Unwritten Rules
I remember watching the World Series when I was in seventh grade. It was 1991, and the reason I remember it is because that year my older brother participated in a German exchange program and that fall our family hosted a German high school student for several weeks.
His name was Georg, he brought several pounds of German Haribo gummi bears for my brother, which I promptly stole, he was one of the tallest people I’d ever met at 6’20”, and he’d never seen a baseball game before.
So we watched one of the World Series games between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves. And Georg was particularly delighted any time Twins second-baseman Chuck Knoblauch came up to bat or made a play – simply because “Knoblauch” was the German word for “garlic.” It probably still is.
I don’t know if anyone here has ever tried explaining the rules of baseball to someone who’s never seen the game, but it’s both incredibly simple and incredibly complicated.
At its heart, it’s beautifully simple. You swing a stick at a ball and try to hit it. It’s a wonderfully easy to grasp premise. Swing and hit the ball. Swing and hit the ball. And if you’re playing defense, it’s equally simple. Catch the ball.
You either hit or you catch, and whichever team does those two things better wins.
But if you try to sit down with someone who’s never watched a game, and you lead off with trying to explain the infield fly rule… or what constitutes a balk… or why sometimes a foul ball counts as a strike and sometimes it doesn’t… well, you’re going to run into trouble.
And those are just the written rules of baseball. Every sport has its unwritten rules too, and baseball has more than most.
Don’t show up the other team. Only pitchers on the pitcher’s mound. Don’t steal bases when you’re winning big. Or losing big. Don’t bunt to break up a no-hitter. Don’t even talk about a no-hitter in progress. The list goes on.
Some of those rules are borne of sportsmanship, others superstition, others… just the norms of doing things the way they’ve always been done.
I looked up the rulebook on Major League Baseball’s website and found a .pdf 188 pages long.
188 pages to explain how to swing. And hit. And catch. And throw.
I know we took the Bibles out of our pews, but you know how long the average pew Bible is? About 900 pages.
900 pages of rules. Of testimonies. Of songs and stories. 900 pages that can be daunting – full of weird and strange rules and procedures, often written by scribes and prophets whose names we can’t even pronounce. It’s a lot.
900 pages to explain how to love. And pray. And live.
If we want to begin our faith with the Levitical laws. And the laws of Deuteronomy. And the rules that Paul gives us and the other writers of the epistles… well… then we might find ourselves in for a rough time.
Later on this afternoon our confirmands will be looking at some of the more obscure rules… the strange rules… the ones that might not make sense at first glance.
The ones about wearing clothes of mixed fabrics.
The ones about what time of day it’s permissible to kill a burglar (apparently it’s fine at night, but not during daylight).
The ones about the foods we can and cannot eat – Leviticus 11 is very concerned that people might be eating owls, and tells us three times that that’s a no-no.
If our intention is to welcome people into our faith, and we begin with the rules like these, many of which we don’t even follow anymore, others we follow only because it’s hard to find owl on the menu anywhere… but if we begin with rules like these, our faith, our religion, our way of worship will be all but impenetrable.
Just as if your introduction to baseball is to be handed a rulebook and told to figure it out from there.
You can study the rulebook, you can know it backwards and forwards, you can parse it and know exactly when a runner is out, when they’re safe, when it’s interference, when it’s a ground rule double…
But until you actually go to a game and see the simple swing of the bat and hear it crack as the ball sails into the sky… you’ll never love the game.
Sometimes, the rules can get in the way of the bigger picture.
They make it impossible to see the forest for the trees.
We can dedicate our lives to following every rule in the Bible – and there are lots of them – and we’ll probably stumble and fall more than a few times along the way.
Or we can take to heart what Jesus is telling us here in Matthew 22.
Love God. And love each other.
That’s the entire point of every rule, every law, every commandment that God gives us from Genesis all the way on down through to Revelation.
Every little thing from what to do if a neighbor’s livestock is injured on our land, to how to resolve conflict, to how to deal with emotions like lust and envy and greed… everything comes back to those two points.
