02/15/12 Jeremiah 29:1-14 GUMC Youth
Have you ever heard this passage before, specifically verse eleven which reads, "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope." If you haven't heard it, or at least if you don't remember that you have heard it, I guarantee that you will one day, if only when you graduate from high school. If you get a chance to go to an open house for a senior, keep your eyes open for it because it shows up everywhere. Jeremiah 29:11 is a verse that shows up every time someone graduates from something and it has been the favorite verse of a bunch of people I have met.
Why might people like the verse so much? I think because it is such a strong message of hope, such a profound declaration that God actually loves us, that God will take care of us, even when things seem hard and that, even if it looks like things aren't going well, we can trust that God's plans are for our good, not our harm. For many people, it is one of the most amazing declarations of hope in the Bible.
So, why did God say this to his people? Did Israel graduate from high school? Did God mean it for his people the same way we often mean it for our friends and family or inside greeting cards? Tonight, we are talking about the Exile of Israel, that is, the time when the Israelites were taken captive by the Babylonians and taken from their land, and I chose this passage because it is probably the single most quoted passage about the Exile that people have no idea is about the Exile. So, since we've been talking about the hugely important, overarching stories that have shaped the whole history of Israel, which means that they have shaped us, too, I wanted to finish up by spending some time trying to understand the Exile and what we can learn about God from it.
You need to understand, first of all, that God was warning people that they might be taken into Exile some day from the very beginning. You can find all kinds of passages in the first few books of the Bible where God is effectively saying, "Look, I have taken you from Egypt and brought you into the land that I promised to your fathers. Don't ever forget how you got here. You didn't free yourselves, I freed you. You didn't win this land for yourselves, I delivered it into your hands. I am the God who takes the way humans do things and turns them upside down. If you forget that you are my people and you turn away from me, I will bring about an exile where you will have to serve your enemies."
The Exile shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. It wasn't as if God sprang on the people the moment they first made a mistake. Remember what we talked about last week about the whole prophetic tradition? God had been sending prophets to the people for over a hundred years who all told the people that they needed to remember God and be faithful, that their identity was bound up with their relationship with God, that they couldn't abandon God without ceasing to be who they were, who they were meant to be. Each and every one of them warned the people of what was heading their way if they didn't change their behavior. Also, we need to realize that it wasn't as though the prophets were adding all kinds of rules for the people; they were simply reminding the people of what God had already told them years ago and pointing out in some concrete ways how they needed to change.
To make matters worse, before the Exile happened, the nation of Israel had split into two, a Northern Kingdom and a Southern Kingdom and when we talk about the Exile, we are usually talking about the exile of the Southern Kingdom. Over a hundred years before the Southern Kingdom went into exile, the Northern Kingdom was defeated by Assyria and they went into exile. The Southern Kingdom should have known better. They had seen firsthand how the people of Israel could be defeated, and yet they didn't listen. Now, we shouldn't be too hard on them. After all, I don't know if we would have done any better if we were in their situation. After all, the people in the South probably didn't think that the defeat of the people in the North had anything to say to them. After all, from their point of view, the Northern Kingdom had abandoned God so of course God let them be defeated; it would be different with God's true people. It is always easy to feel superior to someone else until the same thing happens to you.
So, the Babylonians who defeated the Southern Kingdom took the people, especially their leaders and their educated people, and took them to Babylon. This caused a serious problem for the people. God had told them over and over again that they were only supposed to worship God, in the sense of making their sacrifices, at the Temple in Jerusalem. Now they were far away from Jerusalem and couldn't make their sacrifices there if they wanted to. What are the people to do? Do they make their sacrifices in Babylon? That might make a bit of sense, but does it really help to respond to God's judgment because the people broke his laws by breaking more of his laws? The people didn't think so, so they tried to find some other way of following God.
Their answer was to develop the synagogue system. The people looked at their lives and their history and they realized that there were two parts to what God had called them to do. He told them to make sacrifices in a particular way and at a particular place and also to follow his law. Now, why were the people in exile? Not because they were making mistakes with their sacrifices. In general, they did what they were supposed to do. The problem, as the prophets pointed out, was that the people were not following God's laws. So, what is the solution? The people realized that they couldn't sacrifice in Jerusalem if they were living in Babylon, so the sacrifices were out. However, there was no reason why they couldn't obey the law. It might be the case that, by being very careful about obeying the law, they might stick out a bit; after all, Jewish people weren't supposed to dress like the Babylonians or eat the same food as the Babylonians. Do you remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? The whole reason they were thrown into the fiery furnace was because they refused to live like the Babylonians. The same is true for why Daniel was thrown into the lion's den. Both of those stories come from this Exile we are talking about.
So, if the people got in trouble for doing the sacrifices right but abandoning the law, they responded by saying, "Even though we can't make sacrifices anymore, we are going to be careful and follow every little law, so this kind of mess never happens again." This whole trend survived, even after the people got to go back to Israel and the people who really focused on the law were around when Jesus walked the earth; they were the Pharisees. In fact, we live in a world where the modern Israelites cannot sacrifice like they have been commanded so, as you might expect, this desire to follow the law carefully is still around today. Today, the people who are called Hasidic Jews are the modern descendants of this desire to carefully observe every part of the law.
The bigger issue, however, is that the Israelites realized that they were not meant to live anywhere else but where God had given them to live. They had originally thought that this would mean that God would simply not allow them to be defeated, but this didn't happen. All kinds of people were asking "Where is God in the midst of all of this? How could God have let this happen?" They were supposed to live in that particular place. How were they supposed to be who they were meant to be so long as they were forced to live somewhere else?
This kind of frustration is clear in one of the more controversial passages in the Bible, Psalm 137. "By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall, how they said, 'Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!' O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!"
Not exactly a happy song, is it? Whether what they are saying here is a good thing or not, whether you agree with it or not, whether you even like it or not, can you at least understand the kind of anguish of soul that the people were going through? Their whole world had been turned upside down. Their anger is understandable. It feels as though God has abandoned them. All of a sudden, the warnings of the prophets seem to be all too clear. When they look back over the years of their lives, it starts to seem amazing that the people could have missed God's clear warnings. What, if anything, could they have done to prevent this?
And yet, the word of comfort, the reminder that God loves his people came from a singularly unexpected source: one of the prophets. Jeremiah was a prophet who relentlessly warned the people about what might very well happen if they didn't return to God and now it has happened. If Jeremiah was like we all too often are, we would expect him to say things like, "I told you so, but you didn't listen to me, did you? How do you like it now?" And yet, that is not at all what he says. Instead, he is transformed from being a vehicle for the judgment and warning of God to being a vehicle for the blessings and comfort of God. And yet, this isn't a contradiction, it is a window into the heart of God.
What we see in this transformation is not that God or Jeremiah changed their minds, but that when God said that he was primarily concerned about the people and that he didn't want the people to die but wanted them to turn from their evil ways, he actually meant it. The point of the Exile was not to destroy the people, but to remind them of who they were and whose they were. The last thing God wanted was any harm for the people, but when they refused to listen to words, it was worth the difficult times of the Exile in order to get the people back to who they were supposed to be.
What did this Jeremiah, who had spent so much time telling people that they needed to get their acts together or else they would go into exile, have to say when they actually went into exile? "Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."
Why would God give this advice to his people? In the following verses we read that there were other people, who were either calling themselves prophets are were being called prophets by others, who were saying that God was going to bring the people back anytime now. We get the idea that these people were saying either that God would realize what a terrible mistake he had made in allowing his people to go into exile and make everything right or else he would raise up a great leader who would deliver them. Jeremiah's words, as often as we hear them in encouraging situations, were once again not the words that the people wanted to hear. "What?" you can imagine the people saying, "We are supposed to build houses and settle down with families, put down roots and get involved in the community of Babylonians? Why should we do that? Isn't it not showing faith that God will deliver us?" And yet, Jeremiah was saying that the people needed to get used to the fact that they were going to be in Babylon for a while.
So what do we learn from this? We learn a hard truth and a welcome truth. The hard truth is that sometimes, when we make mistakes, we have to live with the consequences. Sometimes when we finally figure things out, when we finally actually do what is right, we don't have to suffer any consequences for what we have done, but sometimes those consequences still come. The people who never listened to God until the consequences came wanted to be faithful, but they didn't care about being faithful in order to be faithful, which is what God wanted, they only wanted to be faithful so they could get out of trouble. What is amazing is that, in order for the lesson to really be learned that we cannot treat our relationship with God like dirt, not even God could reduce the time the people were going to be in captivity. Anything less than the seventy years and the lesson would not be learned.
The welcome truth is that, in spite of the fact that it seemed to be a giving up of hope to settle down and build houses in Babylon, in spite of the fact that the people were being punished by God for what they had done, God had not abandoned them. He says, "For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope." What God told those people and what he is telling us is that, during those times when it doesn't seem like things are going right, when it seems that the only real option you have is not the one you want, God has not abandoned you. God's plans for you are for your welfare and not for harm, for a future with hope.
