When I was in seminary, I had a professor who used the term, “huckster religion” to describe people he thought were peddling theology that sounded good, but was not really true to the gospel.  Example:  The famous guote, “God helps those who help themselves.”  Well, that may be true to a certain extent.  But it’s not in the Bible.  It’s attributed to Benjamin Franklin from the 1736 Farmer’s Almanac.  If we were going to sum up what the Bible says, it’s probably more along the lines of “God helps those who CAN’T help themselves!”

Another example:  All you need is love.  No offense to the Beatles, but that is an example of what marriage counselors call “idealistic distortion”—looking at things through rose colored glasses.  If you want to experience the limits of love, try being loving to a wasp or bee.  Odds are good you’re going to get stung.

Tomorrow we start a new school year here at Lima.  Our Bus Stop and Lima Christian Nursery School teachers are so excited to have students returning to the building.  I took this photo in the After-Kindergarten classroom.  It says, “Let’s Get Along”.  What a great goal!  But the After-Kindergarten teachers know it will take more than love to make sure everyone gets along.  It will take rules.  It will take structure and schedules and organization.  And because there is always more than one child here at a time, it will definitely take fairness.

Many years ago there was a popular book called, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum.  It starts out like this:

 

All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten.

 

ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School.  These are the things I learned:

Share everything.

Play fair.

Don’t hit people.

Put things back where you found them.

Clean up your own mess.

Don’t take things that aren’t yours.

Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

 

The second thing that came to Robert Fulghum’s mind was, “play fair”, and if you think about it, almost all of what he mentions have to do with fairness.  Well, not the warm cookies and cold milk part, but putting things back where you found them?  It’s not fair to the next person who might be looking for the scissors or glue or whatever it is you used if you don’t bother to put it away in the right spot.  Clean up your own mess?  It’s not fair to expect someone else to do that for you.  Same goes for flushing!  If we’re all going to get along, it’s going to take more than love.  We are going to need a big dose of fairness.  And that is going to mean setting some boundaries.

The expression, “Good fences make good neighbors” isn’t in the Bible, but Paul’s words in our section of scripture for today come pretty close.  People who had genuine encounters with the good news of the gospel were trying very hard to be faithful followers Jesus’ commands, be witnesses for Christ in Rome and beyond, and be people who sacrificed for the greater good.  But huckster religion is not a new thing.  It was around in Paul’s day, too.  There were people who saw the success of the early Church as an opportunity for promoting their own agendas instead of Jesus’ agenda.  They were using bits and pieces of the truth, and using that to make trouble.  Paul says these ringleaders, “aren’t above using pious sweet talk to dupe unsuspecting innocents.”

At the heart of this is a fairness issue.  Paul was very concerned that some people were being taken advantage of.  Their trust was being used against them, and instead of being encouraged to sacrifice for the good of God’s Kingdom, they were being encouraged to sacrifice for the good of the hucksters.  Paul did not want anyone being lured away from the real message of Jesus.  He also did not want to see the people who were working so hard, the people of integrity and true faith, get robbed of the fruit of their labor.  So he issues a pretty harsh sounding teaching:  give these hucksters a wide berth.  Stay away from the troublemakers.  Draw a line between the healthy people and the unhealthy people, and do not let them destroy the good you have worked so hard for.

Now, I’m sure I’m not the only one who is thinking, “Umm…excuse me, didn’t Pastor Karen just say last week that we are supposed to pass the love, not the judgment?”  I know, right?  Studying the book of Romans is NOT a cakewalk.   There is much to wrestle with in this book.  It’s hard to swallow this idea that there may be times when the most loving thing we can do is to set a firm boundary and part ways with someone whose behavior is taking a toll on us or our community.  It sounds so judgy, and we are supposed to avoid being judgy!  But Paul is not the first to give this teaching.  He is simply restating Jesus’ teaching from Matthew 15.  For Jesus, protecting the mission of the church was such an important priority, he commanded his followers to set limits around those whose behavior threatened the well-being of the Body of Christ.

This summer I picked up a volume called, “A Pretty Good Person” by Lewes Smedes.  I have read almost every single book Lewes Smedes wrote, and when I get to heaven, I really hope I get to sit down and talk to him and tell him how much I have appreciated his writing.  I like his writing because he offers a realistic take on what loving our neighbors as ourselves looks like in real life.  In his book, “A Pretty Good Person”, he concludes that one of the most important qualities we must develop if we are going to be a pretty good person is fairness.  We must learn to love in ways that protect ourselves and others from harm.  He tells the story of a mother whose son was killed by a drunk driver.  For years she harbored hatred toward the driver in her heart and realized, he was taking her life, too.  She went to see her priest, and gradually, she was able to forgive the drunk driver who killed her son. But the priest said, you cannot stop at forgiveness.  He urged her to do something like start a chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving to send the message that she did not intend to tolerate drunk driving.

