The Arc of God’s Story IV: Law & Wisdom

2020 5 31 -The Arc of God’s Story IV: Law & Wisdom – M. Kitchener, Youtube Transcript

This is a message given to Peace Mennonite Church May 31, 2020. I share the Youtube transcript re-formatted for your benefit:

I want to let you know just a little bit about what's been happening since I've been with you last. I'm currently serving as an intern at a long-term care home in South Vancouver. For me each morning I'm there starts about the same I walk through the door.  I'm met by somebody right at the door who takes my temperature. Every one of those little things done. A thermometer held up to your head, scary the first time but they take your temperature and then they pull out a swab that you have to swab your phone. You have to sanitize your hands and then they give you a mask for the day. That's how my morning starts now. 

That probably doesn't surprise you too much that all those stipulations are in place but the fact that it doesn't surprise you itself shows you how much our world has changed since I was with you last. Picture yourself a year ago and imagine that your year-ago self had a time machine of some kind that brought you to this point, dropped you off here. Without context, you were all of a sudden dropped in this new space with all the new rules but didn't understand what was going on. So. you get out and you see by your feet there's these lines or big round pictures of feet where you can stand while you wait in long lines to get into the grocery store. You're told no you cannot visit your friends or your family and no you cannot go to a theatre or a concert. You certainly cannot go to church. Wouldn't you wonder what happened? What happened to the Canada that I know and love that all of a sudden I'm dropped into this place with all these random rules. Why? Because you're stuck with rules without a context you don't understand what the rules are about.

As we come to our text this morning we find that we can live this way with God's rules, God's words, God's commands as well, when we look at them without context. It's a particular problem with how we think of the Ten Commandments or as I'll be calling them today, the 10 words. 

If you ask people to recite these ten words/Ten Commandments you may get an answer like I saw this week on an online video. The interviewer was walking down the street asking random kids to tell her the Ten Commandments. One young man said ‘thou shalt not kill.’ Right, good, “thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie, doing pretty well so far, thou shalt not be angry even if you feel angry. And then he said ’forgive and forget.’ You know three out of five, that's not too bad. He did totally make up the fifth one but even if people know all ten, even if they can recite them one to ten, usually they'll start like this one: “you shall have no other gods before me.’ But that's not how it starts. That's not how the ten words start. Let's look at it together: Exodus chapter 20 verse 1-17. 

Of course, there's more details in there but what's the big deal? Why am I making such a big deal about the Beginning. It's because the introduction is crucial to understanding these words. People separate the 10 words from the speaker of the words. We tend to separate rules from relationship and we see strictness disconnected from story. What we need is a context. That's what you needed when you were dropped into this new reality. You needed to understand there's this thing called Covid-19 and in light of Covid-19 all these restrictions make sense. We need to understand that as the people of God we need the context of God so that we might understand and appreciate and live into his words. 

Now Winston has been giving you a beautiful gift of context in this sermon series; giving you the big part of the story of God, the story of God being with his people. Last week I understand he brought us to the foot of Mount Sinai where God is reestablishing a covenant with Israel. Remember the people of Israel. They've been enslaved to this dictator Pharaoh. They called out to God who heard them, rescued them and brought them to freedom. You heard last week in Exodus 19, God was deepening the covenant that he had made with Abram and all the way back to Adam and now it includes all of Abraham's offspring and those who are with them and even invites

those further yet.  He is really creating them as a people. 

In fact, this reordering of the chaos in their community is nothing less than a sign of the new creation of God. As God breathes on and creates a new people - and speaking of God breathing - today's Pentecost Sunday where churches around the world remotely are celebrating the birthday of the church as God's Spirit is poured out on the people of God in a fresh way. Our birth is built on this foundational story of God and these foundational stories that you are hearing of God, continually being with his people; of God shaping a people and working with them to shape a new creation and we are a part of that story. 

We continue to be a part of that story of God. Of course, Jesus is a crucial pivot in this story but even his story is rooted in the story of Israel, who of course is rooted in God's ancient story. Coming back to the commands, coming back to these ten words, we need the context to properly understand and live into these good words given by God. You see, these 10 words, these 10 commandments are not random rules to test Israel's blind faith to another self-absorbed dictator. It's not as if God had some big cosmic dartboard with random commands, 1/2 a million all over it and God just went, alright, I'll take that command, that command and that command. That command looks thrown together and you know in a list of 10, a top 10 list and let's just see how his reel does with this. 

