1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17
Coming from the aspirational working class, my cultural tastes are a mix of high brow and low brow, from the Daytona 500 to The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, a contemporary opera super relevant to recent events. Then add in a little generation-straddling, and you never know what you’ll get.
In movies, however, I am decidedly low-class. I have zero need to see another Meryl Streep melodrama. Give me a good adventure or caper film any day. I probably know almost as many quotes from Gen X films as I do from scripture, from “You’re killing me, Smalls!” to “I don’t think that means what you think that means.”
But some of my favorite films are filled with memorable lines inappropriate for use in a pulpit, and barely suitable for a pool hall. Almost everything that comes out of John Goodman’s mouth in his role as Walter Sobchak in “The Big Lebowski” is profane. But there is that one G-rated quote relevant to today’s scripture:
“This isn’t ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.”
And gosh are there rules. Rabbinic Judaism, which formed after the Jewish War in the First Century, claims 613 commandments in the Law of Moses. Then there were the smooth-talkers who interpreted the rules like latter-day contortionists, “smooth talker” a derogatory term in that context.
Both the gospel traditionally attributed to John but certainly not written by John and the first letter claimed to have been written by John but certainly not written by John tell us to obey God’s commandments, which seems good counsel despite the dubious authorship. But what are God’s commands? That list of 613 reasons you are probably a sinner?
Jesus states very clearly that he did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. But his interpretation of the law is far from smooth… it is demanding. When asked to summarize the Law, he said “Love God above all things, and love your neighbor as you love yourself,” which by the way also means you can’t hate yourself. Jesus is then asked “Who is my neighbor?,” leading him to tell the story of the Good Samaritan.
So what is it? The Law of Selflessness and Love? Or the minutia and nit-picking the gospel writers would attribute to the Scribes and Pharisees?
It is a sort-of eternal question. So let me tell you a more contemporary story.
During the 2006-2007 academic year, I completed a Clinical Pastoral Education unit while also continuing my full-time studies in Divinity School. The CPE program was at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, a historic Boston hospital founded to care for poor and elderly women. Just a few years later, the hospital and the healthcare system of which it was a part were sold to a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management. Cerberus created a dummy corporation called Medical Properties Trust. They sold all of the building to this pretend company, allowing them to cash out hundreds of millions of dollars, and agreed to lease back the buildings. All of this is perfectly legal.
By last year, St. Elizabeth’s was deeply entangled in Medicare fraud. Then came December.
Remember that the hospital was originally founded to serve women. A new mother experienced a liver bleed. Medical staff prepared to treat her with an embolism coil, but discovered the device missing. It had been repossessed, and the patient died.
A recent Harvard study found that there was a 25% higher chance of a hospital-acquired negative event for patients in hospitals owned by private equity firms. For the record, one out of four patients is statistically significant. And now private equity firms are buying up all the veterinary clinics, so even Fluffy isn’t safe.
Even in parts of our supposed rational free-market capitalism, like entertainment, there is serious trouble. Families are taking on insane debt to buy tickets to Taylor Swift concerts, while a third of the seats in Major League Baseball stadiums sit empty as prices soar, and that is not just Oakland, where the owners are receiving municipal welfare to move the team. The NBA has banned a player for gambling on his own performance in games, but who could have expected that? Now, let’s go to the DraftKings Halftime Show sponsored by FanDuel…
We end up with 613 laws and 613,000 laws because humans will find news ways to lie, cheat, and steal every single day. It makes me want to embrace my inner Calvinist and the idea of “total depravity,” for every time I think I’ve heard it all, I haven’t.
One reason for that is the intractable problem of libertarianism versus authoritarianism, all is permitted unless explicitly prohibited or all is prohibited unless explicitly permitted. And honestly, I’m not going to tackle that. I am more of a communitarian, but the right balance between individual thriving and communal thriving is subjective, and besides, America’s collective myth may be communal, but that has never been America’s reality, for rugged individualism is the other myth, a mix of genocidal Manifest Destiny, boot straps and sociopathy.
But there is one area we can tackle, and that is the idea that there are parts of our lives that are exempt from morality, carve outs from love and decency.
The most obvious, of course, is business, where reason is supposed to rule the market. But, as we have discussed, actuaries may place a dollar value on human life, but humans generally do not, and humans are anything except rational. We rightly consider it a tragedy if a family has to choose between shelter and healthcare, yet modern pirates steal value they didn’t create and view people as acceptable collateral damage all the time. Most corporate charters include shareholder primacy, a legal requirement that decisions be made, even deadly decisions, based on net profit for the shareholder. And that doesn’t even count the run-away firms owned by individuals and families like the Sacklers, a brood of sociopaths if ever one existed.
In a perverse way, this has been made worse by middle-class investing, by the rise in 401Ks, for many of us own portions of companies, but our investments are passive. We might choose a fund based on ESG principles, “environmental, social, and governance,” but how much do we really know about the far reaches of that one particular multi-national that happens to be using slave labor in China, contractors and shell companies like an ever-morphing Russian nesting doll.
So let’s be clear. God did not say “Do justice, except in financial transactions, where anything goes.” ‘Cause you know what? Many of those 613 laws in the Torah have to do with economic justice. Never mind all that crazy and generous grace in the prophets and in Christ. Economic justice is biblical.
Far more worrying, these days, is the idea that all is fair in politics, that winning is all that matters. We can pin the modern iteration of this on Newt Gingrich, Steve Bannon, and others of their ilk, but a disease needs a host, and the American people have been more than willing. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the alignment of “evangelical” Christianity with ethno-nationalism and the leader of that death cult.
Of course, that sort of make sense. Israelite scripture gives us three great figures, Abraham, Moses, and David. Only one of these has a crown, the usurper and murderer David. A sexual predator on the throne is nothing if not biblical.
God does not excuse evil in the pursuit of power. There is no such thing as “the ends justify the means” in the Bible. It is not there. Evil is evil, and there are no carve outs.
Of course, none of this matters if we are too comfortable to speak out, to call evil evil, if we are too afraid we might upset someone. But consider this: letting your neighbor fall deeper and deeper into sin is not an act of love.
There are rules in bowling and in community, rules that never seem to keep up with the creativity of evil. Maybe we need to be equally creative in our compassion. We are called to do justice, to loving kindness, to walk in humility with the holy. In the end, we are called to just love, exactly as Jesus taught us. Amen.