Sunday, October 26, 2014

October 5, 2014 - The Joy of the Law

Exodus 20:1-21 - Lutheran Church of the Cross, Calgary

In less than two weeks from now, people from the Jewish faith will celebrate the religious holiday of Simchat Torah. There’s not really any comparable holiday in the Christian faith. It celebrates God giving the Torah - the first five books of the Bible, including - in particular - the Ten Commandments - to Moses on Mount Sinai. On Simchat Torah, Jews gather together, joyfully and with excitement, to dance around the Torah scrolls, because in Judaism, Torah - the Law - is considered one of the blessings of God.
Now, those of us raised solidly in the Lutheran tradition might understandably find this a bit odd. Most of us were taught that the Law of God, including these rather intimidating Ten Commandments, are not really something that we would celebrate. They are the LAW, they are the things that demonstrate how far we fall short of what God wants us to be doing. Those of us who went through Lutheran confirmation class might remember Luther’s Small Catechism. Luther took the Ten Commandments and expanded on what they meant, attaching to each “You shall not” a “You shall do.” For instance, “You shall not murder” becomes “You shall help your neighbour in every bodily need,” so that if your neighbour goes hungry or doesn’t have mitts when it snows, you are murdering her if you do not help. “You shall not steal” becomes, for Luther, a rule that you must “help your neighbour to protect and improve their property and business.” If you see someone breaking into their car and don’t scare the burglar away, and the contents of the car are stolen, according to Luther, you have broken the commandment to not steal. The Ten Commandments are strict guidelines that we must not break. If we do, we can expect to experience God’s full punishment. The idea of celebrating these commandments just seems... odd.
As Lutherans, and as Christians in general, we tend to look down on those who make too much of the law. Legalists, we call them. We bring up stories of Jesus and the Pharisees, and talk about how Jesus came to set aside the Law, which made the Pharisees - who were Jewish - mad. Even Paul in our first reading says it, “as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” We make the transition very easily from Law to legalism to Pharisees to death. The passage in the reading that I read that really resonates with this type of thinking says it clearly, “I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of the parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me.” If I break one of God’s laws, not only will I be punished, but my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, and even my great-great-grandchildren, too.

Did you know that Luther suffered from depression and anxiety? He truly believed that awful things were going to be happen at any moment, and that the devil was really hunting him down. Not symbolically, but really. If you’ve ever suffered from clinical depression or anxiety - and I have - then Luther’s theology and what we believe in the Lutheran church will feel very familiar. The sense that no matter how hard you try, you will never be as good as you should be. The sense that something terrible is lurking around the corner. The panic when something you do goes wrong and everything feels as if it’s about to fall apart. Combine this with the Ten Commandments, and for some people it’s overwhelming. I didn’t give food to the food bank this month, and now underprivileged children in Calgary will go hungry, and I am breaking the commandment not to kill. I found someone’s credit card on the ground in the CTrain parking lot and I didn’t pick it up and report it to the police, and I just broke the commandment to not steal.
Thinking of the Law as punishment and as an indicator of all our failings is exhausting. It makes us harder on ourselves than we need to be - I am not responsible for feeding all of the children in Calgary, and I actually tucked the credit card into the side of the door next to the car where I found it. But I still feel like I didn’t do enough. We become afraid to really truly believe in God’s grace - we have a hard time telling ourselves that it’s okay, or that our actions are good enough. We think of God’s punishment on the third and fourth generations and we want to hide - to deny our sins, like children do when caught in a lie. Because, of course, we seldom like to confess publicly how awful we think we are, and then we do what psychologists call “projecting,” and we project our failures onto others. We become harder on others. We judge others in order to make ourselves feel better. We accuse others of not caring enough, or of not trying hard enough. We blame others for setting up standards that we can’t reach. For instance, we judge the Jews and Pharisees as legalists. We feel resentful towards God’s law.

