OUR PART OF THE BARGAIN

March 6, 1988, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Mark 12:28-34
Exodus 20:1-17

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and
strength... and your neighbor as yourself. | —-Mark 12:30-31

The object of my desire was a 1938 Buick. We discovered it when we
broke the window of the garage in which it sat. There were four of us,
sixteen years old. We were playing basketball. A pass went astray,
straight through the window - and there it was. In the subsequent
hegotiations with the elderly gentleman whose garage window we had broken,
and in the process of replacing the window, we saw it up close. It had
seen better days, but it could easily be put in running condition. He
would selj it to us, he said, for $100... if we would just push it out of
the garage. We were ecstatic. Twenty-five dollars-a piece! A car!
Freedom! Life! Gorgeous vistas of possibility suddenly opened to us.

It never occurred to me that anyone with an ounce of intelligence,
particularly one who cared about my welfare and happiness, would fail to
see the wonderful bargain and the wise economic sense this new opportunity
made. Weil, someone did - at the dinner table that night, with some
finality. “No,” he said, “you can't buy the car."| "Why not?" J asked.
“Because” the answer came, "four people can't own anything together. You
can't afford the insurance. -Do you know what ofe tire costs? Can you
change a tire?" I believe the conclusion was something like — “Because I
said so, that's why.".

Now that decision, I see in retrospect, was made because my father
cared about me and loved me. It was, therefore, a fairly life-giving
decision. I did not like it at the time. Not at all. I thought my
autonomy, my freedom, had been severely curtailed: I was hurt and anpry.

If you are fortunate, you had a parent or parents who loved you
enough to say "no," to set limits; and therefore te create structure in
which your life could be nurtured and survive - even grow. It took two
psychologists, David and Phyllis York, and their concept of "Tough Love,"
to remind a generation of increasingly indulgent parents that real love
sets limits. I'll not forget a psychiatrist friend of mine who used to
address parents of teen-agers on the topic of alcohol and drugs. He would
always say, “You professional people have to learn to love your children

enough to risk being disliked by them. You all feel guilty about how
little time you spend with them. You know your parental deficiencies too
thoroughly, and you have a hard time making decisions that will make your
children unhappy."

Love means the strength to say "no" at strategic times. In that "no"
an important “yes" is said; a loving affirmation which we will understand
and appreciate years later. It is not easy to love like that. In many
ways it is easier never to say "no."

For several weeks we have been looking at the idea of the Covenant.
It is the foundational idea of our religion. God not only creates - God is
committed and involved in creation. God creates a people — then makes
promises to those people. This morning that story of God and the
Covenant comes to the wilderness of Sinai and Moses and the Ten
Commandments. At the outset, it is a parent God, setting the limits,
saying a strategic "no" — so that the people will live,

I believe it was one of those wonderful New Yorker cartoons which
showed a group of Israeli Army officers around a map-strewn table in the
Situation Room. One of them. says, looking wistfully at the map, "Just
think: if Moses had turned right instead of left, we'd have the oil and
they'd have the Ten Commandments." That's not as amusing as it used to be,
given the tragedy now being played out between Israel and its neighbors.

In fact, a cartoon in the Tribune yesterday ~ showed Moses coming down from
Sinai with the two tablets and his saying ~ "He didn't tell us what to do
with. the Palestinians," The terrible tragedy is that God did. It's all
there - a way to live in peace and harmony and justice. We're not ina
very strong moral position to be critical, but the simple fact is that
Israel isn't being true to the best and highest ideals of its own law.

In any event, the Covenant has not always felt like a blessing... In
Joseph. Heller's irreverent novel, Ged Knows, King David complains...
"'TE'l] give you laws,' said God. ‘I've got laws to give you that you have
never. heard before...'. That's .what he promised and that's all he gave us,
along with a complicated set of dietary rules that have not made life any
easier. To the goyim 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."

The historical situation is this. The Hebrew tribes, living and
thriving in Egypt, but pressed into a kind of forced labor, have suddenly
found themselves on the way out of Egypt. Led by Moses, they narrowly
escape the armies of Pharaoh at a swampy tidai basin known as the Sea of
Reeds. Now they are free, but lost, facing a barren and frightening
desert wilderness. After three months of wandering they make camp at the
base of a mountain called Sinai. There the loose-knit tribes become a
nation.

What creates a nation - actually gives life to the people - is the
Covenant. Whispered first, back on the edges of history and remembered in
the old stories they told around their campfires as they walked... Stories
about Noah and God's promise, about Sarah and Abraham and God's promise of
descendants and land, and the enigmatic commitment that God will be God to

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those descendants. And now Moses is telling them that God has not
forgotten them, has remembered the promises, and has liberated them from
their captivity. The Covenant is remembered and renewed at Sinai —- and
significantly amplified. Now the people of the Covenant, on the way to
becoming a nation, are given a law: ten principles upon which God's people
can live into the future.

