Sermons
March 2, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.
Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church
Psalm 50:1–6
Exodus 20:1–7
1 Corinthians 8:1–6
“Yet for us there is one God, the Father,
from whom are all things and for whom we exist,
and one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”
1 Corinthians 8:6 (NRSV)
O God, we know our own weakness, and by ourselves we cannot find the truth. Our wills are weak, and by ourselves we cannot resist temptation or bring to completion that which we know we ought to do. So this day we humbly ask that you would enlighten, strengthen, and guide us, that we might know afresh that which makes for life, goodness, and wholeness, for the glory of your name. Amen. (1)
A couple of years ago, my husband and I took a trip to California. We planned to spend a few days driving through the wine country and thought it might be useful to rent from Avis one of those navigational systems that you can put in your car to find your way through unfamiliar territory. The plan was very appealing, because one of us does not have the greatest sense of direction, and the other of us is congenitally predisposed never to ask another living being for directions anywhere. Use your imagination as to who is who. Well, we ended up not renting the system, because we were told we had to return it to the place where we had started our trip, and so we traveled the California highways the old-fashioned way, with a little bit of tension in the front seat and a map to go by.
Let me ask you this question: how do you usually find your way? I am not speaking of a trip in another part of the country. I am asking about how you find your way through the often confusing moral landscape of modern life. What values guide your personal decisions and life path? To ask the question more broadly, what values ought to shape and guide society as we bravely go forward into a new century and a new millennium?
The truth is that we are not going back to where we came from, where life, though it likely was not simpler, at least seemed simpler. We are going to face choices that human beings have never faced before because of advances in science and technology. There will be new questions that will have to be answered by some set of values or another. There will also be plenty of the same old decisions to make, having to do with how we build just and peaceable societies and how we treat other people and sustain the institution of the family. These questions have been around for thousands of years, and we will still need to answer them in a new time.
Should I keep my marriage vow of sexual fidelity, though my marriage has long since become lonely and empty? How should I honor my father and mother? My mother is gone now and my elderly father is frail and needful, yet he never paid me a bit of attention when I was little. What do I owe him now?
Think of those ancient words, “Thou shalt not kill,” as 165,000 American troops are poised in the Middle East for war against Iraq and 3,000 precision guided missiles and bombs are waiting to be launched. (2) What, if anything, do old rules have to say about the sacredness of life now?
Today I begin a five-Sunday series of sermons entitled “The Search for a Moral Center.” I am going to suggest that in the face of these complicated questions we turn for guidance to our great faith tradition. When you hear the words “Ten Commandments,” perhaps you think of Moses—no, you probably don’t think of Moses, you think of Charlton Heston as Moses and an ancient set of hard-edged absolutes written on stone tablets. I want to suggest today and in the weeks ahead that we think of these ancient commandments first of all as a gift from God, who loves us and wants to save us from a world of hurt. Think of them as a divine navigational system. This system of ethics, both personal and social, has guided the community of faith for more than 3,000 years. There is no equivalent in any other religion to the Ten Commandments in their usefulness and their power to last. We need help in these confusing days so that we can order our lives in ways that ensure peace, meaning, and joy.
Moral grounding. Who here doesn’t need it? In yesterday’s New York Times, there was the picture of a 750-year-old sequoia tree in California that had finally fallen. Scientists said that this massive, magnificent tree had died because of root failure. That is much like what is happening today in an age of moral confusion and shallow values, without much grounding in anything other than one’s own feelings and immediate needs.
I simply cannot accept the criterion laid out by Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon: “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” Surely not. Surely there is more to go on than that.
We are in many ways facing a moral crisis, both the church—as denominations deal with scandal surrounding the clergy—and within society—as pornography and violence permeate television and the Internet.
Just recently I learned that someone in another part of the country was preaching my own sermons word for word, week after week, without a word of attribution. “Why?” I asked. “I am depressed, and I have been under a lot of stress,” was the answer. No grounding in anything other than one’s own feelings and immediate needs. That kind of thing will not hold us up, will not hold society up.
There are many reasons why this congregation has experienced such numerical growth in recent years, but I believe that many of us are here because we are on “a quest for moral authenticity.” (3) We have that old hunger, referred to in the scriptures as “a hunger or thirst for righteousness.” God put it in all of us. We cannot live without knowing the good. Of what use is the church if it is not a place in which we are reacquainted with that which is good and lasting and eternal?
Lent begins this week, on Ash Wednesday. This serious season recalls Jesus’ hunger and thirst, his forty-day fast in the wilderness. It also recalls the forty years the Hebrew people spent on their journey from bondage to freedom.
I have a friend, a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), a man named Dr. Albert C. Winn, who has written extensively on the Ten Commandments. He preached a series of sermons on the subject, dealing with one commandment a Sunday for ten weeks. At the end of that time, as he was shaking hands at the door, one of the members of the congregation said to him, “I was beginning to wonder, Dr. Winn, which was going to last longer, the sojourn of the children of Israel in the wilderness or your sermon series.” Have no fear. I am going to double up, and we’ll be done before Palm Sunday. By the time we get to the end, I hope we will know a little more than the young person who, when asked by his Sunday school teacher if he knew what the Tenth Commandment was, responded, “Thou shall not take the covers off thy neighbor’s wife.” I hope we will do a little better than that.
The commandments, what the Jewish scholars call “the ten words,” hold a unique place in our faith tradition: the place of honor as God’s special revelation of how to live a full life and how to create an authentic community on this broken earth.