What we find is that what the passage really means isn't anything less than what we thought it meant by looking at all those cards, it means so much more. It means that our God cares for us more than we can possibly imagine, that how things seem to us isn't always what they really are. It means when all hope seems lost we can say, "God, I don't know what's going on, but I know that through whatever I have to face, your plans are for my good. You are the God who brings good that we could never expect out of the evil we face; make the good that I cannot see come out of this situation." God loved his people with a love that would not let them go, even when he was in the middle of correcting them. The Exile was not a sign that God had abandoned his people but a sign that he would not allow even their sin to separate them from him. How much more will God's love bind us, for whom Christ has died, to him? Let us pray.
AMEN
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Ephesians 4:1-16
02/12/12 Ephesians 4:1-16 Grace UMC
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I must admit that it feels as though I have been continually pestered by a theme over the last few months. Throughout the whole month of December, we were celebrating the season of Advent, culminating in Christmas. During that time, we were celebrating that the very Son of God has entered into our world of space and time, that when we say that God loves us, we do not only mean that God loves our souls or loves our spirits but loves our entire selves, body and soul. We saw that God did not leave us trapped in a body of sin but rather entered into our physicality and transformed it, offering us physical salvation every bit as much as spiritual salvation.
More recently, we had a Celebration Sunday, where we were reminded that when we talk about celebrating and being joyful in the Lord, we don't simply mean that we should have some kind of disembodied, spiritual joy, but that the joy should overflow and make a difference in absolutely every area of our lives. I feel like I have been reminded, over and over again recently, about the intense physicality of our spiritual lives and the intense spirituality of our physical lives. We cannot separate the things we do for our bodies and the things we do for our souls into different compartments that have nothing, or very little, to do with one another. Our bodies are always bodies-of-our-souls and our souls are always souls-of-our-bodies.
It is with that in mind that I wanted to spend some time talking about something we hear about every so often in the church but that we seldom really dig deep in: the role and importance of community in our Christian lives. It is interesting that it seems as though we live in a world that emphasizes faith as a personal thing, that it is something that each individual has entirely on their own and the faith one person has is so personal to themselves that it does not, or at least it should not, have an impact on anyone else. This last point is so strong that it has, at least in a way, been woven into the fabric of our American constitution. The reason that this is so interesting is that we find absolutely no model, anywhere in the Bible, for being an individual Christian. We hear about disciples (in the plural) and apostles (also in the plural), we hear about churches (groups of Christians) and we hear about the body of Christ (a term used for all Christians taken together), but we hear nothing about a person having such an isolated faith that it is theirs and theirs alone that they can either nurture or neglect based only on their own whims and desires and nobody can ever have a problem with it because it is their faith and their faith alone.
What we find is that the Bible is incredibly consistent about the importance of our interpersonal relationships together as Christians. In fact, the Bible is much more clearly consistent on this topic than on many others. The reason for this is rooted in the very most basic nature of our Christian lives. As much as some would like to convince us otherwise, we are not just isolated individuals on some kind of nebulous "personal faith journey" that has nothing to do with anyone else's nebulous "personal faith journey." Rather, as Christians, we believe in a very concrete spiritual experience. We believe not so much in the importance of faith, but the importance of the object of our faith. We believe that we are forgiven and reconciled to God, not through wishful thinking, not by being "good people," not even because we go to church, but because in Christ, God has met with us, has taken our broken condition upon himself, and has utterly transformed our situation. We as Christians are each made partakers of the ministry of Christ, again not by wishful thinking, but because we are actually taken and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, grafted into Christ himself like branches on a vine and are therefore joined to each other at the same time.
It is because we are joined together that the writers of the New Testament encourage us so often to pray for one another, to support one another through difficult times, to take on one another's burdens, to rejoice together and to grieve together. It isn't just because that's what good people do, but because those other people, in a crucial sense, make up part of who we are. There is a sense in which there are no such things as "individuals" in the fullest sense. To speak only of myself, I could call myself a father, but to do so is already to name my son; I could call myself a husband, but to do so is already to name my wife; I could call myself a son, but to do so is already to name my parents; I can call myself a pastor, but to do so is already to name all of you. Even to call me by my name is to tie me up with my whole family. There really is no way to consider a person in complete isolation from all other persons. We are bound together and cannot be isolated, even if we might want to be.
This idea, that things are only what they are because of the relations in which they are found is something that science has had to deal with. Ever since James Clerk Maxwell wrote about electromagnetic theory and, in doing so, pointed out that what we used to think of as individual particles or atoms are actually significant points in a continuous field of force, we have had to deal with the fact that we cannot isolate something without, in some sense, damaging it. The same is true for us. If we try to isolate someone, either ourselves or someone else, we have changed who they are, torn them out of the relationships that make up who they are.
This should come as no surprise to us as Christians. After all, we believe that God himself is Triune, that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that these three are one. The Persons of the Trinity are so completely united that everything we say about the Father we say about the Son except "Father," and everything we say about the Son we say about the Father except "Son," and so on. We cannot consider Jesus in isolation from his Father without destroying his identity, we cannot consider the Father except as the one who has sent his Son, and we cannot understand the Holy Spirit except as the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son. This deep connection with others is not something that we invented one day but something that is part even of the nature of God.
All of this brings me to one of the most wonderful and, unfortunately, most forgotten aspects of early Methodism that contributed greatly to the revival and helped to shape generations of Christians both in England and in America. One of the most amazing things about early Methodism was the significance of their small group ministry. If you wanted to become a Methodist, you were asked only one question. Just one. "Do you desire to flee from the wrath to come?" If you could look into the depths of your heart and recognize that you were someone who needed saving by God, you were welcomed with open arms among the Methodists. You didn't need to pass a doctrinal exam, you didn't need to prove that you were reformed from sin, you didn't need to do anything to be accepted other than answer "yes" to that one question. If you did, you were enrolled in the society (remember, in its earliest days, Methodism was a movement of renewal, not a separate church) and, at the very same time, enrolled into what was called a "class."
Now, a Methodist class is not the same thing as a Sunday School class. It isn't a place where you go to learn, at least not in the sense that you have one person who has prepared and teaches the rest of the people. Instead, it is a place for people to gather every week and support each other as they grow in their faith. It is important to notice a significant difference between how small groups were approached in early Methodism and how they are often approached today. Today, most people in any given local church do not participate in a small group that is geared toward sharing life with one another. If someone feels that they desire to go above and beyond their experience on Sunday mornings, they might join a class where they can study a book of the Bible or one written by some significant contemporary Christian leader. Sometimes, such groups spill over from being just a study group to becoming a place where people can share their lives of faith, but this is usually not the primary goal of the group.
By contrast, in early Methodism, everyone was in a small group. And by everyone, I mean everyone. Absolutely nobody was exempt. The only thing that was asked was whether they desired to flee from the wrath to come, which meant that they weren't even asked if they were a Christian. In fact it was, in general, assumed that new Methodists weren't Christians, that they needed to learn how to be Christians, that simply joining a church or even a renewal movement did not imply that one already had saving faith but very likely needed to live in a new way in order to really believe the gospel. In doing so, they were building on the key insight of people such as Athanasius who argued that, if you really want to understand what the apostles have to tell us about Jesus, you have to live in a way consistent with how they lived, that you may have to live like a Christian before you can believe like a Christian.
For those early Methodists, participation in the small group ministry was not something extra that could be tacked on to "normal" Christian commitment, it was understood as an absolutely vital part of Christian life. If someone were to say, "I really love the Methodists. I really look forward to meeting with the larger congregation every week. I love everything about Methodism except those small group meetings. I will do anything you say except be a part of a small group," you were dropped from the rolls of the society. Whatever else you may have been, if you were not part of a small group that was actively helping you to live as a Christian in every aspect of your life, you were not a Methodist. It was taken that seriously.
It is important to understand, however, that the Methodists realized that not everyone was in the same place in their relationship with God, that different people who were in different places spiritually had different needs. If you were not yet a Christian, if you could only bear witness to your need to be forgiven but could not yet testify that you had been assured of your salvation by grace, you were part of a class. You met with between eight and twelve other people in similar life situations led by someone who was more mature in their faith as a guide and facilitator. After you became aware of God's saving grace in your own life and were able to bear witness to God's salvation and its impact in transforming your life, you became a member of what was called a "band." Now a band was intended for those who were confident in the grace of God, who could look back on their life and point to a time when they were not a Christian and a time when they were a Christian and share in concrete ways how God had saved them and delivered them from their sins.
When you joined a band, you were asked the following eleven questions, to which the answer "yes" was expected to each. 1. Have you the forgiveness of your sins? 2. Have you peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ? 3. Have you the witness of God’s Spirit with your spirit, that you are a child of God? 4. Is the love of God shed abroad in your heart? 5. Has no sin, inward or outward, dominion over you? 6. Do you desire to be told your faults? 7. Do you desire to be told all your faults, and that plain and home? 8. Do you desire that every one of us should tell you, from time to time, whatsoever is in his heart concerning you? 9. Consider! Do you desire we should tell you whatsoever we think, whatsoever we fear, whatsoever we hear, concerning you? 10. Do you desire that, in doing this, we should come as close as possible, that we should cut to the quick, and search your heart to the bottom? 11. Is it your desire and design to be on this, and all other occasions, entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart without exception, without disguise, and without reserve?
