Today’s Scripture Reading (February
10, 2015): Titus 1
We like our
rules. On a large scale, rules keep the playing field level, allowing all of us
to have at least a chance to win. So the outrage over “deflategate” as the 2015
Super Bowl approached threw many people into a frenzy. And it wasn’t about who
was going to win the Super Bowl, the question was ‘had the New England Patriots
been doing this for a long period of time?’ That is the question that has sent
a number of math people into the stats of the game, coming up with the
conclusion that in 2006, something happened in New England. All in a sudden
they stopped fumbling the ball. Up until that season they had been a fairly
average team, but after 2006 something changed – the ball seemed to be glued to
them. All in a sudden, they far outclassed the rest of the league in terms of
being able to hold onto the ball. And people began to ask of this change happened
because that was the moment that the Patriots began using slightly deflated
balls (a deflated ball is much easier to hold onto than one that is properly
inflated.) Did New England win not because they were better, but because they
were more willing to break the rules? It also caused one reporter to wonder if
properly inflated balls in the 2015 Super Bowl game might mean that New England
would break the record for most fumbles in a game, a record held by the Buffalo
Bills with eight fumbled balls on route to a 52-17 loss to the Dallas Cowboys
in 1993 - something which, of course, did not happen as New England beat Seattle 28-24 in spite of properly inflated balls.
But rules
don’t always work that way. Sometimes rules keep us down. Rosa Parks might be
one of the best examples of that kind of a rule breaker. On December 1, 1955 in
Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for civil disobedience when she
refused to give up her seat in the “colored” section of the bus to a white
person, after the white section of the bus had filled up. Rosa Parks was not
the first to speak out against bus segregation, but her act of disobedience did
not just get her arrested, it sent shock waves throughout the segregated south
of the United States. And today there are so many ways in which our world is a
better place to live simply because Rosa Parks, and others like her, decided to
break the rules.
In
Christianity, we celebrate our own rule breakers. And one of our foremost rule
breakers was the Apostle Paul. Paul led the charge against the segregation
between the Jews and the non-Jews, regardless of color, in the Judea of his day.
His reputation for being a rule breaker was so great that he was arrested in
Jerusalem just because he was seen in the company of a Greek man, Trophimus
from the Greek city of Ephesus, and because of Paul’s reputation the
authorities assumed that Paul had brought Trophimus into the temple – something
that was strictly against the law. Paul sought for an equality between the Jew
and the Gentile, and really an equality among all of the races of the world.
So as Paul
writes to Titus, he reminds the pastor that Christians must always be on guard
against those who want to use rules and laws to keep other people in a
subservient positions. The early Christian Church had been infiltrated by
Pharisees who saw the beauty of Christianity, but insisted that it must remain
a Jewish religion – after all, the Messiah was the possession of the Jews.
Keeping Christianity Jewish would also benefit those who were responsible for
collecting fees from believers for Jewish rites. But for Paul, there was no
room for this kind of behavior. This Jewish teacher stood arm in arm with his
Gentile counterparts as equals in a world that had left this kind of unfair
regulations far behind. Paul needed Titus, and anyone else who might read the
letter, to simply remember that, and fight for the equality of all people – we are,
after all, all God’s children.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Titus 2
& 3
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