August 17th, 2025 - "Bible on Broadway - Les Misérables: The Limits of the Law" - Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris

Matt Nelson: Welcome to the Sermon podcast from First United Methodist

Church in downtown Bentonville.

If you have questions related to what you hear today or just want to find

out more about the ministries of First United Methodist Church, please visit us

online at FUMCbentonville.org or check us out on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris: Thank you all so much.

Thank you for sharing your gifts.

It's such a joy to get to see so many people with so many gifts

in this community and to get to celebrate that with this series.

And I'll add, Alice is one of the confirmation class that got this, uh,

series off the ground, so, so glad she got to participate in it as well.

And Ken, you're one of my tall friends.

All right.

Today we're gonna be looking at miserable and the story of Paul.

And in this service and in the tenin service, the topic of the sermon

will be the limits of the law.

If you stick around and go to 11 o'clock, you'll get to hear unlimited

grace, but if you don't stick around, remember, you can always catch that

sermon and the music online as well.

To frame that up, hear these words from Philippians, and I wanna say a little

bit about this passage from Philippians.

Just so you know, the translators have cleaned Paul up quite a bit here.

This is kind of an R-rated passage when it's in Greek, but I'm not

gonna do that from the pulpit.

If you want more details, catch me later.

Alright,

so then my brothers and sisters be glad in the Lord.

It's no trouble for me to repeat the same things to you because

they will help keep you on track.

Watch out for the dogs.

Watch out for people who do evil things.

Watch out for those who insist on circumcision, which is really mutilation.

We are the circumcision.

We are the ones who serve by God's spirit and who boast in Christ Jesus.

We don't put our confidence in rituals performed on the body, though I have good

reason to have this kind of confidence.

If anyone else has reason to put their confidence in physical

advantages, I have even more.

I was circumcised on the eighth day.

I am from the people of Israel and the tribe of Benjamin.

I'm a Hebrew of the Hebrews.

With respect to observing the law, I am a Pharisee With respect to

devotion to the face, I harass the church with respect to righteousness

under the law, I am blameless.

These things were my assets, but I wrote them off as a loss for the sake of Christ.

But even beyond that, I consider everything a loss in comparison with

the superior value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, I have lost everything

for him, but what I lost, I think of as sewer trash, so that I might

gain Christ and be found in him.

In Christ.

I have a righteousness that is not my own, and that does not come from the law, but

rather from the faithfulness of Christ.

It is the righteousness of God that is based on faith.

The righteousness that I have come from knowing Christ, the

power of his resurrection and the participation in his sufferings.

It includes being conformed to his death so that I may perhaps reach the

goal of the resurrection of the dead.

It's not that I have already reached this goal or have already been perfected,

but I pursue it so that I may grab hold of it because Christ grabbed

hold of me for just this purpose.

Brothers and sisters.

I myself don't think I've reached it, but I do this one thing.

I forget about the things behind me and reach out for the things ahead of me.

The goal I pursue is the prize of God's upward call in Christ Jesus.

So all of us who are spiritually mature should think this way, and

if anyone thinks differently, God will reveal it to him or her only.

Let's live in a way that is consistent with whatever level we have reached.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

Lord, open our hearts, our minds, and our eyes that we might see and know

the word you have for us this day.

In your holy name we pray.

Amen.

So anytime I'm addressing the topic of the law, I love to look up weird laws and

so looked up some weird Arkansas laws.

This one I've known for a long time.

It's illegal to mispronounce.

The name of our state you.

Yeah.

They had a whole legislative session on this in the 18 hundreds, by the

way, to decide that the pronunciation of the state was Arkansas and that

we are arkansans instead of Ayers.

All right.

And it became a law that you properly pronounce the name of

the state, which my son loved to resist when we lived in Texas.

He'd go around going, um, so we're going to our Kansas this weekend.

I'm like, no, that is not, don't say it.

And when you're in Arkansas, you better say Arkansas.

It's apparently also illegal in this state to whistle underwater.

It's illegal to give away more than 25 free games of pinball to any one person.

And in Bebe, no donkeys sleeping in bathtubs.

