A Rule of Love

          A scribe walks up to Jesus and asks, “What is the first commandment?”

          “The Lord is our God, The Lord alone. You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. The second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (“Matthew 22:39, John 15:17 NKJV)

          And, as one rabbi taught, “Everything else is conversation.”

          Jesus places the Ten Commandments into one inseparable relationship with his answer. Every image we have of the Ten commandments depicts two tables. On one table is how we are to live our life before God and the other is how we live together as a community. Yet, the two tables are inseparable. One cannot love God without loving one’s neighbor and one cannot love one’s neighbor without loving God. Choosing to emphasize one at the expense of the other is contrary to what God intends the people of God to do.

Yet too often we do just that. Indeed, many Christians create displays of the ten commandments like the one Roy Moore did when he was running for public office in Alabama. He created a display that weighs 5,280 pounds or about five hundred pounds per commandment, so when he brings this monument to public appearances it needs to be loaded on the back of a flatbed truck. Joshua Green, writing in the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago, notes that whenever the truck returns to Alabama, “a 57-foot yellow I-beam crane that spans the ceiling of the Clark Memorials warehouse drops down to retrieve the Rock from its chariot, and even this one — a five-ton crane/ — buckles visibly under the weight.”

“I know,” as Professor Tom Long writes, “that Jesus once scolded the Pharisees for neglecting the weightier matters of the law, but somehow this I-beam-bending version of the Decalogue seems way out of proportion.”

          But it makes the perfect point about the way the Ten Commandments have become a heavy burden in our contemporary culture. Every conversation I hear about them has some commentator wagging a finger at another person saying, “thou shalt not!” as if the commandments were created by God to be a moral imperative, a checklist for deciding whether someone is getting into heaven or not, rather than being the structure forming and shaping a community of health and well-being. Of course, for other folks, the commandments are a legalistic framework used to place heavy yokes publicly on the necks of rebellious children or a society out of control. I mean listen to the words of Luther’s Small Catechism, “God threatens to punish everyone who breaks these commandments. We should be afraid of His anger because of this and not violate such commandments.” (“The Ten Commandments – Bible Hub”)

I suppose all these understandings of the Decalogue makes a two-and-a-half-ton rock sitting on the bed of a truck seem to be about a perfect symbol for what the Ten Commandments might be. Especially, since we seem to have forgotten that the Babylonians’ gods were heavy idols that had to be trucked around, “These things you carry,” Isaiah chided the Israelites, “are loaded as burdens on weary animals” (Isa. 46:1).

          The problem is that all the ways we use the Ten Commandments or the ten words as they are referred to in Hebrew scripture fails to recognize they are about liberation and are God’s rule of love. They are given as an expression of God’s liberating the people from slavery out of the love God has for people. Indeed, the reading begins with, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the house of slavery.” God liberates the Hebrews from slavery, then freely provides them all they need for life, including how to be free and loving as a community of health, well-being, mutuality, loving-kindness, and wholeness. Indeed, as Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar, points out, “these ten commands are to be the bedrock of God’s intention for Israel, from which all other commands in Israel is understood to be derivative. “

          Also, these commands are created to establish a social rule contrasted with that of pharaoh, so that the people do not attempt to replicate the governance of pharaoh with its coercion, brutality, dehumanization of other peoples, and exploitation of other peoples within the community. Thus, this community of God’s people are to practice God’s justice instead of pharaoh’s injustice and to establish neighborly well-being instead of coercion, fear, and exploitation.

 You see, God does not intend to re-enslave people with these commands, but to set them free as if to say, “you are free not to need any other gods or even to make 5,280-pound images of God to truck around. You are free to rest on the seventh day because you, your animals, your servants, your land all need rest from productivity, so you can all be healthy and enjoy a long life. You are no longer at the mercy of an oppressor working you to death and you are not something to be used up or consumed until there is nothing left of you. You, the powerless, are free from the rapacious capacity of the strong because I, the Lord, have set limits to the acquisitive capacity of members of the community. You are free from some members who want to take what another member of the community needs for life.

 You are free from the tyranny of lifeless idols made of stones or wood; free from solving every problem with violence and you can instead look for ways to solve problems with other people and tribes, so everyone wins and gets what they need for life because there is abundance for all. You are free to find ways to sustain life for yourselves, for neighbors and for all creation. You are free from having to covet what your neighbor has because you both have everything you need for life and, by the way, you are free from having to compare yourself with your neighbor or find your self-worth based upon what you or your neighbor owns or can do because you are loved just as you are and you are free to celebrate other people’s gifts because you have valuable gifts, too.

          Or as another theologian has written “You want to make an idol of this God, an image of bird, snake, tree, pole, money, fame, or pleasure? This God will have none of that because this is the God who brought you out of slavery. You want to trivialize the name of this God by slapping God’s name onto any fool thing you already want to do, thereby baptizing your idiocy with a divine seal of approval, thereby enslaving oneself in the bondage of self-satisfied power. God will have none of that either, for that is also a kind of slavery from which you need to be free.”

“God says, I want you free, because I am in the freedom business. All the ways you can imagine falling back into slavery and death, God is there to call you out to freedom and life, because that is who God is. God is life and freedom. It is God who has brought us out of the house of slavery and God can surely do so again, bringing us the lasting freedom of grace.

          Not only that, but God’s good news of life should be like music with the Ten Commandments the dance steps that set us moving together, as Tom Long has suggested. They are supposed to be our wings, so we might soar on the wind of the Holy Spirit. This is one of the reasons Luther, also, suggested to change the language of the commandments from “thou shalt not” to more positive language that evokes the freedom God’s love intends for us to enjoy, so instead of “thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor” perhaps ‘find joy in telling the truth, being honest and upholding the goodness and good name of your neighbor as if pronouncing a blessing upon your neighbor.”

          Also, if we want to pass this good news of freedom and life to our children, then we are going to have to be creative; more creative than hanging the Ten Commandments on a wall, memorizing them in order or hauling them around on a flatbed truck. I suggest we create stories because as Robert Wuthnow writes, “”Stories do more than keep memories alive. Sometimes these stories become so implanted in our minds that they act back upon us, directly and powerfully.”

          Wuthnow tells the story of Jack Casey, a volunteer firefighter and ambulance attendant who, as a child, had to have some of his teeth extracted under general anesthesia. Jack was terrified, but a nurse standing nearby said to him, “Don’t worry, I’ll be here right beside you no matter what happens.” When he woke up from the surgery, she had kept her word, and she was still standing beside him.

