The Laws of God

Luke 13:10-17 and Words from Oscar Romero

August 24, 2025

By Nicole M. Lamarche

Thank you again for being here, I invite you to take some deeper breaths,

reminding us to never get too far from our breath.

As you are moved join me in a spirit of prayer. God, Love, Light, Creator

and co-creator with us what shall be, where we need a turn toward

gratitude, help us to take in all that is good. We give thanks for our lives, for

this day, for this place for this people. Expand our sense of gratitude and

joy. Open us to hear whatever we need to today. May the words of my

mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our

Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I have been wondering if some of us have idolized what is legal, which

leads us to ask the wrong questions or consider just part of the picture,

making decisions from incomplete information at the very least. But the

problem with this, at least for me and many in my coming of age and

maybe yours too, what is legal and what is right were presented as the

same thing. Don’t get me started about the DARE Program, that is a great

example!

We are living in a time when we are off the rails, so it’s hard to know what is

guiding our shared life together, other than a consolidation of power,

domination seems to be the strategy of the day. For some the truth doesn’t

matter, painful history and facts themselves are negotiable. I found myself

wanting to shout, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their

own facts.” Expertise tossed aside; science is dismissed. So today I feel

moved to talk about the difference between what is legal and what is right.

I confess I have wanted to have this conversation with you for a while now

but I knew I would get it wrong and so from the get-go let’s just say I have

already failed. That’s done. For my personality type that is just really hard.

It’s impossible to get it right; I put it off. But I took vows and made promises

about 20 years ago, related to what I would commit to with my ordination

when taking this on and speaking from the pulpit and being privileged

enough to be in your lives so I take seriously what I owe you.

What is legal and what is right are now being presented as the same thing.

But they are not. And with all the noise and chaos of these days, as people

of faith and people of conscience, it feels important to say that boldly.

Now over 60,000 Palestinians have died in the Israel-Hamas war and many

of the hostages from the attacks on October 7th where 1200 people were

killed have still not been returned. Oddly enough I had already arranged to

preach against war so I mostly stuck with what I had written, but in that

sermon, I said that I believed that Hamas attacking civilians was terrible

and that strategically, I doubted that doing what they did would make life

better for the average Palestinian.” I said that “what is also true is that the

lives of those who live surrounded by a wall with barbed wire and

checkpoints and is basically a prison. I am not sure I would feel the way I

do if I hadn’t been there myself on a pilgrimage in 2007.

Tens of thousands are dead. Now a famine has been declared. Everyone is

less safe. The whole region is more unsettled. And on it goes. I find groups

are divided over this, families, our own City Council.

After one of our Jewish neighbors was attacked on Pearl Street in early

June I gathered with a group of colleagues, and we cried and someone

asked us why we hadn’t talked about it. I said, “Because we wanted to stay

friends.”

After that day I did start to write the letter with a colleague. It has taken

months to get the wording right. Someday it will be a good story.

But it's because it feels almost impossible to talk about, to write about, or

speak about, which is partly why it has taken me so long to get it right so

that everyone feels seen.

And part of what I want to say is that when people tell us it’s too

complicated to understand, (at least in my growing up) that can be a way to

dismiss. We don’t always need to understand every part of the history to

fully to be a part of talking about what is right.

Among the hardest articles for me to read about what is going on in the

Holy Lands are those about the legality. Those essays that say that laws of

war only apply in particular situations and in this case, they apply in armed

conflict only if it’s an official occupation. Because if it’s officially an

occupation, there are legal obligations that include the immediate provision

of food, water, shelter, medical services, and whatever other critical

resources are needed. The State of Israel goes out of its way to use the

phrase “take control” instead of anything like occupy or occupation. And I

have also learned that international humanitarian laws govern only the

conduct related to hostilities and is distinct and separate from the law that

governs the decision to use force.

But what if this is one of many situations in this moment where people of

conscience must ask stop all of that: is this right? Is what is happening

right? And even when it’s risky we need to ask.

Because we can hold the complicated history of a place, we can be a

both/and people, we can have relationships across all the chasms, and at

the same time, we can ask with clarity ask: is this right? Is this aligned with

God and the love God wants for us?

