A
sermon preached by The Rev. Scott D. Nowack on October 2, 2011
at
the First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas.
Plowing the Dark
Exodus
20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Philippians
3:4b-14
When you heard the words of our Old Testament reading this morning, many if not most of you easily recognized them. To say that this Old Testament passage from Exodus 20 is one of the most well-known passages of scripture would be the understatement of the year. This passage is so fundamental to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, that it is often equated with some kind of natural law or moral law, with a focus on them beyond their function within the community of faith. Their influence and instruction upon the civil and political order is undeniable. They have had a significant influence on the development of legal codes and laws throughout the Western world. They continue to have an impact today on judicial and political matters in our nation, although I believe that impact is waning in the hearts and minds of many of our fellow citizens.
What place do the Ten Commandments have in our life? What do we do with them? Where do they belong in our walk with Christ?
Have you ever been stuck in the dark? I remember as a boy scout on a camping trip one weekend walking through the woods at night trying to find my tent without a flashlight. It was pitch black. I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face. I was terrified trying not to freak out. I found myself groping through the woods as I would if I was trying to find a light switch in a dark bedroom; avoiding branches with no success, tripping over fallen trees and stumps; hearing strange noises around and not knowing whether or not I was going to die a horrific death. In the dark, you lose your sense of direction and have no idea where you are headed. There are no signals or markers to show you the right way to get to the light.
When I look at our culture today and see people coming and going in all their busyness, I wonder how many of them find themselves stuck and lost in the dark, plowing through life with no direction, no purpose, no guides, and no parameters for their lives. I wonder how many of them have true peace; how many are grounded in some way or are connected to a particular community. Do you know anyone like this?
The common misconception in our culture about the ten commandments is many view them as a crutch for our souls. Athetists argue that God and God’s laws limit us; they restrain us and keep us from living life to the fullest; they keep us from doing what we want to do and to be who we want to be; they don’t allow us to be creative and open to new possibilities. In short, the Ten Commandments take away our freedom.
These lies couldn’t be further from the truth.
Writer and columnist Colin Campbell wrote about the relationship between freedom and the law: “Freedom does not mean the absence of constraints or moral absolutes. Suppose a sky diver at 10,000 feet announces to the rest of the group, ‘I’m not using a parachute this time. I want freedom!’ The fact is that a skydiver is constrained by a greater law – the law of gravity. But when the skydiver chooses the ‘constraint’ of the parachute, he or she is free to enjoy the exhilaration. God’s moral laws act the same way: they restrain, but they are absolutely necessary to enjoy the exhilaration of real freedom.”
The Ten Commandments provide all of us with an important means by which we can express our acceptance of God’s love; it’s a way to say yes to God’s salvation of humanity.
When we uphold the Ten Commandments, we are protecting the health of the community, in which the individual plays a very important role. The concern is to guard the community from behaviors that have the potential of destroying it. The Commandments hold the community together, giving our lives shape and leading us to love. They free us from the hypnotic voices of our idols. These are idols, according to author Chris Hedges, “…that promise us fulfillment through the destructive impulses of constant self-gratification. They help us avoid being enslaved to our desires and save us from ourselves.”
The appeal of the Ten Commandments is to hold fast to a deeper motivation for obedience. They lift up the importance of internal motivation rather than external pressure and coercion. The Ten Commandments are not an imposed set of rules by a manipulative, coercive God. To follow and obey the commandments is to be what you were created to be; to be who the creator of the universe and everything in it designed you to be.
In his book Serving God, Ben Patterson tells this story:
Once upon a time a woman was married to a perfectionist husband. No matter what his wife did for him, it was never enough. At the beginning of each day, he would make out his list of chores for her to do, and at the end of each day, he would scrutinize it to make sure she had done all that she was supposed to do. The best compliment she ever received was a disinterested grunt if she finished everything. She grew to hate her husband. When he died unexpectedly, she was embarrassed to admit to herself that she was relieved.
Within a year of her husband’s death, she met a warm and loving man who was everything her former husband was not. They fell deeply in love with each other and were married. Every day they spent together seemed better than the day before.
One afternoon, as she was cleaning out boxes in the attic, a crumpled piece of paper caught her eye. It was one of the old lists of chores that her first husband used to make out for her. In spite of her shame, she couldn’t help reading it again. To her shock and amazement she discovered that, without even thinking about it, she was now doing for her new husband all the things she used to hate to do for her old husband. Her new husband never once suggested that she do any of these things. But she was doing them anyway—because she loved him.
The Ten Commandments, the law of God, opens the human spirit to more creative avenues of faithfulness and obedience. When you and I are motivated to live by the spirit of the law rather than living to the letter of the law, the possibilities to offer gracious responses to God’s love are limitless. We are obedient to the God of all creation not out of coercion, but out of our love for God. We adhere to the foundation that has been laid, the foundation of Jesus Christ, upon which this community was established in the middle of the piney woods of East Texas some one hundred and sixty-one years ago; the foundation that has established communities of light in a dark world declaring that the God of history is doing a new thing. It is the foundation that gives us peace, clarity, and stability to love and be loved, to be free to be who we were created to be.
As the Apostle Paul writes, we are set free to run the race set before us without watching our feet, without counting our steps, plowing the dark guided by the law of God in order to prepare ourselves and our culture for the nurturing, healing rain of God to come and saturate the soil of our hearts and minds.
And so we seek because we have been found. We can know because we are fully known. We can apprehend because we have already been apprehended. The one who is in Christ is free to do the works of the law, not as a tool to remain Christian, but as instruction for shaping a life of faith and service active in love.
Come, let us plow the dark together.
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