After sunset,

apparently they can have an afternoon nap, that's fine.

But no after sunset, no.

Being in the bathtub, you donkeys.

I wanna know the story behind these laws, don't you?

Um, and I tried, I tried to find out the story and, and everything that I

would say was their meaning is lost.

But I will tell you this laws come from situations and they come from values.

Right.

They come from situations that have arisen, that people want to put a box

around actually, ideally, and they come from a value that's trying to be preserved

in the midst of creating that law.

We tend to think of laws as value neutral, but they are not.

They are not value neutral.

In fact, if anything, they are clear statements of what our values seem to be.

Because what they're trying to do is to protect and preserve the

society we are trying to create.

Even universal laws, so-called universal laws are not neutral.

There is still a value behind it.

Universal laws are those generally accepted laws that

show up across cultures.

Things like do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness in a court.

But what is true about all of those?

Besides trying to create and preserve a society is that ideally they're

also trying to protect the vulnerable among us behind practically every

law should stand that value to protect the vulnerable among us.

The Apostle Paul and Jave from Les Mis are defenders of the law.

They are defending law and order.

And for Vera, that means that he does not care about the reason or the justification

for someone breaking the law.

He doesn't care about the context around the law.

The law is clear and the law is to be enforced, which is why he seems to have

zero moral qualms about the fact that spends 20 years in prison for stealing one

loaf of bread to feed his starving nephew.

He broke the law.

Therefore he is to be punished.

Paul also was a defender of the law in the sense that he did everything.

We saw that litany of things that he did, and he can claim righteousness before the

law, and he even persecuted Christians because for him to proclaim the Messiah

as someone who was a criminal to proclaim a criminal to be the son of God is.

So far out of his realm of thinking and so far out of how he understands

the law to be that he absolutely cannot accept it and must defend

it to the death, not his death.

He didn't really think it should be his death.

Other people's death.

Yes.

He was at the stoning of Steven and he was on his way to Damascus to at least

arrest some of the followers of Jesus.

They're not actually defenders of the law, though they are defenders of legalism.

Now, what is legalism?

Legalism is rule keeping, so they are defenders of rule keeping at the

expense of mercy and compassion at the expense of mercy and compassion.

Y'all, if you're a student of the Bible, you will note that almost every time.

Justice appears in the Bible.

Mercy is nearby.

It is either in the very same verse or there is a situation around

the description of justice that involves mercy and compassion.

So from God's perspective, justice is never divorced from mercy and compassion.

They arely related, but.

For a legalist, following the rules means that you forget the purpose

of the law, which is to protect the vulnerable, and in Paul's case, and

actually in Java's case, to forget the purpose of doing the will of God.

Jair and Paul both.

Proclaim that they are righteous, that they are doing God's justice,

and yet they have forgotten what God calls us to, to care for the widow,

the orphan, the stranger, to protect those who are most in need around us.

The song looked down from miserable, tries to recall the ver, to see that

humanity and then writ large tries to recall Paris to see the purpose, to

remember that we are to care for those.

Suffering around us.

Those that don't have bread, both Jave and Paul reach a crisis point.

However, Jave is exposed as a spy, spying on the revolutionaries, and when he

is exposed, he is handed over to Vja.

Now he has spent the entirety of this unfolding narrative hunting down vja.

Trying to bring him to justice for skipping out on his parole.

He served his 20 years for stealing red, but he skipped parole, and so

ver is hunting valon down, and then he is handed over to Val Jonn by the

revolutionaries, and JE lets him go.

Instead of executing him, which the revolutionaries instructed

him to do, he lets him go.

Which puts Bajan in double jeopardy.

If the revolutionaries find out what he's done, they're liable to take

out punishment on him, and that means JoVE is still out there to hunt him

down, and yet he gives him mercy.

Paul experiences his crisis point on that Damascus road as he is

heading into Damascus to arrest those who are following Jesus.

Jesus appears before him, identifies himself as the one.

That Paul is persecuting and Jesus blinds him.

Paul later receives his sight.

Thanks to the generosity and mercy of Ananias, a follower of Jesus, what

happens once they've received that mercy?

