Laying down the Law.
O God be in my mouth as I speak
for you and fill this place with your great grace, that we may leave this place
less of what we use to be and more of what we ought to be, through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.
Then God spoke all these words, “I am the Lord your God,
who brought your out of the land of Egypt; out of the house of slavery; you
shall have no other gods before me.”
Whenever, I have to preach on the Ten Commandments I am
reminded of my favorite New Yorker cartoon. (Moses coming down the
mountain. Tablets in each arm. The crowd waiting. ‘Good news, bad news. Got him
down to ten. Bad news adultery still in.’)
The cartoonist in my story above captured something of the
ambiguity we feel when it comes to discussing the role of scripture in our
lives.
When and how are we supposed to use God’s words?
It is certainly clear that the writers of Holy Scripture
believed that the spoken word had great power.
In the book of Genesis, God has only to speak a word and whether it is
the light, the darkness, vegetation or living creatures; each of these things
are called into being simply by the power of God’s creative and redemptive
word.
The author of St. John’s gospel also picks up on this
theme from Genesis when he begins his gospel with the familiar words, In the
beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the words was God…All
things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into
being.
Jesus too recognized the power of the spoken word. A few
weeks ago in our Gospel lesson from Mark, Jesus tells the paralytic to stand
up, take up his bed and walk.
These storytellers believed that for something to be done
it was only necessary to invoke the authority of God’s spoken word. This
tradition has also been an active and vital part of our Episcopal tradition as
well.
Each week, our community stands together reciting the
creed, making our confession, and participating in the Holy Eucharist. These
are not just words we say by rote, but they are words that in some mysterious
way have the possibility of changing the course of our sinful lives.
And this brings me back to my topic for this morning, the role of The Ten Commandments. In our previous 1928 prayer book, older Episcopalians will remember that as part of the old communion service we would recite the Ten Commandments together.
In fact, one of my earliest church memories is sitting in
the junior choir at Christ Church, Macon, wearing a red robe, white top, and
extremely thick glasses singing the following response.
Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep
this law.
The authors of our prayer book felt that one important
part of Christian worship was moral formation. If you say it over and over again,
sooner or later the words might begin to sink in or at least take root and
grow.
Now, I am not entirely sure if I knew in third grader what
it meant to have my heart inclined. But one reason I am with you today as a
priest is that both the words and the rhythm of Episcopal worship sunk into my
hard head and my soul.
These words of God formed me. And that is why I feel it is
a loss that the Ten Commandments have been consigned to the penitential order
in our present Book of Common Prayer.
The penitential order. Think about the type of message
this gives to people sitting in our pews. Instead of making the recitation of
God’s law a joyful experience we have delegated it to a Lenten Season of
sackcloth and ashes.
Now I am aware that our present world sees most rules as
personally suffocating. We are a “no boundaries” and “just do it” kind of
culture. But this is not the way that the early Hebrew writers understood the
ancient Jewish law.
Our psalmist this morning captures something of the
positive flavor I am trying to get across to you:
The law of the lord is perfect and revives the soul, the
testimony of the Lord is sure and gives wisdom to the innocent. The statues of
the Lord are just and rejoice the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear
and gives light to the eyes.
For the Jewish people, the law was a source of life not of
death. It was not something that oppressed people but it was seen as something
that set people free to love and to serve God.
Sometimes I hear well-meaning people say that Jesus
released us from having to obey the old law. Or they will say that he replaced
the old rules with the rule of love. Why certainly when asked Jesus provided a
summary of the law: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself, I think it is
a little hasty to say that he dismissed it entirely or to think that love part
especially easy.
In some of his public comments he even seemed to raise the
bar. You have heard it said an eye for an eye but for Jesus even being angry
with your brother or sister was wrong. And you will recall, he never hesitated
to tell his audience that their righteous had to exceed that of the Scribes and
the Pharisees if they had any hope of inheriting the kingdom.
So where do we go from here? On the one hand, we have
discarded the Ten Commandments from our public worship lessening their
importance to Christian formation. On the other hand, Jesus and other Hebrew
writers seemed to think that God’s law was important and worth making every
effort to observe.
I am going to suggest that the key to reconciling these
two different perspectives can be found in the gospel lesson from St. John. The
story is found in all four gospels. And they all report basically the same
occurrence, Jesus cleansing the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus comes to the Temple, sees people selling animals for
sacrifice and changing money from Roman coins to Jewish coins and he goes on a
rampage, overturning tables and driving our merchants with a whip of cords.
Jesus’ anger is a bit hard for us to understand but it was
related to the notion that people selling items and changing coins had a
monopoly on trade.
No one could offer a sacrifice unless they had a pigeon,
or lamb that had an official stamp of approval. No one could make a temple
donation unless they had coins that did not have an image of the roman emperor
on it. In both of these cases, those who controlled the animals and coins
controlled the access that common people had to God.
Jesus was concerned that people misused their authority to
keep people from loving God’s law in a way that freed them from bondage. For
Jesus, the law was not a roadblock but an invitation to come closer to God’s
love. This is another reason that I feel it was important that we use to say
the Ten Commandments together as a church more often.
In saying God’s words together, we establish “who we were”
and we invite people to come and know the joy and happiness of living life
according to God’s commandments.
This being said as Christians today, we must be on our
guard not to put the rules before the invitation. Jesus’ own life was not about
hanging out with those who kept rules. He want out of his way to find those
lost sheep, those people that were hurt, suffering, and maybe didn’t even know
they wanted a closer relationship to God.
And in the same way, we are here as the church to remind
people that God loves them, God has forgiven them and God wants them to feel
welcomed at our table. Following all the rules of Christian Living comes later
with some practice and trial and error. And perhaps that is way it is meant to
be.
As I mentioned earlier at the age of nine I didn’t know what it meant when I said, Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law. But through the years, those words become an important part of my journey in faith and they have challenged me to be the kind of person that God desires me to be. Less of what I use to be and more of what I ought to be.
And I suspect that is what God wants from all of you as
well.
To stop worshiping the idol of perfection, to embrace our
brokenness and to let others know that God’s law is always ready to invite them
into the possibility of a new and richer human life.
The law of the Lord is perfect and it revives the soul.
Thanks be to God.