, he decides he needs a “fellow traveler” for this experience. His wife Julie declines, but his friend John rises to the challenge, and they eat the crickets, which makes Jacobs feel somehow more closely related to John the Baptist.

It’s only later that his teen-aged cousin Rick, who is in to entomology, explains to Jacobs that actually we all eat insect parts all the time, a fact Jacobs confirms on the Food and Drug Administration website that lists “the ‘natural and unavoidable’ amounts of insects for every kind of food. One hundred grams of pizza sauce can have up to thirty insect eggs. One hundred grams of drained mushrooms may contain twenty or more maggots. And if you want oregano on your mushroom pizza, you’ll be enjoying 1,250 or more insect fragments per ten grams. So I was violating the Bible rules even without intending to. Or maybe not. Depends on the interpretation. Orthodox Jews usually reason that since they didn’t have microscopes in biblical times, then a bug must be visible with bare eyes to [make the] forbidden [list.]”

Well, enough along this line. Much of Jacobs’ book provides a lot of interesting information and is just plain funny. But Jacobs has also discovered that his year of taking the Bible both literally and seriously has led him to some powerful spiritual insights that he had never considered before and that have enriched his life.

Consider Leviticus 19:32, which Jacobs reads while on a trip to a wedding in Florida. “Rise up in the presence of the aged,” says the Lord. “Show respect for the elderly....” “If ever there’s a time to laser in on this rule, [it’s while I’m in Boca Raton], where the average age approaches that of a Genesis patriarch.” So while he and his wife Julie and their little boy Jasper are waiting for their pasta at a strip mall restaurant, Jacobs starts standing up and sitting down ever time a gray-haired person comes in, ”which is pretty much every 45 seconds,” he says. “It looks like I’m playing a solitaire version of musical chairs.”

“’What are you doing?’ Julie asks. ‘I tell her about Leviticus 19.’ ‘It’s very distracting.’ I stand up and sit down. ‘I thought you had a wedgie,’ Julie says. I stand up and sit down. ‘Are you going to do this the rest of the year?’ ‘I’m going to try,’ I say. ‘I know I’ll fail – there’s just too much to remember to follow in biblical living – but I don’t want to admit that yet.’”

And then Jacobs turns serious. He tells us what he has learned about why the Bible includes such a commandment. It’s because in biblical times many of the elderly lived a subsistence-level nomadic life and were considered a liability, which is also pretty much true today as increasing numbers of our elderly live out their lives in loneliness and despair. “So I have pledged to have mercy on those older than I,” Jacobs tells Julie, as they “watch an old man get up from his table and shuffle off to the bathroom” and then emerge a few minutes later, and then, confused, sit down alone at a table two tables away from his family, until his daughter finally notices him and calls, ”’Dad! We’re over here, Dad!’ And he looks over, suddenly remembering, and returns to his table, somewhat dazed.”

Julie looks like she’s about to cry. “The standing [up and sitting down] stuff I could do without,” she says. “But I think it’s good that you’re honoring your elders. That’s a good thing.”

One more. The wedding is “a lovely, quiet outdoor ceremony in a Japanese-style garden,” Jacobs says, and although he could barely hear the bride and groom, it didn’t matter, because his journey through the Bible has led him to focus on the biblical passage chosen for the event – Genesis 2:24 – a passage quoted by Jesus – where “we read about how man and woman are not complete until they cleave to each other. They are two halves. Only together can they create a full being.”

Which leads us to what the Bible has to say to us this morning. Only together do we create the fulness of the Body of Christ. Only together do we approach the fullness of the Creation as God made it to be. In God’s Church we are married to Christ; we cleave to Christ and therefore we cleave to each other, the ones for whom Christ died. And that is why Jesus so insists on our reconciliation one to another, for when we are not reconciled to one another, it is literally hell that we create for Jesus, and for his Father, who are dismayed when we and our enemies, both of whom they love, do not love each other.

As Mark Twain observed and as A. J. Jacobs learned in his year of trying actually to live the commandments, the difficulty in learning to live biblically lies not in the parts of the Bible we don’t understand, but in those parts we do understand. It’s not the commandments about what to eat and what not to eat that give us spiritual indigestion; it the commandments we do understand – like honoring the aged and giving to the poor and cleaving to each other and caring for the lost and the little ones among us and doing good to our enemies – it’s these commandments that turn our stomachs and put our viscera in turmoil. So when this morning Jesus reminds us that our Father in heaven is not willing that even one of his little ones should be lost and commands us to reconcile ourselves to our brothers and sisters, we reach for the Alka Seltzer...

