SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

October 26, 2008

Matthew 22:34-46

"Space, the final frontier…."  These words are more recognizable to the majority of Americans than the preamble to the Constitution or the opening line of the Gettysburg Address, "Fourscore and seven years ago…."  These words are for our time the immortal words of Captains Kirk, Picard and others from the various reincarnations of the original Star Trek, which is being resurrected again, coming out to a theater near us in May of 2009 with a new movie.  What is it about Star Trek that won't go away?

The original Star Trek, according to the Bible of such things, TV Guide, comes in at number three on the all time top 100 television shows.  There have been more than just a few times in our lives when television programming helped lure us forward in some positive ways.  Star Trek visually pioneered racial and gender inclusiveness by showing us what the future might look like beyond our current cultural biases.  (And who knew at the time that Mr. Zulu was gay?  He and his lifelong partner were just married last week and I understand from the tabloids that Captain James T. Kirk was not invited to the wedding and he is upset.)

Star Trek and the variants that continue to our present day on cable channels -- Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager or Enterprise -- each employed a foundational principle that guided them to go where no person had gone before.  They had a Prime Directive that governed every action and behavior.  It was simple: Don't interfere in the affairs of other planets.  Don't judge, don't meddle, don't try to change others, and don't try to fix what isn't broken.  Don't do anything that might influence or damage the natural course of history for any planet or people.  Do no harm, do good, be present, then leave each place exactly as you find it.  Whenever this principle was obeyed all was well.  Each time the Prime Directive was violated, well, that provided the plot for nearly fifty years of programming. 

How wonderful it was to have a prime directive to fall back upon to help keep the Starfleet Federation focused when Scotty would, inevitably, warn the Captain every time tension would mount, saying, "We've haven't got much time Captain, the nuclear core is overheating!"

And isn't that what we have from Matthew's Jesus this morning, a faith prime directive?  Things have been getting superheated between Jesus and his debate partners, the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees. 

Historically, Matthew is writing during the time, not when Jesus was living, but fifty years later.  What was happening fifty years later is that within the synagogues there was great tension building between two main groups of faithful Jews….the orthodox, regular, conservative Jews and the young whippersnappers, the ones who text during church and who want to have video capabilities in worship and interactive church web sites, who were known in Matthew's days as the followers of the Way of Jesus of Nazareth.  In the time of the writing of the gospel according to Matthew, these two groups were splitting, as it turns out, permanently.

Every Protestant church in the United States knows about congregations and denominations splitting because they can't agree on issues.  This congregation has certainly been no stranger to the living reality of Matthew's gospel tensions.  Matthew's Jesus has been challenged on every contemporary issue except gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered ones, and that is because such terms had not yet entered into the vocabulary in Matthew's time.   In the last couple of weeks Jesus has skirted around what to give to Caesar, the Empire, and the government.  He established a standard of church-state separation and an answer to taxation issues.  He has had to deal with the issue of divorce and who will be married to whom in heaven.  

Matthew's Jesus, incidentally, has been doing very well in the exchange and the only reason Jesus has not addressed text messaging is because in the Ten Commandments it never says, "Thou shall not text during worship."  My number is 345-6940.  Just don't expect me to respond, I'm busy.  The Ten Commandments does say something about texting while driving.  Not paying attention and having an accident to property or person or even killing one's self or others because we are not paying attention, we all know the answer to that question.  Killing is contrary to one of the most significant of the Ten Commandments.  Texting morality, texting behavior is easily alluded to in the interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

What was happening in the midst of Matthew's gospel writing was that the faith structure of what it had historically meant to be a Jew was crumbling right before their eyes.  In the immediate context what it meant to be a Jew was centered on the temple rituals.  For the last four hundred years, since the Babylonian captivity was over and the temple rebuilt, to be a Jew meant coming to Jerusalem and worshipping in the temple.  But both the temple and Jerusalem and the whole country of Israel had been wiped off the map and every contemporary Jewish leader killed by the mighty Roman empire and Caesar.

What happens after a major national trauma?  One of the easiest things to predict is folks get more conservative and harken back to that which makes them feel most secure.  But there is always that sub-group that wants to risk being more flexible, more responsive to the new world order.  In Matthew's time the synagogues became very conservative, finding refuge in tradition and the traditional interpretations.  And then there were those liberal Jews who were beginning to be called Christians, those who followed the way of Jesus, who were saying, "Hey! There is a new way forward through this horrible time, a creative way to reach out and grow like never before."

Eight years after Matthew's Gospel is written, in the year 88 of the current era, the synagogues split and those following the still very Jewish way of Jesus were expelled from the synagogues.  They could no longer agree on what the prime directive was.  Jesus said it was, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.'  This is the greatest commandment.  And a second is like it:  'you shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"

I'm something of a Jesus freak.  When push comes to shove over societal or religious issues, I find myself going back time and again and searching for what it is most likely that Jesus actually said.  You and I are honest enough to know that is not always an easy task.  There are several places in our Gospels where later generations have gone back in time and wrote in things they wanted Jesus to have said.  Biblical interpretation is a wonderful art form and is a dangerous place to allow literalists to roam free.

"Wouldn't it be glorious," Anna Carter Florence states, "if we could recite Jesus great commandment during the next spat of petty issues?  Wouldn't it be a great relief to have something huge and firm and reliable to lean on, even as it gently pries us open?"  In so many of the debates over significant issues in church, society or in the world, sometimes we just need to stop micro-managing and navel gazing.  Sometimes we just need to step back and look at the big picture and ask, "Are we loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind, here?  Do we love our neighbors as ourselves?  If not…what needs to change?"

I don't need to break away from folks who disagree with me.  But I do need for both myself and other folks to be loving even in the midst of disagreeing.  It is not loving to tell folks with whom you disagree that they are going to hell.  That's mean and derogatory.  It is not loving God with all our minds, I think, to discount the high probability that, however creation began, an evolutionary process has been at work ever since and to hold all people who believe in evolution as spiritually suspect.  In the midst of honest critique we are required to be loving -- both to people's faces and behind their backs.

In the movie Forest Gump , the famous line is, "stupid is as stupid does."  So it is with us who claim to be persons of faith.  Loving is as loving does.  Jesus goes on to tell us who we should love with our words, our deeds, our most secret thoughts.  Jesus says we will best be known by how we love our enemies.

Historians remind us that one of the most hated Presidents that we have ever had -- one of them is our current President -- coming in at number four is the one that always surprises me: Abraham Lincoln.  Times were tough and he made a decision to maintain unity by calling us to war that killed more Americans than all Americans killed in all other wars combined.  Many argue that he became a leader against slavery against his preferences.  A hated man has become nearly a saint.

Lincoln, I believe, never was a member of a church.  He said once that he'd join a church that actually stated its creed as, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and you shall love your neighbor as yourself."  He died still hunting.  I hope that the folks we have the integrity to argue with and disagree with are blessed not only by our positions but even more so by our love of them.

Love.  It is the final frontier, to go where so few have gone before.

Amen.