Now, because we live in a different time and because this dynamic small group structure has been conspicuously absent from the mainstream of Methodism since the beginning of the twentieth century, we have a tendency to hear those questions and see them in a very much negative way. We start to wonder why we should allow someone else to ask us questions like this, we start to have serious doubts about whether we actually want to be told what is wrong with us. We might not actually want to let other people into the deep, dark secrets of our lives because, you know, sometimes we have sins that we like committing, that we have convinced ourselves don't hurt anyone but ourselves and that they might not even hurt us, either. If we answer "yes" to those questions, we realize that we might have to be a Christian full-time, that we can't really get away from people who will hold us accountable.
And yet, if we see those questions as being in any way negative, we have missed the whole point and the beauty of early Methodism. We were meant to have those with whom we can be open, honest, and transparent. In a crucial moment in Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic, The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister who fathered the child that marked Hester Prynne with her badge of adultery while he remained unsuspected, had this to say. "Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for what I am! Had I one friend—or were it my worst enemy!—to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood!—all emptiness!—all death!" He realized that being vulnerable and honest with at least a few people, is much to be preferred to being loved and respected with guilt on his heart.
The beauty of the classes and bands is that it provided an opportunity to really put faith into practice, to allow our relationship with God and the salvation we have in grace to be made manifest in every area of life and to take seriously the fact that we were made to live in a community that shapes who we are and to live consistently with that rather than fighting it. It was a structure that professed that it was better to be known truly as a sinner by those who love us and who want to help the victory of grace over sin be realized in our lives than to continue to live tormented by our shortcomings and our falsehoods.
You see, nobody likes being corrected; nobody likes being reminded that they have done wrong but if I can be convinced that when you ask me if you can tell me everything that is on your heart concerning me, that whatever I may hear, it is coming not from a source of hostile criticism, but of genuine concern and care, that I should be prepared, not to be nitpicked but to be supported and assisted, it will help me to be open to positive change, the change the gospel teaches about, a change away from sin and toward God. If I know that, when you point out my sin, it is because you realize that my sin affects you just as your sin affects me and, because of that, you are willing to participate and give of yourself to help me be transformed by the gospel, and if I know that you say this, not from a position of superiority, but as another sinner, just as broken and in need of support and accountability as I am, I am far more likely to hear you and to hear you with joy.
The point of those questions is not to set up a bunch of rules to beat you with when you make a mistake, but to cultivate a community that is so marked by love and compassion between brothers and sisters in Christ that grace can rule the day, can make us into the people we were meant to be, to truly be God's people. Though we cannot pretend that we can import eighteenth century British Methodism into twenty-first century America without making adjustments for the change in time and place, do we not find ourselves in need of this kind of radical community, a community of people that makes sacrifices for the well being of others? Let us pray that God might bring about such a community in our midst and nurture it so that radical love and support can become the dominant characteristic of Christians in this town. Let us pray.
AMEN
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I must admit that it feels as though I have been continually pestered by a theme over the last few months. Throughout the whole month of December, we were celebrating the season of Advent, culminating in Christmas. During that time, we were celebrating that the very Son of God has entered into our world of space and time, that when we say that God loves us, we do not only mean that God loves our souls or loves our spirits but loves our entire selves, body and soul. We saw that God did not leave us trapped in a body of sin but rather entered into our physicality and transformed it, offering us physical salvation every bit as much as spiritual salvation.
More recently, we had a Celebration Sunday, where we were reminded that when we talk about celebrating and being joyful in the Lord, we don't simply mean that we should have some kind of disembodied, spiritual joy, but that the joy should overflow and make a difference in absolutely every area of our lives. I feel like I have been reminded, over and over again recently, about the intense physicality of our spiritual lives and the intense spirituality of our physical lives. We cannot separate the things we do for our bodies and the things we do for our souls into different compartments that have nothing, or very little, to do with one another. Our bodies are always bodies-of-our-souls and our souls are always souls-of-our-bodies.
It is with that in mind that I wanted to spend some time talking about something we hear about every so often in the church but that we seldom really dig deep in: the role and importance of community in our Christian lives. It is interesting that it seems as though we live in a world that emphasizes faith as a personal thing, that it is something that each individual has entirely on their own and the faith one person has is so personal to themselves that it does not, or at least it should not, have an impact on anyone else. This last point is so strong that it has, at least in a way, been woven into the fabric of our American constitution. The reason that this is so interesting is that we find absolutely no model, anywhere in the Bible, for being an individual Christian. We hear about disciples (in the plural) and apostles (also in the plural), we hear about churches (groups of Christians) and we hear about the body of Christ (a term used for all Christians taken together), but we hear nothing about a person having such an isolated faith that it is theirs and theirs alone that they can either nurture or neglect based only on their own whims and desires and nobody can ever have a problem with it because it is their faith and their faith alone.
What we find is that the Bible is incredibly consistent about the importance of our interpersonal relationships together as Christians. In fact, the Bible is much more clearly consistent on this topic than on many others. The reason for this is rooted in the very most basic nature of our Christian lives. As much as some would like to convince us otherwise, we are not just isolated individuals on some kind of nebulous "personal faith journey" that has nothing to do with anyone else's nebulous "personal faith journey." Rather, as Christians, we believe in a very concrete spiritual experience. We believe not so much in the importance of faith, but the importance of the object of our faith. We believe that we are forgiven and reconciled to God, not through wishful thinking, not by being "good people," not even because we go to church, but because in Christ, God has met with us, has taken our broken condition upon himself, and has utterly transformed our situation. We as Christians are each made partakers of the ministry of Christ, again not by wishful thinking, but because we are actually taken and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, grafted into Christ himself like branches on a vine and are therefore joined to each other at the same time.
It is because we are joined together that the writers of the New Testament encourage us so often to pray for one another, to support one another through difficult times, to take on one another's burdens, to rejoice together and to grieve together. It isn't just because that's what good people do, but because those other people, in a crucial sense, make up part of who we are. There is a sense in which there are no such things as "individuals" in the fullest sense. To speak only of myself, I could call myself a father, but to do so is already to name my son; I could call myself a husband, but to do so is already to name my wife; I could call myself a son, but to do so is already to name my parents; I can call myself a pastor, but to do so is already to name all of you. Even to call me by my name is to tie me up with my whole family. There really is no way to consider a person in complete isolation from all other persons. We are bound together and cannot be isolated, even if we might want to be.
This idea, that things are only what they are because of the relations in which they are found is something that science has had to deal with. Ever since James Clerk Maxwell wrote about electromagnetic theory and, in doing so, pointed out that what we used to think of as individual particles or atoms are actually significant points in a continuous field of force, we have had to deal with the fact that we cannot isolate something without, in some sense, damaging it. The same is true for us. If we try to isolate someone, either ourselves or someone else, we have changed who they are, torn them out of the relationships that make up who they are.
This should come as no surprise to us as Christians. After all, we believe that God himself is Triune, that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that these three are one. The Persons of the Trinity are so completely united that everything we say about the Father we say about the Son except "Father," and everything we say about the Son we say about the Father except "Son," and so on. We cannot consider Jesus in isolation from his Father without destroying his identity, we cannot consider the Father except as the one who has sent his Son, and we cannot understand the Holy Spirit except as the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son. This deep connection with others is not something that we invented one day but something that is part even of the nature of God.
All of this brings me to one of the most wonderful and, unfortunately, most forgotten aspects of early Methodism that contributed greatly to the revival and helped to shape generations of Christians both in England and in America. One of the most amazing things about early Methodism was the significance of their small group ministry. If you wanted to become a Methodist, you were asked only one question. Just one. "Do you desire to flee from the wrath to come?" If you could look into the depths of your heart and recognize that you were someone who needed saving by God, you were welcomed with open arms among the Methodists. You didn't need to pass a doctrinal exam, you didn't need to prove that you were reformed from sin, you didn't need to do anything to be accepted other than answer "yes" to that one question. If you did, you were enrolled in the society (remember, in its earliest days, Methodism was a movement of renewal, not a separate church) and, at the very same time, enrolled into what was called a "class."
Now, a Methodist class is not the same thing as a Sunday School class. It isn't a place where you go to learn, at least not in the sense that you have one person who has prepared and teaches the rest of the people. Instead, it is a place for people to gather every week and support each other as they grow in their faith. It is important to notice a significant difference between how small groups were approached in early Methodism and how they are often approached today. Today, most people in any given local church do not participate in a small group that is geared toward sharing life with one another. If someone feels that they desire to go above and beyond their experience on Sunday mornings, they might join a class where they can study a book of the Bible or one written by some significant contemporary Christian leader. Sometimes, such groups spill over from being just a study group to becoming a place where people can share their lives of faith, but this is usually not the primary goal of the group.