This experience of being cared for by the nurse stayed with him, and 20 years later his ambulance crew was called to the scene of an accident. The driver was pinned upside down in his pickup truck, and Jack crawled inside to try to get him out of the wreckage. Gasoline was dripping onto both Jack and the driver, and there was a danger of fire because power tools were being used to free the driver, the whole time, the driver was crying out about how scared of dying he was, and Jack kept saying to him, recalling what the nurse had said so many years before, “Look, don’t worry, I’m right here with you, I’m not going anywhere.” Later, after the truck driver had been safely rescued, he was incredulous. “You were an idiot “he said to Jack. “You know that thing could have exploded, and we’d have both been burned up.” In reply, Jack simply said he felt he just could not leave him.

This is how the commandments are supposed to work, as Tom Long says it, “We have the experience of being cared for, the experience of being set free and loved, preserved in a story. Then, comes the life shaped ethically around that story. A nurse saying, “I’ll be right here beside you” becomes the action of a man risking his life for a stranger because he knows in his bones that he just cannot leave him.”

 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you . . . out of the house of slavery” prompts us to live lives shaped by the love and freedom created by God,” asserts Tom Long.

And I got to believe living God’s joyous freedom and love held within the Ten Commandments is much better than carrying around tons of dreary duty, just hoping the wheels do not come off the flatbed truck of our lives.

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Rules to Keep, Rules to Break

What do we see?

This is the persistent question Jesus is dealing with in Luke’s Gospel. He has just chided the people gathering around him for being able to tell when it will rain, when the sun is about rise in the morning, or a strong wind from the south means a heat spell, but not being able see what was happening right in front of them in the present moment.

Indeed, Jesus has been talking about this blindness and about the weakness of those who cannot discern the present evidence of God’s rule since he preached his sermon on the plain. But Jesus is not alone in this chiding of God’s people. God calls Jeremiah to be a prophet because God wants people to hear about how they have been conned and duped by the Kings, the priests, and the false prophets who shout Peace! Peace, when there is no peace and the priests who have failed to teach the people God’s way of living and leading the people to be united to God.

Instead, the priests have taught the people to practice meaningless rituals, while they maintained the status quo of the elites on top and people serving the elites as though they were still slaves in Pharaoh’s kingdom.

  Jeremiah is calling the people to change the direction of their lives and to make the decision to live united to God in God’s covenant of ten commands each day of their lives, rather than to keep trusting those who are leading them away from God.

The psalmist in psalm seventy-one sings the praise that celebrates God’s presence while proclaiming trust in God as only a person can do who always knows now and in every circumstance that her life belongs to God and her future depends upon God.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews tells those listening to this letter read in worship to change the direction of their lives-live a transformed existence. The letter writer is calling them to decide to be united with God through Christ. Yet, this transformed existence can only happen in the presence of a transforming power available to those called to such a transformed existence. This power, as the writer of Hebrew asserts, is in Jesus the Christ, the mediator of the new covenant. The mediator of God’s love.

          Jesus is teaching in a local synagogue on the Sabbath for the last time as this story opens. A woman who has been crippled to weakness for 18 years enters the place of worship, the place where the story of liberation, healing to wholeness, and God’s love is told and re-told to every generation, so that each generation participating in the story may praise and express gratitude to God. This woman is nameless, which makes her invisible to her first century village. She has no name, no status, and no connection to this community. We have no idea what has crippled her. What has pressed down upon her with such persistence that it has sapped her strength, made her fragile, liable to yield to collapse or break under pressure or strain? What has kept her crippled, nameless, and invisible? What cripples anyone to weakness? Abuse or mistreatment done daily with such ferocity that one bends and bends just hoping it will stop or by bending one hopes to escape some of the crippling blows. It doesn’t have to be physical abuse because emotional abuse is just as crippling, just as strength sapping. I know because I am a survivor of both and of a poverty that can be just as crippling.

Maybe, it is an addiction. Addictions whether of drugs, alcohol, gambling, overeating, compulsive shopping, or nail biting, judging others or gossiping can all make us fragile and likely to break under the weight of our demons leading us to what addicts us, what makes us fragile as well as our shame and guilt.

          Then, there is the wilderness of oppression, poverty, violence, bigotry, a narrow perspective about what is happening in our community, state or world that also cripples us with a weakness that may leave us unable to cope, unable to live in hope or able find the way out of the wilderness.

In addition, every time we alter our behavior to accommodate our addiction or whatever cripples us with weakness, it can seem like there is no way out, there is no way of getting away from it because it envelops you, surrounds you and overwhelms you like Louisiana flood waters or a California wildfire raging out of control. So, after trying to stand up to it, to fight back against it only to fail repeatedly, it is easy to bend under its weight, to accept it and, worse, to embrace it as who you are and let others define you by what cripples you to weakness.

          You see, this unnamed woman, who is bent over by the weight of all that has crippled her isn’t just some woman, she is like way too many women, way too many children, way too many men whose vision of the world never reaches beyond the fragility and the breaking point of what cripples them and what keeps them crippled by a community’s status quo and those who seek to keep the rules rigidly in place.

          People like the leader of the synagogue who challenges Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath as breaking the Sabbath rules because such healing is considered work and work is not to be done on the day of rest, re-creation, and refreshment. Maintaining the Sabbath rules that are piled on the people year after year have become in the first century and, even like the 21^st century interpretation by some Christians, a means of social control and oppression. The questions we might want to ask are what does the rigid keeping of rules accomplish and who benefits by the rule keeping? These are, of course, variations of the questions we might want to ask about solving the problems of poverty, income inequality, violence, and immigration.

What are the rules maintaining the status quo of poverty, income inequality, violence, and immigration and who is benefiting by not solving these problems?

          The answers just might reside in Jesus’ acts to heal the woman and instruct the people in the synagogue. First, remember Jesus takes the initiative to heal the woman. She doesn’t come seeking something from him, she simply comes to worship God. By this healing act, Jesus not only lifts off the weight of the crippling weakness, but he brings her fully back into the community. She can now be seen as the person she is, and she can now fully participate in the life of the community. Jesus’ teaches that the woman is a daughter of Abraham, so shouldn’t she be treated better than they would treat an animal? If an animal were bound, wouldn’t they unbind it and bring it to water, don’t they feed and care for their animals on the Sabbath, if an ox were found in a ditch on the Sabbath wouldn’t they rescue it, wouldn’t they free the ox? So, why wouldn’t they set free a human being from whatever is keeping her or him bound, enslaved, or diminished?  Didn’t God do that for them when they were enslaved in Egypt? Isn’t that what is celebrated on the Sabbath?

