Home of Parrish W. Jones

Gracious Law Giving

by Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.

©2005. All rights reserved.

 

Psalm 78:1-8

Exodus 20:1-17

 

Stanley Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at Duke University Divinity School, writes that when people ask him how to raise good children, he tells them to sign them up for little league baseball. When the persons get over their surprise and ask him the point, he tells them that young people who play baseball learn the rules of the game and never ask, "Why?"despite there being a thousand such questions in baseball: Why three bases and home plate? Why three strikes and four balls? Why 9 players instead of ten? And why is an infield fly an automatic out? They accept without question that that is the way things are. Those are the rules.

Perhaps, the church, he writes, would be better off if it made clear there are things that are non-negotiable, like doing the right thing. Of course, Hauerwas knows that doing the right thing is not always that simple to figure out. The fact is that many of us in my generation found it difficult to give much direction at all to our children desiring not to impose what many of us experienced as dogmatic morality that told us, "That's just the way it is!" like in baseball. Yet, our children like all children needed and often wanted more guidance than we Boomers wanted to give.

When Kimberly was a college student, she was trying to make a decision about something. I really cannot remember what and it doesn't matter. Anyway, she sat down with me and said she needed to talk. She outlined the choices she had. There were four or five pretty incredible things she could do, and she was having trouble deciding. In my 1960's mode and the mode I had learned from my father, which is don't give advice, I told her that I thought she should do what she thought would be best for her or something about as helpful.

She looked at me with consternation and said, "Daddy, I need some guidance here." I was sort of taken aback because I was trying to be the caring, respectful and open minded father I thought I should be. The problem she had is a common problem in these days. She was facing an anarchy or a tyranny of choices. We tend to think that anarchy and tyranny live on opposite ends of the political spectrum. However, in our culture anarchy becomes tyrannical. Too many choices leads us to despair.

What happens when you have a large number of people who so far have no organizational principles except whatever each one wants to do. The natural human tendency is to establish some order, some system of governance and action. That is where we find the people of Israel this morning. They have reached Mt. Sinai after the struggle for liberation, flight and the trek through the wilderness of sin. So far the only sin we have seen them commit is that of faithlessness, hopelessness, quarreling and testing the Lord and diminishing the glory of the Lord by looking back to the glory of Pharaoh's empire. Moses has committed the sin of arrogance and taking for himself glory that is appropriate only to the Lord.

At Sinai, God lines out the general commandments by which this community is to live. The first two are long and articulate the requirement of glory. No national holidays here. The only holiday for giving glory is the Sabbath when glory will be given only to the Lord. That is, the day will be given to praise, thanksgiving, confession, penance, intercession, and before the Lord, and, of course, listening to the Word of the Lord. To take away from the Glory of the Lord by giving glory to any other is sin.

Then there are the other sins regarding human relationships. We fail to understand these commandments if we think of them as the beginning and end of the law. They are only an outline of spiritual and moral life. There will be much more fleshing out of these commandments later on in their journey. Even Jesus will fill them full of meaning as he preaches in the Gospels.

In the Protestant tradition we have been prone, following Martin Luther, to draw a distinct line between law and grace. However, the giving of the law was an act of grace. Disorder is not God's way. Just as in creation God brought order out of chaos, in the creating of communities God gifts us with order through the law. Thus law giving is an act of grace.

If we give ourselves to the study of the books of the law, recognizing the context in which they were written, we discover the breadth of the grace of  God to Israel. Israel, like Kimberly, needed guidance. It would not have been kind or loving to leave them to their own devices because none of them was prepared for that sort of community organizing.

Nor are we. That is why we turn to scripture week in and week out to seek the guidance of the Lord. That is why when we ask questions about the great concerns of the church: worship, Christian Education, evangelism, community, hymnody, service and mission, and so forth, we turn to scripture. Being faithful to God is not a matter of doing what people want. That transfers glory from God to human desire.

We have many issues that we need to deal with at SPC. None of them is overwhelming, but they need our attention. Some of them need to be dealt with before a new pastor is called so s/he does not walk into firestorms. We will have an easier time dealing with all of them if we remember that our main concern is always the glory of the Lord not our desire. We will find them easier to deal with if we keep our focus on Sunday, if we keep it holy. We all have a tendency to want to do business, organizational and otherwise on Sunday morning. As with all of you, I need to commit to making Sunday morning at church completely committed to a time of worship. Distractions from worship whether they be scheduling, planning, complaining, all keep us from giving complete glory to God. Of course, our chief goal in life 24/7 is to glorify and enjoy God. That is particularly true on Sunday morning. Anything anyone says or does that diminishes any other person's capacity to give glory to God diminishes the glory of God.

I honestly believe most of you know that in your heart. However, you and I are saddled with the common human ailment: "All have sinned and fallen short in giving glory to God." We cannot be perfect in keeping the first of the commandments anymore than we can do so with the latter ones. That is why we have prayers of confession and declarations of forgiveness as part of the liturgy.

Just as God has given us the Commandments, the Lord has given us in scripture the basics of what is to happen in worship. That has been and will remain the substance of worship. There are certainly appropriate times to have praise services that focus just on praise just as it is appropriate to have penitential services, but that is not the sum of worship. It has been the practice of the church since its earliest moments to include the elements of worship that are common to our services. These were given us by God to meet the deepest needs of our soul. They are like the rules of baseball. Without them we cannot live well in the world.

The commandments like the structure of worship are gifts of God that we give thanks for because they shape our lives. Without them, we live in a veritable tyranny of choices. God rescues us from the tyranny and gives us life giving, soul feeding order. Thus the Sabbath Day is a part of that ordering that rescues us from the tyranny of choice to focusing us spiritually. May we each commit ourselves to maintaining that day for Divine Worship.