By contrast, in early Methodism, everyone was in a small group. And by everyone, I mean everyone. Absolutely nobody was exempt. The only thing that was asked was whether they desired to flee from the wrath to come, which meant that they weren't even asked if they were a Christian. In fact it was, in general, assumed that new Methodists weren't Christians, that they needed to learn how to be Christians, that simply joining a church or even a renewal movement did not imply that one already had saving faith but very likely needed to live in a new way in order to really believe the gospel. In doing so, they were building on the key insight of people such as Athanasius who argued that, if you really want to understand what the apostles have to tell us about Jesus, you have to live in a way consistent with how they lived, that you may have to live like a Christian before you can believe like a Christian.
For those early Methodists, participation in the small group ministry was not something extra that could be tacked on to "normal" Christian commitment, it was understood as an absolutely vital part of Christian life. If someone were to say, "I really love the Methodists. I really look forward to meeting with the larger congregation every week. I love everything about Methodism except those small group meetings. I will do anything you say except be a part of a small group," you were dropped from the rolls of the society. Whatever else you may have been, if you were not part of a small group that was actively helping you to live as a Christian in every aspect of your life, you were not a Methodist. It was taken that seriously.
It is important to understand, however, that the Methodists realized that not everyone was in the same place in their relationship with God, that different people who were in different places spiritually had different needs. If you were not yet a Christian, if you could only bear witness to your need to be forgiven but could not yet testify that you had been assured of your salvation by grace, you were part of a class. You met with between eight and twelve other people in similar life situations led by someone who was more mature in their faith as a guide and facilitator. After you became aware of God's saving grace in your own life and were able to bear witness to God's salvation and its impact in transforming your life, you became a member of what was called a "band." Now a band was intended for those who were confident in the grace of God, who could look back on their life and point to a time when they were not a Christian and a time when they were a Christian and share in concrete ways how God had saved them and delivered them from their sins.
When you joined a band, you were asked the following eleven questions, to which the answer "yes" was expected to each. 1. Have you the forgiveness of your sins? 2. Have you peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ? 3. Have you the witness of God’s Spirit with your spirit, that you are a child of God? 4. Is the love of God shed abroad in your heart? 5. Has no sin, inward or outward, dominion over you? 6. Do you desire to be told your faults? 7. Do you desire to be told all your faults, and that plain and home? 8. Do you desire that every one of us should tell you, from time to time, whatsoever is in his heart concerning you? 9. Consider! Do you desire we should tell you whatsoever we think, whatsoever we fear, whatsoever we hear, concerning you? 10. Do you desire that, in doing this, we should come as close as possible, that we should cut to the quick, and search your heart to the bottom? 11. Is it your desire and design to be on this, and all other occasions, entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart without exception, without disguise, and without reserve?
Now, because we live in a different time and because this dynamic small group structure has been conspicuously absent from the mainstream of Methodism since the beginning of the twentieth century, we have a tendency to hear those questions and see them in a very much negative way. We start to wonder why we should allow someone else to ask us questions like this, we start to have serious doubts about whether we actually want to be told what is wrong with us. We might not actually want to let other people into the deep, dark secrets of our lives because, you know, sometimes we have sins that we like committing, that we have convinced ourselves don't hurt anyone but ourselves and that they might not even hurt us, either. If we answer "yes" to those questions, we realize that we might have to be a Christian full-time, that we can't really get away from people who will hold us accountable.
And yet, if we see those questions as being in any way negative, we have missed the whole point and the beauty of early Methodism. We were meant to have those with whom we can be open, honest, and transparent. In a crucial moment in Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic, The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister who fathered the child that marked Hester Prynne with her badge of adultery while he remained unsuspected, had this to say. "Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for what I am! Had I one friend—or were it my worst enemy!—to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood!—all emptiness!—all death!" He realized that being vulnerable and honest with at least a few people, is much to be preferred to being loved and respected with guilt on his heart.
The beauty of the classes and bands is that it provided an opportunity to really put faith into practice, to allow our relationship with God and the salvation we have in grace to be made manifest in every area of life and to take seriously the fact that we were made to live in a community that shapes who we are and to live consistently with that rather than fighting it. It was a structure that professed that it was better to be known truly as a sinner by those who love us and who want to help the victory of grace over sin be realized in our lives than to continue to live tormented by our shortcomings and our falsehoods.
You see, nobody likes being corrected; nobody likes being reminded that they have done wrong but if I can be convinced that when you ask me if you can tell me everything that is on your heart concerning me, that whatever I may hear, it is coming not from a source of hostile criticism, but of genuine concern and care, that I should be prepared, not to be nitpicked but to be supported and assisted, it will help me to be open to positive change, the change the gospel teaches about, a change away from sin and toward God. If I know that, when you point out my sin, it is because you realize that my sin affects you just as your sin affects me and, because of that, you are willing to participate and give of yourself to help me be transformed by the gospel, and if I know that you say this, not from a position of superiority, but as another sinner, just as broken and in need of support and accountability as I am, I am far more likely to hear you and to hear you with joy.
The point of those questions is not to set up a bunch of rules to beat you with when you make a mistake, but to cultivate a community that is so marked by love and compassion between brothers and sisters in Christ that grace can rule the day, can make us into the people we were meant to be, to truly be God's people. Though we cannot pretend that we can import eighteenth century British Methodism into twenty-first century America without making adjustments for the change in time and place, do we not find ourselves in need of this kind of radical community, a community of people that makes sacrifices for the well being of others? Let us pray that God might bring about such a community in our midst and nurture it so that radical love and support can become the dominant characteristic of Christians in this town. Let us pray.
AMEN
Saturday, February 11, 2012
The Prophet Tradition
02/08/12 Jeremiah 20:7-12 GUMC Youth
Do you know what a prophet is? In our society today, we don't tend to take prophets all that seriously. Prophets are seen as somewhat primitive, oftentimes crazy people, who talk nonsensically about stuff that might happen in the future but also very well may not happen. On the other hand, I suppose that there are times that our society takes prophets incredibly seriously, though we sometimes wonder why we do. After all, it is 2012 isn't it? How much of America has spent time worrying about whether or not the world will end this year? Many would say far too much, myself included.
I think that we have a tendency to misunderstand just who the prophets were and what prophecy really is in the Bible and in our world as Christians. For example, we often think of prophets, when acting as prophets, kind of going into some kind of trance, where they stop being themselves and simply become a mouthpiece for God to speak through. That way, when we hear that a prophet said something, we should think that it is God and God alone who is speaking and everything that is said takes on a very mysterious quality. While it is true that there is a passage in the Old Testament that portrays prophets in this way, you really can't say that this is what the Old Testament prophets were really like. It is, however, exactly what the ancient Greek oracle of Delphi was supposed to be like. The oracle would breathe in these mystic vapors and then start speaking mysteries that were often incredibly difficult to make any real sense out of.
The other thing we tend to think of when we think of prophets are that they are people who give elaborate and deeply symbolic descriptions of future events. Again, though there are certainly places in the Bible where this is the case, most of the time, the symbolism wasn't so much intended to obscure what was going to happen as much as it was an attempt to adequately communicate what God was doing. The fact of the matter is that, when you try to explain what God has done and is doing, and if you don't want people to try to understand God as if he is just like everything else in our lives (which is something we do all the time), then you sometimes need to develop a completely new way of talking about things. The goal isn't to confuse people, it is to try to explain something absolutely new, so new that we simply don't have the words to describe it. It is not altogether unlike trying to explain color to someone who has been blind all their lives.
Before I get to what exactly prophets actually are in the Bible, I want to point out one more thing that they are not, a big difference between how prophets function in the history of Israel and the Old Testament and how we hear about them in other contexts. If you read stories that come from ancient Greece, you will notice that prophecy in the sense of telling the future is kind of a joke. What I mean is that you have all these heroes and kings who go to the prophets to try to find out what is going to happen in the future so they can prepare and act accordingly. That makes a lot of sense, right? You want to make decisions based on the best information you can get. But when they go, they get a prediction in the form of a riddle or something that is so incredibly vague, so amazingly unclear that it is a miracle if they can make any real sense out of it or, more often than not, the person who hears the prediction interprets it in a radically inappropriate way, going off in confidence when they should be preparing for defeat. Outside of the Israelite tradition, prophets are less people who give good information and more instruments of fate, telling people what they want to hear to make sure that everything happens in the way that has been foretold and there can be no change in the future.
By contrast, the Israelite prophets were always about telling people what God was up to, not to confuse them or to lead them down the wrong path, but to encourage them to do what was right. We have this wonderful passage in the book of the prophet Ezekiel (33:11-20), where we read, "As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel. And you, mortal, say to the people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not save them when they transgress; and as for the wickedness of the wicked, it shall not make them stumble when they turn from their wickedness; and the righteous shall not be able to live by their righteousness when they sin. Though I say to the righteous that they shall surely live, yet if they trust in their righteousness and commit iniquity, none of their righteous deeds shall be remembered; but in the iniquity that they have committed they shall die. Again, though I say to the wicked, 'You shall surely die,' yet if they turn from their sin and do what is lawful and right - if the wicked restore the pledge, give back what they have taken by robbery, and walk in the statutes of life, committing no iniquity -they shall surely live, they shall not die. None of the sins that they have committed shall be remembered against them; they have done what is lawful and right, they shall surely live."
