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Sermon delivered October 25, 2009, by
The Rev. Eugene C. Buie, DMin.
Jeremiah 28:10-14
Matthew 15:21-28
Thus says the LORD:
'Maintain justice, and do what is right,
for soon my salvation will come,
and my deliverance be revealed.'
Isaiah 56: 1
These words, from the One who created and sustains the universe, speak to us of trust and hope. A life without trust and hope is a life lived in despair, and God would not have us live in despair.
In the sixth century BCE, Judah was over-run by the armies of Babylon. The Jews were carried away to live in despair, exiled from their homeland. The prophet Jeremiah sent them a word from God, saying…
'…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.
Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me,
I will hear you.
When you search for me, you will find me;
if you seek me with all your heart,
I will let you find me…'
Jeremiah 28:11-14a
Always and regardless of the circumstances in which we may find ourselves, we can know that God has a plan for our welfare, to give us a future with hope. That is the central message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. God loved the world so much He was willing to sacrifice His beloved and unique Son, so that whoever trusted and placed their hope in Him would have life eternally with God.
Just as the Jews were told to wait patiently until their deliverance from exile was revealed, we wait for our deliverance from living under the shadow of evil when Christ returns. He is the object on which our hope is fixed. While we wait with confident expectation of His return, the LORD instructs us to "maintain justice and do what is right." Living by the moral standards given to us by the One who has our welfare in mind, we begin to live out our hope for the world to see.
Let me teach you a little biblical Greek this morning. There is, in the ancient Greek, a family of words that has justice as its root. "Dik'ae," or justice, is defined as doing "what is right." "Dik'aios," or just, refers to a person who does what is right (justice). Said of God, dik'aios designates the perfect agreement between His nature and His acts. God expects His people to be dik'aios because God is dik'aios. "Dikaiosu'nae," or righteousness, expresses the quality of one rightly-related to God and whatever conforms to the Word of God. The Word of God is that gracious gift of God to all who have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Through Christ we are brought into a right relationship with God the Father. Therefore, we may say that justice and righteousness are synonymous with God's people.
Thus the LORD commands, "Maintain justice, and do what is right." If we do this, God says His salvation will come and His deliverance will be revealed. If we do not live in this way, God does not say here what will happen. But the Scriptures teach that unrighteousness is not compatible with the nature of God. And, if the unrighteous (unjust) person is not compatible with God, that person is separated from God or, in another word, is lost in sin. Generally speaking, this is the human condition without the intervention of Jesus Christ.
Let me interject at this point something regarding human nature. It has to do with what Christianity calls "original sin" and what the study of human psychological development calls the infantile sense of the "grandiose-self." The infantile grandiose-self thinks, "I am perfect and you admire me." This attitude, when carried beyond childhood into adolescence and adulthood, is a "fatal conceit" that has taken over many in modern society. It is expressed in the popular idea that "I am able to shape the world around me according to my wishes and desires."
How does this relate to Christianity and the American culture? An adolescent or adult grandiose-self, viewing itself as perfect, does not accept either the reality of sin (a broken relationship with God) or the need for salvation (restoring that relationship) in the Christian sense. If the grandiose-self has any standards of behavior, it sets such standards relative to its own needs for self-gratification and not to any moral standards beyond or outside of itself. The grandiose-self is out of touch with reality and is incapable of recognizing God as different from itself. Thus, the grandiose-self trusts only itself and possesses no sense of hope or reliance on anyone outside of itself. Psychology refers to this condition as developmentally abnormal in a relational world. Yet, this sense of isolation and autonomy describes many in society today.
In normal development, that is, the childhood development that God intended for the human race, an infant's sense of security and comfort depends on the relationship he or she has with parents or primary care-givers. In this nurturing and caring relationship, a child can give up his or her grandiose-self (I am perfect and you admire me) and accept the idealized parental image (you are perfect and I am part of you). This idealized image of the loving and faithful parent allows the child to adopt a basic relational metaphor of trust and reliance that shapes all personal relationships in the future, including that of eventually accepting the love of God when age-appropriate (the ability to think abstractly), being able to trust God's saving grace, and to live by faith as an adult.
Of course, the successful process of a child's maturation depends on the parental ability to encourage the child's development, but the basic trust the child learns as an infant becomes her relational metaphor for a life of faith. One day, she will come to say to God, "You are perfect, and I am part of you." This is, after all, the meaning of our faith as trusting in, relying on, and committing to Jesus Christ. We become part of the body of Christ. But for those whose parents were not nurturing or faithful care-givers, a child's journey into faith becomes much more difficult.
As a consequence of this inborn tendency for faith, first in loving parents and later in a loving Creator, we are able to do as God commands, maintaining justice and doing what is right. Thus, we come back to the word dikaios, doing what is right according to the nature of God. In this way, faith has a direct correlation with justice and righteousness.
When God revealed Himself to the Hebrews, His nature was revealed as well as His expectations that the Hebrews would live according to His moral code of justice and righteousness. The descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. They cried out to the God of their fathers, and by mighty acts of power God freed them from bondage. Moses then led them into the wilderness to a mountain where God spoke to the people through Moses and revealed how the world was made to work in relation to Him.
God gave to the Hebrews the Ten Commandments or the Decalogue, God's instructions for doing what was right. These propositions outlined how humanity was intended to relate rightly to God and to one another. Paraphrased, God said something like this to Moses: "Write this down! First, you will have no gods other than me. I brought you out of Egypt, and you are mine. Second, don't make any idols. I am not like anything you can imagine. You may not give yourself to anything but me, not your job, not your possessions, not your spouse, and not your nation. Then don't lie, don't steal, don't have sex with anyone accept your spouse, don't envy or desire what belongs to your neighbor."
