A Shock to the System--June 28, 2021

A Shock to the System--June 28, 2021

"Now if perfection had been attainable through the levitical priesthood--for the people received the law under this priesthood--what further need would there have been to speak of another priest arising according to the order of Melchizedek, rather than one according to the order of Aaron? For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well." [Hebrews 7:11-12]

Sometimes you have to do more than just replace one broken piece; sometimes the whole system needs to be changed.  And Jesus has come, not as a new replacement cog in the same old machine--he brings a whole new creation with him.

And honestly, that's scary to a lot of us.  Keeping and maintaining a routine we know is at least familiar.  But replacing it altogether with a new way of doing things... that makes us nervous.  I get it. I mean, we're all creatures of habit.  We get fussy when our computers or phones install a software update, and we have to learn a whole new arrangement of buttons and screens and processes--even when those are clearly meant to make our technology work better.  

People (at least the ones who controlled the levers of power) were furiously opposed to big changes in their way of life in the American South when the civil rights movement called for an end to Jim Crow and segregation, because they knew it would mean a change to the systems they had built their lives around.  Even folks who considered themselves nice, Christian, and "without a racist bone in their bodies" were upset at the idea of having their order of the world shaken by replacing an old system with a new one, even if some part of them deep down understood that it was wrong to disadvantage Black neighbors in their schools, businesses, and housing options. 

For that matter, reaching back centuries to what we now call the Protestant Reformation, there were plenty of folks who saw abuse and corruption in the church of the medieval era, but who didn't want to go pulling at threads to speak up about them, because they knew that once you pulled at the thread of saying, "Why are we raising funds for extravagant building projects by selling people get-out-of-purgatory papers called indulgences?" you were going to unravel entire theological systems based on earning and meriting God's grace rather than receiving grace as a completely free gift.  Part of why many were afraid of joining reform movements like Martin Luther's (or Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, Wesley, and leaders in other places) was that they realized that they were calling for a whole new systemic way of understanding the world and God ourselves, and folks were scared about all that newness.  It's always easier to slap a band-aid on something and wish it would go away than to do the honest work of dismantling what is broken and building something new.  But it's never a wise move in the long run.

So much of human history has been just that, though--us trying to tape or paper over things that were deeply broken, rather than seeing where a whole new system was needed--a whole new way of ordering our lives and shared world.  And when voices come along saying that we need more than a replacement of a single part, but that the whole mechanism isn't working anymore, we tend to want to silence (or even crucify) those voices.  There's a terrible truth to that line of the Joker's in the movie The Dark Knight:  "Nobody panics when things go according to plan--even if 'the plan' is horrifying."  Slavery lasted for centuries in this country because folks accepted and then became invested in the system it was built on, and then legal segregation lasted a hundred years after that because people--perhaps nice, but often cowardly--were afraid of envisioning a new system where things were different.  And today we're all invested to one degree or another in a system where one person can order anything to be shipped to their house overnight on a whim while others go hungry at night, a system in which I can complain about not having enough options for shows to watch on my rectangles of technology while other folks are fleeing from crushing poverty in their home countries.  Why don't things change, if we can all agree that hunger or poverty or greed or violence or racism or xenophobia are bad things?  Because at some level, we have become invested in a system that operates with those bad things in place--and we are afraid of a shock to the systems we benefit from.

I want to suggest that the arrival of Jesus on the stage of human history is about a change of systems, rather than merely replacing one faulty piece with an identical new one.  The writer of Hebrews sees something like that, even down to the level of the kind of priesthood Jesus brings.  Our author says that the old system--what we call the "levitical priesthood" because it was ostensibly built on the family line of the tribe of Levi--was itself insufficient for humanity's needs.  It wasn't just that you had one or two bad priests who were "bad apples" or didn't do their jobs well--it was that the whole system wasn't really able to deal with the estrangement between God and humanity.  It was passable for a long time as an institution in ancient Israel's history because it reasonably pointed toward the reality of a God who forgave sin and called for justice and righteousness, but it was never the fix it sold itself as.  There was always a need for a better system--a whole new kind of priesthood.  And Jesus, the author of Hebrews says, brings that whole new system, grounded in himself.  The writer of Hebrews knows that we don't just need a new person to sacrifice animals in a new way, or to light incense or wear robes with better technical proficiency.  We have needed a whole new system--even though it is scary for humans to have an old system dismantled because we were invested in it.

So today let's be honest about the courage it takes to follow Jesus.  Following Jesus will call forth from us the bravery to imagine new systems, new arrangements, and new ways to organize our common life, and it will mean the dismantling of old systems--even ones we have gotten invested in.  But if we can now look back and see other times in human history when we needed nothing less than a systemic overhaul, then maybe we can dare to open our lives up to the ways Jesus will rearrange things among us today.

Lord Jesus, bring your newness in all the places we need it.