Aren’t we celebrating God’s kingdom where no one is weighed down with burdens so heavy they bend one over, no one is left fragile, no one is left vulnerable to crippling weaknesses, but are strengthened, are set free from all the ways humans are oppressed, addicted, traumatized, and betrayed by one another? After all, humanity was not created for the keeping of Sabbath rules, instead Sabbath was a gift to humanity from God. The gift of liberation from the pre-occupation of 24/7/365 tasks completion. The gift of liberation from all that enslaves us. The gift of liberation to be restored, to live a transformed existence of active holiness where we celebrate everything God has done for us and will do for us by seeing God’s presence and the evidence of God’s rule in the present moments of our lives even as we live united to God and God’s rule that lifts people out of their present situation into a new transformed life where they fully participate in the life of the community and are seen as a talented human person who has a name, who makes a contribution to the community and who is the very image of God in our midst. Just like all of us.

Isn’t this what Jesus calls us to see when he breaks the rules and heals a woman on the Sabbath? Isn’t Jesus calling us to embrace God’s rule of love as the only rule we need to keep?         

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Living What We Pray

The pastor of the small church was busily writing the sermon for Sunday morning worship hoping to finally have the quiet to complete his work. Scattered on the desk was the Scriptures opened to the passage in Matthew that was the basis for his sermon along with theological dictionaries, New Testament in Greek, the Greek-English lexicon, and a couple of commentaries. He had started writing his sermon early in the morning but was interrupted by telephone calls and visitors. Now, sitting at his desk with the desk lamp shedding light only on the space of his desk he wrote as the late evening darkness enveloped the rest of the room. Then, the doorbell rang not once, but three times.

          “Perhaps if I just sit here quietly and wait, whoever is there will go away,” the pastor mumbled to himself, but the ringing persisted. He couldn’t just sit there, so he dropped his pen on the desk and dragged himself to the door. He opened it. Standing before him was a wizened old man, “What d’ya want?” The pastor asked.

          “Well, I was wondering if ya might have a couple of dollars to spare.” The old man smiled a toothless grin.

“No! Good night!” The pastor slammed the door. He went back to his desk muttering and trying to recoup his train of thought when his eyes fell on the passage from Matthew, “When was it we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And, when was it that we saw you naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you? Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

The pastor rubbed his hands together as if washing them. The words convicted him because he failed to do exactly what he was planning to tell his parishioners on Sunday morning to do; live what you pray.

Which is exactly what God is telling the people Israel to do through the prophet Isaiah.

Although, God first speaks a word of criticism that is about as harsh as any other words God might speak. Through the words Isaiah speaks, God tells the people Israel that they are the people and rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities that symbolize utter wickedness, injustice, and absolutely over the top sinning as a lifestyle. God doesn’t say to the Israelites you are acting like them, or your behavior is like them. No, God says, “You are those people!” What a stinging rebuke to the people God has chosen to be a blessing to the world. Yet, God doesn’t stop there. God tells the Israelites, “I want nothing to do with your worship or your offerings. They are meaningless”

God has had enough of their burnt offerings, their incense burning, their gatherings for the holy days and the Sabbath. God is weary of their worship and doesn’t even want to hear any more of their prayers. Their worship means nothing to the Lord. Their worship adds nothing to the relationship between God and the people and it has become a burden God is tired of carrying. Their worship has become no more than the noise of so many feet slapping against stone pavement as they trample through God’s courts. They treat worship as simply one more obligation they keep among many obligations if they bother to worship at all. They are just going through the motions and God has had enough of them.

Cleary, God is bringing judgment upon Israel, but what is it they have done or more importantly what is it they failed to do that makes God not even want to hear their prayers any longer? The answer comes at the end of verse 15 and continues through verse 17, “your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean. Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil. Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”

They have been coming to worship God with words of praise, thanksgiving, confession, and pleas for mercy, but they have failed to live the justice and compassion contained within the covenant. Instead, they have acted as oppressors, worshipped idols of their own making, and become like all the people around them. And, it had been a top-down enterprise beginning with King David followed up and expanded by Solomon as he used marriage as a tool for establishing trading partners and military alliances and allowed his foreign wives to bring with them alien religious commitments that are deeply linked to alien socio-economic-political values. In addition, Solomon used taxation and conscription of the peasants to provide for a standing army and constructing grand buildings that gave the illusion of security and power.

All this runs against the covenant God gave the people at Sinai. Thus, Solomon turned away from God and in doing so turned away from loving the neighbor. Subsequent kings who reigned during Isaiah’s ministry fared a little better. Jotham would serve adequately but failed to remove the “high places” of pagan worship (2 Kings 15:35). Ahaz went so far as to “cast images for the Baal” idols and seemed to have sacrificed his own son by fire in a pagan ritual in the Hinnom Valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, a practice that was especially repugnant to God (2 Kings 16:1-4; 2 Chronicles 28:1-4).  Manasseh reversed many of his father Hezekiah’s policies and led Judah farther away from God (2 Chronicles 29:1-33:9). 

While apostasy was a recurring theme throughout the reign of the kings of Judah, the sins of the nation itself went deeper. Isaiah made the point that injustice, particularly toward those most vulnerable in society, was the even greater sin because it broke the second great command to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

This prophetic critique does not mean that worship is unimportant and social behavior, what one does outside of worship, is more important. Rather, it means that Israel’s worship of praise and thanksgiving to God does not stop at the sanctuary doors but extends into every aspect of their lives leading them to act against injustice and to perform acts of compassion for their neighbors.

They really must live out God’s command written in Leviticus Chapter 19 to “be holy, for I, the Lord your God am holy!”  This is the reason God gives the people Israel the Decalogue in the first place. They are to be different and distinct from all the people around them just as God is distinctively different from all the other deities the people around them worship.

Most significantly, God has a name and reveals that name to human persons. Back at the beginning of the Hebrew exodus out of the slavery in Egypt God appears to Moses in a burning bush and calls Moses to go to Pharaoh and tell Pharaoh to let my people go. God also tells Moses to go to the elders of the Hebrews and tell them they are leaving Egypt. Moses asks, “Who are you? What is your name that I can tell the Hebrews, so they will know you have sent me?”

God answers with a puzzling conversation stopper, “I am who I am.” God’s name written in Hebrew is derived from the verb to be, so what God is telling Moses is essentially “I am life. I am the one who causes life to exist. I create life.” Indeed, God is the very power of newness that will create a new life for the Hebrews outside the deathliness of Egyptian slavery.

The other significant aspect of God is that God hears the cries of a people being oppressed and abused and acts to free them from their oppression. God is the God who favors the poor and the powerless over and against the rich and the powerful. God is the one whose very nature is justice, mercy, faithfulness, steadfast love, and forgiveness.