The whole point of prophecy was to bring about change. Do you remember the story of the prophet Jonah, who was told to preach to the people of Nineveh, a city that hated God and he didn't want to go. We find out in the story that the reason he didn't want to go was not because he was afraid of being mistreated but because he was certain that the people would actually listen and if they listened, they wouldn't be destroyed and he wanted them to be destroyed! God sends prophets because he wants the best for us, even when we don't, and even when the prophets themselves don't.
Alright, so what is the main thing that prophets do? It is true that, sometimes, the prophets go into this kind of ecstatic trance and it is true that, sometimes, the prophets tell about future events and acts of God that are far beyond the ability of normal human knowledge, but that is not what they do most of the time. While it is true that the prophets are often foretellers, they spend most of their time as what we could call forthtellers. More often than not, the prophets we read about in the Bible are people who end up as advisors to kings, not necessarily because the kings want to have the prophets around but because they can't seem to get away from them. The main way the prophets functioned was as someone who stood outside of the mainstream of the political world who looked at the same events that everyone else was looking at but, instead of asking first, "How can we win our battles and make our nation great," would ask, "What is God doing in the midst of all this? Are we being faithful? Are we really doing what the people of God should be doing? Are we listening to God at all?" It is interesting that the constant claims we hear about various politicians being an "outsider," whether it is true or not, is based on this idea that those in political power need to be reminded of other ways of looking at the world.
Now, when we look at things from our American point of view, where we see all kinds of people on TV and on the internet who criticize the government and point out their mistakes, and we ourselves even join in the blame placing and finger pointing, we might get the idea that this role of the prophet was something that everyone wanted to do. After all, it is kind of fun to get into an argument where we can show everyone how right we are and how wrong someone else is. And yet, however respected the prophets may or may not have been at any given time, when we actually read what they had to say, we find that they didn't always want to be a prophet. Perhaps the strongest example is the text we read at the beginning, where Jeremiah said that God tricked him into being a prophet and that he wishes that he could just keep his mouth shut and not have to talk about God and what God wants, but every time he does, he says, "then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot."
The prophets were constant messengers from God to call his people back to faithfulness. They were the concrete and physical reminders that God still loved his people and it that it breaks his heart when we forget him and live as if he didn't really exist. These were people who, because of their ministry, helped to mould and shape a whole community over hundreds of years. It seems pretty clear how, when Israel was faithful, they were bound all the more firmly to God, but the whole prophetic tradition shows us that the mistakes of the people did not stop God from claiming them and calling them his own. Every time a prophet spoke out against the people, it was a declaration of God's love and faithfulness. Even when it seemed harsh, it was truly an act of love. After all, God doesn't need any of us. If he decided that he had had enough of the Israelites, he could easily have just turned his back and rejected them. Nothing would have been simpler. The fact that God continued to reach out to his people after they rejected him over and over and over again shows just how much God truly loves us.
Not everyone loved the prophets, though. As you can imagine, you can only go up to powerful political leaders and tell them things they don't want to hear and tell them that they have abandoned God so many times before you start to get picked on. Remember, Israel was a nation that, by definition was bound to God. For the prophets to say that Israel had abandoned God, even though God had not abandoned them, was to say that the nation and its leaders have completely lost their way, are not who they ought to be, have committed a crime, not against the people, but against God. They were not very popular among the people they came to speak to. Though we do not hear many details in the Bible, we know that many of the prophets in the Bible came to tragic ends. Some were beheaded, others, according to the book of Hebrews (11:35-38), "were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented - of whom the world was not worthy."
The question I want to ask you tonight and I want you to think hard about it both tonight and in the days to come, is "Who are the prophets in your life today?" Who are the people you know who stand up for what is right, even when everyone else around hates them for it? Who are the people who care so much about you that they will tell you that you are doing something wrong when everyone else is too afraid of hurting your feelings to say anything? Who are the people who wish they weren't in the spotlight because of what they believe but keep getting pushed into it because they don't really have a choice? I'm not talking about people who want to beat people with their faith and set out to do so, I mean the people whose lives are maybe a bit odd, but completely sincere and marked by love, even if that love looks a bit different than our world wants it to. Are there any prophets like that around? Are there any in your life? Do you want God to speak into your life and tell you what he wants you to do, even if it means that you need to do something that you may not want to do?
Here's another question. "Are you a prophet?" Most of the time, when people are asked that question today, their first reaction is to say, "Of course not. I'm not a prophet." But when they are asked, they almost always are thinking of some great and holy leader who sits on a pedestal or wears a sign on the street corner and spouts off symbolic doomsday predictions or something like that. My question is not whether you are like that. My question is whether you are a person who is so concerned for what God has done, is doing and will do that you are willing to stand for God when everyone around is against him, even if they would never say they are against him? Are you willing to be faithful even when nobody else seems to see the need for it? If so, it probably feels like everyone around gets all worked up over things that don't matter and seem to not care at all about the things that do matter. It probably feels like you are the only one who cares about God (though you should know that it isn't true. Lots of people care about God, even if it doesn't always feel like it). If that is you, you probably don't understand what people are getting at when they say, "You need to bring your faith into every area of your life," because you can't understand how faith can really be faith if it isn't something that affects every area of life.
Our world is desperately in need of prophets, but I don't think that it is because God simply isn't calling people to be prophets. I think it is because the people who God has called to be prophets don't realize that is what it is that they have been called to be because they've gotten the wrong idea of what the prophetic ministry is. Here is something that we read in the first letter of Peter. "But 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." Is God calling to be a prophet, to be a witness for what God has done and is doing in Spencer? Let us pray.
AMEN
Do you know what a prophet is? In our society today, we don't tend to take prophets all that seriously. Prophets are seen as somewhat primitive, oftentimes crazy people, who talk nonsensically about stuff that might happen in the future but also very well may not happen. On the other hand, I suppose that there are times that our society takes prophets incredibly seriously, though we sometimes wonder why we do. After all, it is 2012 isn't it? How much of America has spent time worrying about whether or not the world will end this year? Many would say far too much, myself included.
I think that we have a tendency to misunderstand just who the prophets were and what prophecy really is in the Bible and in our world as Christians. For example, we often think of prophets, when acting as prophets, kind of going into some kind of trance, where they stop being themselves and simply become a mouthpiece for God to speak through. That way, when we hear that a prophet said something, we should think that it is God and God alone who is speaking and everything that is said takes on a very mysterious quality. While it is true that there is a passage in the Old Testament that portrays prophets in this way, you really can't say that this is what the Old Testament prophets were really like. It is, however, exactly what the ancient Greek oracle of Delphi was supposed to be like. The oracle would breathe in these mystic vapors and then start speaking mysteries that were often incredibly difficult to make any real sense out of.
The other thing we tend to think of when we think of prophets are that they are people who give elaborate and deeply symbolic descriptions of future events. Again, though there are certainly places in the Bible where this is the case, most of the time, the symbolism wasn't so much intended to obscure what was going to happen as much as it was an attempt to adequately communicate what God was doing. The fact of the matter is that, when you try to explain what God has done and is doing, and if you don't want people to try to understand God as if he is just like everything else in our lives (which is something we do all the time), then you sometimes need to develop a completely new way of talking about things. The goal isn't to confuse people, it is to try to explain something absolutely new, so new that we simply don't have the words to describe it. It is not altogether unlike trying to explain color to someone who has been blind all their lives.
Before I get to what exactly prophets actually are in the Bible, I want to point out one more thing that they are not, a big difference between how prophets function in the history of Israel and the Old Testament and how we hear about them in other contexts. If you read stories that come from ancient Greece, you will notice that prophecy in the sense of telling the future is kind of a joke. What I mean is that you have all these heroes and kings who go to the prophets to try to find out what is going to happen in the future so they can prepare and act accordingly. That makes a lot of sense, right? You want to make decisions based on the best information you can get. But when they go, they get a prediction in the form of a riddle or something that is so incredibly vague, so amazingly unclear that it is a miracle if they can make any real sense out of it or, more often than not, the person who hears the prediction interprets it in a radically inappropriate way, going off in confidence when they should be preparing for defeat. Outside of the Israelite tradition, prophets are less people who give good information and more instruments of fate, telling people what they want to hear to make sure that everything happens in the way that has been foretold and there can be no change in the future.
By contrast, the Israelite prophets were always about telling people what God was up to, not to confuse them or to lead them down the wrong path, but to encourage them to do what was right. We have this wonderful passage in the book of the prophet Ezekiel (33:11-20), where we read, "As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel. And you, mortal, say to the people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not save them when they transgress; and as for the wickedness of the wicked, it shall not make them stumble when they turn from their wickedness; and the righteous shall not be able to live by their righteousness when they sin. Though I say to the righteous that they shall surely live, yet if they trust in their righteousness and commit iniquity, none of their righteous deeds shall be remembered; but in the iniquity that they have committed they shall die. Again, though I say to the wicked, 'You shall surely die,' yet if they turn from their sin and do what is lawful and right - if the wicked restore the pledge, give back what they have taken by robbery, and walk in the statutes of life, committing no iniquity -they shall surely live, they shall not die. None of the sins that they have committed shall be remembered against them; they have done what is lawful and right, they shall surely live."