For love to be fair, it must be as intolerant of evil as it is forgiving.  When Jesus spoke to the woman caught in adultery, he said, I do not condemn you—in other words, your sins are forgiven. But then he said, “go and sin no more.”  If we are to obey Jesus’ command that we love our neighbors as ourselves, we have an obligation to set limits around what we will tolerate.

Our dog Jenkins has discovered that he likes eating tennis balls.  Last summer, we ended up at the emergency vet and narrowly avoided surgery.  We probably should have said, that’s it, no more tennis balls.  We are going to set a limit.  But he really likes to play outside, and he has an amazing knack for finding tennis balls everywhere we go.  So instead of limiting Jenkins, we put a limit around ourselves:  no looking at our phones when we have him outside so we can watch him closely.  But wouldn’t you know, exactly a year later, he ate a ball again.  This time we were able to go to our regular vet, and there was less suffering all around—meaning, it only cost about half as much money as it did last year.  Our regular vet took x-rays and emailed them to us, though, in case Jenkins got sicker over the weekend and we had to take him back to the emergency place.  Thankfully we avoided that, but I was determined to find a way to put this experience to good use.

Well guess what Lewes Smedes goes on to say about love?  “Love needs fairness the way a body needs a backbone.  Love is soft.  It needs spine to make it work well.”  I’m assuming no one watching today is a veterinarian, but I think all of us can recognize that this x-ray shows a backbone, some ribs, and the pelvis.  In all four x-rays they took of Jenkins’ stomach, the backbone is prominently featured.  The backbone is such an essential body part, that it needs to be an essential part of every look inside ourselves.

When we got Jenkins as a puppy, I told Phil that I really wanted a “lovey dovey dog”.  I wanted a friendly dog that liked to snuggle.  And Jenkins does that.  But what makes him such a great dog is that he’s not just soft and cuddly.  He’s got backbone.  He’s got zip.  He’s got his own ideas about what makes life so good for him, just as I have my own ideas about what makes life so good for me.

So we are going to have to find a way to get along, Jenkins and me, that is fair.  He loves to play ball.  It’s not fair to deny him that.  It’s also not fair to blame him if, unsupervised, he chews up things and eats them.  He’s a dog!  He will never make the connection between eating rubber one day and feeling terrible the next.  For love to be fair, I am going to have to forgive him, and also set firm limits and be very vigilant with him.  Love is as intolerant of evil as it is forgiving.  Love has backbone.

It would be really great if, in order to get along well in our families, churches, and communities, all we need to do is put up a sign that says, “Let’s get along.”  But life doesn’t work that way, and ultimately, getting along is not our mandate from God.  God’s invitation to us is to partner with God to make God’s kingdom come on earth as it in heaven.  That means, when we encounter injustice, we are called to work for justice.  When we see exploitation, we should set protective limits.  When we become aware of false teaching and deception, we will have to speak the truth in love.  We have not been called to this crucial moment in the history of the Church to “get along”.   We have been called to be the hands and feet of Christ, to bring change and transformation and salvation to a world vulnerable to sin and its consequences.  That means we will need to be the backbone of Christ, too.

This summer when we started Romans, we noted that Paul wrote this letter in order to encourage the Christians in Rome.  He wanted his perspective to encourage them, just as the Romans’ experiences were an encouragement to Paul.  Even our scripture passage today, which Paul calls “one final word of counsel”, is meant to be an encouragement.  Yes, we are called to pass the peace, not the judgment.  But we are also given permission—no, given a mandate—to set limits around the people whose behavior is damaging to ourselves or to the body of Christ.  We cannot walk with Jesus into healing and new life if we remain loyal to protecting the people and communities that have contributed to our harm.  There is no discipleship without backbone.

My son-in-law EJ worked construction during college, and when something didn’t line up just right, his boss would often say, “Good enough for who it’s for!”  It would be great if everything were perfect, but that’s not the world we live in.  I wish I could be a perfect person, but I would settle for just being a pretty good person!  I’m still working on it, and one thing I need to get better at is loving fairly.  Or as the prophet Micah said, love mercy, AND do justice, AND walk humbly with God.  Amen.