COVENANT: PART III Jobn M. Buchanan

OUR PART OF THE BARGAIN Broad Street Presbyterian Church

Exodus 20:1~-17 Columbus, Ohic
March 17, 1985

Text: You shail love the Lord your Ged with ali your heart, and with all your

soul, and with all your mind...and your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37,
39}

Love means caring enough to say ‘no”. Love means saying “yes" to a lot of
things: to intimacy, and joy, and play, and fun, and adventure. But love
also needa to be big encugh and strong enough sometimes to sey “no."“ Several
years ago two psychologists, David and Phylis York, coined a phrase which is

now universally understeod - "tough love." The idea ia simple: when dealing
with children who are constantly in trouble, understanding and forgiveness are
laudable, but alone, they are not enough. Tough love sets standards, draws a

bottom line and sticks to it.

I get involved on occasion with groups which are concerned about substance
abuse in our society. Almost ail the people who seem to know what they are
doing agree that in order to be effective in this arena parenta have to love
their children strongly encugh to risk being disliked by them. A psychologist
I know said that to a roomful of parents one tise and after the nervous
chuckles subsided, went on: “The trouble with all your professional people is
that you fee] guilty about your children. You worry about not spending enough
time with them, you conatently analyze your own parenting and calculate your
deficiencies and then feel guilty. And you have a very hard time making
decisions that will cause your children to be unhappy."

Love means the strength to say “no" at strategic times. In that "no" an
important “yes” is said: a loving affirmation which is usually understood and
appreciated years later. We are grateful for the fact that our parents seid
"no" to us: that they cared about us enough to get standards. At the time,
however, we didn’t Like it and it probably wasn’t easy for them, ond it
required that they love us with especial strength.

That is whet is going on in the 20th chapter of the Book of Exodus. It
was one of those delightful New Yorker cartoons several yeers ago I believe
that showed a group of Israeli Army officers around a map strewn table in

their Situation Room. One of them said: "Just think: if Moses had turned
right we’d have the oi] and they'd have the Ten Commandments." Joseph
Heller’s irreverent King David remembers: "'T?1) give you laws,’ said God.

I’ve got laws to give you that you have never heard before...That’s what he
promised end that’s all he gave us, along with a complicated set of dietary
rules that have not made life easier. To the gdoyim he gives bacon, sweet
pork, juicy sirloin and rare prime ribs of beef. To us he gives a pastrami.
In Egypt we get the fat of the land. In Leviticus he prohibits us from eating
it." (God Knows, p. 24)

-3-

The historical situation is this: the Hebrew tribes, thriving in Egypt,
in the land of Goshen, have been freed from their slavery after a remarkable
series of calamities. Led by Moses, they narrowly escape the pursuing armies
of Pharch at a swampy tidal basin known as the Sea of Reeds and suddenly find
theaselves, amazingly, frighteningly free, liberated - from alavery, but for
what no one seems to know. The one thing for sure is that they are ina
wilderness and after three months or so of wandering in the wilderness they
make camp at the base of a mountain called Sinai. | And there the loose-knit
tribes, families, clane — become a nation.

The covenant, whispered first back on the edges of history between their
ancestors Nosh, Abraham, Sarah, and the one God is remembered and now renewed
at Sinai. The terms of the covenant are a law: ten basic principles on the
basis of which God’s people will live together. Ethicists, political
acientists, jurists ever since have suggested that these ten principles, or
something very close to them, constitute the basis for any civilization that
Wishes to survive. Time has honored them. But as they are here conveyed by
Moses to the people they are more than laws. They begin, not with a moral
principle: for instance “God is righteous and here are ten waya to conform to
God’s standards." That is how most morality begins. This system differs
radically, at the prologue. "ZI am the Lord your God, who brought you out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods
befcre me." The prologue is not God’s moral perfection, but liberating
activity. William Barclay thought that was ac important that we ought to
attach the prologue to each of the individual commands: "I am the Lord your
God who brought you out...Honor' your parents...I am the Lord your God who
brought you out...,You shall not ateal..."

The peculiarity here is the Judeo-Christian genius: God acts - people
respond. It is called the rhythm of grace. God loves us first ~ we react to
that love. God gives life - we thank him. God aavea - we respond. Grace ~—
then faith. You don’t get to heaven by fulfilling God’s ethical quotas, but
because in love God has opened the gates and invited everybody to come in. It
is the most revolutionary idea in the history of religion and it is there, on
Mt. Sinai, st the beginning of the atory.

The ten principles fall into two clear categories: those governing the
relationship between individuals and Ged, and those having to do with the
relationship between people. Reverence and justice. That is our secondary
genius. Grace is firat: second is the idea that God cares Squally about our
religion and our politics, our piety and our economics. In Judaism and
Christianity, you can’t have one without the other. You're not supposed to
worship idols and you're not supposed to take things from your neighbor and
God cares equally about both. It is not possible in any Christian sense to
separate theology from ethics. The early Christians knew that and one of then
wrote with great impact, if not finesse: “If a man says he loves Ged and
hates his neighbor he is a liar.”

The judgment of history is that the slaves hecome free people not only
when they are liberated from someone else's bondage, but when they voluntarily
submit to the self-limiting restrictions and the internal discipline of the
law. History's judgment is that the law is not burden but the secret of
survival, the source of life. Israel lived through the wilderness because of
the covenant. Love means saying "no" sometimes. Love means caring enough
about people to hold them accountable. Life depends on it.

