NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE

I wonder sometimes how often Jesus’ disciples got into scraps with one another. They were a pretty hodgepodge group of guys, and even the dullest of personalities have been known to clash. Big-mouthed, burly fishermen and straight-laced, don’t you see what you’re doing tax collectors – Jesus handpicked them all. They had to have walked loaded with baggage. They had to have had soul-struggles knotted into their sandals, unlaced in scuffles in the dust. Having the Prince of Peace living and breathing beside you twenty-four seven is no guarantee that everyone is going to agape.

There are things that make my blood boil, hanging my own soul-struggles like an iron pot over a fire. I get that Somebody find me a whip kind of feeling. I badly want to flip over some tables and not even help to clean up after. It always feels like righteous indignation but of course it rarely, if ever, is. Most of the time, I have to dig through a mile-high pile of bat shit pride before I can even  get a glimpse at the root of it.

I have an aversion to people who carry rulers – stiff, flat things that measure off life in millimeters, that mark the straight and narrow, that find their way to a child’s backside when they step out of line. I see in their eyes, You just need a good spanking.

It’s not rules that I don’t like – rules are boundaries. People who have been violated have love affairs with fences. If I were being crucified, the sign over my head would likely read, No Trespassing. Rules help people to get along with one another, keep order and structure, remind us that we belong to one another and that life is not all about us. Rules teach us respect for ourselves and for others, teach us obedience and what authority means, give security, safety and stability. Rules are a protection, a structure, a shield. They are a well-shingled roof over our head, and clean walls around us.

Rules are boundaries, and I am all about boundaries. Without Law there can be no Grace, and I am all about Grace. God save us from a world without rules.

What sets my blood bubbling is Rules. Capital R. When the Rule stops being a roof and a wall, and becomes the foundation – the thing everything is built upon, the last word, the period at the end of the sentence. When adherence to the Rule takes precedence over the moral imperative to carry one another’s burdens and to love one another. When the journey of a mile in another’s moccasins is subverted by the need for socks.

There are Rules. Period.

Rules are solid foundations – you can sink your feet deep into them like wet concrete and sing with all confidence, I will not be shaken, I will not be moved. When you have a Rule, you are battle ready – almost always inherited, revered, passed down from generations, Rule is the sword of Law. When you wield it, at your back stands an impenetrable army of cement-blocked soldiers, fixed and immovable. You own the last word. WOA. Hold up! Nobody is trying to OFFEND you. This is not MY opinion - this is a RULE.

When you have a Rule, you don’t have to read between the lines. Kindness, compassion and empathy become the extra that you do – not required, but extended at will because you are in a good mood, well-intentioned and perhaps actually a good person. Truthfully, you don’t have to care much about another soul to be classified as a good person. There is no law that says you have to care – even a nurse is not required to care.

When you are swinging a Rule you don’t have to stop and take the time to consider whether your words or your actions might be a serrated knife into somebody’s spirit-spine on any particular morning. You don’t have to look in their eyes and see desperation, maxed-out, hanging by a thread. You’re right. Clearly you’re right. Everybody can see plain as day that you’re right.

Obedience to Rule is freedom for the keeper of it – freedom from guilt for not stopping to lend your gifting and resources to another person for the monumental task of trying to actually pull their wailing donkey out of a deep, dark well. Whose donkey falls into a well? How does that even happen? Are you giving it water? I’m not saying you’re necessarily doing anything wrong, but my donkey has never been in a well, ever. We have Rules. OMG. Is your donkey not wearing SHOES?

When you serve Rules, you don’t have to spend any energy wrestling with God or woman, getting all sweaty and sore trying to get a good hold on Holy. You don’t have to set the motives of your impure heart onto the God-scale, ponder the vastness of the created universe that exists between bone and marrow, or unravel your too much tension knitted mind back to the point of the dropped stitch. You don’t ever have to feel your heart break for another person and ask on their behalf, Why, God, why? You already know why – they didn’t follow the Rules. Period.

It is a toxic mentality, it is demoralizing, and on this I have completely lost the will to try to see it from the other side. Perhaps that’s one of those good God things that died in me this year – taking walk-abouts in other people’s shoes. God has corked the flow of Grace for that. I’ve seen one too many women literally damned to hell for cutting their hair, for wearing pants, and for wearing open-toed shoes to church. Don’t get me started on the perils of dancing. We wouldn’t know a proper Rule if it spanked us.

I have been a woman at the end of every known to man resource, forcing myself to get out of bed, digging deeper than Hades for the will to be kind, to not take it out on my children, to not drop the ball on anything that really, truly matters. Armed with a slingshot and not a Solid Rock in sight, in a battle to the death against generational curses. Poor in spirit. Not feeling blessed. I have narcissistically prioritized my own needs in my children – compassion, expression and choice. I have wrapped myself sticky like a fly in a web, surrendered to the bloodletting of faith, hope and love. I’ve been bent low, back down into the Hades hole, under the weight of Rules like, Thou Shalt Wear Socks.

Always with the socks. I like the way Jesus said it – Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

Jesus did not go out of his way to break the rules – he paid his taxes and he obeyed his mother, who may or may not have forced him to keep his five year old feet booted in a library. But Jesus understood that at the heart of God, the point of it all, was people – broken, burdened, mind-twisted, world-weary people seeking out Love and to be fully known. He looked them in the eyes, and he really saw them. I think Jesus fully grasped that when your ship is going down one of the first things thrown over the side of the boat is Rules, and that the only thing that can even hope to float you is Grace.

I do wonder a lot about Jesus – what he was like, really. I wonder if he had any friends, back when he was a boy, back when he was hanging out in the temple, not out kicking cans and rocks, not joining any clubs. I wonder if people thought he was kinda weird, gossiped about him, scape-goated him, told their kids not to play with him. I wonder if he was good at everything or if the Father measured out his gifts, gave him a little less to work with, forced him to draw from Spirit. I wonder if he struggled with grammar, with the difference between the tenses – Past, Present, Future – and if he ever had to practice, practice, practice and do it again.

I wonder if being so attuned to the Spirit, all senses abuzz and aware of everything, gave his body temple sensory issues – caused his collar to chronically itch the back of his neck, made him struggle to sit both feet on the floor at the table, gave him an aversion to anything too soft on his skin or cinched too tightly at the waist, caused him to say, Who touched me? I wonder if he fidgeted to distraction over anything that came between his travelling shod with the Gospel of Peace feet and the grass and stone earth to which his flesh would never turn.

It’s impossible to know. And not that it matters, but of this I am almost certain – Jesus did not wear socks.