Love God. Love each other.
If we truly love God with everything in our being… if we love God’s kindness and generosity… if we love God’s charity and good work in our lives… then that will show in the lives that we live, whether we know every single little rule or not.
And if we love each other. If we love our neighbors – not just the ones we like and get along with – but love our Samaritan neighbor, our Roman neighbor, our Democratic or Republican neighbor… our neighbor across the street and our neighbor halfway around the world… then that love will also come through.
The God we worship can be very small or very big.
A small God gives us small rules, with no bigger picture in sight. Rules meant to bind us, enslave us, keep us guessing, keep us down. A God of rules and rules alone is a petty God I have no interest in worshiping.
But if the purpose of God’s law is to guide us towards something bigger. Something grander. Something greater than ourselves… then that speaks to a worthy, majestic God. If God’s purpose is to love us and show us how to love… if God’s bigger picture is to give us ideas and guidelines for how to channel our own generosity, our own kindness, our own sense of God’s blessings to other people… then that is a God I will worship morning, noon, and night, each and every day.
We do not worship a small God in this church.
We do not worship a petty God in the church.
We do not worship a God who gives us rules for the sake of rules.
We worship a loving God.
A great and powerful God.
A God who expects and demands bigger things from us; who expects us to be a part of this world’s blessings for all its people.
And that begins first and foremost with learning, with practicing, and with sharing God’s great love.
The other stuff can be picked up later. The individual bits and pieces… that’s all inside baseball.
But without love – love for God, and love for people – we might as well pack it in and go home. God isn’t rules. God isn’t commandments. God isn’t doctrine or theology.
God is love. Amen.
Please pray with me.
Holy and loving God, we pray this morning that you teach us each and every day how to love. That as you fill the world with blessings of kindness and compassion, generosity and forgiveness, that you refresh our hearts to know and share each of those joys as well. Help us to keep our eyes on your bigger picture, always striving to love you and each other. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
I remember watching the World Series when I was in seventh grade. It was 1991, and the reason I remember it is because that year my older brother participated in a German exchange program and that fall our family hosted a German high school student for several weeks.
His name was Georg, he brought several pounds of German Haribo gummi bears for my brother, which I promptly stole, he was one of the tallest people I’d ever met at 6’20”, and he’d never seen a baseball game before.
So we watched one of the World Series games between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves. And Georg was particularly delighted any time Twins second-baseman Chuck Knoblauch came up to bat or made a play – simply because “Knoblauch” was the German word for “garlic.” It probably still is.
I don’t know if anyone here has ever tried explaining the rules of baseball to someone who’s never seen the game, but it’s both incredibly simple and incredibly complicated.
At its heart, it’s beautifully simple. You swing a stick at a ball and try to hit it. It’s a wonderfully easy to grasp premise. Swing and hit the ball. Swing and hit the ball. And if you’re playing defense, it’s equally simple. Catch the ball.
You either hit or you catch, and whichever team does those two things better wins.
But if you try to sit down with someone who’s never watched a game, and you lead off with trying to explain the infield fly rule… or what constitutes a balk… or why sometimes a foul ball counts as a strike and sometimes it doesn’t… well, you’re going to run into trouble.
And those are just the written rules of baseball. Every sport has its unwritten rules too, and baseball has more than most.
Don’t show up the other team. Only pitchers on the pitcher’s mound. Don’t steal bases when you’re winning big. Or losing big. Don’t bunt to break up a no-hitter. Don’t even talk about a no-hitter in progress. The list goes on.
Some of those rules are borne of sportsmanship, others superstition, others… just the norms of doing things the way they’ve always been done.
I looked up the rulebook on Major League Baseball’s website and found a .pdf 188 pages long.
188 pages to explain how to swing. And hit. And catch. And throw.
I know we took the Bibles out of our pews, but you know how long the average pew Bible is? About 900 pages.
