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On Not Keeping Commandments
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 15, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 4:5-14 Matthew 5:17-20
“In the afternoon on Sunday we all sat around looking at the paper,” remembers the first person of Elizabeth Spencer’s “A Christian Education”. “My mother had doubts about this, but we all indulged the desire anyway. After the ordeal of dressing up, of Sunday School and the long service and dinner, it seemed almost a debauchery to be able to pitch into those large cracking sheets, especially the funny papers, which were garish with color and loud with exclamation points, question marks, shouting, and all sorts of misdeeds…. “‘What did you all do?’ my mother asked me. [She and father had gone to an aunt’s funeral that Sunday morning, and left me in the care of my grandfather]. ‘How did you pass the time while we were gone?’ ‘We walked downtown,’ I said, for I had…wanted to share the morning’s happiness with them without telling any more or letting any real trouble in. But my mother was on it, quicker than anything. “‘You didn’t go in the drugstore, did you?’ I looked up. Why did she have to ask? … ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I slowly said. ‘But not for long,’ I added. ‘You didn’t get an ice cream cone, did you?’ … My face must have had astonishment on it as well as guilt. Not even I could have imagined them going this far. Why, on the day of a funeral, should they care if anybody bought an ice cream cone?” “Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord our God commanded you,” says the third or the fourth commandment, depending on your Reformer of choice. Of course the parents of Elizabeth’s Spencer’s story knew all ten by heart and kept them by the letter! In a society longing to herd human moral behavior back into the barn from which we think it escaped when we were in the drugstore on Sunday morning (now buying birth control pills instead of ice cream), we have taken to posting the commandments at the center of our public squares and judicial rotunda, in a vain effort to gain control again. I propose instead, on this Sunday morning, that we address these anxieties by asking anew after the meaning and purpose of the commandments, lest in our scramble to keep them, we miss the One toward whom they were given to turn our hearts and minds. Robert Penn Warren spoke the truth of our troubled times when he wrote, “Yes, message on message, like wind or water, in light or in dark,/The whole world pours at us. But the code book, somehow is lost.” We have these words, you see, written on stone, words we once memorized but now, with the whole world pouring at us, our hearts draw a blank. We have heard similar words spoken in the voice of Him whom we have tried to follow, but now we are lost and alone. So we wave the letter of the law in each other’s faces or crack stone tablets over each other’s already broken lives, yet nothing appears to be redeemed. For those of us who believe that the clue to the meaning and purpose of our lives has everything to do with the God who addresses us in Scripture and supremely in Jesus Christ, the overarching question is: what has the world of Scripture to do with the world in which we live? “Life at a human level,” wrote Paul Lehmann in his book on the Decalogue, “is always and at the same time life in two worlds: it is always on the move from the world of origin and destiny [the world of Scripture] toward and within the world of human story; and from the world of human story it moves under and toward the destiny purposed at and by its origin.” But how are we to make this move? How are we to be the human beings we are destined to become rather than another? How are we to live in relation to the God who has chosen to be in relation with us, who has addressed us in the words of Scripture and who has come on this planet to dwell with us and be known by us in Jesus Christ? How are we to live here and now in obedience to the will of the God for whom our days were made? Somehow the search for an answer to all of these questions, as well as our present anxiety, has landed us at the bottom of Sinai and in the crowd gathered on a mount in Galilee. “Thou shalt…” the one set of words commands while the other presumes, “You have heard it said…” and goes on to say something not just exponentially more but radically new! So we lean in to listen. The commandments are God’s law, we are told, and for many that is enough said. “What about ‘not’ don’t you understand,” they would ask if we were to raise the question of meaning and purpose in the face of these perfectly plain sentences. But at the impasse of God’s address and human understanding, the two worlds (the world of scripture and human experience) have divided into four and a kind of societal cancer begins to infect us all. For the law as it is given and variously misunderstood from out of the world of scripture moves toward the planet God “provided for, made fit for and [has] kept for being human in,” spinning it, or