God continued, "There are other so-called gods who are worshipped through fertility rites, loud music, child sacrifice, and pretty priestesses. Don't do those things. I'm into things like justice and righteousness. Honor your parents. You're not the first to walk this earth. Did you write that down? Oh, and by the way, remember I created the heavens and the earth, so I'm telling you how things work best here. Outside of following what I'm telling you, things could get messy. Don't say I didn't warn you."
As God spoke, Moses began to understand why the Hebrews were freed from slavery. It wasn't that God was necessarily for liberation or freedom. Rather, God wanted a people set apart who would be a light to all the peoples of the world. God wanted a people whose daily worship would be expressed in the ethical shape and substance of righteous, God-like behavior that was life-giving.
There was a time in our nation's history when congregations recited the Decalogue regularly. Some older churches still have the Ten Commandments carved into their walls. But more recently, say in the last fifty years or so, many Americans began to believe these rules of behavior were primitive, out-dated, and no longer relevant. In their place, the words for our age have become "individuality" and "personal opinion," rather than obedience and trust.
Our modern world wants to make up its own rules or have no rules at all. We get our direction, not from the Holy One who created us and who ought to know how things work best, but rather our modern sense of right arises out of our "personal experiences," out of our so-called "raised consciousness," or from "what seems personally right to me." We even go so far as to say, "If God is God, then I am the cause. If I were not, God would not be God." In other words, modern morality comes from our "grandiose self."
Let us be honest with one another. The sad wreckage of this kind of ungrounded living is all around us today. There are a lot of folks in pain across our nation, because they have lost their way and their hope for the future. We cannot find the way by ourselves. That was Israel's name for the Decalogue and all things related to it. "Torah" meant "the way," or better yet, "the finger pointing the way" to God.
But in our modern arrogance, we have lost our way because we have abandoned the teachings of Torah or the Bible. We are confused about what is right. People blow up and kill other people, calling it the work of justice. Marriage vows are made and broken with ease, without concern for the damage done to children. As if to give weight to the argument to abandon the Ten Commandments as a public ethic, there are some who also argue that evolution theory proves God never existed. If you want to make sure the divine rules for human relationships are eliminated from North American culture, give people a reason to think the author of those rules doesn't exist. Tell them God is dead.
Given these challenges to Christian faith, we Christians need to remind ourselves why God freed the Hebrews and brought them out of Egypt. They were intended by God to be a light to the nations, and it should follow, so are we. Quiet frankly, the real issue before us today is not the validity of the Ten Commandments as an ethical guide for our nation. Rather, the real issue is the continuing reality of God's presence in the public arena. Putting the Ten Commandments in every classroom and public building accomplishes little, unless people acknowledge the Holy God who gives the rules and who forgives us through Jesus Christ when we fail to keep them.
Christians need to engage with clarity and conviction words and philosophies that deny the existence of God, such as, Darwinism, evolutionism, and even the progressive concept of separation of church and state. Most Christian theologians have not rejected Darwin's theory outright, they have merely ignored it. This is not helpful. Some are even content to nod at the platitude that "evolution is God's way of creating." But this is no longer an adequate response either.
Materialism, the belief that "lifeless and mindless matter" alone is real, has provided the philosophical foundation for most evolutionary theory. But this materialistic philosophy is not representative of Darwin's own writings. He did not give us a godless universe, but his theories have been co-opted by those who would wish it so.
Christians must not fear Darwin. "Darwin has gifted us with an account of life. Its depth, beauty, and pathos, when seen in the context of the larger cosmic epic of evolution, expose us afresh to the raw reality of God and to a vibrant and meaningful universe." We find that, indeed, we are wonderfully and fearfully made. British genetics professor Steve Jones reports from his research that the cell's DNA possesses a fantastic error-correction soft-ware. Occasionally, creative errors are allowed, for without such errors, Jones reports, we all would certainly be dead.
What Darwin shows us is that science is our discovery of what God has created and now sustains as life. We have a playful God, a God who allows creation to live and evolve according to pre-established rules. What we are hearing lately are materialistic scientists who deny God on one side and irresponsible theologians who deny science on the other. The lie they each propose is that science and theology are not coincident. In reality, what we lack is understanding. "My ways are not your ways," said the LORD.
I personally will not accept either of their claims of exclusive knowledge. There is something suspicious about a scientist who thinks he is a theologian, and a theologian who thinks he is a scientist. It is time we recognized that these pointless arguments are merely diversions. Having turned its back on God's moral standards, there is much evidence in our society and in the chaos that afflicts our lives which proves the continuing necessity of the ten ancient rules and the Creator God who prescribed them for the world. Martin Luther marveled, not in the excessive demands of the Decalogue, but in its brevity and simplicity.
Thanks be to God, we don't need the ethical perception of a Plato, or a college course in philosophy to engage life. The Commandments are God's way of freeing us from enslavement to gods that are cruel and selfishly demanding….to idols of our own making, such as, alienation, narcissistic subjectivity, and a relentless quest for self-indulgence.
It is true that we look forward to the day of Christ's return, but in the meantime we have an intense responsibility for the order of this world, an order expressed in the words and intent of the Ten Commandments. Our God loves us enough to send His Son to redeem us from sin and set us free. Our God gives us the rules that show us the way to righteousness and justice, so that we might have a future with hope. Amen.