Henrietta
United
Rev. David Inglis
Exodus 20:1-8,
12-21
“Living by the Law”
For me, the Bible is an endless source of
inspiration, wisdom and guidance. I’ve
preached about a thousand sermons based on the Bible, and I don’t expect that
I’ll ever run out of material. The Ten
Commandments are among the Bible’s great beacons that have been shining timeless truth into
the world for over 3000 years. And
they’re just as important to us today as they were to the ancient Hebrews who
first heard them.
But I’m going to take a risk and confess something to
you. There are parts of the Bible that
sometimes I would like to cut out and throw away. Here’s an example. In the commandment against worshiping idols,
God reportedly says, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children
for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those
who reject me.”
Now if you had a child who was insolent and rejected
your authority, how many of you would not only punish that child, but also
punish that child’s children when they came along, and then punish those
children’s children, and even punish those children’s children--even if
you had to haunt them and harass them from the grave. That would be sick, wouldn’t it? In fact, we’d appeal to the court might to
issue a restraining order to prevent such a vindictive, narcissistic person
from hurting all these innocent people. I would fear a God like that, but I
would never gladly give my heart and my life to serve that kind of God.
And look at how this passage ends. While God was giving his commandments to the
people, his words were accompanied by thunder, lightning, trumpet blasts and
smoke pouring out of the mountain. The
people tell Moses, “We’ll listen to you, but don’t let God speak to us,
or we’ll die!” And Moses tells them that
God won’t kill them; he’s doing this to make them too afraid of him to dare to
sin.
If I could edit the Bible, I’d like to cut that part
out too.
That sounds arrogant, doesn’t it? That puts me on very shaky
ground. Who am I to question the
Bible, or to presume to judge God? Especially
when I want to cut out the parts that make me uncomfortable. Making God into the kind of God that reflects
what I want instead of bowing before what God wants is exactly what that second
commandment about idolatry is about. So maybe I’d better shut up and sit down
before the thunder and lightning start, Methodist Hill starts billowing smoke,
and the ceiling falls in on us (put on hard hat).
But the truth is, my love for God, my love for you,
and my desire for all of us to grow and mature into the nature and likeness of
God’s loving, creating, redeeming, and uniting Spirit won’t let me sit down and
shut up, even if I risk heresy in some people’s minds. And the thing that makes me sure that my
eternal destiny–and our heads--are safe (remove hard hat) is that the
Bible itself shows a progression of understanding God and God’s
laws and a progression of what our relationship to God can be like. I find it enormously helpful and spiritually
necessary to look at the parts of the Bible that I want to cut out through the
lens of that progression.
Let me show what I mean by looking at the Ten
Commandments through that lens. The Ten Commandments came into existence at an
early stage of human civilization when almost everyone believed in multiple
gods who were self-centered, manipulative, and seemed to have almost no
morals. They had power, but no principles. And so human society was
organized around kings and tyrants who also had power but no principles, and
were often worshiped and feared like gods.
So into this chaotic scene came the Ten
Commandments. They were given to a band
of recently-freed slaves wandering in the desert. They had no land, no king, no
laws, and no understanding of God. These commandments showed the people that
the God who broke Pharaoh’s iron grip on them and had led them through the
Do you see what a revolutionary step in human history
this was? It created the very foundation
for what we call a just and civilized society.
Now the first three commandments–about not having any
other gods before the One True God, or making idols, or misusing God’s
name–were crucial, because as soon as you put anything or anyone ahead of this
just, ethical God, you’re going to put cracks in this foundation. Those who put
themselves above God, or those who think they can get away with murder or theft
or adultry when nobody is looking, will begin destroying this just society from
the top down or the bottom up. And if
that happens, the sins of the parents will be visited on their children
to the third or fourth generation–not because God is inflicting punishment but
because succeeding generations will have to deal with the consequences of a
corrupt social order. But it will seem
like God’s punishment, because God’s laws were disobeyed.
So what about the thunder and lightning and fear part
of the story? When you’re raising young
children, you have to teach them respect for your parental authority, and
sometimes this means their knowing that you mean business. I think showing them natural consequences is
great, but I’d hate to rely on that when your kid starts running out into the
street or strangling his baby sister. Before
children develop the ability to empathize and to think things through on their
own, their immature brains and untamed emotions need the structure of clear
limits and of knowing what’s right and wrong.
And I
believe that fear of punishment, when it’s fair and reasonable, needs to be
part of that. Punishment for doing
something hurtful or destructive only becomes harmful if the child is made to
feel like they are bad instead of their actions being bad, if the
parent’s motive is power or fear more than love, or if they’re not allowed to
think for themselves as they become able.
