Sunday, April 7, 2013: Acts 5:27-32 (ESV)

Disobedience came hard for a nice girl like me. I was taught to respect authority, which I did, despite bumper stickers urging us to question it. I did my homework, kept to the speed limit and came home on time. I rarely got in trouble, though I admired those who did, like the people who joined picket lines or burned their draft cards.

War protests were my first serious encounters with purposeful disobedience. As classmates faced being shipped out to Vietnam, I developed a deep respect for those who heeded the call to disobedience. I watched leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. challenge unjust laws and professors risk censure or worse to speak out against those who controlled the biggest war machine in history. My brother and several friends wrote statements of conscientious objection that helped me see the link between resistance and faith. I began to question authority—who had it, by what right, with what limits. A tectonic shift took place in my theology. I learned to live with more ambiguity and to recognize how the paradoxes at the heart of Jesus’ teaching were meant to keep us wrestling with moral complexity rather than simply applying rules. I learned that even legitimately appointed leaders need to be challenged and unjust laws broken.

Discerning when to disobey can be tricky. I’m not sure any of us should undertake it alone; it’s much harder than acting on principle, which can lead to a self-righteousness that’s sometimes hard to see in oneself when a principle needs defending and we appoint ourselves to the task. When the disciples stand before the high priests they don’t invoke principle. They speak from a lived relationship with God, whom they know with an intimacy and certainty that trumps all other claims to obedience. It’s not just a spirit of resistance that drives them, but irrepressible love. The logic of that love is fairly simple: here we stand. We can do no other.