The whole point of prophecy was to bring about change. Do you remember the story of the prophet Jonah, who was told to preach to the people of Nineveh, a city that hated God and he didn't want to go. We find out in the story that the reason he didn't want to go was not because he was afraid of being mistreated but because he was certain that the people would actually listen and if they listened, they wouldn't be destroyed and he wanted them to be destroyed! God sends prophets because he wants the best for us, even when we don't, and even when the prophets themselves don't.
Alright, so what is the main thing that prophets do? It is true that, sometimes, the prophets go into this kind of ecstatic trance and it is true that, sometimes, the prophets tell about future events and acts of God that are far beyond the ability of normal human knowledge, but that is not what they do most of the time. While it is true that the prophets are often foretellers, they spend most of their time as what we could call forthtellers. More often than not, the prophets we read about in the Bible are people who end up as advisors to kings, not necessarily because the kings want to have the prophets around but because they can't seem to get away from them. The main way the prophets functioned was as someone who stood outside of the mainstream of the political world who looked at the same events that everyone else was looking at but, instead of asking first, "How can we win our battles and make our nation great," would ask, "What is God doing in the midst of all this? Are we being faithful? Are we really doing what the people of God should be doing? Are we listening to God at all?" It is interesting that the constant claims we hear about various politicians being an "outsider," whether it is true or not, is based on this idea that those in political power need to be reminded of other ways of looking at the world.
Now, when we look at things from our American point of view, where we see all kinds of people on TV and on the internet who criticize the government and point out their mistakes, and we ourselves even join in the blame placing and finger pointing, we might get the idea that this role of the prophet was something that everyone wanted to do. After all, it is kind of fun to get into an argument where we can show everyone how right we are and how wrong someone else is. And yet, however respected the prophets may or may not have been at any given time, when we actually read what they had to say, we find that they didn't always want to be a prophet. Perhaps the strongest example is the text we read at the beginning, where Jeremiah said that God tricked him into being a prophet and that he wishes that he could just keep his mouth shut and not have to talk about God and what God wants, but every time he does, he says, "then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot."
The prophets were constant messengers from God to call his people back to faithfulness. They were the concrete and physical reminders that God still loved his people and it that it breaks his heart when we forget him and live as if he didn't really exist. These were people who, because of their ministry, helped to mould and shape a whole community over hundreds of years. It seems pretty clear how, when Israel was faithful, they were bound all the more firmly to God, but the whole prophetic tradition shows us that the mistakes of the people did not stop God from claiming them and calling them his own. Every time a prophet spoke out against the people, it was a declaration of God's love and faithfulness. Even when it seemed harsh, it was truly an act of love. After all, God doesn't need any of us. If he decided that he had had enough of the Israelites, he could easily have just turned his back and rejected them. Nothing would have been simpler. The fact that God continued to reach out to his people after they rejected him over and over and over again shows just how much God truly loves us.
Not everyone loved the prophets, though. As you can imagine, you can only go up to powerful political leaders and tell them things they don't want to hear and tell them that they have abandoned God so many times before you start to get picked on. Remember, Israel was a nation that, by definition was bound to God. For the prophets to say that Israel had abandoned God, even though God had not abandoned them, was to say that the nation and its leaders have completely lost their way, are not who they ought to be, have committed a crime, not against the people, but against God. They were not very popular among the people they came to speak to. Though we do not hear many details in the Bible, we know that many of the prophets in the Bible came to tragic ends. Some were beheaded, others, according to the book of Hebrews (11:35-38), "were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented - of whom the world was not worthy."
The question I want to ask you tonight and I want you to think hard about it both tonight and in the days to come, is "Who are the prophets in your life today?" Who are the people you know who stand up for what is right, even when everyone else around hates them for it? Who are the people who care so much about you that they will tell you that you are doing something wrong when everyone else is too afraid of hurting your feelings to say anything? Who are the people who wish they weren't in the spotlight because of what they believe but keep getting pushed into it because they don't really have a choice? I'm not talking about people who want to beat people with their faith and set out to do so, I mean the people whose lives are maybe a bit odd, but completely sincere and marked by love, even if that love looks a bit different than our world wants it to. Are there any prophets like that around? Are there any in your life? Do you want God to speak into your life and tell you what he wants you to do, even if it means that you need to do something that you may not want to do?
Here's another question. "Are you a prophet?" Most of the time, when people are asked that question today, their first reaction is to say, "Of course not. I'm not a prophet." But when they are asked, they almost always are thinking of some great and holy leader who sits on a pedestal or wears a sign on the street corner and spouts off symbolic doomsday predictions or something like that. My question is not whether you are like that. My question is whether you are a person who is so concerned for what God has done, is doing and will do that you are willing to stand for God when everyone around is against him, even if they would never say they are against him? Are you willing to be faithful even when nobody else seems to see the need for it? If so, it probably feels like everyone around gets all worked up over things that don't matter and seem to not care at all about the things that do matter. It probably feels like you are the only one who cares about God (though you should know that it isn't true. Lots of people care about God, even if it doesn't always feel like it). If that is you, you probably don't understand what people are getting at when they say, "You need to bring your faith into every area of your life," because you can't understand how faith can really be faith if it isn't something that affects every area of life.
Our world is desperately in need of prophets, but I don't think that it is because God simply isn't calling people to be prophets. I think it is because the people who God has called to be prophets don't realize that is what it is that they have been called to be because they've gotten the wrong idea of what the prophetic ministry is. Here is something that we read in the first letter of Peter. "But 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." Is God calling to be a prophet, to be a witness for what God has done and is doing in Spencer? Let us pray.
AMEN
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Exodus 20:1-21
02/01/12 Exodus 20:1-21 GUMC Youth
Tonight, we continue on in our series, "What in the World has God Been Up To?" by looking at God giving his law to his people on Mount Sinai. I'm sure that most of you have heard the Ten Commandments before. Often, throughout history, Christians have tended to separate the commandments into two "tables" (that is, tablets), based on the kind of relationships that they have to do with. Most traditionally, you have the "first table" which includes the first four commandments: No other Gods, no idols, don't take the Lord's name in vain, and honor the Sabbath. These commandments focus first and foremost on our relationship with God. The "second table" includes the other six commandments: Honor your parents, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie, and don't covet your neighbor's stuff. These commandments are primarily focused on our relationships with other people.
Now, I want to point out something that you may or may not have noticed in the last few years. Every once in a while, you hear people arguing that America was founded on the Ten Commandments, or there will be some big story in the news about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be displayed in some public building. What are people really talking about when they say things like this? Are they really talking about all the Ten Commandments? What I find is that most people, when they want to emphasize the Ten Commandments, are really just looking at a few of them. We want to emphasize that it isn't acceptable to kill one another, to just break the marriage promises that we make without consequence, to take what doesn't belong to us, or to lie, especially in court. Those are all great and important values, and they are all found within the Ten Commandments, but can we really say that by affirming those values, we are affirming the Ten Commandments? It seems to me that we are only affirming four of them. We aren't all that interested, it seems, in ensuring that there are no other gods before God; in fact, one of the things you have to live with if you want religious freedom is that other people might not follow your God. By the same token, how often do you hear people arguing that a shared Sabbath is crucial to American success? How about looking at how people treat their parents, however old they may be, as a major part of whether they are "good" people? Almost never.
The reason why I bring this up is that most people I have heard who talk a lot about affirming the Ten Commandments are really only supporting what we could call the Four Commandments, and they aren't even at the top of the list. The worship of God is, if we can make any claim that the most important things are listed first, which I think we can, far more important than the things we usually hear about. To talk about the Ten Commandments as if what they have to say about our relationships with other people is what really matters, or even if it is the only thing we care about is to miss the whole point. The Ten Commandments have much more to do with our relation to God than they do with our relation to one another.
I understand that not everyone likes rules. What I want to ask you is, "What function do rules or commandments have?" Are there good functions or are there only bad ones? All of us, not least you who are still in school, can give examples of rules that we don't like. We don't like rules that tell us when we need to go to bed, when we need to get up in the morning, that tell us how to dress, what we can and cannot say, what movies we can watch, and any number of other things. Sometimes, we want to break rules, not because we actually want to do what we aren't supposed to do, but that the very declaration, "This is bad," makes us want to do it, even if we never wanted to do it before. There was a famous poet, Carl Sandberg, who wrote, "Why did the children put beans in their ears when the one thing we told them they must not do is put beans in their ears? Why did the children pour molasses on the cat when the one thing we told them they must not do is pour molasses on the cat?"
