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On Having No Other Gods
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 3, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 20:1-21 Romans 1:16-25
This morning we begin a summer-long series on the Ten Commandments. Think of this as our catechetical year together: having considered the Lord’s Prayer phrase by phrase throughout the season of Lent, we turn now to the Commandments. A few of you no doubt remember the days when you were promised a dollar if you would memorize and recite the Shorter Catechism: one hundred seven questions whose answers taught generations by rote the faith of the church, including the commandments and their meaning. Today none of us could afford such a bribe, nor do we seem to care--for the most part--whether our children know either poetry or multiplication tables or scripture by heart. As we soon shall see, the heart is the organ in question when it comes to the commandment before us, the first which reads: You shall have no other gods before me. “To have a God,” wrote Luther, “properly means to have something in which the heart trusts completely.” But we are getting ahead of ourselves! We need, at the beginning, to do a bit a spade work in order to prepare the ground on which our deeper understanding of all these commandments may take root! Three contexts present themselves, the first being that of the story in which the commandments are set. According to scripture, we are given not a general set of universal values, but rather ten words spoken to a particular people by the God who had chosen them and who therefore calls them “my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine,” says God, “but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” The Israelites are a people chosen for a way of being human in the world, a way revealed in the wilderness of the very next chapter by the God who has freed them alone from all other gods. That way has to do not so much with regulations as responsibilities; not so much with imperatives as indicatives. The Decalogue underlines, in the words of Paul Lehmann, “the descriptive as opposed to the prescriptive relations of the Commandments to the human living of human life [what life would be like if we had no other gods]. In this world,” wrote Lehmann as he was leaving it, “the Decalogue is at hand as a primer for learning to spell, and especially to spell our freedom.” We, of course, have preferred our slavery every time! Later in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses recounts the commandments, only slightly edited, to this same people who stand on the boundary between the wilderness and the Promised Land. As if speaking to the likes of us a few millennia later, Moses says “Not with our ancestors did the Lord God make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today.” In other words, this is not an historical document alongside others for the general community, but the present tense address of God to God’s people, spoken anew at every turn in the road. Still later the people of Israel hear the commandments again in exile as they remember a priestly kingdom and a holy nation gone awry. The Book of Deuteronomy, you remember, was discovered in the rubble of the temple renovations, when a people who once had trusted the living God chose to settle for gods that were not God, generation after generation. There the words of Moses were recovered and became cause for a great reformation under the leadership of King Josiah. For a season the people returned to the God whom alone they could trust. We who are Christians, of course, are not that people directly, but belong to God by way of adoption through Jesus Christ. Yet there is a sense in which these ten words have been addressed to us anew on another mountain “where we are drawn not under the rules but into parables.” The Sermon on the Mount can be heard, according to Matthew’s interpreters, as midrash on the commandments, a variation on the theme of obedience that will sound through these reflections week by week. So first there is the context of scripture. In the second place, there is a theological context with which we must do business before we line out the texts. You and I declare ourselves to be Calvin’s heirs simply by the way we number the commandments, even as we will take many of our more pastoral cues from Martin Luther. For Calvin, the command to have no other gods and the prohibition against idols are two commands, while for Luther these were one. Likewise for Luther the command not to covet the neighbor’s house was distinct from the command not to covet the neighbor’s wife, servants or livestock. Calvin believed one command was sufficient for all these things! Why? Theologically our besetting sin according to Calvin was idolatry, the human mind being a factory for idols, he once said; for Luther the trappings of 16th century German bourgeois existence presented the greater temptation. The final context is that of our own post-modern existence. Most immediately, of course, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Ten Commandments may be displayed on public property only if displayed as an artifact of history placed beside foundational documents such as the Magna Carte or the Mayflower Compact. Were I of the so-called Christian right, I would consider this a pyrrhic victory! As a Christian of Reformed persuasion, I find the co-opting of the commandments by civil religion at best a hindrance to the witness of the community whose text they are; but more than that, so much of what melds church and state is an appropriation of God’s word which flies in the face of the singular trust the word commands. To put the matter