No, no, they begin with a self-revelation of God. He starts out with, here's Who I am, here's what I'm about. I was Yahweh, he gives him his name.  I'm your God - relationship - and I rescued you from Egypt. When there's slavery we have the activity of God. 

Now when you think about the ten commandments or God's rules or commands in general, is that your view? Wow so this is who God is and what God is about, or at least this is how people who have wrestled with God in the past, this is how they viewed God, this is how they understood God. That type of wrestling doesn't separate the commandments from the Creator. It doesn't separate the commands from his character, which is what I want to push against today: that separation, because if we separate God's person from God's Word, then these Ten Commandments, these ten words, aren't nearly as positive. These aren't words of grace and life. Instead, they're going to be words of slavery, just a different kind of slavery.

So, as we together reflect on the Ten Commandments today, I'm going to offer you four images of the ten words and ask you to reflect how you interact with God's commands, and see if one of these images reflects how you live with God's commandments.

1. For some these ten words become a wall separating us from God, when I bite into a story from the New Testament - it's from Luke 10 - and in Luke 10 Jesus is talking with a lawyer, this professional in the law, who stands up to test Jesus. He asks him, what shall I do to gain eternal life, teacher? How should I go about living God's eternal life? Jesus answers a question with a question which good teachers did, “I ask the, so how do you understand the law?” The lawyer answers, “Love the Lord God with everything you've got and love your neighbor as yourself,” and Jesus actually commended the lawyer for his answer. He commends him for seeing at the heart of the ten words is this call to love God. It's a commendation that we might miss because this conversation is leading into the story of the Good Samaritan but don't miss Jesus’ commendation there, because for many, the Ten Commandments are seen more as a random set of rules. Maybe good advice but not at all connected with God's work in their lives. t's because we've missed those foundational words, I am the Lord who rescued you, words of relationship, so instead of loving God, some of us with these Commandments enslave ourselves to a new Pharaoh. Some have thought, I've kept the rules 1 to 10. I've got them all. I'm a good person. It's not just people with those Ten Commandments. It's an orientation toward life that any of us can have.

What are the expectations? Read your Bible every day, alright, I got that, ah, make sure you pray, okay, get that, make sure you witness, alright, got that, make sure you do this and don't do that, okay I've got that. I've kept the rules I made but that misses this foundational connection with God. If our relationship is fundamentally with the rules and not the rescuer, then we miss out on the whole point of this text. Others live by this image but they do it the opposite way. They ignore the rules altogether. They look at them and they're like, all this doesn't apply to me from thousands of years ago and so they react against the rules. But again, the relationship is with the rules and not the rescue for these both. The ten words are a wall. 

2. There's a second image that I see in Scripture. I see an experience and that images for some the words become a ruler measuring and judging others or themselves. Back to Luke 10. Jesus is in this conversation with a lawyer and when he asks the lawyer, “How do you read it?” and the lawyer says love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus offers a commendation for the second part of his answer as well - that the lawyer saw that the ten words are a call to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus commends him for that understanding. How many times have you been in a conversation with someone and they find out you're a

Christian, like Christians who are so unloving and judgmental and hypocritical. Listen, I I'm sure some of that is unfounded, but I tell you, I've met a few like that as well, that that would describe him and honestly, I've been that person. I've been the person who looked at somebody else, held them up against my measuring stick and

Said, well they do pretty well here but in here they're an absolute failure, here not so good either; maybe they get a 50% for this overall, maybe I'll give them barely a passing rate. See, I'm living with that same heart, the heart of measuring others, see how they stack up according to my standard. Watch for it in yourself when we use language of the day they always fall short. They're not doing it right. Those people see it gives us away that

we are doing this measuring stick view of the rules in life. But wait a minute wait, how did that end? Start with this language, I rescued you. I lifted you up. Who's the you there? The you there are the rescued people. It's the people who already acknowledge God as Lord and rescuer. For those still trying to rescue themselves, save themselves, that 10 aren't going to be helpful. It will just be more expectation without more of God that's impossibly heavy. 

Pentecost shows us we need we have to have God's Spirit to live God's life. It's impossible otherwise and so this ruler way of viewing the law places an impossible burden on other people and on ourselves to be the one who decides it's whether people measure up or don't measure up. So, the 10 is a wall which separates. The 10 has a ruler which judges.