You might be wondering why we are talking about the old covenant when we are, through Christ, children of the new covenant. If that is your question, I remind you that Jesus himself claimed not to have come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. It is true that his strongest words of criticism were for those who made an idol out of the letter of the law, but it is also true that he not only honored the law but took it to an even higher level. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said not just no to adultery, but no to lust. No not only to swearing falsely, but no to swearing at all. He instructs not just to love one’s neighbor, but to love one’s enemy. (4) “I have come to fulfill the law.” (Matthew 5:17–48)
On another mountainside, the Ten Commandments were given. The scene began dramatically, with earthquake, fire, and trumpet sound, all boldly declaring that this was a revelation charged with nothing less than the mystery and majesty of God. The first commandment that Moses announced to the people when he returned from the mountaintop was a statement before it was a commandment.
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt; you shall have no other gods before me.”
God’s liberating grace makes a focused, faithful life possible. Obedience to this or any other commandment has nothing to do with earning divine favor; it has to do with how we respond to the divine favor that God has already given: the freedom to live the life that we were intended to live from the time of creation
Probably few of you have seen an odd movie called A Simple Plan. I would commend it to those who have not seen it. Two brothers and a friend come upon the wreckage of an airplane in the snowy Minnesota woods. They find one deceased pilot and four million dollars in cash stuffed in a duffel bag. None is really a bad guy. One is a really good guy, a family man. His wife is pregnant. The men can’t think of any good reason not to take the money, and so they do. Before you know it, they have borne false witness, killed other people, dishonored the heritage of their father and mother, and robbed a little baby of an honorable heritage. It all started with breaking the first commandment. Yes, the first commandment. They placed their love of money before their love for God. (5) To be truly free is, through God’s grace, to have mastery over our baser instincts. To be truly free is to wholly belong to God, “the one from whom all good things come, and the one for whom every being exists” (1 Corinthians 8:6).
Commandment One: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” out of whatever slavery you were in; therefore, you do not have to go back into that way of life where you serve gods who wish you all kinds and manner of hurt.
The Second Commandment: “You shall not make yourself a graven image.” That appears to address a temptation to which you and I are not likely to succumb. Put your jewelry in a stewpot and melt it down and make an idol? But listen to the rest of the commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything on earth or in heaven or in the water under the earth.” In other words, nothing in creation shall be worshipped in place of the Creator.
Paul Tillich defined idolatry as bestowing ultimate concern on that which is not ultimate. There are plenty of things in our lives of penultimate importance to which we are tempted to ascribe ultimate importance: career, reputation, political party, alma mater, personal health, national pride. Are these important? Yes. Are any of them of ultimate importance? No. Only God warrants our unconditional love, and God wishes to save us from the disappointment that is the inevitable consequence of idolatry.
I wonder if you have ever made a god out of someone you know. “O, he is just the greatest person.” “She is just fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.” You idealize this other human being to the point that he or she becomes unreal in your own mind, and then you discover that the person is a flawed human being, just as you are. Only God is perfect. Idolatry. It is a temptation to us all.
I remember the words of Barbara Wheeler, who spoke at Fourth Presbyterian Church last spring. She asked if there was anything heavy in our lives, anything that weighed us down, such as a sense of responsibility to our work. She suggested that if it is heavy, likely it is an idol, because one has to carry idols. God will carry you. That is how you can tell the difference.
The Second Commandment ends with a frightening statement: “I am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generations.” What in the world shall we do with that kind of harshness? The prophets wrestled with this idea of God over and over again. We do not have time to wrestle with it today, but I will say two things. First, what happens in our families is very important. The priorities of parents, the idolatries of parents, have effects on children. They have consequences for children. Your home life really matters, not only to the people who live there now, but also on the generations that are to come.
Second, is God a God of retribution or of fairness? I think that we begin to find the answer to that question as we continue our journey into the deep mystery of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, who took upon himself the sins of the world. The ashes, the cross, tell us that retribution does not characterize the heart of God, but they also remind us that what we do, how we live and whom we serve, are of eternal importance.
Finally, a word about the prohibition of swearing falsely in God’s name: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” What does this mean? It means that you should not use the Lord’s name for the purposes of magic. I recall hearing about a prayer group in which a group of young mothers met and prayed for various things. One of the members of the group actually prayed for a set of color-coordinated kitchen appliances. That is using the Lord’s name in vain. I recall a friend telling me about his seminary class and how every day they began the class with prayer. “Lord, please help us today to study and learn, and please guide our pencils across the paper as we take our Greek exam . . .” Toward the end of the semester, my friend said he couldn’t stand it any longer. He asked, “Don’t you think today we could ask God to help somebody else besides just us? The suffering, starving people of the world, for instance?”
Thou shalt not use the name of the Lord to your own end.
In the 1960s, I taught English in a public high school. Most of my students were Jewish, and they turned out to be some of the greatest teachers I ever had in my life. As they wrote their essays and book reports, they would write the first letter of the divine name when they were referring to God, and then they would draw a line across the page. The name of the Almighty God was too holy to write and was never to be trivialized.
Someone had said that perhaps we should not use God’s name again for 100 years, because it is used so loosely today. But whether we do or not, we must be very clear: God is not a prayer-activated magician. God is Alpha and Omega. Bring on the earthquake, the wind, and the fire. God alone is to be worshiped and served. Amen.
Notes
1. Adapted from a prayer of William Barclay from Prayers for the Christian Year.
2. Roger Angell, “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, March 3 2003.
3. An expression used by Douglas John Hall in The Awkward Church.
4. Eugene C. Bay, “Bending Life Toward God,” Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, Bryn Mawr, Penn., 14 November 1994.
5. See James Wall’s review of The Decalogue by Krystof Kieslowski in The Christian Century, 16 November 1996.
Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church
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