No Rules, Just Response

Growing up I loved the musical Grease, and in the climactic drag race scene between Danny Zucco of the T-Birds and Leo Balmudo of the Scorpions, just before they take off, Leo looks over at Danny and says out of his car, “Rules are, there ain’t no rules.”

It’s such a cheesy line, and me and my siblings would always say it to each other and laugh at how ridiculous it sounds, especially when you say it with the same dramatic tone of Leo in the film. “Rules are, there there ain’t no rules.”

But I was reminded of that line as I was preparing this sermon today, because over and over in all of our scripture texts, we either have characters breaking or bending the rules, or we’re being told by Paul in Romans that we’ve been set free from the law, or we could say, the rules of sin and of death.

Take for instance Jacob in our story from Genesis today. We heard last week about the love story between Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob’s parents, and this week we have their birth story, and after their waiting, God blesses Isaac and Rebekah with two sons, twins Esau and Jacob. Even at birth we know this won’t be the conventional, play by the rules, firstborn inheritance story as Jacob comes out of Rebekah’s womb with his hand on Esau’s heel, thus indicating Jacob’s desire to upset Esau’s status as the firstborn son and to subvert the social customs and expectations that would favor the firstborn. Later in the story, Jacob gets his opportunity to steal his older brother’s birthright. He exploits Esau’s tiredness after he comes home from a long day in the field vulnerable and famished. In Esau’s weakened state, Jacob convinces Esau to swear his birthright to Jacob in exchange for some stew that Jacob has prepared. Jacob seized this opportunity here to break the birthright rules, less than compassionate to his brother’s needs, and in a rather deceitful way if you ask me.

And while I don’t want to emulate Jacob’s compassionless deceit, in the spirit of this narrative I’m not going to preach by the rules today, and instead of preaching the text, the parable of the sower today in our Gospel, I am going to preach against this text, because I’m not going to lie, this text gives me some anxiety when I start wondering what kind of soil I am in this parable.

Because reading this text at face value can leave you with the overwhelming fear that you might not be like the good soil. Like, how do we even assess what kind of shape our soil is in? I don’t know about you, but for me, all of a sudden, my mind rushes to the conclusion that maybe God has been planting seeds in me, and they haven’t lived because the soil of my life is rocky or thorny.

But when my mind goes to this place of fear and anxiety, the grace that I turn to can be summed up in a quote by the great Jeff Goldblum from the classic film Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”

What I mean by this is that I know that life is stronger than death, so instead of fretting over the soil of my life and trying and failing to make it ready to receive the seeds that God is sowing, I can trust that no matter my soil, life will find a way. Tupac Shakur wrote a poem that eloquently captures the essence of this resilient lifeforce, it's called The Rose That Grew from Concrete and it goes like this,

Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature's law is wrong it
learned to walk without having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.

In the third line Tupac writes that the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete proved nature's laws wrong. In other words, the rose doesn’t play by the rules of nature and it grows where it’s not “supposed” to grow. It grows despite being planted in a crack in the concrete. That’s the way of God, making a way where there is no way.

And that’s why God, the sower, is not stingy with the seeds because God can bring life from anywhere, even the most death-stricken places. God’s abundant sowing of seed from the outside looks like recklessness, especially in light of today’s agricultural practices where farmers plant just the right amount of seed in just the right soil with just the right spacing in between using GPS technology to produce the best harvest. In contrast, God, our sower, is just spreading seed upon all soil, even in the cracks in the concrete. And to our efficiency-minded brains, that’s just wasteful. God is breaking all the rules of restraint and efficiency, but in God’s reality, the rules of scarcity don’t apply to God, because in God's reality there is only abundance. Whether the soil is ideal or not, God spreads the seed liberally because God knows that life will find a way out of no way. The rules of death cannot stop life from happening, no bird can snatch that seed of life, no sun can scorch the roots of that life, no thorn can choke that life from finding a way.

And what a counter-cultural contrast this provides to our current world where the rules of sin death seemingly have a hold on us, and we witness fascist appeals to “law and order” and politicians falling over each other trying to establish themselves as THE “law and order” candidate. Especially in response to the recent uprising of Black Lives Matter protests, we’ve heard this law and order phrase repeated over and over. Just a cursory dive into the history of this phrase reveals its roots in racism. Using the southern strategy to increase support among white voters by appealing to racism as racial tensions were deepened following the end of Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement, and the race riots of the 60s, Richard Nixon was the first politician to really leverage this law and order phrase to win the presidency in ‘68. And it’s not just the history of this phrase that is problematic, but the real, racist oppression of mass incarceration and police brutality that is waged upon our black, indigenous, and siblings of color when this phrase is wielded by those in power. It leaves me wondering how can we as Christians even call for law and order and trust such a racist system to deliver justice?

So instead of calling for law and order, I say we must call out law and order for what it is, a racist dog whistle. Because as followers of Christ we have been set free from the laws of sin and death and in the famous words of Leo Balmudo from Grease, “the rules are there ain’t no rules,” just our response to the love and grace we have experienced through Christ's death and resurrection. Christ IS victorious over death and has sown in us a victory garden with seeds of freedom planted in the soil of our lives, watered by our baptism, that give way to glorious, life-giving fruit. Through the example of rule-breakers like Jacob, Paul, and even God, our profligate seed sower, we are invited to also not follow the rules, and instead follow Christ and respond to the love and grace we have in Christ by extending that same love and grace to others. Amen.