900 pages of rules. Of testimonies. Of songs and stories. 900 pages that can be daunting – full of weird and strange rules and procedures, often written by scribes and prophets whose names we can’t even pronounce. It’s a lot.
900 pages to explain how to love. And pray. And live.
If we want to begin our faith with the Levitical laws. And the laws of Deuteronomy. And the rules that Paul gives us and the other writers of the epistles… well… then we might find ourselves in for a rough time.
Later on this afternoon our confirmands will be looking at some of the more obscure rules… the strange rules… the ones that might not make sense at first glance.
The ones about wearing clothes of mixed fabrics.
The ones about what time of day it’s permissible to kill a burglar (apparently it’s fine at night, but not during daylight).
The ones about the foods we can and cannot eat – Leviticus 11 is very concerned that people might be eating owls, and tells us three times that that’s a no-no.
If our intention is to welcome people into our faith, and we begin with the rules like these, many of which we don’t even follow anymore, others we follow only because it’s hard to find owl on the menu anywhere… but if we begin with rules like these, our faith, our religion, our way of worship will be all but impenetrable.
Just as if your introduction to baseball is to be handed a rulebook and told to figure it out from there.
You can study the rulebook, you can know it backwards and forwards, you can parse it and know exactly when a runner is out, when they’re safe, when it’s interference, when it’s a ground rule double…
But until you actually go to a game and see the simple swing of the bat and hear it crack as the ball sails into the sky… you’ll never love the game.
Sometimes, the rules can get in the way of the bigger picture.
They make it impossible to see the forest for the trees.
We can dedicate our lives to following every rule in the Bible – and there are lots of them – and we’ll probably stumble and fall more than a few times along the way.
Or we can take to heart what Jesus is telling us here in Matthew 22.
Love God. And love each other.
That’s the entire point of every rule, every law, every commandment that God gives us from Genesis all the way on down through to Revelation.
Every little thing from what to do if a neighbor’s livestock is injured on our land, to how to resolve conflict, to how to deal with emotions like lust and envy and greed… everything comes back to those two points.
Love God. Love each other.
If we truly love God with everything in our being… if we love God’s kindness and generosity… if we love God’s charity and good work in our lives… then that will show in the lives that we live, whether we know every single little rule or not.
And if we love each other. If we love our neighbors – not just the ones we like and get along with – but love our Samaritan neighbor, our Roman neighbor, our Democratic or Republican neighbor… our neighbor across the street and our neighbor halfway around the world… then that love will also come through.
The God we worship can be very small or very big.
A small God gives us small rules, with no bigger picture in sight. Rules meant to bind us, enslave us, keep us guessing, keep us down. A God of rules and rules alone is a petty God I have no interest in worshiping.
But if the purpose of God’s law is to guide us towards something bigger. Something grander. Something greater than ourselves… then that speaks to a worthy, majestic God. If God’s purpose is to love us and show us how to love… if God’s bigger picture is to give us ideas and guidelines for how to channel our own generosity, our own kindness, our own sense of God’s blessings to other people… then that is a God I will worship morning, noon, and night, each and every day.
We do not worship a small God in this church.
We do not worship a petty God in the church.
We do not worship a God who gives us rules for the sake of rules.
We worship a loving God.
A great and powerful God.
A God who expects and demands bigger things from us; who expects us to be a part of this world’s blessings for all its people.
And that begins first and foremost with learning, with practicing, and with sharing God’s great love.
The other stuff can be picked up later. The individual bits and pieces… that’s all inside baseball.
But without love – love for God, and love for people – we might as well pack it in and go home. God isn’t rules. God isn’t commandments. God isn’t doctrine or theology.
God is love. Amen.
Please pray with me.
Holy and loving God, we pray this morning that you teach us each and every day how to love. That as you fill the world with blessings of kindness and compassion, generosity and forgiveness, that you refresh our hearts to know and share each of those joys as well. Help us to keep our eyes on your bigger picture, always striving to love you and each other. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.