Live and Let Live

Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone!  Let them go!

For if their purpose is of human origin, it will fail.

But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; 

you will only find yourselves fighting against God.

-Acts 5: 38-39

Once upon a time there was a culture that stood divided.

There were deep divisions among the people; among the leaders; among the teachers, philosophers and theologians.  No one could seem to agree about what was right and wrong, good and bad, and people were generally just a hair shy of breaking out into open hostility if you pushed them a little too far.

On one side you had people who called themselves the House of Hillel, after a great and wise teacher of a previous generation.  They were the progressives, the liberals, the live and let live crowd.  They were the ones who saw that you really couldn't fight the current of history for too long, so you should just figure out how to swim with the Roman sharks.  As long as you could still read your Holy Books and pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, what could Caesar really do to you anyway?

On the other side you had the House of Shammai, named for another great teacher, who was a little more of a headbanger than Hillel, who wanted to fight the power and shake the world with strict dedication to the Law.  The followers of Shammai wanted a revolution, they wanted the good old days back, they clung to their mores like a life raft and kicked at the sharks for all they were worth.

Shammai had it's day, but eventually there were just too many sharks.  When the temple came down in 70 CE, no one wanted to hear the fever dreams of a vengeful god anymore.  Eventually then Shammai became a footnote and Hillel became orthodoxy.

But they both eventually lost.

Without a challenger, Hillel had no fire and all that was left was to drift along with the current, avoiding the sharks, or getting in bed with them.  Hillel survived, but just like Shammai always said would happen, he was never quite what he once was.

But there was someone who had a few things in common with both Hillel and Shammai, who managed to find a different current.  Who drifted along until the sharks stopped swimming, who washed up on a virgin shore and founded a new empire.  Who claimed a new Rabbi, and their Rabbi was no mere human, their Rabbi was God incarnate.  Hillel and Shammai had the stone tablets of the law and the scrolls of the prophets; the new tribe had those as well, plus something new: Jesus of Nazareth.  They had a handful of parables, some peculiar miracle stories, a few strange new sacraments and a lot of talk about a bloody cross and an empty tomb.

What it all stacked up to was a New Covenant, based on the Old Covenant, but founded on grace instead of law, and burning with tongues of the fire of the Holy Spirit.  The New Covenant showed old Hillel and Shammai that they both missed the boat.  Now that they had that out of the way, what could possibly go wrong?

A lot apparently.  Sin is a Hell of thing.

It would seem that the New Covenant was not immune to the same polarizing process that afflicted their Hebrew forerunners.  Does God want us to follow the rules, or does God want us to go with the flow?  A lot depends on how you answer that question.

Even for people who once recognized that there was a way out of one shark infested current, it seems way too easy to get sucked right into another one.  We go through the endless process of choosing up sides, dividing into houses and fighting it out, until one side goes away and the other "wins."

And we all lose.

And we cry out to God: "Lord Jesus, how did you let this happen to your church?"

To which Christ replies: "I didn't call you to fight and win, I called you to stretch out your arms and die, so that in dying you might live.  Weren't you listening to that part?"