The Free Life

What we usually think of 

 Deuteronomy 5:1-22, 6:4-9

Once, when Owen was four, and Maisy was yet two, we had a moment that made me realize what the Ten Commandments were all about.  

In a fit of frustration with his baby sister, Owen threw a Star Wars action figure at her.  In our house, throwing something (other than a soft, squishy ball) leads to an immediate time out.  After his grueling four minutes in the torturous time out chair, I knelt down in front of him and asked him if he knew why he had to sit there. 

This is a routine that happened, by the way, daily, and several times a day on bad days. I did not expect him to engage me, and hoped only that repetition of these consequences would cause him to figure that it wasn’t worth it, and give up on throwing things as a means to get his way.  So far it hadn’t happened that way, but forge ahead I did. 

So I asked him if he knew why he was on time out, and he said, “Because I threw something at Maisy. Sorry.”  But something stopped me this time, and since I had his attention along with his contrition, I asked him, “Owen, do you know WHY we don’t throw things in this house?”  He looked at me, big eyes and pensive stare, “Why?”

“We have that rule because we want this house to be a safe place for everyone to play, a place where everyone is protected and free to have fun.  You, Maisy, Mommy and Daddy, and even people who visit us.  If people were allowed to throw things here, nobody would be safe or protected, or be able to play without being afraid.  That’s why we can’t have any throwing. 

Do you think that is a good rule for us to have?”

And he paused, then he nodded.  

Then he said, with a very concerned face, “Mommy, that’s a good rule. But I forget! I forget what to do when Maisy touches my things! So I just throw things at her!” 

And I promised that next time she touched his things, I would help him remember to tell her NO, then ask me to help get her away.  Because just as we don’t throw things, we also don’t take other people’s things without asking.  And he left satisfied. 

Last week we saw our Israelites fresh into the wilderness, their liminal space, caught between where they’d been and where they were going, and adjusting to the vacuum of structure and order. 

This week we catch up with them when they’ve reached the base of Mt. Sinai, and set up camp there that would end up lasting two years.  And their leader, Moses, keeps disappearing up this mountain to talk with God.  He comes back and tells them all to be ready, because God is going to appear.  Then it happens – the ground shakes, the mountain billows smoke and a trumpet blares, the whole camp trembles with fear, and God speaks.

We call this portion of scripture “The Ten Commandments” –and to a person, I’d be willing to bet we picture Charleton Heston clutching the stone tablets, his gray hair and beard shining as he gazes at the heavens. 

Or we think of tombstone shaped faux stone, with Roman numerals down them – a Sunday school prop.  Or the fight to a few years ago to have them displayed in a courthouse.  We may pause and search our memory banks, straining to get them straight in our heads like state capitols or books of the Bible – the point is, we’ve at least encountered them before. 

And chances are that if we are honest, other than seeing them as a distant ethical code, or simple Bible trivia – they haven’t impacted us all that much. 

In Hebrew they are referred to as, “The ten words” , and they are the foundation to all the laws and teaching of the prophets that follow in the Torah.  More than that, these ten words are to define the Israelites.

God said these are the things that will characterize you as a people, as my people.  They are not worded as suggestions or guidelines, requests  - these are descriptive – they describe the way this new life they will build together will work.  No contingency plan, simply the way it is. Period.

They are grounded first in God – who God is and what God has done for them.  The first word that shapes all others is: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt – and gave you water and food and fed you and parted the red sea and destroyed the Egyptian army and guided you day and night across the dessert – that is all implied here as well.   

I am the God that saved you and claimed you as my own and guided and protected you.  That’s me – and now, here’ s you – you wont serve other gods, you wont covet or steal or murder or commit adultery. 

These people, 400 years in slavery, are used to being told what to do.  They are punished when they don’t obey, their wills don’t factor into it at all, they are slaves.

There is no such thing as choice, they are not seen as human, they are valued only for what they provide and do, and are basically disposable.  And now, suddenly and quite dramatically, they are given freedom. 