Time has honored these Ten Commandments. Historians tell us that no
civilization survives for long without something like them.

This legal code is significantly different, however, in the way it
begins. The prologue, instead of a legal abstraction, sets out to tell who
God is and what God has done: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out
of Egypt. Therefore you shall have no other gods... honer your parents...
you shall not steal or kill."

That is the genius of our religion, the common theological ground on
which Jews and Christians stand. God acts. God's people respond. It is
the rhythm of grace. It is the most revolutionary idea in the history of
religious ideas. Religion is not the way to persuade God to love.
Religion — the whole system of it - is the way we respond to grace which
has already been given.

The Ten Commandments, or moral principles, fall into two clear
categories: those which have to do with an individual's relationship with
God, and those which have to do with human relationships, life in
community. Piety and Justice. That is our secondary genius: the welding
together of personal religion and sociai or political religion. From its
genesis, our faith is equal tension: a person's relationship with God -
piety - and that person's relationship with the neighbor, the sojourner,
the widow, the orphan - call that justice. The temptation is always to
forget the latter, to allow religion to focus on one's walk with God. © And
whenever that balance is tipped, the prophets of Israel remind the people
of the ancient tension. Amos growled:

"I hate — I despise your feasts,

and I take no delight in your

solemn assemblies...

But let justice roll down like waters..."

It is a reminder God's people have needed in every generation.

The other thing that happens to the law - besides getting out of
balance - is that the great moral principles in it become a Jong list of
not-so-great rules and regulations. Morality is always being reduced to
moralisms. So before long, Israel not oniy has a great and life-giving
moral principle about observing a Sabbath, now it has hundreds of
regulations, scrolls full of rules about what to do and what not to do on
the Sabbath.

That fractures the rhythm of grace so that we begin to think that
instead of living lives of endless gratitude for God's goodness, we must
devise ways to get on God's side, to accumulate some assets on the heavenly
ledger. And at that point grace is gone, so is joy and freedom: morality

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has become moralism; the Covenant has become legalism and religion has
become lifeless, joyless and loveless. Living a good life out of profound
gratitude to God has. been replaced by living a good life in order to please
God, get ahead, make a place in heaven. There is a very significant
difference between the two.

William Sloane Coffin, musing about the fact that Christians seem to
enjoy nothing so much as deciding who isn't going to get into the Kingdom,
says that legalism "turns people who could be free and loving inte mean
little Puritans, blue-nosed busybodies, passing judgment on others instead
of themselves being just." [The Courage to Love, p. 14]

Enter Jesus. One day a lawyer asked him, “Teacher, what is the great
_commandment in the law?" Jesus knew the content of Exodus 20. He could
recite the Ten Commandments. The lawyer knew that he knew. Jesus also
knew that the question itself reflected a distorted view of covenant
morality... So he answered in a very interesting way. He took those ten
great moral principles which gave life to Israel and he recast them.

The five commandments which have to do with an individual's
relationship with God come out - “Love God with heart, soul, mind and
strength." The five commandments which regulate the relationship between
people come out. "Love your neighbor as yourself." (see Leviticus 19:18)

Faithfulness is not a negative moralism but a positive, outgoing love
for God and for other. people.

The value crisis of our time, everyone agrees, is not adequately
described as more people doing more bad things. Rather, the moral dilemma
of the 80s is.seen as a profound self-centeredness. Christopher Lasch
called it "the New Narcissism" and Tom Wolfe the "Me Generation." The
individual has become the arbiter of morality. “if it feels good do it."
Economically, if it makes a profit, do it... Greed is in.

A Tribune feature last week described the universal lack of enthusiasm
for courses in ethics at the business schools, put it bluntly — "Teaching
ethics to students cannot alter the facts of business practice. In a
capitalistic system, greed is the main fuel that drives the engine. Ethics
work against greed. Business is not inherently immoral, but it is amoral.
For virtually all decisions, ethics are irrelevant." [Chicago Tribune,
“Ethics Training or Not, Business Will Be Business," Section 1, p. 13,
2/29/88)

That is a caricature to be sure. Not all business people think like
that. In fact, many business people combine a sense of community
responsibility and ethical integrity with business success. But, that is
not always popular. Greed currently is in: Insider Trading, bribes to
high government officials, privileged information, lobbying by former White
House aides. Obviously, there is a value system at work here which is at
least very different from the one we assumed was in place.