~t-

The temptation, of course, is to translate the principles into rules, and
rules to interpret the rules, and rules to cover the exceptions to the rules.
And so before long Israel not only knows it is supposed to observe a Sabbath,
it now has scrolls full of regulationa defining what activities are in
violation of the Sabbath principle. And, following suit Christians have
sometimes thought it important to enforce a restrictive and moralistic under-
standing of that principle on themselves and on all of society, so that I
can’t hear the Fourth Commandment without remembering my childhood chum, on
het sumer Sunday afternoons, confined te his front porch, with a tie on,
watching enviously as my parents’ Presbyterianism allowed me to head off for
the baseball field or serimming pool.

Allowing, of course, for the richness which deversity produces, the
trouble is that the rhythm of grace gets interupted and revised somewhere in
the widdle of that. And instead of understanding that the reason for these
rules is to live a grateful life because of God's love, slowly we begin to
think that if we obey these rules God will surely love us, or worse yet, if we
violate the rules, God will surely stop loving us. At that point the rhythm
of grace is gone: morality has come moralism: and the life-affirming,
life-giving covenant offered by God had become a restrictive covenant by which
we may keep all the undesirables out of the ecclesiastical neighborhood.
Which is what Mr. Falwell did so eloquentiy when he came to town lest week.
"Bo it our way or get out. Only born again Christians can work at the
college. Only right thinking politicians should be elected."

When Jesus was asked the question of religious ethics, God’s brand of
morality, he did a very interesting thing. A lawyer asked: “Teacher what is
the great commandment in the law?" Jesus knew the content of Exodus 20. The
lawyer knew he knew. Jesus slao knew that the queation itael? reflected a
distortion of the covenant, and so he answered in a very interesting way. He
took the ten principles which gave life ta Israel at Sinai and recast them in
two positive statements. The five commandments which have to do with an
individual’s relationship with God come out - “Love God with heart, soul and
mind." The five commandments which regulate the relationships between people
within the covenant come out, "Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus keeps faith with tradition. But now, new power, new relevance is
added as Jesus recasts the largely negative principles into two strong
positive commands to love God and neighbor.

A contemporary physicist, John Platt, remarked recently that “Jesus did
not leave a philosophy of life, but a set of active verba." (Martin Marty,
Context, 3/15/85) Go, sell, follow, teach, heal, love, obey. The temptation,
however, is to reduce his positive” imperative to love, to the same old
legalistic and negative moraliam, Part of that stems from the same dynamic
that gave Israel] laws on top of laws. It is, in fact, easier to know how to
live like a Christian if someone can tel! you what to do and what not to do,
instead of having to decide yourself how to love your neighbor. But part of
it, today, stems froma real need for moral clarity in a very complex world.
Where is right and wrong in the ethical nightmare of the artificial
prolongation of human life by high medical technology? Where ig the clerity
in the Right of Choice/Right to Life debate? or in the predicament of deciding
to support a racist government economically or withdraw our support and
perhaps our ability to influence positively? Where is the moral clarity in
these distressing atatistica released last week that reveal that with
everything we think we are doing right, and with ell the moralizing American

~—

young people still lead the world in unwanted pregnancies by a margin of two
to one? We desperately want ethical simplicity and moral clarity...in the
world, of the kind German Fascism and the attack on Pearl Harbor handed to us
45 years ago, and personally of the kind the sociology of the 1930's and 40's
seemed to offer: curfews, soda fountains, Glen Miller, and small midwestern
Main Streets. The temptation ‘today is to oversimplify: to wrench simple
moralisms out of our moral principles, It is tempting and it is so satisfying
emotionally to know whe the bad people are, who the evil empire is, and which
side to be on.

Jesus resisted that. His people in each age are charged with the serious
responsibility of reminding the world that the Gospel is net a Liat of
moraligssms but a challenge to decide complex issues in the freedom of a love
that wants to be responsible.

The purpose, after all, is life. We need nothing so much, I think, as to
remind ourselves on occasion that God’s purpose in establishing a covenant, in
calling a people, in sending a son, is to provide the way for people to enjoy
the gift of life he has given. God's purpose is not, as it sometimes seems,
to satisfy a narrow standerd of righteousness by circumscribing ali the
delightful possibilities of our humanity. It is precisely the opposite of
that. It is te give us life. ‘YI have come that you might have life - fully,"
Jesus said once. That is what Iranaeus, the early church theologian, meant in
a hauntingly beautiful image: "The glory of Ged is a human being fully
alive." And it is what those crusty old Calvinists meant in the 17th century
when they allowed that "our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy God forever."

The purpose is life. The covenant, with its ten commanding principles,
was the formula for life ss those tribes faced four decades of wilderness. i
am convinced that it is a powerful metaphor for our time: that facing a
wilderness of enormous dangers, the key to life is that same imperative to
love: to love Gad: to reverence and respect and celebrate the holiness of
life in this blessed world, and to respect and reverence and celebrate the
sanctity of the life of every man, woman, and child who shares it with us.
Suddenly, that strong, morel love looks like the only alternative with a
future attached to it.

Bill Coffin quoted the philosopher Descarte recently: "“'Cogito, Ergo
Sum.’- ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Everybody agrees that is the beginning of
philosophy. With characteristic bluntness, Coffin said, ’Nensense! Amo, Ergo
Sum’ - 'I love, therefore, I am.’ We are as we love. Love is the name of our
journey and our moral imperative and our vocation as disciples of Jesus
Christ." (The Courage to Love, p. 35)

It was, and it is, the formula for life. God cares about us, and wants
our life to be as full and rich and joyful as it can be. Our part of the
Covenant bargain is to accept the fact that we are loved of God: to accept it

by living ta iowa: atrasg, ereative, obedient love - faithful to the one who,
himself, loved so auch he died for us.

And now to the one who ia able to keep us from falling, to the one God,
ruler of all, be honor and praise, forever. Amen.