...because, unlike the ambiguities of the dietary laws and the commandments to carry a staff and dress like Moses, these commandments of Jesus and Paul this morning are crystal clear, and we know that if we are committed to living biblically, then we will actually have to do them. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, and faithful in prayer. Share with God’s people who are in need. Look for opportunities to welcome the stranger and the poor among you. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with those of low position. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. Do not repay evil with evil. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Nothing difficult to understand here. The problem is not that we do not understand what the Bible has to say to us today. The problem is that it does not come naturally. But for those who would be God’s Church as Jesus created it from the Cross, forgiveness and reconciliation and associating with those of low degree and seeing our enemy as our brother are not options. They are of the essence of who we are as the Body of Christ.

For us Christians, ”there is a very real danger of our drifting into an attitude of contempt for humanity,” warned Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “We know quite well that we have no right to do so, and that it would lead us into the most sterile relation to our fellow-men.... It means that we at once fall into the worst blunders of our opponents....” Because the truth is that “nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We often expect from others more than we are willing to do ourselves.... We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. The only profitable relationship to others – and especially to our weaker brethren – is one of love, and that means the will to hold fellowship with them. God himself did not despise humanity, but became man for men’s sake.” (Letters and Papers from Prison, pp. 3, 9)

Well, as you know, on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was executed for his trouble, but he did not return evil for evil. He refused to allow evil to have its way with that part of the world he was in charge of, namely, himself.

Two questions persist. How big is God’s community, the community God became man for? Who are the people of God, the people whom God loves, those for whom Christ himself died? And what part of the world am I in charge of?

Jean Vanier of L’Arche Community in Toronto also warns about our human habit of dividing ourselves into the “good” people and the “bad” people. When we do this, he says, usually over some kind of “issue,” invariably we see ourselves as the “good” people, while the others are the “bad.” “In issue-oriented groups,” he notes, ”the enemy is always outside, those who are of the other party.” Witness the tenor of much of our political rhetoric this year.

“The community [of God’s Church] is different,” Vanier reminds us. True community is different from “issue-oriented groups,” because, in true community our “single-minded principles” are trumped by the principle of the Cross. “True community is different because of the realization that the evil is inside, not just inside the community, but inside me. I cannot think of taking the speck of dust out of my neighbor’s eye unless I’m working on the log in my own. Evil is here in me. Warfare is inside my own community, and I am called to be an agent of peace there. But warfare is also in me, and I am called to seek wholeness inside myself.” (From Brokenness to Community.)

What Bonhoeffer and Vanier correctly observe in the context of human conflict in our own day is what Jesus and Paul and all the saints of the Bible knew centuries ago – that the evil which would tear human beings apart cuts through every human heart and culture. It is, as C. S. Lewis once said, as if the whole earth is enemy-occupied territory, and Satan works mightily to divide us into groups called good and bad so that we will tear each other apart. This is why reconciliation is a thread that weaves its way through all the commandments and themes of the Bible, and is not optional in God’s Church.

Because evil is here in me as well as in my enemy, we don’t have to wait until someone commits another terrorist attack, or even until someone commits just ordinary murder, to practice forgiveness and reconciliation. There are other, more local circumstances that call for forgiveness as we come to God's table to share God’s food and drink this morning. I am the part of the world I am most in charge of. So today’s Bible readings offer practical, down-to-earth advice about how we human beings, torn within and without by the divisiveness of sin, are to embody the community of God’s promised kingdom – here on earth as it is in heaven, even in our political processes, even right here in the parish church. It is here, within ourselves and with our own local neighbors, that the war on terrorism begins, and it is here that it will ultimately be won, for it is difficult to remain an enemy with someone with whom we share food and drink.

Practicing forgiveness is not optional for the Christian. We are to forgive each other as we have been forgiven, just as we are to welcome others as God has welcomed us and as we would like to be welcomed. In fact, as we will later acknowledge when we pray in the way our Lord taught us, the one depends upon the other: our offering forgiveness depends upon our having been forgiven, and our being forgiven depends upon our offering forgiveness.

Making a commitment to that life is, I think, what God is using the Bible to try to do to us today. It’s not very hard to understand. What’s hard is wanting it and working at it. In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul offers his unambiguous prescription for doing it, his practical advice for being a success at being God’s Church, for building up the Body of Christ. It’s as clear as the light of day: Go out of your way to welcome the stranger and the poor among you. Go out of your way to practice forgiveness.

It is hard to remain an enemy with someone with whom we share food and drink. That’s why God welcomes you and me, all of us, to his table this morning.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.