So, when God commands Israel, to “be holy just I, the Lord your God, am holy” God is calling Israel to live and act in imitation of the way God is and the way God acts. They are to be the very image of God within creation, which is an echo of Genesis 1. What follows this command in Chapter 19 of Leviticus is the Torah that teaches the way this people will be holy. Worship and social justice are integrated into a unity of community life that is inseparable from each other. Their liturgical life will shape their moral lives. Their ethics will come out from their worship of God. They will practice Sabbath and they will honor parents. They shall dispose of sacrificial offerings in certain ways, and they shall not act fraudulently in business dealings. They shall reap their harvests but leave a portion on the edges for the poor to glean. They will do and say in worship what they will do and say in the rest of their lives because both worship and life seek to praise and to glorify God.

That is the point. The Hebrews are not to follow these commands so they will be a great and powerful nation among all other nations of the world, but so their lives point other people to the one true living, holy God, who is life. So, when other people see the way the Israelites are living, they will see God’s will for the world and God’s name will be hallowed, will be glorified. And those people will come seeking to join God’s people and to live as God intends for all people to live together as a community because it is a more joy filled, abundant and peaceful life.

What is true for the Israelites is also true for Christians. Which is Jesus’ point in the reading from Luke. Like the Israelites our Sunday worship is only the beginning of our worship of God because it prepares us to worship God in the everyday affairs of our lives from Monday through Saturday. We, too, are a people whose lives are shaped by worship. We often sing hymns or read Scripture lessons that praise the name of God. But when we pray the Lord’s Prayer we come into the deep waters of faith.

“Our Father, who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.” The moment we say, “our Father” we are saying we are a part of God’s people. We belong to the people God has called, chosen, and claimed to be God’s own. We no longer live our lives only for ourselves but have become part of the people who are created to praise God. We are part of the people whose lives are brought into God’s good intention for the world. We are a people whose treasure is not gold or silver but is God and God’s way of life. We are not just a man or a woman as the rest of the world might define us. Rather, we count for something more in the larger scheme of things and we are joining our voices with those of all creatures in praising a holy God who comes to us, who enjoys our praise, who hears our prayers, and who delights even to hear our songs. As we join this chorus, we learn to hallow the name of God and, in doing so, we discover our true being.  

As the first letter of Peter sings joyfully, “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people. In order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”  We are the community where all the barriers and boundaries separating one person from another are broken down and no longer exist. Just as our worship and our social behaviors are inseparable from each other, so we as a community are united together as the Body of Christ. We are called, set apart, made holy by God to live our lives in such a way as to make visible to the world the truth, that the holy God reigns.

We do this as Paul writes to the Colossians by, “clothing ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Above all, clothing ourselves with love which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

We do this by standing in opposition to present injustice because in the face of poverty, oppression, and all forms of inequity, we insist on something more, something greater than whatever is achievable by human effort alone. We do this by learning from and continuing to serve God by serving our neighbors as long lines of our Christian ancestors have done and who appear to us as William James writes “in a photograph of saintliness.” Those Christians who Tertullian, the North African theologian of the third century, described as supporting and burying the poor, supplying the needs of the boys and girls destitute of means, caring for the elderly confined to houses, or caring for those banished to mines for their fidelity to Christ. Those Christians whose hearts, minds and lives were centered on Christ like the desert mothers and fathers who founded monasteries, like those who joined George Fox as Quakers and those who joined John Wesley, and those like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa who cared for people no one else cared about.

We do this by being honest with each other, by actively listening to the pain of grief from our neighbor-no matter the cause of that grief, by buying and drinking Fair Trade coffee because the farmers who grow the beans for this coffee are paid enough for their crops that they can sustain themselves, their families, and their communities. We do this by refusing to bless greed and violence and by seeing Christ in the face of every person we meet. We do this by making God in Christ the treasure of our lives, certain that where our treasure is there our hearts and lives will be.  We do this by living what we pray.

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Impossible Possibility

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go to a bookshelf and pull down a cookbook and find a recipe for “How to help your best friend through their problems?” It might tell you exactly what to say, when to say it, then what to do next. Maybe something like, “Bring Danish, add strong coffee, sit around the kitchen table for 30 minutes.” Something clear and exact.

Or maybe we could look up the recipe for “How to raise children who always do what you ask them to do.” In this magical cookbook, there are clearly defined ingredients and specific instructions. Of course, nowhere, but nowhere would you ever find the nebulous, “season to taste.”

Wouldn’t it be great, also, if we could just reach up and grab the cookbook for being a follower of Christ? We would find the specific ingredients in designated amounts telling us how to serve God. Pray four times a day, say a kind word three times a day, and add two hours of Bible study each week, mix, simmer, and serve. We would be sure we were praising and giving thanks to God correctly because the directions would be clear and exact.  We’d know that it’s possible to follow this recipe because we’d know ahead of time that the recipe works.

          Very often, Christians approach Jesus teaching his disciples through the sermon on the plain what the vision of God’s kingdom is as if it is a magical recipe for life. Remember, Jesus begins this sermon by saying the folks who are blessed are the poor, the hungry, the folks who are weeping, and the folks who are excluded, reviled, hated, and defamed on account of Jesus.

 Then, Jesus teaches that the folks who are woeful are the rich, the well-fed, the ones who are laughing, the people other people are holding up as examples of how to live according to the norms of the culture.

          After that, Jesus tells his disciples, “Love your enemies. Do well to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. If someone hits you on the left cheek offer that person the right cheek. If someone takes your coat then give them your shirt. Don’t practice revenge. Give to everyone who begs from you. Do to others what you would have them do to you. Lend to those who cannot repay you. As a matter of fact give without expecting to get anything in return.”

          And if we do hear these words as if they are magical cookbook recipe that we can follow and use saying, “Oh, do to others what you want them to do for you.  We can do that. I want people to speak nicely to me, so I’ll speak nicely to them. I want people to help me, so I’ll help other people. What could be easier?”

          By approaching Jesus’ teachings this way, we might become like the woman who lives in New York City. She hears a sermon on these words of Jesus and decides to put them into practice. She’s going to change her attitude and change the way she deals with people. No longer is life lived through resentment and revenge. From here on out it is “love the enemy, turn the other cheek, and forgiveness.”

          Monday morning comes and she heads to work. Barely has she left her apartment building when she is approached by a beggar. “Give to everyone who begs,” Jesus said. So, some money is fished out and placed in the beggar’s hand. On the subway there are other beggars and more money is handed out. At the entrance to the office building sits a homeless woman, shivering in the cold. “Do not withhold even your shirt,” Jesus said. So, this faithful person sheds coat and sweater and hands them to the woman. Inside the building, office politics are in full swing. Instead of jockeying for power, she shares words of affirmation and practices a spirit of forgiveness. But, an office rival, sensing an opportunity to move up the corporate ladder because of her new way of being, moves in skillfully for power and pushes her out the door. At the end of the day, this woman may well have lived the gospel command, but she may also be broke, cold, and unemployed.