starkly, “those who worship ‘the Lord your God’ know that obedience to this God carries no ‘and’ with it. It stands alone.” [Mark Lilla, in an arresting article bemoaning the decline of a liberal minded Protestant witness in the face of evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic movements writes: “The more the Bible is treated as a historical document, the more its message is interpreted in universal terms, the more the churches santify the political and cultural order, the less hold liberal religion (that is to say, the Reformed tradition of which we are a part) will have on the hearts and minds of believers.”] So you will remember that the writers of the Barmen Confession in 1933 could not stand by and watch as the ground was laid in Germany for “an and, something ‘beside me,’ beside God and beside what is revealed in the First Commandment, beside what is revealed in the one word that is Jesus Christ…something ‘beside’ that might and could and in [that] situation did become ‘besides’ and ‘over against’ God.” [Patrick Miller] But an opposite word also must be said out of our present context if we are to hear the first commandment as God’s command to us. Curiously that word was spoken by Henry Sloane Coffin in his sermon series on the commandments--preached from the pulpit of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in the fall after the beginning of the “Great War” and published in July 1915. Taking the text we have before us, he suggested that “Were this commandment to be phrased today, it might read: ‘Thou shalt have at least one God.’ Our danger,” he said, “apparently lies not in worshipping too many deities, but in worshipping none at all.” What, you might wonder given this nation awash in religion, has such a sermon to do with our context? Before I respond, let me add the more contemporary reflections of David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian. Hart writes that we come to the First Commandment today in the context of our “custom-fitted spiritualities…by which many of us now divert ourselves from the quotidian dreariness of our lives.” At the top of the list of such spiritualities would be the trappings of civil religion, but that is only the loudest pretender to faith in the living God of our day. “The triviality of this sort of devotion, its want of dogma or discipline, its tendency to find its divinities not in glades and grottoes but in gift shops make it obvious that this is no reversion to pre-Christian polytheism. It is, rather, a thoroughly modern religion, whose burlesque (boutique) gods command neither reverence, nor dread, nor love, nor belief.” Hart’s conclusion is that of Coffin: at the end of the day we believe in no god, in nothing, making Paul’s words to the Romans prescient: “for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.” “What does it mean,” asks Martin Luther as though addressing us in our collective darkness, “to have a God?” “To have a God,” he says, “properly means to have something in which the heart trusts completely [something, someone who alone is trustworthy: there is only one]. To have a God does not mean to lay hands upon him, or put him into a purse, or shut him up in a chest….To cling to him with all our heart is nothing else than to entrust ourselves to him completely.” Most of what we cling to with our hearts cannot bear the weight: a marriage, a child, a parent, a nation, a value system, an abstract First Cause, a political party, a hefty bank account, a friend, a job, a preacher, a politician, a church, a religion. Sooner or later, all these will collapse under the weight of our misplaced worship, leaving us in the middle of the wilderness with nothing save for one daunting realization: namely that we have believed in nothing, have put our trust in nothing, have given our minds, hearts, souls and strength to nothing. We wake in a wilderness of our own making, hungry with no bread of life to sustain us; dying with no living water to slake our true thirst; alone with no trustworthy name on whom to call for help. Oh for the fleshpots of Egypt! Yet here and nowhere else, says priest turned novelist John Carroll, “human aloneness becomes a kind of [vulnerability to] the aloneness of God. God is one. One only”: One alone to whom we may cling with our whole heart in the middle of the wilderness or at her boundaries, in the quotidian dreariness of our landed lives or when we are exiled and far from home. What does it mean to have a God? I think it means both less and more than we have ever dared ask or think. It means less because all we have are these words, these witnesses, this story, this Spirit we cannot hold, this mystery we cannot dispel, this Savior who has pitched a tent in the same wilderness of our life and death in order to accompany us through the wilderness to the green pastures promised and in the valley of the shadow between that awaits us all. But to have a God also means more, means in the words of the Larger Catechism that far from a quotidian dreariness, our days are to be spent “thinking, meditating, remembering, highly esteeming, honoring, adoring, choosing, loving, delighting, and rejoicing” in the God who has chosen us in Jesus Christ. No longer slaves, no longer vulnerable to every spirit that blows onto the best seller list nor to the powers and principalities that would hold sway over our minds by the lies they exchange for the truth nor to the things of the world which possess us long before we manage to possess them, our hearts are freed from these for the adventure that is trust in the living God, in the God who commanded: I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other Gods beside me. Thanks be to God. |