(Part 1) The Rev. Dr. Luke Lindon

Once upon a time, there was a certain group of people in England.
The king wanted a divorce. The pope said no. The king then declared, “Fine. I’m the pope now!”

That sounded like good news to a certain group of people. They had long wanted a different way of doing church. They were tired of the hierarchy, traditions, and regalia of the medieval Roman church. They wanted simplicity. They wanted local control—no bishops, no monarchs yelling commands from afar. They wanted the Bible in their own language. Because unless you spoke Latin, you were out of luck in worship.

For these commitments, people like William Tyndale were executed. Groups like the Congregationalists found themselves at odds with the crown. Some fled to the Netherlands, and from there, some pressed on to Massachusetts. Life was hard and simple, but rooted in covenant and community. These are our ancestors. This is why the last part of our name is Medina UCC, Congregational.

They broke the rules. They broke with the Roman and English church, saying, we don’t need all that pomp and circumstance. We need the Bible and spiritual disciplines to live out our faith, not just in words but in action. No intermediaries. Together, in covenant, we must be the church. The church is not a building or a hierarchy or a set of bylaws. The church is the people.

That flew in the face of the rules of the time. The pope set the rules. The bishops enforced them. You were, at best, a spectator while your priest recited the same thing every other priest was reciting. Congregationalists said, “No. We are called to something more alive than that.”

These are our roots. Congregational roots. And they’re still holding us. We believe in the Trinity. We believe in local control. We believe in vibrant mission that works alongside partners here in town and far beyond. But sometimes… sometimes we forget. Sometimes we get so attached to “how we’ve always done it” that we reject the very rule breakers who gave us our identity. The Congregationalists were rule breakers because Jesus was a rule breaker.

Today we read how Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath. And the religious leaders were mad. They wagged their fingers: “You shouldn’t do that, Jesus. That’s against the rules!”
And Jesus snaps back: “You hypocrites! You treat your animals better than this woman. She’s been bound for eighteen years. Isn’t the Sabbath the perfect day for her to be set free?” (Luke 13:15–16).

Fundamentalists ruin everything. They’re the loudest to claim Jesus but so often miss the point. God made the Sabbath for us and our healing, not the other way around (Mark 2:27).

And Jesus? He was constantly breaking rules. In Matthew he says, “You have heard it said… but I say to you…” (Matthew 5). He healed. He ate with the wrong people. He forgave sins when forgiveness was supposed to be tightly controlled. That drove the religious leaders wild.

Now—rules exist for reasons. Someone breaks them, and communities make laws to prevent harm. The Bible itself reflects this. There’s a law in Exodus: if an ox gores someone, you kill it. But if the ox is known to gore people and the owner hides that, you kill both the ox and the owner. Harsh, yes, but it tells you something: Moses didn’t make that up out of nowhere. Somebody had a mean ox. And somebody covered it up. Laws are built from pain and accidents.

It’s the same today. Cars didn’t start with seatbelts. It took crashes and lawsuits. There was one infamous car that would explode if rear-ended before certain rules became standard. Rules are meant to protect life. But sometimes, we get so locked in on the rules that we forget their purpose.

That’s when we need the rule breakers to remind us. Jesus was such a rule breaker. And sometimes the class clown is too. In my Catholic school days, our class clown was Cuv. Our dress code was strict. Once, the principal started inspecting every boy’s belt. The next day Cuv showed up with a belt so long it hung down to his knees. That started a trend—everyone looping belts in protest. Still within the rules but bending them. At the time, I was too much of a rule follower to appreciate it. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to value the Cuvs of the world. They remind us not to worship the rules, but the reasons.

G.K. Chesterton told a parable about a fence across a road. The knee-jerk reformer says, “I don’t see the use of this; let’s tear it down.” But the wise reformer replies, “If you don’t see the use of it, you may not tear it down. First, find out why it was put there. Then we’ll talk.”

The lesson: fences don’t appear by accident. Someone thought they served a purpose. Before you tear one down, know the reason. Maybe it was a bad reason. Maybe times have changed. But first—understand.[1] So it is with rules. We don’t want to be the religious scolds, missing the point while Jesus heals. The Sabbath is meant for healing. Rules are meant to protect life. But when rules get in the way of love, it’s time to break them.

So let’s try an exercise. A visual scavenger hunt. You’ll find photos in your bulletin. Each one is from the square. Here’s the rule: you cannot do this alone. Find a partner. Bonus points if it’s someone you don’t know. Double points if they’re from a different generation.

Because sometimes we’ve been in the square so long we stop seeing what’s here. Like rules, we forget the why. We’ll take 10 minutes. Meghan and I will watch the time and call you back.

(Part 2) Rev. Meghan Malone

When his choice was between breaking a rule, and helping his neighbor, Jesus didn’t hesitate. It was no contest for him. He chose people every time, because human lives are so worthy of care that it gets his top consideration, and he wasn’t afraid of being scolded.