          And, we are tempted to cry out, “what a minute! I thought she’d be blessed and get the rewards of those blessings Jesus taught. How come everyone doesn’t like her, help her and affirm her? That’s not the way the recipe said it’d turn out!”

          The problem is we either forget or fail to comprehend that Jesus is beginning to differentiate the kingdom of God from the prevailing culture the people who are listening to him are living within.  Remember, Jesus has just called all twelve of his disciples to “follow me and be my apostles” then he walks down from the mountain with them to the level plain. He begins by saying that in the kingdom of God the rules of the prevailing culture don’t work. Those cultural rules that define who a person is, what a person’s status is and where the boundary markers of who is valued, who is blessed by God, who is to be emulated and imitated, and who is acceptable don’t work in the kingdom of God.

          In the kingdom of God the persons the prevailing culture does not bless, but does scorn and regard as cursed, such as the poor, are the ones who are blessed. The persons the prevailing culture does not want to see, but wants to hide away somewhere because those people are reminders about what is unpleasant, what is negative, what is embarrassing to see, what makes people feel bad, because those folks are reminders that life in creation is fragile, conditional, and can be painful, such as those persons who weep and mourn, those who weep and mourn are the ones blessed. The persons the prevailing culture doesn’t care about, doesn’t see as they beg on the streets and at the city gates and whom the prevailing culture won’t give even the basic necessities for life, such as the hungry and homeless, these are the persons blessed in God’s kingdom. The persons the prevailing culture wishes would stop speaking, would stop reminding everybody about the covenant with God, would stop saying that the way the prevailing culture operates is more about death than about life, those persons who the prevailing culture will destroy to put an end to their speaking, such as the prophets, they are the ones blessed.  And, in the kingdom of God those people whom the prevailing culture regards as blessed, as valued will discover how woeful they really are.

They will be like Jacob the tailor who felt he had been mistreated in the church. So, he withdrew from the community and isolated himself from his friends and neighbors. Weeks went by until, finally, the pastor called on him. After a polite greeting, there was a heavy silence. Then the pastor said, “Let’s sit in front of the fire.” So the two men sat in complete silence. An hour or so later the pastor picked up the fireplace tongs, pulled out a coal and placed it on the hearth, away from the fire. Still no word was spoken. The two men just sat and watched the glowing, burning piece of coal become darker and darker, until finally it was cold and dusty with ashes. A few moments later, Jacob the tailor spoke, “I understand,” he said. Not one word had been uttered but the point had been made. When we withdraw from the community, we isolate ourselves from our neighbors and from God, and we are alone, cold, and ashen.

This is the woe for those the prevailing culture blesses because in the end they will discover how far they have separated themselves from God, the source of life. 

Now, Jesus doesn’t speak these woes because God doesn’t like rich people, or people who are comfortable, or people who have enough to eat, or people who are lighthearted and enjoying their life, or people other people celebrate. Or, because they are beyond God’s redeeming power.

The point is the way life is lived in God’s kingdom is radically different from the kingdoms they are living within whether it is Herod’s kingdom, the Roman Emperor’s kingdom, or any other kingdom. And, Jesus is teaching these people that they have a choice about which kingdom to live within. Either God’s kingdom or some other kingdom. This is made clear in Jesus words because the words Jesus uses are performative words. Words that describe reality the way it is right now. You see, the kingdom of God is not some faraway place. It is not some distant future reality that exists in some highly romanticized and sentimental ideal, Shangri-La, over the rainbow place, but exists here and now. These blessings are happening as we speak. God’s vision and agenda for life is happening today and is continuing to happen tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow whether we experience it or not. Whether we take part in it or not.

          And, if we want to live within God’s kingdom we have to understand that the model for how we live, our behaviors and responses to creation and the people around us is God. It is not any other person or any philosophy or moral construct of the prevailing culture. God is our model for living as Leviticus 19:2 points out, “You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy.”  Followers of Christ do not reciprocate because we are given gifts, invited to dinners or treated nicely nor do we even love those who love us, nor do followers of Christ retaliate when we are mistreated, abused, experience violence or hated because we do not draw our behavior patterns and responses from those who would victimize us. We are not shaped or molded by the hostilities and abuse unleashed on us or by the love and nice treatment we receive from others. Followers of Christ do not respond in kind, or by playing dead or whining, rather followers of Christ take the initiative to act the way God acts, with self-offering love, forgiveness, and generosity as God teaches us by God’s own actions. God does not reciprocate but is kind and generous even to the ungrateful and selfish. God created the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike, the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust. God offers a radical grace to everyone without respect to whether a person merits it or not. This is the point of the prodigal son and older son story later in Luke.

          This is not to say that living in God’s kingdom is an easily learned and practiced formula or a magical recipe for life. It is not. Even Martin Luther King Jr. understood this during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in the early 1950’s when he spoke about having to teach people that non-violence, non-retaliation was not cowardice, stagnant passivity, a deadening complacency, but was an act of resistance, it was a refusal to cooperate with the systemic racism and the violence used to maintain the status quo of Jim Crow. As he said in a speech before the YMCA and YWCA at the University of California, Berkeley, “We had to use our mass meetings to explain non-violence to a community of people who had never heard,” of it. Doctor King also asserted in a sermon in Montgomery that the most durable power in the world is love and it is central to life, quoting John, “God is love.’ The person who loves is a participant in the being of God. The person who hates does not know God.”

          Living in God’s kingdom is to daily remember that God’s kingdom is not bound to any nation-state, to any government, to any religious doctrine, denomination or institution, to any political or economic philosophy or to any other human constructed norms or understandings and is very often in radical opposition to all them because God’s kingdom is love seeking the well-being of every single person because every single person is created in God’s image and likeness and God loves everyone and desires every person to thrive and have well-being!

          This means the followers of Christ wake up each morning with feet on the ground, committing to living today in God’s kingdom and none other, saying aloud, “Today I will be holy as God is holy.”

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Co-Workers with God

“And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which, there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and many animals?” God says to Jonah in one of best last lines of any book in the Bible.

Now, the question sounds like Cain’s question to God, “Well am I my brother’s keeper? Am I really supposed to be my brother’s powerful ally in living this life?” Which if one is faithful to God’s agenda can only be answered, “Of course.”

But, Jonah really wants to say, “No you’re not supposed to be concerned about them. They are the enemy! Not only do they not know their right hand from their left, but they don’t know right from wrong and they destroyed your own people in the Northern Kingdom Israel. So, you should just destroy them like you said you were going to do when you told me to go and tell them “Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed.”

However, if Jonah did get to say that, we’d miss the most humorous book in the entire Bible. Jonah is, I think, an ancient near east satire where the hero says all the right things, but his actions contradict his words.

