Becoming a Mature Christian 6

Give yourself (and others) a break  Luke 5:33-39

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This is an interesting group of sayings.  Luke gives Jesus credit for saying all of them but it was the writer Luke who put them all together in this paragraph.  What connection did he see in them?  I won’t pretend to read the mind of Luke, let alone Jesus, but the connection that came to my mind was, “there is a time and place for everything.”  Several years ago, this truth was reinforced to me by Stan McKay a few years before he become the Moderator of the United Church.  We were at an event together and some participants were decrying the excess of our meals when others on the streets outside the church where we were meeting were going hungry.  Stan, in his wise quiet way simply said, “In my culture, we know that there is a time and place for feasting.”   (Stan is from the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba.)   

In our striving to become mature, perfect, self-aware, self-actualized, whole (use whatever word you want) maybe it is important to remember that there is a time and a place not only for striving, but also for resting, not only for ‘doing the right thing’ but also for letting go and feasting.  When life is throwing us a curve, maybe we need to give ourselves, and others we love a bit of a break.  When that curve lasts two years??? we don’t want that ‘break’ to become a habit.  How do you decide when is the time and place for feasting? 

 Do we become what we do?  Luke 6:1-11

When I was a child, we never went to the store on Sunday.  We never even went to the corner store for a jug of milk.  Six quarts were purchased on Saturday to get the family of seven milk drinkers through to Monday.  One didn’t shop on Sunday.  One Sunday when I was a young adult, Ross and I went to church where a former minister of mine was preaching.  His wife invited us to join them for lunch at their home.  On the way from the church to their home, they stopped to get some bread for sandwiches at a local store.  So, I learned, good people sometimes do shop on Sunday.  How to keep Sunday a ‘holy day’ is something that has bothered me over the years.

I wonder when Jesus was stretching the rules of the Sabbath whether he ever struggled with the choices he made.  He justified his actions by referring back to an incident in 1 Samuel 21 where David convinced the priest to give him some of the holy bread.  Satisfying real hunger or healing pain seems much easier to justify than going shopping.  This passage pushes us to look at the roots of our routine behaviours, to question not just the routine but the why of that routine.  It could also challenge us to think about the effect that new behaviours will have on us.  

Our behaviours not only reflect who we are, but they shape who we are. Being honest with ourselves about the why of our behaviours can help us evaluate their value and/or their harm.  Next week we enter the Season of Lent—a good time for us to practice any changes that our exploration of self-awareness might have sparked.