rather us, in opposite directions! So there are those who open the Bible and find a law that operates as fate—as that which must be imposed upon us from without and always at enmity with our personal being. Here the law is understood as a check on human freedom exercised as license and thus the commandments are to be kept. Here there are raised up those who know good from evil without risk (through the serpentine promise that ‘you will be like gods’) and who have been granted, for their good behavior, “reserved seats in advance at the messianic banquet.” Then there are others who open the Bible and are addressed by the same law in the same words, but understand it as “a sign of promise and thus as the harbinger of human freedom and fulfillment.” Here the commandments are to be observed. That is to say, they are the “pathfinder toward the motivations and structures of responsible behavior…in a world made and redeemed for being human in.” They lead our lives into unexpected possibility, as we follow neither a rule or a principle or a proposition, but God’s law fulfilled a human life: “born under the law in order to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as children.” Now in both understandings, life on this planet is experienced as other than the world God intends. But where the law is understood to operate as fate, as the imposition of a curb on our enthusiasm, we are to spend our days “just saying no” as the mark of our responsible discipleship. The spin is centripetal, closing in on the self. Where the law is understood as promise, in Lehmann’s words, “the world of experience is understood to be so radically at odds with the world [God intends] as to have been given a second chance at the taking of responsibility for the shaping of that world for the destiny promised.” Jesus Christ is that second chance. In his love, the spin has become centrifugal, moving us out of ourselves, with Christ at the center, and into the world as it is unfolding toward promise and possibility. In his life, death and resurrection, seeing in him the law fulfilled, we are given a second chance at the destiny for which we were born. Not surprisingly, those for whom the law is gospel honestly hear him to be saying, on the mount, you think things were tough under Moses? Jimmy, don’t you even think about that other woman or you are going to hell! In other words, he is made into a new law, which requires not his flesh and blood, but ours. Redemption, that is to say God’s love shown toward God’s creatures eternally, is still ours to earn by our good behavior. But for those whose lives have been broken into enough pieces to know that our only hope lies in the impossible possibility of God’s love undeserved, something else is heard on that mount. Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, he says, and we know we are sunk unless it is true that he has fulfilled what even our law-abiding lives forever miss. Righteousness, you see, is simply life lived in relation to the God who has chosen to live in relation to us. In Jesus Christ, the commandments are fulfilled in that the world God intends and the world of our experience are met. We see, we observe and feebly follow. Luther said it best: in Christ we are given to know what it means to have a God, to have something in which the heart trusts completely. “In short,” concludes Lehmann, “the Commandments are not prescriptive statements about duties toward God and one’s neighbor…They are, on the contrary, descriptive statements of what happens behaviorally in a world that God has made for being human in—[a world] given, in Jesus Christ, as second chance for the fulfillment of what it means to be human…” “The thing to know is that my parents really believed everything they said they believed. They believed that awful punishments were meted out to those who did not remember the Sabbath was holy. They believed about a million other things. They were terribly honest about it. “Much later on, my mother went into my grandfather’s room. I was silently behind her, and I heard her speak to him. ‘She says you took her to town while we were gone and got an ice cream.’ He had waked up and was reading by his lamp. At first he seemed not to hear; at last, he put his book face down in his lap and looked up. ‘I did,’ he said lightly. A silence fell between them. Finally she turned and went away. This, so far as I know, was all. “Because of the incident, that certain immunity of spirit my grandfather possessed was passed on to me. It came, I think, out of the precise way in which he put his book down on his lap to answer. There was a lifetime in the gesture, distilled, and I have been a good part of the long growing up to all its meaning. “After this, though all went on as before, there was nothing much my parents could finally do about the church and me. They could lock the barn door, but the bright horse of freedom was already loose in my world. Down the hill, across the creek, in the next pasture—where? Somewhere, certainly, that much was proved; and all was different for its being so.” Thanks be to God! |