They are given personhood, ontology, being – being in relation to each other, being in relation to God.  They are valued for who they are and claimed as God’s own. They have an identity, and they have freedom.

My kids and I used to spend quite a bit of time in the summers at Como Zoo. It is only about 2 miles from my house, and admission is free, so almost once a week, we park outside the gates and load up the stroller and spend a few hours visiting the monkeys and gorillas, lions and giraffes, zebras and sea lions.

Sparky the sea lion is not the Sparky from when I was a kid, in fact, I think we are about 4 Sparkys removed – as the offspring of the offspring of Sparky carry on the title and perform as Sparky.  For decades and generations these sea lions and the other zoo animals have been raised in captivity – their parents were born into captivity and their grandparents too. 

I wonder what would happen if these animals were one day, for whatever reason, released?  

The zebras’ gates thrown open, and the buffalo prodded out to the grasses beyond the walls, the penguins waddling down Como Ave. 

They wouldn’t have a clue what to do, how to find food, where to sleep, even what it feels like to venture beyond the 20 x 20 walls they’ve only ever known.  Many of them would not survive for long. 

With the move from Egypt to the Wilderness -these Israelites are dramatically and irreversibly thrust into a radically different way of life, perhaps imagined, but never experienced.

 Slaves for generations, now suddenly, they find themselves with no rulers, no forced labor, no mandates dictating their daily activity.  They are free.

When God gives them the Ten Words, this isn’t about exchanging one set of rules for another.  This is the contrast between slavery and freedom. 

The rules in freedom are rules for life, for liberation, not for enslavement and oppression.   These are rules for the promised land – filled with promise. 

Here is what it looks like in the promised land, what it will be like in the home I give to you.  Here is what life looks like when done in a way that honors and respects people, all people, in a safe place where everyone can grow, and play, and not be afraid.

This is not a burden on you – taking away your freedom.  This is your freedom. Freedom to live for God and one another.  Where everyone matters and who you are gets to breathe, and thrive.

 This is a description of life in my house.

The 10 Commandments is more than a list of rules, something to be displayed in a courthouse, a standard to hopelessly aspire to, or measure yourself against. 

Rather than the orders of a bossy God who is just trying to tell people what to do and dictate their lives, the ten commandments are a promise:  this is what life can and should be like.

 They are the house rules of a life of freedom.

Hear again the ten words God gives the people of Israel as they are descriptions of the home God makes for God’s people:

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt.

I am your deliverance and your freedom.  You are not on your own, facing the elements and the enemies by yourself.  I am in charge here, and I delivered you out of slavery and into freedom.  You can trust me.

You will not have other gods before me.

You are not to be a slave to anything else – nothing else can dictate who you are, you’ve been freed from slavery.  Not money or power, not self-promotion or personal security, not your work or your reputation. Nothing else defines you – I am your God, and I made you free.

Make no idols for yourself – and no images of me. 

You cannot possess me or control me, and as soon as you try you make yourselves slaves again to an idea of your own making. 

I am not a political party or a stance on an issue, I am not a way of worshipping or a particular denomination. 

I am not what you make me to be with your songs and your prayers and your stained glass windows and your infighting.  I am always more. 

No box can hold me, I am free to be mystery, to be encountered instead of encapsulated.

Don’t take my name in vain. 

I am not something to be used to back your point or vent your frustration.

Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy.  

Keep perspective and balance, everything does not depend on you, and your life is about more than work and what you do, or produce, or contribute.  It is about who you are as my people. Remember that.  Choosing to remember that is a discipline that needs practice, or it will be forgotten.

Honor your parents and your life will be long in the land I am giving to you.  Cherish those who gave you life and nurtured you, respect them and esteem them. And those you raise and love will do the same for you as well  - there is a generational cycle of love and respect and honor that characterizes life in this home – this place values past and anticipates future.

You will not murder. 

You are human beings, persons made in my image, not a workforce, not possessions, not a number, or a credit score, or a diagnosis or a burden.  Each one of you is sacred, your life is valuable - not to be tossed away or taken away, precious and irreplaceable.