A young man named Justin Scott shared a message on Instagram

demanding that we stop confusing the law with truth. He said with passion

in a video with now millions of views that when we talk about the word

illegal, we cannot think that it ends the debate. He reminded his viewers

that the Bible once freed slaves and criminalized their escape in the same

breath. So, we cannot just say that something is illegal or legal and leave it

at that.

Because the problem is that what is legal and what is right are being

presented as the same thing. But they are not. Therefore, it is our job to

keep looking for what is true. And you know there is a long list of people

who have done this. The list of people who have given themselves to the

gap between what is legal and what is right is so long we cannot possibly

recount it here right now, but we are going to say some: Joan of Arc and

Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks and Susan B. Anthony and Wangari

Maathai and Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi and Malala Yousafzai

and wow we could keep going. Do you have some names? Greta

Thunberg, John Lewis, Marsha P. Johnson, Jesus…

Today we have this beautiful story where Jesus dares to go against the law

to heal on the sabbath. When the group gathered around tells him that

what he is doing is wrong, he reminds them that they get their donkey what

it needs, so they better get the woman what she needs too. It’s something

like a First Century way of asking, I know it’s legal, but is it right? Jesus

shows how we are called to respond within oppressive systems, he shows

that we still have agency, that we have choices, that our job is to be

creative about not participating, how can we opt out? As scholar Rodney

Sadler Jr. wrote of this text in the Gospel of Luke, “The control of sabbath

practice…represents a convenient way of maintaining an oppressive

system whereby some people are forced to endure perpetual suffering by

others who are more concerned with sustaining a system that benefits

them than alleviating the burdens of those it cripples.” To know whether

something is right, we can ask: is this situation/person/organization more

concerned with sustaining what is or alleviating the burdens of those

suffering? The spiritual question for us, never starts with legality.

Because as Justin Scott says, the Mexicans became foreign on a land that

used to be theirs. While migrant workers are being picked up at beloved

restaurants, at immigration hearings, a young person detained on the way

to a high school volleyball game, on the way to work at Home Depot,

harvesting fruit in the fields, worshiping, a white woman even claimed to

have been pulled over because she had a Mexican flag bumper sticker, so

many are putting them on their cars to confuse authorities. Maybe we

should all put Mexican bumper stickers on our cars? What is legal right now

are quotas. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are trying

to deliver on record level deportation, with the goal of up to 3,000 arrests a

every single day, so it is now more a Latino terror campaign. But Justin

Smith says that Americans don’t hate the undocumented, not really,

because in fact we like our food cheap, our buildings tall, our lawns cut, our

meat packed and our economy moving. He says the truth is that we prefer

our co-workers invisible. Isn’t that a heartbreaking truth? He said let me

“Interrupt your fiction-the story that this country tells is that we are a nation

of laws, but it is a country of illegal loopholes for the rich and cages for the

desperate.” This means that some of what is happening isn’t blocking, it’s

exposing.

You know Beloved of God, we are all about honesty here and especially in

this time, where we need clarity, let us stop confusing the law with truth. Let

us stop conflating what is legal with what is right. Let us stop thinking that

what is happening is what God intended. It might feel impossible to speak

about any of this without friction, but it is time because it is our job to care,

our call to make imperfect statements, to live in the messy complications of

doing what is right, knowing it is true. Jesus asks us now: What deserves

our loyalty? The law or the truth? What is legal or what is right?

Oscar Romero reminded that we as the Church are entrusted with the

Earth’s glory, which includes caring for one another. I believe that if we are

to get through this with our hearts intact and our cores still solid, we must

stop mistaking what human beings have created with what God intended

and we cannot right now confuse what is legal, with what is right. We can

keep our grip on the truth, on God’s laws, the overarching power of love.

COMMUNAL REFLECTION

What does it look like for us to join Jesus in prioritizing the care of human

beings over maintaining oppressive systems? What does it look like to put

God’s laws first?

Beloved of God, let us not confuse what is legal, with what is right. We can

do this together. May it be so. Amen.