Well, for Paul, Paul becomes a rabid defender of Jesus and Grace.

You heard it in the passage that I read for you.

He knows he had all of those rights and privileges.

As a Pharisee, and yet he gave all of that up and becomes one who fights for

the Gentiles, in fact, which would've been the people Paul would've been least likely

to include as a defender of legalism.

And now he has mercy.

Ver, however, cannot accept that challenge to his worldview.

He cannot accept mercy in his worldview.

The law must be followed.

And if the law is not followed, he does not know his place in that world.

And as a result, he leaves the world dies by suicide, which

not a sidebar, but a note if you at all are considering suicide.

Um, just know that you're loved, you're cared for, you matter.

And we're here for you, but so is 9 8 8, which is the emergency

line to call if that's something that is within you right now.

But Vera just cannot vary from the words that he sings, that

those who follow the path of righteousness shall have their reward.

And actually that's true.

It's just he understands righteousness as rule following.

Instead of law loving, we see in their stories the limits of the

law, that the letter of the law often cannot account for mercy.

And that law is limited in that it can only restrain.

It cannot transform.

We cannot restrain people into love.

You can't make people love only freedom and mercy and compassion can do that.

The law does have a purpose.

As I said, it's to preserve and to protect society and to protect our

values, but we have to remember the values behind those laws, and as soon

as the laws are divorced from the values, then we have to resist the laws.

As soon as those laws are divorced from the values, we have to resist the laws.

That's why the revolution broke out was because people were starving

in the streets and the lessons that were learned in the earlier

French Revolution had been ignored.

The monarchy was back in place.

The division between haves and havenots was back in place, and that's why Paul now

understanding the nature of God can only, can only be a defender of grace instead of

someone who tries to condemn with the law.

Wow.

And let's also note that grace was present in the Jewish faith.

It wasn't actually leaving his faith of his birth.

It was recovering the faith of his birth and then expanding that

faith to be inclusive of others.

We have a moral imperative when the laws are divorced from our values.

We have to resist the laws, so when someone's stealing bread to feed.

Starving people.

20 years when someone is killing people to defend the faith,

you're betraying the very faith you say you're trying to defend.

This happens in our everyday lives, y'all.

We find ourselves in conflict with the law because the value is conflicted.

I think of when I served in West Memphis.

There was a man, he didn't live on the streets, but he was very vulnerable.

He wouldn't have looked vulnerable.

He was about seven feet tall, but he had a lot of mental struggles and

he had a hard time keeping a job.

And he came to worship about once a month, and I was always grateful to see him.

And when he came, he always stole the money that we kept in an envelope to

collect for paying for the upper room.

And every time he did it, someone would see him and they would come

to me and they would say, he's stealing the upper room money.

What are we gonna do about it?

And I'm always like, first of all, you pick the five foot pastor to go up

against the seven foot dude, but whatever.

I would just say, let him have it.

We can pay for the upper rooms, y'all.

It's not gonna break us.

And he needs the money.

That is just a small instance of when we use grace and mercy to resist

the law in favor of the purpose, which is care for the vulnerable.

And I will tell you this, you will never find yourself in conflict if

you're hold to the value of love of God and love of neighbor because God will

never, will never ask you to choose God.

Over neighbor because in fact, to love neighbor is is to love God.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Matt Nelson: Thanks for listening to the Sermon podcast from First United

Methodist Church in downtown Bentonville.

If you would like to let us know you were here, follow the link below to connect.

To participate in worship through giving, you can give

online at fumcbentonville.org, or on Venmo @FUMCBentonville.

FUMC Bentonville welcomes all.

Because we believe the communion table is God's table,

we invite everyone into our church family.

We welcome and celebrate every race, gender, gender identity, sexual

orientation, marital status, age, physical and mental ability, national origin,

economic station, and political ideology.

We come together in action and outreach, aspiring to follow Jesus' example of

radical hospitality, love, and grace as a transformative movement in our community.

Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings at 9:00 AM, 10:10 AM, and 11:00

AM, live, and on our YouTube channel.

Grace and peace.