3. I've just got one more bad image of price and then we'll turn it around. Some people look at the words, words that are supposed to give life and grace and invite us into this new relationship. For some of us, the words become a tombstone, marking our death. When Jesus finished up this will chat with the lawyer before going into his story of the Good Samaritan, he says to the lawyer, “Do this and you will live.” The ten words here are about a way of life. They’re invitation into life but for those of us who relate to the law without a relationship with the lawgiver, we simply enslave ourselves trying to save ourselves. Let me say that again, those that relate to the law without a relationship with the law giver will enslave themselves trying to save themselves. It's a recipe for death not only for them but for those around them. This is how Jesus described one of the groups of his day called the Pharisees, people who truly wanted Israel to follow God's commands. The problem was they, at least for many of them who interacted with Jesus, they missed out on the connection with God and so this life-giving relationship ended up being a thing of death. Jesus described them as whitewashed tombs, places of death. He said they put mill stones around the necks of their followers, leading others to death, so these words who flow from a God of life were meant to restore instead become objects of death

4. Now to go the other way to simply ignore God's way, his teaching and advice is similarly destructive because we go into a total self-destruct mode by refusing to love God and others. We turn in and live only for ourselves. It’s a catastrophe for all of us. 

But we are hopefully living out the 10 in a way that's rooted in our relationship with the rescuer. When we begin by acknowledging that that we need rescue and when we live in a relationship of gratitude with our rescuer, the ten words have a very different image. They're no longer a wall which separates us, they're no longer a measuring stick to judge others, they're no longer a tombstone of death. Instead these words can be a door, a door of wisdom, a door welcoming us into the character of God and a door that welcomes us to shape our joint life and mission. These words open the door to God. They tell us what is God like. Picture the ten lines this way. Picture them as our life posts, as our life posts to God continuing his description of himself in Exodus 19, the last chapter you talked about last week.

God says ‘I’m like the caring mother eagle, the protection carries you. In the beginning of this chapter God says ‘I'm your rescuer. I bring you into freedom and then the invitation is: continue to listen, continue to read and live these 10 and you'll discover what else on what is God like. As we look through the ten we discover, Oh, God is God alone, there is no other. God is faithful to the Covenant that he's just made, That's great news. God is trustworthy. God is generous. We could go on and on looking at each of these commands and asking ourselves. What is it about God's character that's connected to these commands, and each one opens up new opportunities to appreciate God. So, these words open a door to God, but they open up another door as well. They open up a

fuller image of who we are, because we as humans bear the image of God. So that 10 teach us what am I like. See, the 10 words aren't imposing some random rules on us. They actually expose who we are and what it looks like to live with wisdom, connected with who we were created to be. 

Who am I? Well, I'm created to be a person in covenant with God and other people. I'm created to be a person who has the rest. I'm creating to be in life affirming relationships with those older and younger than me. I'm created to speak and live in a way that encourages the life of another. That's who were meant to be. It opens a door to God. It opens a door to who we are individually but finally and crucially the words open the door to our life together.

What does it look like to live together as a rescued people? The invitation here is to a life of the wisdom, because

the 10 words, they don't cover every single particular detail that we'll ever wrestle with. Israel herself came into so many different situations from the time they heard these 10 words the first time, well right through until Jesus came. I mean, think about it, they heard these words and they were a wandering people, and then they were people coming in to the land that God gave them. They were people who were repenting and coming back and they were people who were taken into foreign lands and then they were people returning from foreign lands and so many other situations. 

In each of these generations, in each of these situations, the people of God have had to wrestle with this question, What does it look like to live faithfully as the people of God? These ten words and the other commands of God offer a framework that help us wrestle with what it means to be the people of God, what it means as God describes us to be a light to those around us as Israel was called to be a light to the nations, to be the church as the new people of God rooted in in this ancient story. 

How can we live together as God's people to extend God's love and life? How do we do that? Well, again, the 10 words help us worshiping God together by refusing idolatry and its many, many forms that it's taken over the centuries and millennia by taking God's honor seriously, by being a community of honesty, by being a people who are life-affirming, covenant-keeping, by being a people who honor one another despite our differences, by being a people who desire the best for others, who are generous to others. See that the 10 words help shape our life together and I think this is our invitation from these 10 words of life - to be a people of wisdom, a people that love fully, not because they're trying to measure up but because they have deeply welcomed God's rescue. They've internalized this rescue of God and they are living with him to welcome others into the same life. 

May God bless you as you live out the 10 words in this way.