The fever had left me drained, sleepy, and glued to the bed of my college dorm room. I had no ambition, but a quick glance at the calendar showed the circled due date of my research paper. It glared down at me continuously.
“You must find some ambition,” I said to myself. “You must get up and get to work.” I closed my eyes once again.
“Jira, are you OK?” my roommate asked. “You’ve got to get moving. You can’t just stay in bed for the rest of the semester.”
“I want to, but I can’t,” I moaned, remaining deeply buried in the imprint formed within my cheap college room mattress. “I don’t know how to get going again.”
“Here’s what you are going to do, Jira,” my roommate wisely instructed. “First, you are going to go take a shower. Then you are going to eat the tray of food that I am going to bring to you. Then you are going to sit in the recliner and write the first paragraph of your paper. Now get up and get in the shower while I get the food.”
And, I did. The rules were simple enough, but for some reason at that point in my life I needed them. I needed them to start living my life again. The rules were a compassionate gift from my roommate, who was also a very good friend.
One day I found the same words coming from my mouth as a tired and dejected man sat across from me in the church office. “First, you are going to go home and take a shower, then you are going to eat the frozen meal that I have right here in the fridge, just pop it in the microwave, then you are going to call your boss.”
The rules were just as basic for him as they were for me, but they were must as needed as he took his turn in restarting a life that had become completely his broken.
Of course, my roommate and I were not the originators of such basic, life-giving rules for life. Just this week a Facebook meme read, “This is your gentle reminder that one time in the Bible Elijah was like, ‘God, I’m so mad! I want to die!’ so God said, ‘Here is some food. Why don’t you have a nap?’ So, Elijah slept, ate, and decided that things weren’t so bad. Never underestimate the power of a nap and a snack.” You can read 1st Kings, chapters 18 and 19, to find that story.
Never underestimate the power of a nap and a snack, yes, but also never underestimate the power of simple, but direct instruction. It is a gift in uncertain times. It is a gift when our brains and bodies are taxed to the maximum just trying to make it to the next day. And, it is the very gift that was given to the people of God through the Ten Commandments.
For some of us, the idea that God’s laws are a gift will be completely foreign to us, and I understand why. For example, in times of divorce, how many people have been reminded over and over again of their moral failures as, “Thou shall not commit adultery” is trotted out as a bat to bludgeon?
How many adult children have been reminded that they should be in church with the chiding, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” That is what God said! The admonition rarely works.
How many people in the car dealership have been pushed away by the salesman with the words, “Thou shall not covet”…wait, that does not happen. I am willing to bet that in the United States, not a single person has ever been pushed out of a car dealership by a concerned car salesperson, all because the salesperson fears you to be deeply in the throes of coveting your neighbor’s car. Heck, it does not even happen at Wal-Mart.
Our culture’s embrace of coveting aside, too many of us have experienced God’s law as a vengeful hammer that beats us into repentance. God’s law can do this, of course, but that is not the intention behind God the law. Rather, God’s law was given as a gift to God’s people, and it is that gift that continues to feed our faith.
Just so you understand, I did not come up with this take on the law. It is not my novel idea. Rather, it is God in the Bible who sets the stage for how we are to understand the Ten Commandments, and here’s a hint: it is not to be understood as a bat to beat others into submission.
Instead, God explicitly states at the start of the Ten Commandments, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…”
Do not gloss over these introductory words, because they are vital. In fact, these words make up the first commandment, or more understandably to our ears, the first “saying” in the Jewish listing of the Ten Commandments.
The salvation that the Lord brings is the start of understanding. The goodness of God is the beginning. The freedom God secured for the people, after generation upon generation of serving the Egyptians as slaves, is the freedom that God desires God’s people to have in their lives beyond slavery.
To a people who were forced by physical threat to obey Pharaoh as if he were a god, the one true God declares in a breath of fresh freedom air, “You shall have no other gods before me.”
To a people who were forced into harsh labor, day after day, with a whip that did not understand the meaning of exhaustion, God declares with concern and care, “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord you God; you shall not do any work.” God goes on to instruct that this gift of rest to a people who have only known the hard life of slavery is a gift to everyone, even their own servants, cattle, and the foreigners among them. Everyone gets to have the gift of rest. Even God naps.
The other commandments are to be understood as a gift to the community of God’s people as well. To these people, who have never known anything but slavery, and now have to find a way to live together and prosper together as a nation, these commandments are a basic gift, containing basic rules; functioning in the same way as the rules my roommate gave to me to get me going in life again.
God’s commandments gave these people a road map of how to live together in peace.
Honoring your father and mother, caring for them and not neglecting them; refusing to plot harm and death when disagreements arise; not taking another person’s spouse and disrupting their relationship; not taking another person’s things; not lying about others or talking behind their backs ( in other words not gossiping); and being happy with all that the Lord has provided and refusing to lust after other people’s houses, things, and relationships; all of these simple instructions gave those first slaves a starting point in recreating a life and a nation for themselves. And, they continue to be a root of faith that, when taken seriously, creates a community of peace among us still today.
“Shalom,” the Jews call it. “Shalom” is the gift of peace that comes from God when all agree to put God’s loving vision for the world first. “I am the Lord your God…you shall have no other gods…” It is God and God’s vision for life, which rightly comes before our own desires and impulses, which create a community that can thrive together. Somehow, this is something we continually forget in today’s world.
But, these commandments are powerful things. Nowhere else in the ancient near east can you find laws like these. Nowhere to be found in the ancient scrolls of neighboring peoples are there laws that promote peace in this way. They are a root of faith. They are a gift from God for God’s people. And, they are a gift rooted in God’s love.
Jesus, our Lord, is clear about how the commandments are rooted in love. When the religious leaders of Jesus’ time try to use the command to keep the Sabbath day holy, as a bat to bludgeon Jesus’ disciples as they eat wheat when hungry on the Sabbath, or when Jesus heals a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath in the second chapter of the gospel of Mark, Jesus asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” Jesus gives us the answer in his actions. The man’s hand was restored.
The Ten Commandments, God’s laws, are a root of faith that always drinks deeply from an underground spring of eternal, divine love.
“The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.” In other words, the Ten Commandments are a gift of love from God to us, so that we can live together in love. We were not created to follow the commandments. The commandments were created so that we might tap deeply into that spring of love; its moisture affecting all we do.
And, it is a root of faith that is so powerful that if it is forgotten or rejected, three to four generations will feel the negative effect of its loss, as God states in Exodus 20:5. But, to those who drink deeply from the commandments, and the love that feeds the commandments, God will show “steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love” God and keep God’s commandments.
Sometimes I wonder if the love that Jesus showed us on the cross, that saves us from sin and inspires us through the Holy Spirit to lives of love still to this day, stems from this promise to love us to the thousandth generation from so many years before? I never was very good at math. One of you can try to work that one out.
Either way, we have this root of faith, the Ten Commandments, which helps us to take a step forward out of the broken, divided, and diseased world in which we find ourselves today. Like my roommate, giving me simple steps to take in order to get my term paper done…which I did by the way…God has given us the Ten Commandments that, when taken seriously, bring us the gift of peace and unity which we desperately seek in our world. The Ten Commandments are a root of faith, giving life to us all.
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