Remember, God calls Jonah to be a prophet and tells Jonah to go to Nineveh. So what does Jonah do ? He runs away in the opposite direction, boarding a ship bound for Tarshish. Then, he tries to hide from the creator of the universe down in the bottom of the boat, reminding me of people who deny something they’ve said even when it’s been recorded and played back for them. Pretty foolish, right? Then, a great catastrophic storm hits the ship and Jonah begs the crew to throw him overboard into the sea, so crew can save themselves, which they do. Of course, God sends a taxi to pick him up in the form of a great fish, who swallows Jonah. While in the belly of the great fish for three days and nights, Jonah prays thanksgiving for God hearing his cry of distress and bringing him safely out of the pit of Sheol and saving his life, of course he never did cry out for help from God, nor was his life ebbing away to death. This prayer uses all the right words, but lacks the conviction of faith. Eventually the great fish vomits Jonah onto the sandy shore just outside of Nineveh.

Now, Nineveh is the capital city of the Assyrians, who don’t believe in God and who were enemies of Israel because they were responsible for the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. They enslaved and scattered the people of the northern kingdom of Israel into the world where they were lost for centuries. Yet, despite Jonah’s unwillingness and disobedience, God still wants Jonah to deliver a message to the people of Nineveh that sounds like the certainty of judgment without the possibility of mercy.

So, Jonah proclaims, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” and he expects God will destroy Nineveh because Jonah can’t imagine the Ninevites repenting of their ways. Also, he doesn’t think the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God of Nineveh and doesn’t think God’s blessing of love, compassion and mercy extends to outsiders, particularly not historic enemies.

Except, the hard truth for God’s co-workers is as my granddaughter Aubrey asserts when she is asked why she has done something, “I do what I do.” Well, God does what God does and we have absolutely no control over what God will do. This is as hard a lesson to learn as that referees and umpires aren’t going to change their calls no matter how much dirt we kick on their shoes, yell in their faces, yell from the sidelines, or scream at the television set. God does what God will do and doesn’t really care if we like it or not.

Jonah learns this the hard way when he proclaims his eight-word sermon and becomes the most successful prophet in the history of Israel when the Ninevites from King to peasant, including animals, go full on medieval repentance wearing sack cloth and ashes without any guarantee it will change anything, but just on the off chance that “God may relent and change his mind, so that we do not perish.” They rest their hope in God’s mercy and forgiveness.  What else could God do, except forgive them.

Jonah goes ballistic preferring death to watching this spectacle of grace. After all, no prophet speaking to the people Israel has ever had this much success calling the people of Israel to repent and turn back to God and God’s ways. Usually, they get stuff thrown at them or the king puts them down a well to drown  or they just ignored by the people. Israel never, ever repents this fully and immediately. It takes war and exile to get Israel to return to God. Jonah has never seen this spectacle of grace in Israel, so is angry at how responsive the people of Ninevah are to his eight-word sermon.

Naturally, God does play with Jonah a bit when he goes ballistic, according to Barbara Brown Taylor, when God creates a castor oil bush to grow up over Jonah’s head and provide shade for him as he sits hunkered down in his sulking pettiness, Naturally, Jonah likes the shade bush very much as much as he hated what happened in Nineveh, but it is short lived. God creates a worm to attack the bush and Jonah again threatens to die, as if this will ruin God’s day.”

And, because this a teachable moment, God asks Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” This, of course, a trick question because if Jonah says no, it isn’t right, then he has no right to be angry about the mercy God shows the Ninevites. If he says yes, it is right for him to be angry, then God gets to compare what happened to the bush to what happens to a whole city full of people and maybe Jonah might get a glimmer of his petty self-righteous bookkeeping.

True to form Jonah does answer, “Yes, I get to be angry about the bush!” You see, Jonah like all of us bookkeepers loves the blessings of grace we receive, even if they come to us from way out of far-left field, like a package delivered to the wrong address. We love grace and forgiveness, we just don’t want those other people whom we know do not deserve grace and forgiveness to be blessed at all. We want to tally up the goodness points according to our calculations of who should get grace and who shouldn’t because. we want to be the distributors of grace according to our standards. But God’s grace doesn’t work that way. We don’t get to decide who gets grace and who doesn’t. It is all up to God. Period!

When God calls us to be co-workers of grace, calling people to change the direction of their lives, we are speaking God’s words, not ours. We are witnessing to God’s intentions that God loves all people and desires all people everywhere to have a life filled to the brim and overflowing with abundant peace. Not our petty bookkeeping way.

And, according to Mark, when Jesus says, “the time it is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe the good news” he is saying God loves everyone and wants everyone to have an abundant life of peace and well being. It is also what Jesus will teach Simon, Andrew, James and John and all the other disciples to proclaim and teach, not just the first twelve, but all of us who claim to be followers of Christ.

Who knows maybe if we proclaim that good news, then teach why it is such good news, maybe we’ll be the most successful prophets and apostles of our day. Then, we too can join the party in Ninevah, whooping it up with all the other folks who don’t know their right hands from their left, but whose hope is in God’s mercy and love.

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Visible Messages of Grace

“You are free to make whatever choice you want, but you are not free from the consequences of the choice,” writes an Anonymous author.

“ There will come a time when we will have to sit down to a banquet of our consequences,” writes Robert Louis Stevenson.

“My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh.

All three of these quotes affirm the same truth; we all make choices or decisions and the consequences of those choices or decisions are ours. We own them whether we like it or not. I imagine Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Bowe Bergdahl are discovering that very truth along with many other folks.

Now, sometimes we see those consequences clearly, but more often than not we fail to see all the consequences of our choices, those we intend and those we discover later as unintended consequences.

Certainly, the Hebrews in the wilderness failed to see all the consequences of their choice to abandon God in favor of worshiping a golden calf made out of their ornaments and jewelry. Yet, Moses knows that without God’s presence this “stiff-necked people” will have a hard time being the distinctive people God intends them to be. They will not be able to live into God’s way of living as the community of God’s people because they have not, yet, learned how their trust in God is connected to how they are to live in the world as the message of God’s grace and as a community where everyone belongs and is valued with dignity and respect.

This message of God’s grace invites everyone to come and join the community of God’s people, so they may see how life nurturing and life sustaining is this way of living in relationship with God and with each other. This is the reason God choose Abraham and Sarah in the first place and continued to choose this family as the instrument God will use to bless the world with wholeness and peace because God intends for everyone in the world to live together in this way of wholeness and peace.

Yet, the consequences of the Hebrews’ choices puts this relationship and way of living at risk because they failed to comprehend that faith in God has serious, but unavoidable consequences for daily life, from the most mundane issues to questions of life and death, particularly, as they live surrounded by cultures whose political, social and religious values are opposed to God’s way of being fully human.

Indeed, the Hebrews do not realize, at this point in their journey, that their identity as God’s people is part of an interwoven conversation about who God is and who they are because of their relationship with the God who creates life, saves life, and sustains life.

They do not realize that knowledge of God leads them to knowledge about themselves, individually and communally. Nor, do they realize that our ultimate obligation to God sets the boundaries and limits to all other obligations of our life, even recognizing we are defined by our relationship and connectedness to God, not by anything else.

The Hebrews’ problem was that they were like the group of alumni of a university who were all highly established in their careers and who got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups — porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite — telling them to help themselves to the coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: “If you noticed, all the nice-looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.

Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups. And then you began eyeing each other’s cups.

Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of the life we live. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us.” God brews the coffee, not the cups. So, enjoy your coffee!

Enjoying the coffee-enjoying life as “God’s people” and recognizing how the choice to trust God has serious, but unavoidable consequences for daily life is the difference between where the Israelites in wilderness were and where the Thessalonians were.

The Thessalonians had done something quite remarkable in the middle of living in the vibrant seaport trading and cultural center of a major Roman city; they made the choice to turn to God away from the idols everyone else worshipped and served. They turned to serve the true and living God. Paul’s letter celebrates this choice, which was so complete that they became the examples for other Christian congregations in Macedonia and Achaia to emulate. Their spirit- derived joy empowered them to maintain their faith, their love and their hope and become the living messages of the gospel-the embodiment of God’s good news in Christ, even as they struggled against persecution from their families and their neighbors.

The church at Thessalonica, of course, was not merely a model where faith, hope and love were held onto like a display in a museum just waiting for people to walk past and admire, rather the church was the place from which the message of faith, the testimony of hope and the power of love went forth into in the world every day. Yet, at the same time, it was also a safe place-a sanctuary- where people lacking faith, feeling hopeless, feeling unlovable could find the great blessings of grace and belonging.

In many ways, every church, including ours, should be such a sanctuary where people in need of the good news of Jesus Christ and the great blessings of the grace and belonging can find them. The first-century Christians got that point, by the way. They saw the church as a safe place to go to survive life’s storms and calamities. One of the first symbols that the early Christians used to represent the church was Noah’s ark, the vessel on which representatives of all living creatures found refuge during the catastrophe of the great flood. The ark was the place from which those surviving people and animals went forth to participate in God’s re-creation of life as a community of mutuality and interdependence.

In similar fashion, the early Christians considered the church as the place from which God’s living messages of grace went forth into the world bringing the story of God’s saving grace to a world in need of faith, love, and most importantly, hope. That’s the reason churches have stained-glass windows of Noah’s ark or the dove with an olive branch in its beak as well as why many sanctuaries were constructed in the shape of a boat and why the pulpit was set up high above like a crow’s nest from which the leaders could see the horizon, see the coming storms, the rocky shoals, or the land where the ship might anchor and be resupplied before continuing its journey.

And, while you’re pondering all of that, think about the importance of faith, love, and hope as blessings of God’s grace and the way we, who are the church bring those blessings to others.

        First, the church is the place where faith is offered without embarrassment. There is an old saying that Christianity is always only one generation away from extinction. Without the passing of the knowledge about Christ and the testimony of faith from parents to children, from elders to youth, from those convinced of the faith to those who have not yet heard it, Christianity might eventually either die out altogether or be reduced to a curious historical phenomenon. Now we could make that one-generation-away-from-extinction statement about many things in life — about technology, skills, scientific discoveries and so on — but with Christianity, what is passed on is not only knowledge, but also the assertion that the meaning of daily life and the path of life is found in Jesus Christ.

Some youth workers, Christian educators and pastors today are wondering, “Will our children have faith?” They observe that young people today are actually quite interested in God, Christ and Christianity, but they aren’t particularly turned on by institutional expressions of it. There is a phenomenon afoot among some in the younger generations who individually express their love for Jesus but not for the church of Jesus. Individual spirituality is a good thing, but it seldom is enough single-handedly to pass the faith to the next generation. It takes communities of Christ’s followers to do that in an intentional way realizing that faith is caught in an environment where people are living their trust in God, expressing their trust in God in worship, and maturing their trust in God through the intentional discipleship of life-long learning; especially the discipline of consistent Bible study and theological reflection all done within a community of faith.

Second, the church is a place where love is exercised without limits. Jesus told us to love our neighbor, and as we in the church understand that, he wasn’t talking about emotions but about behavior. He was talking about acting in ways that support the well being of others as opposed to exploiting other people. And when we really grasp that Jesus is calling us to love others as God loves us, calling us to compare the way we are treating our families, our neighbors, the guy who is annoying at work or the woman who is hard to get along with at the gym to the way God treats us and all other people, then we realize we come up short, but that doesn’t let us off the hook because it ought to cause us to dig deeper by realizing that love has no stopping point where we can say, “There, I’ve done my duty, and now I can forget about that person.”

        Third, the church is the place where hope is nourished without delusion. Certainly there are ample reasons to lose hope in life. In fact, it’s fairly easy to experience despair, because in the day-to-day flow of life it often seems so much more credible than hope. There’s generally plenty of evidence around us to encourage and engender despair, especially listening or reading to the news, tweets, or what happens to our neighbors and friends. But we in the church understand that hope is not rooted in what happens in the present moment. The hope the church shelters believes the kingdom of God is here, now and will come in fullness, without denying life’s sometimes tragic character or attempting to explain away tragedy as “God’s will.”

Hope is not some sort of wishful thinking that those of us with strong enough gumption can somehow muster up from some mythological place, like fantasyland. Rather, hope is the steadfast trust that when all else fails, when every other support gives way, our lives remain in God’s hands. The writer of Deuteronomy spoke of this hope when she said, “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27, RSV). The image Deuteronomy suggests is of God’s arms creating a “floor” under us so that no matter how far down the weight and even the tragedy of life pushes us, we have a solid foundation on which to find our footing. Our task as the community of faith is to nourish this hope by being the strong advocate for hope in a community and a world too easily and too quickly grasping for the comfort of hopelessness.

Finally, faith, love and hope are the foundations and the fruit of a community of faith’s life as Paul certainly made clear in writing to the Corinthians, when he wrote at the end of the wonderful chapter about love, “And now faith, hope, and love abide.” They dwell together in a community of God’s people. That is, why he once again points to those three at the very beginning of his letter to the Thessalonians, “We continually remember before God, our Father, your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”  When we look for the blessings rising from the community of faith’s life together, these three rise to the surface: faith, love, and hope. They are God’s blessings for life given to us, so we might be living messages of grace blessing the lives of other folks.

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Freedom and Love in Ten Words

I have been thinking about Roy Moore, the onetime Alabama Supreme Court Justice forced to leave that office after refusing to uphold the law, because he is now campaigning for the U.S. Senate seat from Alabama. As a judge Roy Moore tried to have a huge block monument of the Ten Commandments placed in front of a courthouse where he presided, but few people remember the story of his monument and how big it was.

It weighs 5,280 pounds or about 500 pounds per commandment, so when he brings this monument to public appearances it needs to be loaded on the back of a flatbed truck. Joshua Green, writing in the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago, notes that whenever the truck returns to Alabama, “a 57-foot yellow I-beam crane that spans the ceiling of the Clark Memorials warehouse drops down to retrieve the Rock from its chariot, and even this one — a five-ton crane/ — buckles visibly under the weight.”

“I know,” as Professor Tom Long writes, “that Jesus once scolded the Pharisees for neglecting the weightier matters of the law, but somehow this I-beam-bending version of the Decalogue seems way out of proportion.”

But, I think it makes the perfect point about the way the Ten Commandments have become a heavy burden in our contemporary culture. Every conversation I hear about them has some commentator wagging a finger at another person saying, “thou shalt not!” as if the commandments were created by God to be a check upon the destructive personal behavior of that particular person, rather than being the structure forming and shaping a community of health and well-being. Of course for other folks, the commandments are a legalistic framework to place heavy yokes publicly on the necks of a rebellious children or a society seemingly out of control. I mean listen to the Luther’s Small Catechism, “God threatens to punish everyone who breaks these commandments. We should be afraid of His anger because of this and not violate such commandments.”

I guess all of these understandings of the Decalogue makes a two-and-a-half-ton rock sitting on the bed of a truck a perfect symbol for what the Ten Commandments might be. Especially, since we seem to have forgotten that the Babylonians’ gods were heavy idols that had to be trucked around, “These things you carry,” Isaiah chided the Israelites, “are loaded as burdens on weary animals” (Isa. 46:1).

The problem is that all of the ways we use the Ten Commandments or the ten words as they are referred to in Hebrew scripture fails to recognize they are about liberation and are God’s rule of love. They are given as an expression of God’s liberating the people from slavery out of the love God has for people. Indeed, the reading begins with, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the house of slavery.” God liberates the Hebrew from slavery, then freely provides them all they need for life, including how to be free as a community of health, well-being, mutuality, loving kindness and wholeness.

God does not intend to re-enslave people with these commands, but to set them free as if to say, “you are free not to need any other gods or even to make 5,280 pound images of God to truck around. You are free to rest on the seventh day because you, your animals, your servants, your land all need rest from productivity, so you can all be healthy and enjoy a long life. You are no longer at the mercy of an oppressor working you to death and you are not something to be used up or consumed until there is nothing left of you. You are free from the tyranny of lifeless idols made of stones or wood; free from solving every problem with violence and you can instead look for ways to solve problems with other people and tribes, so everyone wins and gets what they need for life because there is abundance for all. You are free to find ways to sustain life for yourselves, for neighbors and for all creation. You are free from having to covet what your neighbor has because you both have everything you need for life and, by the way, you are free from having to compare yourself with your neighbor or find your self-worth based upon what your neighbor owns or is able to do because you are loved just as you are and you are free to celebrate other people’s gifts because you have valuable gifts as well.

Or has another theologian has written “You want to make an idol of this God, an image of bird or snake or tree or pole or money or fame or pleasure? This God will have none of that, because this is the God who brought you out of slavery. You want to trivialize the name of this God by slapping the name on to any fool thing you already want to do, thereby baptizing your idiocy with a divine seal of approval, thereby enslaving oneself in the bondage of self-satisfied power. God will have none of that, for that is also a kind of slavery from which you need to be free.”

“God says, I want you free, because I am in the freedom business. All the ways you can imagine to fall back into slavery and death, God is there to call you out to freedom and life, because that is who God is. God is life and freedom. Only the certainty that it is God who has brought us out of the house of slavery and can surely do so again, if we get our relationship to God strong and continuous, can bring us the lasting freedom that we crave.

Not only that, but God’s good news of life should be like music with the Ten Commandments the dance steps that set us moving together, as Tom Long has suggested. They are supposed to be our wings, so we might soar on the wind of the Holy Spirit. This is one of reasons Luther, also, suggested to change the language of the commandments from “thou shalt not” to more positive language that evokes the freedom God and love intends for us to enjoy, so instead of “thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor” perhaps ‘find joy in telling the truth, being honest and upholding the goodness and good name of your neighbor as if pronouncing a blessing upon your neighbor.”

Also, if we want to pass this good news of freedom and life to our children, then I think we are going to have to be creative; more creative than hanging the Ten Commandments on a wall, memorizing them in order or hauling them around on a flatbed truck. I suggest we create stories because as Robert Wuthnow writes, “”Stories do more than keep memories alive. Sometimes these stories become so implanted in our minds that they act back upon us, directly and powerfully.”

Wuthnow tells the story of Jack Casey, a volunteer fireman and ambulance attendant who, as a child, had to have some of his teeth extracted under general anesthesia. Jack was terrified, but a nurse standing nearby said to him, “Don’t worry, I’ll be here right beside you no matter what happens.” When he woke up from the surgery, she had kept her word and was still standing beside him.

This experience of being cared for by the nurse stayed with him, and nearly 20 years later his ambulance crew was called to the scene of an accident. The driver was pinned upside down in his pickup truck, and Jack crawled inside to try to get him out of the wreckage. Gasoline was dripping onto both Jack and the driver, and there was a serious danger of fire because power tools were being used to free the driver, The whole time, the driver was crying out about how scared of dying he was, and Jack kept saying to him, recalling what the nurse had said so many years before, “Look, don’t worry, I’m right here with you, I’m not going anywhere.” Later, after the truck driver had been safely rescued, he was incredulous. “You were an idiot “he said to Jack.”You know that the thing could have exploded and we’d have both been burned up1” In reply, Jack simply said he felt he just couldn’t leave him.

This how the commandments are supposed to work, as Tom Long says it, “We have the experience of being cared for, the experience of being set free, preserved in a story. Then, comes the life shaped ethically around that story. A nurse saying “I’ll be right here beside you” becomes the action of a man risking his life for a stranger because he knows in his bones that he just can’t leave him.”

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you . . . out of the house of slavery” prompts us to live lives shaped by the freedom created by that God,” asserts Tom Long.

I gotta believe living in God’s joyous freedom and love of the Ten Commandments is much better than carrying around tons of dreary duty and wondering when the wheels are going to come off the flatbed truck of our lives.

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