3 LENT, YEAR B
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY
15 MARCH 2009
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Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1;18-25; John 2:13-22
This is the third Sunday in Lent, and we hear God’s third covenant. God’s third strategic plan, laid out for the people. “Here’s how you and I will live together,” God says, “here’s how our life together will unfold….” The Ten Commandments, the Decalogue.
Ages earlier, God made the first covenant. God had been furious with the people’s violence and corruption. God nearly wiped out everything God had made but in the end God backed down and made a promise never to destroy the earth. A promise with no strings attached. God’s initiative entirely. And the bow God placed in the sky served to remind God of that promise, no matter what mischief the people would get up to.
God made a second covenant. God announced that in order to make the first covenant promise work, a decrepit couple, Abraham and Sarah, would produce a son from whom whole nations would be born. For their part and as a sign of this second God-initiated covenant, Abraham and Sarah were to walk blamelessly with God and Abraham would make sure that all the males would from then on would be circumcised. Outward signs of the promise of God and the promised response of the people.
Now, once again, God makes a covenant. The third covenant. Abraham’s and Sarah’s descendants had fled to Egypt to escape a famine. After they’d been there awhile, a new Egyptian pharaoh enslaved them. God sent plagues and disasters on the Egyptians, in a fruitless attempt to get the Egyptians to let the people go. In the end, God led the people out of Egypt through the parted waters of the Red Sea. It was a terrifying and glorious event, that escape. We call it the Exodus. After wandering in the desert for decades, the rescued Hebrew people finally reached the promised land where they built a nation. New life, born from suffering and even death. The Exodus remains as the foundational moment in Jewish tradition and faith. It lies as fundamental to ours as well. Jesus’ own journey and death and resurrection are Christian fulfillments of and parallels to the Exodus experience.
And so God spoke to the people in the desert, after the Exodus. Remember, God said, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods but me….” The people were griping about life in the desert, and God was reminding them of what he had done for them. God was laying out to them how their relationship with God and with each other as a community was to work. Life lived in thanksgiving.
It is a mistake to look at the Ten Commandments in any way other than as part the story of God and God’s people. The Decalogue is not a random list of laws. By reminding the people of their Exodus escape, their new birth, their freedom now, their new life, God was showing them a way to live. “Here’s what I’ve done for you. Now here’s how we’ll live with each other. The first four commandments describe you and me together: how you will love me. The last six commandments show how you will live with one another: how you will love your neighbor.”
The Ten Commandments, the Law, are a guide for life, for the Hebrews, for us, in response to God’s generous covenant promises. It seems the God bent over backwards, liberating his people, making the people free. Scripture is packed with stories of God, bending over backwards, again and again, to show God’s passionate dream for us. And we have a blueprint for living lives of grateful response. Not with a list of laws browbeating us into following but as a program which keeps us safe. Freedom is never absolute. The edges of freedom, the boundaries, the commandments of God, serve as a strategy, says Walter Brueggeman, a strategy to enable us all to enjoy a safe and enduring life in community. Jesus, not meek in today’s gospel story, not mild as he threw the tables around in the Temple, Jesus was furious at the people who refused to remember what God had done for their ancestors and for them and who refused to live in thankful response. Jesus’ zeal for the law and the prophets he had come to fulfill drove him and led him to the cross.
Here’s how one author (Joe Roos) puts it, and I paraphrase a bit: “The Ten Commandments don’t begin with ‘Here are ten commandments, learn them by rote, or ‘Here are ten commandments, obey them.’ Instead, they begin with a sweeping announcement of freedom: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’ We will probably always think of the declarations that follow as the Ten Commandments. But we could, and probably should, think of them as invitations to God’s liberation. Because the Lord is our God, we are free (from the need of having)…other gods. We are free from the tyranny of lifeless idols. We are free to rest on the Sabbath. We are free to enjoy our parents as long as they live. We are set free from murder, stealing, and covetousness as ways to establish ourselves...” We are free.
The Hebrew people understood that God’s mighty arm had intervened for them. They understood the Exodus as a chance for new life.
I cannot say for certain, of course, that God intervened directly in our parish life last Sunday when a Guild room ceiling light and a large number of ceiling tiles fell AFTER most of the people had left from Coffee Hour and AFTER Lucy and Janie Leonard decided to go downstairs with their mother to tell the vestry meeting there that one of the tiles had started to bulge suddenly and it was before they had gotten back upstairs that the ceiling actually gave way and the heavy light and all those tiles fell right where the children had been eating their refreshments moments before. And if those little girls had stayed upstairs the story might have been very different and I would have had a very hard time telling it to you today because it wouldn’t have been good. I can’t tell you that it was the divine hand of God at work that day the way the Hebrew people said that God’s mighty arm saved them from the Egyptians at the Exodus. I can’t say that it was God’s hand that timed those events last Sunday so that there was NO HUMAN DAMAGE and minimal damage to Guild Room objects. Who am I to say why the events happened as they did?
But I can say that as we remember what happened (and did NOT happen!) last Sunday, we can reflect on what God has given us as God has also given to the Hebrew people and all people: and that is life, our life, and what we have and who we have to share it with. And that we have been given another day, this very day, to live. And that we should rejoice and be glad in it. I can say that.
I can also say that we have been shown ways to love God and to love our neighbor, whoever the neighbor might happen to be. Ways to live with God and in community with each other. Ways, commandments, designed not to oppress but to set us free. I can say that, too.