My February 9, 2020 sermon in brief, with an additional thought:
A year or so out of high school, one of my sons was a young adult chaperone for a youth mission trip. At one point during the week, I was sent photos. In the middle of one of them was him, directing the mission traffic. The funny part was what he was wearing: a t-shirt picked up from who knows where with two words that said it all for his role that week—with tongue in cheek: Obey me.
A sentiment that every youth leader, chaperone, teacher, or parent secretly dreams of saying to folks in their charge. Simple, to the point, efficient. Except, not really.
I remember the popular bumper sticker a couple of decades ago: "Question Authority," it demanded, with assertive authority of its own—as if you couldn't question its authority.
This is all worth thinking about. When I throw "obedience" into the thesaurus that came with my MacBookPro, here's what comes back: "compliance, acquiescence, tractability (which means being easy to control), amenability; dutifulness, duty, deference, observance of the law/rules; submissiveness, submission, conformity, docility, tameness, subservience, obsequiousness, servility."
Yikes. But that pretty much sums up how we think of it. And I don't want to be any of those—or at least I don't want to admit it if I am. And if that's what we mean by obedience, who among us wants it said at our funeral, "My, she was obedient."
But that definition of obedience is recent, and it's sadly thin. For both the Greek word we translate as obedience and the Latin roots of the English there is much more going on than mere subservience.
Oboedire is the Latin word. It's the same word that we get "audio" from. And there's a clue. It's about sound, speech, face-to-face interaction. It means hearing, listening, responding, with intensity. It implies physical movement toward another. To obey is to lean in, to listen to, to hear with care, and to engage in response. And it means to give authority, or place, or right of attention to another person. The Greek word is even used to describe God—as God hears—or obeys—our prayer.
Hearing beneath hearing. Listening beyond words. Attending deeper than just registering. Seeking understanding before acting. Respecting the other, before merely submitting. Obedience requires mutual regard, recognition, and appreciation of role. Words matter, as does care, and responsibility, and rigor. A relationship of obedience resists deception, lies, and bullying. It respects promises.
It could even be said that this kind of obedience is the key to fidelity and to faithful relationships. It's a rich concept. And it ain't easy.
But for Christians, the Christ we worship is God's obedience to God's creation. He is God leaning in, bridging distance to come toward: touching, hearing, exchanging breath, listening intently. So much so that he is affected by our brokenness, and our ugliness, and our habits of serving power instead of serving life—even to the point that he suffers because of his obedience, even death on a cross by the very ones he loves.
We are saved by Christ's obedience—to God and to us.
In short, this is the way of obedience—for our own lives and for the church: listening intently, thinking carefully, responding with our whole being, as if emptying ourselves into higher truths, and taking the time we need to wrestle with our ignorance, and our distractions, and all that keeps us from hearing—so we might hear the Spirit saying, in that more perfect way: "Obey me."
Additional note: No matter where you land on his final decision, I think that one has to hear Senator Romney's statement this past week regarding his vote in the impeachment hearing as a serious grappling with obedience, and in that way an expression of his faith. So why did the evocation of his faith sound so quaint, or even naïve, to contemporary ears? Perhaps that is, at least in part, because we live in an incredibly accelerated culture when patience and silence for obedience (in this classical sense) are at a minimum, and so there's little space for care in either speaking or listening. On the whole, we seem to only accept or reject—uninformed, without really wrestling with truth.
