Sermons from the Pulpit
Seeing Red
Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the third Sunday in Lent, March 26, 2000, by Jane Geffken Henderson, pastor.
Exodus 20:1-18, Mark 11:15-19
I saw a great cartoon in the paper last week. It shows a Bill Clinton Moses and a Charlton Heston Moses, both dressed in robes and sandals and carrying walking sticks. They've come down from opposite sides of Mount Sinai, and they are at the bottom, facing each other off. The Bill Clinton Moses is fuming; he's holding one of the tablets of the 10 Commandments and he's pointing it at the Charlton Heston Moses. The tablet reads, "Thou shalt not kill." The Charlton Heston Moses, who's wearing an NRA button, is also fuming, and he has a tablet too, and he's pointing his at the Bill Clinton Moses. This tablet reads, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
And that, alas, is exactly what our society thinks is the purpose of the 10 Commandments: they have become weapons in a moralistic game of "Gotcha!" We brandish them to clobber people we hate. We display them as if they were precious nuggets excavated from the vast mine of Scripture - timeless, golden gems of truth which can be lifted right out of their ancient context and stuck up on a wall in any high school classroom in the country.
And it won't work, folks.
(Michael thought I should end the sermon right here: "It won't work. Amen.") Well, I guess I could, but I won't.
"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for your self any idols: you shall not bow to them or worship them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God."
Maybe that's where we ought to stop, right there, and think about those words for a while, maybe a couple of years. Because this is where the stumbling block is; this is where we get snagged. We think of the 10 Commandments as a rulebook: Do this, or else! But what if we heard them not as rules, but as a description: a revelation of the very character and intentions of God?
The writer of Exodus takes pains to show that the commandments come directly from God. The famous cinematic representation of this was Charlton Heston's Moses watching in terror as fiery red fingers swooped out from the burning bush to brand the tablets with roman numeral one, roman numeral two, and so on. Or, there's our bulletin cover, which depicts an old, bearded man in the sky who has taken the trouble to inscribe the commandments in private before handing them to Moses.
What would give rise to a story like this?
The answer is: an experience of a God who heard the cries of an enslaved people and set them free. God's agenda isn't giving people rules, it's setting them free. Deliverance! The Exodus! The God who commands is the God who delivers. And God commands so that the people will be able to live as free people. They will have a system which is different from Pharaoh's system. No idols! No murder! No stealing! No lying! No greedy coveting of what rightfully belongs to your neighbor! The old way of life enslaves, God says, and don't you ever forget it!
That's why the commandments are so urgent, so insistent: Walter Brueggemann suggests we think of them as God's strategy for fending off a return to the pre-Exodus way of life - that is, Egypt. You must not go back to Egypt, either literally or figuratively, God says, because Egypt means the killing of body and soul.
The God of Exodus says there are limits - limits to what the people can take for themselves. They are not to rob their neighbors of what is rightfully theirs, including and especially their human dignity. They are not to exploit or force or oppress or deceive. They are to establish justice in relation to each other as God established justice by delivering them in the first place.
What are people for? The biblical answer is: connection. Relationship. God hears the people's cries, and God connects with them. And the people in turn respond - by honoring God and honoring each other.
That's the purpose of human life. That's how in God's creation things are supposed to work. But that's only half the story. The other half is: the people can say "No," and they do. Now, this may seem obvious, but it's not. They don't have to say "yes." There's no coercion here. They can say "no" because they're free. They have radical freedom, and they can say "no" to anything they want. Any parent of a grown child knows exactly what this means.
So: God's authority goes only as far as the people's assent and response. It does put God in a bind. It means that people must desire God as much as God desires the people. But there are so many other, attractive gods out there, gods that are also bidding for human love and loyalty. So what if these lesser gods can't deliver? So what if their worship leads to all kinds of oppression, denial, and death? The idols must be very compelling and also deceivingly subtle. How else do we explain how SS guards in the Nazi camps could do their duty shoveling corpses during the week and pause to take communion on Sunday morning? How else could the rich nations of the world support economic systems which contribute to the poverty of most of the rest of the world? How else to explain the arguments against restitution to black America for the sin of slavery?
All this makes God see red. God is called a "jealous" God. The Hebrew word conveys a sense of a face enflamed with passion, or the indignation of one who has been wronged or betrayed. Just as a parent flares up when her child is in harm's way, so God has a strong emotional response to anything which threatens and demeans what belongs to God. As Brueggemann says, it's an aspect of God that admits of no taming.
And that brings us to Jesus' own untamed behavior in the temple, overturning the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those selling doves. These stations were set up for the convenience of the pilgrims, but there was price gouging, and those who were affected most were: guess who? The poor, and the ones who needed doves for ritual cleansing, mostly lepers and women. Jesus brought the whole operation to a grinding halt. Doves flying all over the place, people being driven out - can you imagine?
God can not be used. Nor can people. If Jesus came into our churches, I wonder which practices he would disrupt before we threw him out. Personally, I'd like to see him go after the wedding industry. But that's not the point. The point is, we do not see what is wrong because we're so - if you'll excuse the term - "wedded" to the way things are. To put it another way, we've abandoned our own Exodus and run back to Egypt, chasing after gods that seem to deliver what we think we want.
But what are people for? Maybe our worst betrayal of God, and of the Gospel, is political. Political in the sense of how we have structured our society and our lives, especially in terms of showing justice and compassion.
Magnolia is a movie about people living in all kinds of personal and institutional bondage, people who can't get it right, people who keep hurting themselves, people who keep choosing death instead of life. There is a scene which has confounded most of the critics, but people of faith should get it. It's the biblical plague of frogs - unleashed with terrible fury against all the idolatry of our own times. We're not talking about little "peepers" here: we're talking big, fat, bloated bullfrogs that fall from the sky in a downpour. And you thought raining like cats and dogs was bad! These frogs splat onto car windshields, they mess up traffic, they knock people down, they pile up on the ground, they crash into houses, churches, and boardrooms.
It's the perfect metaphor of a jealous, passionate God who still says to Pharaoh: let my people go!
"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me."
Amen
For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God. -Exodus 20:5