RIGHT VS. RIGHT

A sermon given on Sunday, August 16, 2026

by the Rt. Rev. Alan M. Gates, Bridge Pastor

Two things for you to know about my parents, of sainted memory:  First, my parents were very frugal people.  As products of the Great Depression, they were admirably loath to discard anything.  I told you last month how my dad would not waste his volunteer “squords.”  Likewise, there were drawers full of old bread bag twisties, creative ways to reuse the inner lining of a cereal box, and crumbs salvaged from the toaster. The battle against waste was perpetual!

The second thing for you to know is that, as heirs of the Puritan ethic, my parents were tea-totallers.  It was never a moral crusade on their part, but we knew where they stood.  When they visited their grown children’s homes, there was a certain discomfort when they opened the refrigerator and saw a couple bottles of wine.

So, it was with great astonishment one day that I heard my mother say to me, “Alan, we were cleaning up the neighborhood beach yesterday and we found these. We wondered if you want them.”  And she held out two unopened cans of Budweiser.  I do not know what went on before these tea-totalling parents decided to offer two beers to their fully-grown son, but I am certain that there was some internal struggle.  It was a conflict between two deeply held values: the virtue of abstinence, and the virtue of letting nothing go to waste.  In the end, apparently, wastefulness was determined to be the greater ill; thrift and using everything, the greater good.

There is a similar story about a group of Buddhist monks who followed a vegetarian diet.  One day a neighbor came to the monastery with a quantity of meat.  “We’ve had a power outage,” said the neighbor.  “We want to share this meat from our freezer which will go bad if it’s not eaten.”  The monk hesitated for a moment, then said thank you, and received the gift.  The meat was chopped into small quantities and eaten with rice and pasta over the following week.  In the scheme of values, the monks’ value of not eating meat was determined to be a lesser good than the priority of not wasting food – and perhaps also the virtue of receiving with grace a gift offered in good faith.

There is something universal about the experience of ethical tension.  The intersection between religious principles and real-life situations is the place where our faith is lived out.  Such intersections often raise hard questions.  The Gospel lesson this morning [Matthew 15:10-28] is about precisely such an intersection.

It is one of those confrontations between Jesus and the religious faithful known as Pharisees.  This time the source of conflict was ritual cleansing.  Jewish code provided for a cleansing of the hands before eating.  In a post-Covid world, you and I would heartily approve of the hygiene of this ritual!  But hygiene was not the issue.  For the Pharisees, paying attention to what went into the mouth was symbolic of the larger commitment they made to separating themselves from various sorts of defilement in the world.  It would be wrong of us to assume their hand-washing was an empty ritual.  This was genuine piety.  But Jesus challenges their unbending commitment to the outward sign of this ritual, when they so often ignored the inner disposition it was meant to represent.  Jesus said they were “blind guides” – hypocrites – if they focused only on the cleanliness of what went into the person, and not also on what comes forth from the person in word and deed. “Out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, … false witness, slander,” says Jesus. “These are what defile a person.”  The ritual of cleanliness is secondary to all the other ways a person manifests the purity of their heart – that is, the Law of Love.

In Mark’s version of the same story, [Mk 7: 9-13] Jesus offers another example to illustrate his point.  The law of Moses included a command to honor one’s father and mother.  Mosaic tradition also commanded thank offerings at the Temple.  So, Jesus asks, supposing a man tells his parents that he’s very sorry but he’s unable to support them because he has already given all his spare resources to the Temple?  Jesus says, No!  That rationale would not honor God and is not the right thing to do!

It’s not that Jesus was opposed to supporting the Temple, or to cleanliness rituals.  Not at all.  But he expected the people always to look for the greatest good, to measure the congruity of our outward actions with our inward motivations and disposition.  Cleanliness Discipline vs. Loving Behavior is not a “right vs. wrong” proposition.  Support of Temple vs. Support of Parents is not a “right vs. wrong” proposition.  These are right vs. right propositions! That’s why they arise as a problem in the first place.  Jesus expected the people to recognize the challenge, and weigh the decision.

I think this is the tension in which we live!  The questions that are most vexing to you and me are not those that appear in black and white:  Shall I feed my neighbor, or cheat him?  Shall I pay for this dress, or steal it?  These are not hard questions to answer; these are easy!  The struggle is less often right vs. wrong, than it is right vs. right, or even wrong vs. wrong.  With my parents and those Budweiser’s, with those Buddhist monks and the meat, we might have to weigh competing values, competing virtues.  That’s where the challenge lies.

A generation ago, an Episcopal theologian named Joseph Fletcher described a moral framework he called Situation Ethics.  He challenged the ability of any one set of rules adequately to guide Christian behavior.  He said you had to judge by the particular situation at hand.  Situation Ethics was widely derided as an invitation to anarchy, a license to “anything goes” morality.  But at its root, Situation Ethics is not a call to ethical recklessness.  It is a call to individual ethical responsibility.  It is a call for each of us to struggle honestly with the ethical complexity in which we live, and be willing to weigh right and right, as well as right and wrong.

When Jesus challenges the piety of the Pharisees, he does not say that the Law is wrong, or that he had come to abolish it.  But he did call the Pharisees to measure even their most deeply held convictions and practices against an ethic of love in the given situation.

That’s why, over the objection of the Pharisees, Jesus said that it was all right for hungry people to eat with hands not fully scrubbed if they needed to; it was all right for them to harvest wheat on the Sabbath; it was all right for Jesus to heal on the Sabbath.  And that’s why vegetarian monks would forgo their conviction about eating meat in the face of a gracious offer to share.  And that’s why my parents could set aside their abstinence principles in order not to waste.  Because in weighing good vs. good, or even bad vs. bad, the ethic of love will lead us to the greater good.

That is why, also, in the second half of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus re-evaluates his own conviction that his mission was only to the house of Israel.  When this assumption is questioned faithfully, he relents and heals the Canaanite woman – because that’s what was dictated by the ethic of love in the given situation.

Life today presents plenty of ethical dilemmas.  Many are the product of new technologies.  Medical advances present us with decisions which far outstrip consensus in medical ethics for making them.  In social media, debates over ethical constraints are complex.  Digital imagery and AI call into question the “objective data” upon which we strive to make our decisions.  Dilemmas galore!

And in this moment, our American political scene has become so polarized that moral absolutism is a feature of more and more of our public policy debates. Positions get staked out as “the only possible Christian viewpoint” because “the Bible says this about that.”  But does it?  Moral absolutism does not advance our problem-solving in public policy. The way of the Pharisees was moral absolutism: there were rules; they were clear; the answers were easy.  But in the Gospels Jesus is clear that sometimes it’s not that simple.  There is no moral life lived on automatic pilot.  One pastor has put it well:

It is a dangerous thing on questions of truth … to be wrong.  But there may be a more

dangerous thing: being right and knowing it.  It is possible to be so caught up in the

joy of being right … that you become more wrong than your most degraded opponent. 

What if it is at least as important to love as to be right?  What if Jesus really meant it

when he said the heart of the law is to love God with your entire being and to love your

neighbor as yourself?  What if Paul really meant it when he said that even if he had all

knowledge, even if he got everything right, he was nothing if he didn’t have love? 

[Pastor John Ortberg, Christianity Today, 5.17.97, p. 25]

Here is what you and I must hang onto when presented with ethical dilemmas and biblical proof-texting.  It is perhaps the only criterion which will enable us to move forward – individually and communally.  In the weighing of competing values and ethical contradiction, pray that we will be led to ask, and graced to know: Where here is the greatest good?  And where here is the greatest love?”  In Jesus’ Name.  Amen.