The Ten Commandments came into the world when the
human race as a whole was at a similar stage of moral and spiritual development
to young children today. If Moses had
said, “Listen, my fellow travelers on this earth plane, my inner spiritual wisdom has been
showing me how we can align ourselves with the divine energy within us and
begin to raise our consciousness and actualize our potential as the spiritual
beings that we truly are,” would the people have all run and gotten their
meditation mats and spiritual journals and sat down to listen? I don’t think so. They needed the fear of God to let them know
there was a Power higher than their own impulses and desires that they were
accountable to.
We still see vestiges of this stage of spiritual
development today. When Katrina hit,
some preachers said God was punishing
But that’s not the way the natural world around us
works. As Jesus said, “God makes his
rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”
Hurricanes destroy houses of worship as well as houses of prostitution. That’s not the nature of God; that’s the
nature of hurricanes.
Observing the way the world works and applying reason
to it like that is actually what carries us to a more advanced stage of
understanding God and God’s laws. Our
observations show us that if we treat most people respectfully and fairly, they
tend to treat us that way too, and we can build satisfying relationships of
mutual respect and care. Our reason tells us that obeying God and following the
Ten Commandments helps create the kind of just and ordered world that makes
life better for us and everyone else. We
come to appreciate the profound wisdom of the Golden Rule–“Do unto others as
you would have them do unto you.” Living
that way makes life so much better for all of us. At this stage we don’t fear God’s punishment
as much as we deeply revere God as the Source of truth, wisdom and
justice.
The psalmist expressed this kind of relationship to
God and God’s law when he declared,
The ordinances of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey,
and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm
19:9b-10)
This stage is very familiar to us here at HUCC. We don’t operate out of fear, guilt, or an
oppressive sense of duty. God’s law is
written on our hearts. We taste the
satisfying sweetness of respecting, caring for, encouraging, and lifting up
each other, and we sense God smiling on us and being present in those
connections between us.
But there’s an even higher stage of living by God’s
law. This is the level that Jesus lived,
embodied and taught. He summed up what
it means to live by God’s laws by using words that were already in the Hebrew scriptures: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And “You shall love
your neighbor as yourself. On these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40).
Jesus revealed the true essence of God’s Law, which
is love. In love, as in Jesus’ life,
there is no coercion, only freedom.
There is no exclusion; it values all without conditions. There is no condemnation; it only offers
forgiveness and redemption.
Because this is the way that God loves us, how can we
not love God? Loving God says Yes to the One who says an eternal Yes to us. And loving God, how can we not love our neighbor–no
matter how different they seem to us or what they have done to us–because God
created them, loves them, and wants the highest good
for them, as God wants it for us.
But living by the law of love goes even deeper than
this. When we let unconditional love
begin going to work in our hearts and minds, it awakens our own spirit, which
is our connection to God’s Spirit. When
we release our own fear, pride, judgments, and selfishness, the power of love
goes to work in our thoughts, actions and words. God’s own nature works through us to heal and
redeem and recreate the world around us.
And we are growing into that level here at HUCC. We experience that when we stretch beyond our
comfort zone and welcome the stranger into our family of faith, when we stretch
to understand and accept people who are different from us, when we offer
compassion and support to people who are too disabled or elderly to pay us
back; and when we pray for those who have wronged us. When these things happen, we can say with Paul,
“It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians
But we couldn’t have gotten where we are now unless
God had started by spelling out in black and white what’s right and what’s
wrong, what’s fair and what’s not fair, and maybe instilling some fear in us to
get us heading in the right direction.
So you know what?
I’ve changed my mind. I don’t
think I want to cut anything out of the Bible after all. It’s all there for a reason. Some people need that structure of knowing
exactly what they can and must not do, and that there will be
consequences if they disobey. Come to
think of it, I need that sometimes myself.
Other times, I’m more ready to let my human nature be taken over by
God’s nature and enjoy the awesome freedom of living in unconditional
love. Whatever level I’m at, I can find
the guidance I need in the Bible.
The key for me is not to read the Bible literally,
but to read it spiritually. The Bible
isn’t God; it is human words that came out of all kinds of human experiences
with God, and so these words point us to God from many different human
perspectives. We have to wrestle with
these words, and probe them, and then let them wrestle with us and probe us,
until we find the place that God is speaking to our heart and to our life. And because God is merciful and patient with
us, we don’t need hard hats to do this, for fear that we’ll make God mad if we
make a mistake. We only need humility,
trust, and the desire to live in alignment with God’s highest will for us,
which is also the highest good for us.
Thanks be to God for God’s
law, and for God’s mercy as we try to live it to the fullest. And thanks be to God
for the awesome truth that God’s law and God’s mercy are, in their essence, one
and the same.