Religiously - I think that when the history of this era is written,
it will be clear that our culture's narcissism found theological expression
as weli. "Feel good" religion is the theological equivalent of "if it

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feels good do it." Howard Rice writes, "People who claim to have had an

experience of Christ which only makes them fee] wonderful, full of goose

bumps and happy, may be imagining a Christ of their own making." [Morton
Kelsey, Resurrection, Epilogue by Howard Rice, p. 192]

The real test of a religious experience, Rice says, is what it does
for the person who had it. “If it leads to permanent withdrawal or
disinterest in the world and other people it is highly suspect. If it
leads to radical love for others and a willingness to risk in their behalf
~ it has met the test of authenticity." [Ibid, p. 184]

This very old idea - God's ancient Covenant -— gathers together the

human quest for the infinite, the human hunger and thirst for the holy,

and the mundane necessities of living together in the world with peace,
compassion, hope, and justice. Jesus took the upward thrust of the human
spirit and insisted that it move horizontally as well. God's purpose, from
the beginning, is a creation in which holiness is worshiped, and justice is
practiced. And, in fact, this horizontal thrust, this relational religion
is life-giving. If we miss this part, we miss the energy of our faith.

One of the most popular and important books of the decade is M. Scott
Peck's, The Road Less Traveled. In the midst of the “Me Generation," Peck
struck a responsive chord by reminding us of the psychological and
sociological truth of some ideas that sound strikingiy biblical. Love, M.
Scott Peck wrote, is not a feeling but an activity. Genuine love implies
commitment - the principle form that love takes is attention. When we love
another we give him or her our attention.

That's what Christianity means by morality... not avoiding wrong so
much as doing right; not keeping our hands clean by never touching the
morally ambiguous so much as rolling up our sleeves and doing the work of
compassion and justice in the world. Think for a moment about the
incredible dilemma teen-age pregnancy has become. Unwed, teen-age
pregnancy is no longer an exception. It is the norm within the culture of
poverty. Studies keep telling us that American teen-agers are no more or
less sexually active than their European counterparts. But they get
pregnant at exactly twice the rate. Why? Because they either don't know
how not to, or don't have access to birth control information and
assistance. "Just say no," may be emotionally satisfying as a slogan. But
it misses utterly the simpie realities of a fourteen-year-old living in
Cabrini-Green. Christian morality (loving thy neighbor) means taking that
young person very seriously.

Corporately - as a church - it means we have work to do in our world,
our city, our neighborhood. By God's grace and your support we get some of
it done. Last week, one of the neighbors Jesus ordered us to love, died.
We were his family. He came to the Social Service Center regularly for
food, clothing, to get out of the cold, to talk to someone who would — in
Peck's vivid metaphor - give him some attention. He died in Washington
Park one night last week. The Social Service Center contacted his out-—of-
town relatives and saw that he was buried. We do that — because our Lord
taught us that it is the way to lave God... And we will continue to do it.
We will, in the name of the one who said morality is measured by love and
justice among the neighbors. We will continue to ask the embarrassing

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questions of - Why he was in the park and not in a shelter... Why this

culture, which can afford a 600 ship Navy,. can't take care of the least of
its citizens,

And so - the ancient Covenant ~ comes to us as challenge; not as
moralism and certainly not as an abstraction; but very specifically in
terms of the people you and are called to love... The neighbor, Jesus

indicated - with elegant simplicity - is that person who needs you... needs
your attention. —

It is your spouse... It is your child... It is the one whose very
being you have been taking for granted. It is your parent... your aging
aunt... It is your friend to whom you have not been listening... Itis

your brother in another city who simply needs to know you are here...

And it is the sojourner —- the homeless man or woman... the welfare
child... the AIDS victim,,. It is the bruised and battered and
forgotten...

The Covenant is challenge to love Ged by attending to these
neighbors... And the miracle is, that in the loving hands of Jesus, this
strenuous challenge becomes —- miraculously - the gentle grace-filled
Gospel.

The command to love thy neighbor is our part of the bargain. It is
also, mysteriously, a gift of life.

M. Scott Peck put it simply, eloquently and in a way I continue to
experience:

"When I genuinely love I am extending

myself and I am growing. The more I

love, the longer I love, the larger

I become. Genuine love is self-replenishing." (Ibid, p. 160]

Bill Coffin, quoting the philosopher Descartes: “Cogito ergo sum. I
think, therefore I am," said recently that that's nonsense! "Amo ergo sum.
I love, therefore I am." f[op. cit., p. 35]

The Covenant promise is that God will be God to us. God's son came
among us that we might live fully, freely, and joyfully. How sad to miss
that. How sad to be so close to it and not see it... the great moral
principle: the key to salvation.

"You shali love the Lord your God," he said, "with all your heart,
soul, mind and strength - and - your neighbor as yourself."

#44
Teach us to live, G God, as your free and whole and joyful children.
Call us to account. Love us even in our disobedience, resentment and

selfishness. And teach us, over and over, that our salvation is to love as
we have been loved - in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen,

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