Our Jesus, the embodiment of God in human flesh, knew that we have no higher purpose than to love God and each other. As he said, on these two things hang all the laws and all the prophets.

Following that purpose is what God asks of us, all throughout the Hebrew Bible and through the teachings of Christ. If there is anything biblical that we should be taking seriously, it is our responsibility to be doing all the good that we can for each other.

Though truthfully, that’s not always the simplest thing to figure out. For example, love does not mean becoming a doormat. Your own well-being is holy and matters too and it can be tricky to decide where to draw the boundaries around how much of yourself you give away.

Putting love first like Jesus did will challenge any rigid and literal guidelines you expect to apply in every situation. Life is too complicated to be captured by a set of rules. And truly, I think that’s one of the overarching messages that Jesus came to give us.

We should not be surprised by the thought that we have misunderstood God because Jesus spent so much of his time talking to people who were sure they had the answers. Maybe because we’ve read their stories, we think that we can’t make the same mistakes that they did, but we definitely can.

And I think it’s a mistake to assume those religious leaders were people with bad intentions or fake faith. I think they were trying to take their instructions seriously, and they were trying to please God, but even in doing so, they had missed the point.

They were human, just as we are, and humans have always been a lot better at pointing out other people’s problems than addressing our own. I would go so far as to say that we sometimes enjoy telling each other what to do, and feeling smarter than everybody else, and writing off the people we don’t get along with as evil or hopeless.

We are quick to speak evil by telling other people that they’re not good enough, and to wag our fingers at their shortcomings, as if that makes us righteous. Yet we do not take literally the repeated demands of God that we feed the hungry and care for the afflicted, because that couldn’t possibly be God’s literal expectation for us. That’s just too hard.

We want God’s rules to be black and white, but the ways of God are technicolor. We expect God to lay out everything so clearly for us, when that same God gave us brains and hearts that are wired to do the hard work of discerning how best to love each other now.

What if we learned to read the words of the Bible and look not for clear instructions but rather look for invitations. Invitations that are not easy and that will continually challenge us to apply ourselves, but that may lead us to the healing that we are dying to find.

Remember that it was to people who had just been released from slavery, that God said, “You should take one day a week and rest, and honor that rest as sacred, and trust that your work is not the place where your value really lies.” I wonder if that was a challenge.

Yet the law of the sabbath was given to set them free. Which is why Jesus responds to his critics by saying, “I literally cannot think of something better for me to be doing right now than this! This is exactly what the Sabbath is for, removing burdens and healing humans!” At least, that’s how it sounded to me.

The laws were given to them to root their newborn nation in the knowledge that caring for themselves, and each other, and God is what they were made to do. A purpose capable of traveling with them through centuries of change, from a people lost in the wilderness, to the Kingdom of David, to a nation scattered and exiled across the Earth.

Last month I went to the National UCC meeting that we call General Synod in Kansas City. There I got to hear from Rev. Jennifer Butler, who has a new book out called “Who Stole My Bible?” In her speech, she reminded us that the Bible was never meant to serve as a prooftext for tyrants, but as a handbook for resisting tyranny.

The Bible carries the echoes of the rebellious strategies of our rule-breaking ancestors. The Bible preserves the relentless heartbeat of hope that has been carried across time.

This moment may be scary, but it is our summons to become a force for good. For we are the inheritors of the commission to love, and we have a responsibility to reclaim these hijacked texts from the misunderstandings that lead us to legalism and not to life.

A heavy yoke has attached itself to God’s word, and beneath it we are struggling and parched, but we were meant to live for so much more. The world is hungry for voices like ours to snap back like Jesus did and break the rules in the name of keeping them.

To use the imagery from Isaiah, it feels like we have been trying to live within ancient ruins, because we are too afraid to become the builders ourselves. But ruins are buildings that have lost their purpose, and without mending, they can no longer serve the living.

We can both honor the wisdom of the past and acknowledge that these streets were made for living on. If life isn’t flourishing, then we know repair is needed. As Isaiah said, we are called to the breaches, perhaps to the chasms that lie between what we were made for and how we are really living.

As God’s people, we are not called to be the keepers of the law. We are called to restoration and imagination that preserves our foundations for future generations.

Be not afraid to break convention or shake things up because God has called us to this work, and equipped us for discernment, and filled us with a wild and Holy spirit.

It likely won’t be easy, and it will require our actions more than our words, but love is the water we’re seeking that makes us into a thriving garden.

We may grapple with ourselves every step towards finding it, but when we do, we will drink deeply until we no longer thirst. Our bones will be strong, and our foundations sturdy, because they are rooted in a purpose that is deep and everlasting.

When we finally let go of all our “shoulds” and learn to seek what is truly good for ourselves and for each other, faithful enough to break the rules into order to follow them, then we will thrive because we will be doing it together.  May it be so. Amen.

[1] Thanks to Dan Marty for this find: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/