There have been people who have tried to spell out what kinds of uses the law can have. Martin Luther, for example, had two uses for the law. The first was to convict us of sin. So long as we never look at something like the Ten Commandments, we might be able to convince ourselves that we have never really done anything wrong or, if we have, we can convince ourselves that it really wasn't that bad. After all, few of us have committed murder or adultery. But have you ever coveted something that someone else had? Did you ever find yourself wanting what you didn't and couldn't have? Even if we never broke any other commandment, we still find ourselves, as the "good" people, in violation of the laws God gave to his people. So long as we look at those four commandments that our society likes to look at, we can talk about ourselves as people who don't break the laws of God. The moment we look at the rest, we realize that there are many times when we allow other things, even if we don't call them "gods," get in the way of our relationship with God. Sometimes its school, sometimes its relationships, sometimes its sports or other activities. The point is that if we actually had to answer for everything we've ever done we would find that we break the Ten Commandments all the time. Psalm 130 says, "If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?"
The second use of the law, according to Luther, is that law can be used to hold people back from acting on their sinful ideas. For example, you might be incredibly mad at someone; you might feel that your life would be so much easier if they simply weren't around. However, even if you would get to the point where you would be willing to kill them, the fact that you would be severely punished for doing so might stop you from following through. In a similar way, though a little less serious, you might want to go as fast as you possibly can down the highway in order to take as little time as possible to get where you are going and yet, because you can get a pretty serious fine, you might not actually do it.
Now, a little later on, John Calvin comes along and adds a third use of the law. He points out that, as true as it is that the law can be a mirror, showing us the sin that we commit every day, and as true as it is that the law can be a kind of curb, that keeps us, at least sometimes, from doing wrong, it is also a guide, a resource we can use to help us live as we are supposed to as Christians. Calvin really emphasized this third use of the law. If Luther focused on how the law is used by those who are not yet Christians, Calvin wanted to emphasize how the law functions for those who are already Christians. For those of you who are thinking to yourselves, "This isn't a Lutheran or a Presbyterian Church, why do we care what Luther and Calvin had to say" (which may be none of you I know), John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, absolutely agreed with Calvin that we should use the law as a guide for Christian behavior. In fact, he emphasized the importance of a transformed life more than just about anyone else in the history of the church.
I want to bring up something that I read for a class in high school. It was a book that was written as a novel but was a vehicle to talk about philosophy and life. This particular author criticized the formulation of the Ten Commandments, not so much because he felt they didn't form a good way to live, but because many of the commandments are of the form "Thou shalt not." He argued that putting rules in a negative form (that is, putting restrictions on what you can do) is just setting people up for failure. Like we talked about earlier, telling someone, "You can't do this" might just make them want to do it more. This author suggested that instead of saying, "You shall not commit murder," God should have said, "You shall value life and work to preserve it."
As much as I agree with the idea that telling someone they can't do something might make them want to do it (even God recognizes this, as we read in Romans 7), I think we need to realize that God was not being dumb when he put the commandments in the form of "Thou shalt not." If you say, "You shall not commit murder," you've got a line in the sand, you have a point where you can say, "Once you cross this line, you have gone too far, but until you do, don't lose too much sleep over it." For example, and actually this example come from the Bible, that you and I are out chopping wood. You swing the axe up to strike again and, all of a sudden, the axehead flies off and hits me in the head, killing me. Is it a tragedy? Absolutely, will it cause problems of various kinds in the community, of course, but did you sin? Not really. You might feel horrible, you might wonder what you might have done differently that could have prevented it, but you didn't hate me ahead of time, you didn't plot at home how you could kill me. It is deeply unfortunate, but not truly sinful.
On the other hand, if you say, "You shall value life and work to preserve it," we never know quite how to interpret it. How can we tell the difference between someone who does not value life as much as we would like them to and someone who is working against life? How do we determine what life is supposed to be and what it looks like to value it? Maybe, for most of us, this isn't a problem we come up in daily life, but it is something that people in hospitals, for example, have to deal with all the time. What if someone is in serious pain, battling hard against a disease against which they simply cannot win, especially if the medicine is a big part of what is making them so miserable? Is it treating life more valuable if we insist that they keep fighting until their final breath or is it treating it as more valuable if we allow them to spend their last days in relative comfort, perhaps even in their home?
I think the beauty in the negative form of the commandments is that it gives us some concrete boundaries, not altogether unlike the boundaries our parents have given us, especially when we were very young and simply didn't know what was good for us and what was bad for us. God tells us, "You need to know that there are certain limits within which human beings were designed to live and if you get too far outside of them, you are going to create lots of problems for yourselves. It is true that you might figure out many of these things for yourself, but there are some you wouldn't necessarily notice unless you were told and I want to save you the turmoil that comes from doing those things." To say "Thou shalt not," you set up guideposts to show you boundaries, inside of which you can do more or less whatever you want. To say, "You shall do this," gives us a general direction, but no guidance as to what to do in concrete situations.
My point, and what I want you to really get out of this tonight, is that, in spite of the fact that people today seem to say that God's law is all about holding us back and making sure we don't do anything wrong, the law is actually intended to be liberating, to make us free. It's true that there are some things that God tells us not to do, but the things we aren't supposed to do are things that aren't good for us anyway, so by saying, "I don't want to listen to God," what we are really saying is, "I want to make poor choices." The whole point is to free us up to love God and love our neighbors more.
Let me give you an example. Most people around, if they believe in God at all, only believe in one God. Polytheism, or the belief in multiple gods, has gone pretty seriously out of style in today's world. But it wasn't always the case. In fact, until Judaism came along, basically everyone was polytheistic. What this meant, especially in the ancient Greek world, was that most people believed that there were gods or spirits in every tree and under every rock. If you wanted to drink from a river, you were supposed to ask permission of the river god; if you wanted to chop down a tree for firewood, you were supposed to ask permission of the god who lived in the tree. You couldn't hardly walk down the street without asking for forgiveness for kicking a stone with your foot by mistake. The fact of the matter is that this is not an easy way to live. You were never sure if you had offended some random god by something you did, either on purpose or by mistake.
The point is that the laws that God gave the Israelites in the Ten Commandments, helped to free them from this kind of mentality. You don't have to worry about appeasing all the gods of the trees and rocks and rivers because there are no such gods. The only God there really is is the God of the universe, the God of the Israelites, the God who came among us as Jesus Christ. God wanted his people to live free from all the silly things that people can get caught up in, so he made sure to tell them the truth about the gods that everyone else got worked up about; they simply don't exist, or at the very least, they are so weak, that they can't even be called "gods."
Notice that the most liberating of the Ten Commandments are the first ones, where God tells us that he is the only God. He is the only real authority, he is the only one that we need to make absolutely sure we listen to. Every other authority is subject to him; and that is really freeing. The point is that God is not trying to micromanage your life; he is trying to free you for more joy, more celebration, more devotion, more love. Love is spontaneous; you can't force it, but you can do things that hinder it. That is why Jesus says that all of the law is summed up in these two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. If you kill your neighbor, or even hate them, you aren't loving him or her. If you are stealing from them, or even just being driven by jealousy, you aren't loving them. If you constantly talk back to your parents and do what you know you aren't supposed to do, you aren't loving them. If you say you worship God but then put all kinds of things in his place, you aren't loving him.
The law marks out boundaries, outside of which, love for God and neighbor cannot really happen. So long as you stay within those general boundaries, you are free to be who you were made to be, free to love as God moves you to love, free to have fun and live life to the fullest. The law wasn't given to ruin your life, it was given to free you from the problems that we often cause ourselves. The law was given in love. Let it free you to love others. Let us pray.
AMEN
Tonight, we continue on in our series, "What in the World has God Been Up To?" by looking at God giving his law to his people on Mount Sinai. I'm sure that most of you have heard the Ten Commandments before. Often, throughout history, Christians have tended to separate the commandments into two "tables" (that is, tablets), based on the kind of relationships that they have to do with. Most traditionally, you have the "first table" which includes the first four commandments: No other Gods, no idols, don't take the Lord's name in vain, and honor the Sabbath. These commandments focus first and foremost on our relationship with God. The "second table" includes the other six commandments: Honor your parents, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie, and don't covet your neighbor's stuff. These commandments are primarily focused on our relationships with other people.
Now, I want to point out something that you may or may not have noticed in the last few years. Every once in a while, you hear people arguing that America was founded on the Ten Commandments, or there will be some big story in the news about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be displayed in some public building. What are people really talking about when they say things like this? Are they really talking about all the Ten Commandments? What I find is that most people, when they want to emphasize the Ten Commandments, are really just looking at a few of them. We want to emphasize that it isn't acceptable to kill one another, to just break the marriage promises that we make without consequence, to take what doesn't belong to us, or to lie, especially in court. Those are all great and important values, and they are all found within the Ten Commandments, but can we really say that by affirming those values, we are affirming the Ten Commandments? It seems to me that we are only affirming four of them. We aren't all that interested, it seems, in ensuring that there are no other gods before God; in fact, one of the things you have to live with if you want religious freedom is that other people might not follow your God. By the same token, how often do you hear people arguing that a shared Sabbath is crucial to American success? How about looking at how people treat their parents, however old they may be, as a major part of whether they are "good" people? Almost never.