Well, Luther was able, by the grace of God, to treat his depression and anxiety by turning to the grace given in Christ. He didn’t have medication available to him, like we do now, and towards the end of his life his anxiety turned into paranoia and anti-Semitism, but he still proclaimed grace as the balance to God’s overwhelming and punishing Law.
Which is wonderful. The more grace the better! But Luther wasn’t quite right in his understanding of the Law. (I know! Did I just say that?!?) Luther, coming to the Law through Paul, thought that the Law was oppressive. But that is not how Jews in Jesus’ time, or even today, saw it. That is now how Jesus himself understood God’s law. For one thing, we have the Gospel of Matthew saying that Jesus said, “I come not to abolish the law but to uphold it.” Jesus was Jewish, and like the Jews of his time, he was formed by the Law - by Torah - and by Jewish attitudes towards the Law. And these attitudes are that Torah and the Ten Commandments are a sign of God’s enduring covenant with God’s people. To contrast with the verse that says God will punish the third and fourth generations, we have what immediately follows, “I the Lord your God am ... showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.” Forget punishment for my great-great-grandchildren if I break a commandment, the thousandth generation after me will receive God’s love if I keep just one! A thousand generations covers about twenty thousand years. That means that if any of your ancestors - grandparents, great-grandparents, anybody in your family going back twenty thousand years - ever loved God and kept the commandments - and there’s got to be at least one person in your family - then you are assured of God’s love for you today. The Ten Commandments are a sign of God’s everlasting commitment - nothing will ever prevent God from staying in relationship with God’s people. Torah and the Ten Commandments are signs of what we Christians like to call grace - God’s promise to never abandon us. Like I said, the more grace, the better!
So, what do we do about Paul, then? I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten about him. Paul... well, Paul is a challenge for Christians. And in the last twenty years the Christian understanding of Paul has undergone some pretty drastic revisions, due in large part to the input of Jewish scholars teaching us about the Jewish relationship to the Law. And so our understanding of Paul has gone from thinking of him as Luther did - a Jew who rejected the Law and converted to Christianity to proclaim Christ - to thinking of him a little more complexly, as a Jew who continued for his entire life to love the law and who believed that Jews would always be the chosen people of God, but who proclaimed Christ to non-Jews. Gentile Christians - what the first Christians called those who followed Christ but didn’t start out as Jewish (because most of them did) - didn’t think of themselves as being part of the Jewish people, or of being part of God’s covenant with Abraham and Moses, and so they didn’t consider themselves to be part of the community of God’s love. So Paul proclaimed to them that they were loved through Christ. The Jews get God’s grace through Torah - Christians get God’s grace through Jesus. The more grace the better!
But that doesn’t mean that for Christians, the Law is oppressive. For Jews, and for Jesus, and since we call ourselves followers of Jesus, for us, too, the Torah - the Law and the Ten Commandments - are a source of comfort and joy and grace. They are something to celebrate, because they tell us how to respond to God’s great gift of love. God loves us, and to say thanks, we do what we can to follow the law. We celebrate God’s grace by doing what God asks us to: God loves you. To say thank you, don’t kill anyone. 
In fact, contrary to what Luther feared, it is not that difficult to keep the Ten Commandments. Taken at face value, we don’t actually worship false idols, we generally don’t murder, or steal, or bear false witness (lie about other people in court.) All of you here in church are keeping the Sabbath day holy. Some of the commandments we could use some work on, but by and large we are doing what God has asked us to do. Actually, as Jesus pointed out, and I’ll call Paul back in again, to fulfill the commandments, we have only to love. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “‘You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’” Paul takes this from Leviticus, from Torah, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” And he continues, “Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” So. God loves us, and in return, we love others. This is something we can do. We can love. Not the least because Christ loves us, and not the least because God’s Holy Spirit comes to us empowering us to love. 

The Ten Commandments are, as they are for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and as they were for Jesus Christ in whose path we follow, a sign of God’s love for you and a sure promise of God’s everlasting commitment to you. You are here. You already worship the Lord our God. God has already blessed you, and is showing steadfast love to you, to your children, to your grandchildren, and to the thousandth generation that will come after you. God’s grace and love comes to us in so many ways, Thanks be to God. Amen.

No comments: