Sermon:  “Law and Grace”

Text:  Exodus 20:1-21

27^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

October 5, 2008

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning, from the 20^th chapter of the book of Exodus, is the first version of the Ten Commandments.[1]  Among the commandments is God’s prohibition, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them.”   When we hear the word “idol,” we probably think of a statue to some god other than the God worshipped by the ancient Israelites.  In that sense idol-worship was a constant snare for the Israelites, as they were tempted to worship Baal, the Canaanite storm-god, or Astarte, the Phoenician fertility goddess.  Clearly, this kind of worship was prohibited by the Ten Commandments. 

As Professor Walter Brueggemann reminds us,[2] however, the Hebrew word that our New Revised Standard Version translates as “idol” can also mean “image,” as in, “You shall not make for yourself an image.”  From this insight emerges a subtler point, for if the commandment prohibits any image at all, this would apply not only to other gods, like Baal and Astarte, but also to the God of the Israelites.  That is, even if the image were an attempted depiction of the one true God, it would violate the commandment.  Apparently, God was concerned that we retain an expansive sense of mystery about God’s being.  And any man-made image of God—no matter what kind—can limit our concept of God’s mystery and holiness.[3]

Sermon.  One of these days, maybe, we’ll try a sermon series on the Ten Commandments.  There would be plenty to talk about because the richness of these verses would be hard to exhaust.  We could take each commandment, some of which are quite brief, and consider what is actually said in Hebrew and then what has often been inferred from the commandments.  For example, is it “Do not murder” or “Do not kill”?  Does the commandment to honor our parents mean to obey everything they say?  And is that commandment directed to young children or to adult children with aging parents?  However, a verse-by-verse consideration is not my purpose this morning.  Rather, I want to look at these commandments all together.

In many ways a Presbyterian pastor should be grateful every time the Ten Commandments come around in the lectionary.  Among all the major Protestant traditions, the Reformed tradition, of which we are a part, has been the friendliest toward Old Testament law.  For generations it was the custom in some Presbyterian churches for the congregation to recite the Ten Commandments every Sunday.  In contrast to the Reformed view, some other faith traditions consider that when Jesus came law ceased to be important and now has been replaced by grace.  In this view, law is bad and constraining and limiting and artificial, while grace is good, freedom producing, and genuine.  To be sure, we Presbyterians like grace, too, but we have taken a different view of law—much closer to the Jewish model—understanding law not as opposed to grace, but rather as one of the ways God extends grace toward us.  In this view, the law is not a burden, but a gift.  And that seems to be the way Jesus thought of it, too.  After all, it was Jesus who said that he had not come to abolish the law, but rather to fulfill it.[4]  And when Jesus looked at the commandments, his interpretations were often stricter than those of the Pharisees.[5]  Apparently, Jesus saw no conflict between the Ten Commandments and the kind of grace that he lived and preached.

I think it’s an expression of God’s grace that we are not left completely on our own when it comes to moral reasoning.  Maybe if we had the luxury of spending all our time thinking of moral philosophy we could work our way to the wisdom that is contained in these Ten Commandments.  But we are not Socrates, who must have had a trust fund or a hard-working wife to support him: we can’t spend all day in conversation about what is right and what is wrong.  It helps us to have a starting point, and that’s exactly what the Ten Commandments do for us.  Of course, interpretive problems still remain.  We can ever escape the necessity of moral reasoning; but because we have the Ten Commandments we don’t have to start from scratch. 

Second, as I tried to illustrate in the Children’s sermon earlier, the law is a means of grace to us because if we follow it, we will avoid some dangers.  To take just one example, if we took the Sabbath commandment seriously, wouldn’t the stress-related illnesses in our lives be greatly reduced?  Just think about it for a moment.  You come here this morning and worship God, reminding yourself of the importance of the spiritual dimensions of our human existence, connecting with those well-springs of energy that come from beyond ourselves, receiving forgiveness for the missteps that are gnawing at our consciences, and re-aligning our priorities with God’s values.  Then, after a nice time of fellowship with your church friends during the coffee hour, you could go home to a lunch that you had prepared yesterday.  All the work that you were thinking of doing this afternoon to get ready for the week ahead—fuhgidaboudit!  Take a long walk or read a stimulating book or catch up on the newspapers or write a letter to a friend you have not seen in years.  And don’t feel guilty about not working because God has commanded you not to work.  Take a nap!  Our bodies and brains need rest, and God’s laws tell us to pay attention to this fact.  When we ignore the Sabbath—and ministers are probably the worst offenders—it is almost as if we deny our humanity, reaching for the sort of constant  functionality that only God can maintain.  And even God rested on the seventh day.[6]  In a similar way, all the commandments are for our own good.  In that way they are an expression of God’s grace toward us.

At an even deeper level, all of the commandments operating together are full of grace because they define the sort of community of faith that is itself full of grace.  Let me say that again: the Ten Commandments define a grace-full community.  We have just spoken about how the Sabbath commandment operates in our individual lives.  Just think what the world would be like if everyone truly observed the Sabbath.  The commandments teach us to pay attention to, and respect, our family structures.  They teach us the sanctity of human life, that people have value not because of how they function, or because of what they can do for us, but because they are created by God and are God’s children.  When we truly recognize that we all are children of God—everyone in the world—we come to see that we are part of a community, that we are all in this world together and that we need to get along.  Getting along means that we respect each other’s person and property.  If our community is as full of grace as God intends, then we probably will want to correct those social systems and structures that result in some members of our family having so little food, clothing, shelter, and employment that their very humanity is challenged.

All these commandments tell us how we are to treat one another.  But the first few commandments tell us how we should relate to the Holy God.  These first command-ments set the context for all the rest.  We do not call ourselves into community.  We did not come together and make the last commandments—the ones about how we should treat each other—we did not make them up ourselves.[7]  No, it was God our creator who calls us into community.  It was God who gave us the commandments.  This God is not on our level.  This God is holy and not to be trifled with.  This God is mysterious and can be understood only as, and to the degree, God chooses to reveal God’s self to us.  That is why it is so important that we do not think of God in human terms.  God is not a wise old man.  God is not a nurturing mother.  God is both and God is neither.  God is far beyond our comprehension and cannot be domesticated by us.  Yet this God is the one who decides to be among us.  This God somehow has decided to pay attention to us and to care about our lives.  This is the God who brought us up out of slavery and wants us to be free.   

This community of fullness and grace, in which God has proper position and in which we treat each other as family members, is what Jesus called the “Kingdom of God.”  Jesus showed us what it looks like to be members of this kingdom, this commonwealth, this community.  It looks like a family banquet, where all are welcome, all are fed, and all are respected.  This community looks like Communion.  And that is why it is so important that we recognize today as World Communion Sunday.  Much of our liturgy this morning comes from a common liturgy being used by many other churches.  Some of the other churches in Terre Haute will be singing the same hymn that we will just before Communion.  And it is fitting that today we receive our special Peacemaking Offering—the envelopes are in the pew racks.  This offering is used locally, nationally, and internationally to break down the barriers that divide and to build bridges to the kind of community that God intends.

So I conclude:  God’s vision of a graceful community did not begin in the New Testament, but reaches back to the earliest times of the Old Testament, the very origins of human society.  God gathered a people to serve as an example to the world and gave them the law—God’s instructions on how we can live together in grace.  Jesus was himself the supreme example of God’s grace and the only image of God worthy of study.  Jesus reminded us of that grace-filled community, which in him God has extended now to the entire world.  We celebrate today that worldwide community and seek, through our peacemaking to realize it more fully each day.