The reason why I bring this up is that most people I have heard who talk a lot about affirming the Ten Commandments are really only supporting what we could call the Four Commandments, and they aren't even at the top of the list. The worship of God is, if we can make any claim that the most important things are listed first, which I think we can, far more important than the things we usually hear about. To talk about the Ten Commandments as if what they have to say about our relationships with other people is what really matters, or even if it is the only thing we care about is to miss the whole point. The Ten Commandments have much more to do with our relation to God than they do with our relation to one another.
I understand that not everyone likes rules. What I want to ask you is, "What function do rules or commandments have?" Are there good functions or are there only bad ones? All of us, not least you who are still in school, can give examples of rules that we don't like. We don't like rules that tell us when we need to go to bed, when we need to get up in the morning, that tell us how to dress, what we can and cannot say, what movies we can watch, and any number of other things. Sometimes, we want to break rules, not because we actually want to do what we aren't supposed to do, but that the very declaration, "This is bad," makes us want to do it, even if we never wanted to do it before. There was a famous poet, Carl Sandberg, who wrote, "Why did the children put beans in their ears when the one thing we told them they must not do is put beans in their ears? Why did the children pour molasses on the cat when the one thing we told them they must not do is pour molasses on the cat?"
There have been people who have tried to spell out what kinds of uses the law can have. Martin Luther, for example, had two uses for the law. The first was to convict us of sin. So long as we never look at something like the Ten Commandments, we might be able to convince ourselves that we have never really done anything wrong or, if we have, we can convince ourselves that it really wasn't that bad. After all, few of us have committed murder or adultery. But have you ever coveted something that someone else had? Did you ever find yourself wanting what you didn't and couldn't have? Even if we never broke any other commandment, we still find ourselves, as the "good" people, in violation of the laws God gave to his people. So long as we look at those four commandments that our society likes to look at, we can talk about ourselves as people who don't break the laws of God. The moment we look at the rest, we realize that there are many times when we allow other things, even if we don't call them "gods," get in the way of our relationship with God. Sometimes its school, sometimes its relationships, sometimes its sports or other activities. The point is that if we actually had to answer for everything we've ever done we would find that we break the Ten Commandments all the time. Psalm 130 says, "If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?"
The second use of the law, according to Luther, is that law can be used to hold people back from acting on their sinful ideas. For example, you might be incredibly mad at someone; you might feel that your life would be so much easier if they simply weren't around. However, even if you would get to the point where you would be willing to kill them, the fact that you would be severely punished for doing so might stop you from following through. In a similar way, though a little less serious, you might want to go as fast as you possibly can down the highway in order to take as little time as possible to get where you are going and yet, because you can get a pretty serious fine, you might not actually do it.
Now, a little later on, John Calvin comes along and adds a third use of the law. He points out that, as true as it is that the law can be a mirror, showing us the sin that we commit every day, and as true as it is that the law can be a kind of curb, that keeps us, at least sometimes, from doing wrong, it is also a guide, a resource we can use to help us live as we are supposed to as Christians. Calvin really emphasized this third use of the law. If Luther focused on how the law is used by those who are not yet Christians, Calvin wanted to emphasize how the law functions for those who are already Christians. For those of you who are thinking to yourselves, "This isn't a Lutheran or a Presbyterian Church, why do we care what Luther and Calvin had to say" (which may be none of you I know), John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, absolutely agreed with Calvin that we should use the law as a guide for Christian behavior. In fact, he emphasized the importance of a transformed life more than just about anyone else in the history of the church.
I want to bring up something that I read for a class in high school. It was a book that was written as a novel but was a vehicle to talk about philosophy and life. This particular author criticized the formulation of the Ten Commandments, not so much because he felt they didn't form a good way to live, but because many of the commandments are of the form "Thou shalt not." He argued that putting rules in a negative form (that is, putting restrictions on what you can do) is just setting people up for failure. Like we talked about earlier, telling someone, "You can't do this" might just make them want to do it more. This author suggested that instead of saying, "You shall not commit murder," God should have said, "You shall value life and work to preserve it."
As much as I agree with the idea that telling someone they can't do something might make them want to do it (even God recognizes this, as we read in Romans 7), I think we need to realize that God was not being dumb when he put the commandments in the form of "Thou shalt not." If you say, "You shall not commit murder," you've got a line in the sand, you have a point where you can say, "Once you cross this line, you have gone too far, but until you do, don't lose too much sleep over it." For example, and actually this example come from the Bible, that you and I are out chopping wood. You swing the axe up to strike again and, all of a sudden, the axehead flies off and hits me in the head, killing me. Is it a tragedy? Absolutely, will it cause problems of various kinds in the community, of course, but did you sin? Not really. You might feel horrible, you might wonder what you might have done differently that could have prevented it, but you didn't hate me ahead of time, you didn't plot at home how you could kill me. It is deeply unfortunate, but not truly sinful.
On the other hand, if you say, "You shall value life and work to preserve it," we never know quite how to interpret it. How can we tell the difference between someone who does not value life as much as we would like them to and someone who is working against life? How do we determine what life is supposed to be and what it looks like to value it? Maybe, for most of us, this isn't a problem we come up in daily life, but it is something that people in hospitals, for example, have to deal with all the time. What if someone is in serious pain, battling hard against a disease against which they simply cannot win, especially if the medicine is a big part of what is making them so miserable? Is it treating life more valuable if we insist that they keep fighting until their final breath or is it treating it as more valuable if we allow them to spend their last days in relative comfort, perhaps even in their home?
I think the beauty in the negative form of the commandments is that it gives us some concrete boundaries, not altogether unlike the boundaries our parents have given us, especially when we were very young and simply didn't know what was good for us and what was bad for us. God tells us, "You need to know that there are certain limits within which human beings were designed to live and if you get too far outside of them, you are going to create lots of problems for yourselves. It is true that you might figure out many of these things for yourself, but there are some you wouldn't necessarily notice unless you were told and I want to save you the turmoil that comes from doing those things." To say "Thou shalt not," you set up guideposts to show you boundaries, inside of which you can do more or less whatever you want. To say, "You shall do this," gives us a general direction, but no guidance as to what to do in concrete situations.
My point, and what I want you to really get out of this tonight, is that, in spite of the fact that people today seem to say that God's law is all about holding us back and making sure we don't do anything wrong, the law is actually intended to be liberating, to make us free. It's true that there are some things that God tells us not to do, but the things we aren't supposed to do are things that aren't good for us anyway, so by saying, "I don't want to listen to God," what we are really saying is, "I want to make poor choices." The whole point is to free us up to love God and love our neighbors more.
Let me give you an example. Most people around, if they believe in God at all, only believe in one God. Polytheism, or the belief in multiple gods, has gone pretty seriously out of style in today's world. But it wasn't always the case. In fact, until Judaism came along, basically everyone was polytheistic. What this meant, especially in the ancient Greek world, was that most people believed that there were gods or spirits in every tree and under every rock. If you wanted to drink from a river, you were supposed to ask permission of the river god; if you wanted to chop down a tree for firewood, you were supposed to ask permission of the god who lived in the tree. You couldn't hardly walk down the street without asking for forgiveness for kicking a stone with your foot by mistake. The fact of the matter is that this is not an easy way to live. You were never sure if you had offended some random god by something you did, either on purpose or by mistake.
The point is that the laws that God gave the Israelites in the Ten Commandments, helped to free them from this kind of mentality. You don't have to worry about appeasing all the gods of the trees and rocks and rivers because there are no such gods. The only God there really is is the God of the universe, the God of the Israelites, the God who came among us as Jesus Christ. God wanted his people to live free from all the silly things that people can get caught up in, so he made sure to tell them the truth about the gods that everyone else got worked up about; they simply don't exist, or at the very least, they are so weak, that they can't even be called "gods."
Notice that the most liberating of the Ten Commandments are the first ones, where God tells us that he is the only God. He is the only real authority, he is the only one that we need to make absolutely sure we listen to. Every other authority is subject to him; and that is really freeing. The point is that God is not trying to micromanage your life; he is trying to free you for more joy, more celebration, more devotion, more love. Love is spontaneous; you can't force it, but you can do things that hinder it. That is why Jesus says that all of the law is summed up in these two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. If you kill your neighbor, or even hate them, you aren't loving him or her. If you are stealing from them, or even just being driven by jealousy, you aren't loving them. If you constantly talk back to your parents and do what you know you aren't supposed to do, you aren't loving them. If you say you worship God but then put all kinds of things in his place, you aren't loving him.
The law marks out boundaries, outside of which, love for God and neighbor cannot really happen. So long as you stay within those general boundaries, you are free to be who you were made to be, free to love as God moves you to love, free to have fun and live life to the fullest. The law wasn't given to ruin your life, it was given to free you from the problems that we often cause ourselves. The law was given in love. Let it free you to love others. Let us pray.
AMEN
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