In today's gospel reading, Jesus is having problems with religious folks. That's hardly worth noting seeing how often it happened. Maybe we've just become numb to it after hearing it so much, but there is something rather odd about how much Jesus runs afoul of the religious authorities. We sometimes obscure this by viewing the Pharisees and others as some sort of corrupt monsters. But in truth, they were part of a Jewish reform movement, and they probably functioned in many towns a lot like the local Protestant pastor once functioned in small town America.Maybe we don't pay much attention to how Jesus troubled religious authorities, and how he violated the plain reading of Old Testament laws, because pastors such as myself are also "religious authorities, working to maintain a religious apparatus, to hold together some sort of consensus about what it means to be God's people. And folks like Jesus cause a lot of trouble when they show up at the church.
What are we to do with this Jesus who shows up proclaiming news so good that religious rules and customs can't be allowed to get in the way? Especially for me, a pastor who is part of religious institution, employed by one of its congregations, what does it mean to proclaim and follow someone who so often infuriated those trying to manage the religious institutions of their day?
I don't think such questions are unique to our time. I suspect that those who work in the church, as well as many church members, have always had occasions when the call to serve God gets distorted into serving the church. And the two are not one in the same.
I've always heard and believed that the most dangerous idols -- meaning anything that becomes a substitute for God -- are those that get dressed up in religious clothing. I'm not saying that the church is an idol, but it certainly can become one.
Lord, help me serve you; help me follow Jesus, even when that means running afoul of the church.
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