Sermon on Matthew 22:34-46

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

We humans like rules.

We may say we don’t, but there’s a lot to like about rules.

It can be satisfying to make rules that others have to follow—ask any kid playing “Simon says.” It makes life easier if others play by our rules.Whether we’re deciding “no shoes in the house” because it makes cleaning the floor easier or “no phones at the dinner table” because it opens us and our families up to more conversation and connection, setting rules can make our lives easier and better.

It can also be fun to find loopholes for rules. How fun was it as a kid to annoy your sibling or a friend by getting all up in their face and saying, “I’m not touching you”? Honoring the letter but not the spirit of a rule can make us feel clever while still getting what we want.

It can even be enjoyable to break rules.For example, as author Douglas Adams wrote, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly by.” There’s something intoxicating about “sticking it to the man” and disregarding others’ rules.

And for those rules we do follow, or at least try to follow, they can make our world simpler to understand. They keep our world in tidy boxes. I can only go this far before breaking a rule. If someone breaks a law, then they are a criminal, unlike me. And that red light I ran? It was only orange. I definitely obey the law. And I get to keep my concept of self and my orderly understanding of the world intact.

These are the very human games the Pharisees are playing,“Let’s trap this upstart rabbi into discrediting himself so that our understanding of the world will stay intact. He’s causing too much trouble, so let’s get him to say the wrong thing or break a rule so that we can quiet all this down and get back to business as usual.”

It's so human. We want rules that keep our lives simple. We want to understand the world in broad strokes: things are either this or that, with no gray area in between. Toddlers want rules—they test boundaries to make sure they understand how far they can go. Grown-ups aren’t much different.

And God gave us rules. God gave Moses the Law. God taught God’s people how to live in community.

Jesus sums it all up in our reading today: love God and love your neighbor.

It all comes down to love.

God’s Law is summed up by love. That’s what God wrote on the hearts of our ancestors in faith in our first reading from Jeremiah. Love.

Butfar too often, too many of us humans use the letter of God’s Law as a weapon to harm our neighbor instead of using the spirit of God’s Law to love them. People use the letter of God’s Law to bludgeon our LGBTQ siblings or to justify violence. That’s not love. But it’s way easier to quote the Bible to justify our own actions than it is to live our lives dedicated to the well-being of every single one of our neighbors—our Muslim neighbors, our Jewish neighbors, our atheist neighbors, our trans neighbors, our addicted neighbors, our neighbors who seem unfriendly or even hostile toward us.

But the spirit of God’s Law is love.

We also remember today, though, that it is not God’s Law that saves us, but God’s grace, as Martin Luther reminded the Church of his day over 500 years ago.

We humans want rules—rules to enforce, bend, and even break. But God gives us grace.

That is our starting point. That is what matters more than anything else. We cry for rules, and God says, “I created you. I love you. There is nothing you can do to make me love you any more or any less. I love you for every bit of who you are, because I am who I am.”

God’s Law is love, because God is love. And it is God’s grace that sets us free to strive for love in this world. And God’s grace is what God wraps us in like a blanket when we miss the mark. And God loves us through it all.

Today marks the 35th anniversary of Pastor Greg’s ordination. Pastor Greg has spent 35-plus years preaching God’s grace and love in his words and actions. What a gift!

And we now prepare for him to follow God’s call to do ministry in new ways apart from this immediate community. It’s okay if our feelings are mixed. We can be happy for his exciting new chapter and also sad that we will be losing his gifts and vision and leadership and friendship in this place.

We can celebrate his 35 years of ordained ministry and mourn that they will continue elsewhere.

God is with us in all of it—joy and grief, love and loss.

We can give thanks that we have been collaborators with Pastor Greg in the ministry the Holy Spirit is up to here at First Lutheran and in Fullerton.

And we get to carry on the legacy of God’s love that Pastor Greg has shared with so many in this place.

We will carry that love forward into the world as we discern where God is leading this congregation in this new chapter.

Whatever God is leading us to, it will be full of God’s grace and love. Because that’s who God is and who we are created to be.