You will not commit adultery. 

Your relationships will never betray or trivialize someone.   Within your relationships you will be safe and respected, you can trust the bonds you have, they are real.

You will not steal.

You can be assured that in this home what is yours will never be taken from you unfairly.

You will not falsely testify against another. 

The truth about you or anyone else will never be sacrificed in order for someone to “win”.   Everyone’s integrity and personhood will be upheld, so that matters can be decided honestly and fairly.

You will not covet your neighbor’s house, or spouse or kids or car or job or vacation home or anything that belongs to your neighbor. 

Jealousy, greed and envy have no place in this home.  Everyone has what they need, and we all live in awareness of our blessings, in joy and gratitude.  We have not become slaves to things, we’re all different, and our relationships come before the things we have.

This is the home God makes for us, the life God gives to us and calls us into– the life of freedom, liberation from slavery.

We make ourselves slaves to so many things. 

We allow things to define us and our lives – and this is a way of fear, not of freedom.  We are slaves to schedules and deadlines, to consumer pressure to buy, own, accumulate.  To people’s expectations and self-imposed obligations, to habits and traditions, to the systems and markets and structures we’ve set up.  These things should support our lives, but often they rule our lives.

But God delivers us from slavery into freedom – and describes the perimeters of that freedom, the way it is cultivated and maintained, shared and spread. 

When you break it down it sounds like a list of rules.  Follow the rules so you don’t get punished. And fresh from slavery and newly, bewilderingly freed, maybe that is the way the Israelites needed to hear it at the time.  Truthfully, it is the way we all need to hear it sometimes.  You will not throw things at your sister.  PERIOD.

But the bigger picture is that this list of rules is a description of life, and a promise of hope, the way we were meant to live, freed by God to live for God and for others.

Today we gather at the table in communion, with the Church, the Household of God – all over the world in congregations of all denominations, all cultures and languages, people are coming before God, with their own fears and doubts, their hopes and their failings, their joys and their very lives. 

And together as one we are celebrating the freedom God brings us in Christ. At home at God’s table: We are breaking the bread of the body and lifting the cup of the blood and speaking out the promise of God’s love and liberation for the world. 

And as we remember the promise, we pray that it would live in us, that we would see it realized in and among us, and share its reality in the world that God claims and loves, until the day we are all at home in God.

Amen.

The Wilderness of In-Between

Image from a stunning collection by Clare Benson

This reflection draws from all of Exodus...

but especially Exodus 1:6-22 

& Exodus 15:20-6:8

And the Hebrew people are delivered from slavery in Egypt to…?

No, not the Promised Land. Not just yet, anyway.  

First, the wilderness.

What’s the point of the wilderness? What is God up to? What is the reason for the wilderness?  In the story of the exodus, the story that defines a people and a God, the actual exodus - as in the leaving itself - is never separated from the wilderness.  The wandering in the wilderness is somehow part of the deliverance.

There is this word that came up for me around this story, Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"). Originally studied as a middle part of a rite of passage, "a liminal place is defined as “a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes.”

...It refers to in-between situations and conditions that are characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes”.

So I am intrigued by the wilderness, this “in between” they get delivered to. This threshold.

 

When Andy and I graduated from seminary I was awarded the “Parish Pulpit Fellowship” for excellence in preaching and commitment to parish ministry.  What it basically meant was that some anonymous donors were awarding us $21,000 to travel and study, to supplement what I had learned in seminary with a broader, experiential education utterly of my own choosing.

So we packed up everything we owned into a 15 x15 storage unit, surrendered our apartment, forwarded our mail to a PO box, put our student loans on hold, and filled a few bags with just a tad more than we could carry and essentially dropped off the grid for six months.

We traveled around the whole world, heading west.  Beginning in Fiji and Hawaii, we stopped off in Australia for three months, and then progressed through Egypt and Israel to Europe, where we bounced around from country to country, currency to currency, language to language with nothing but the packs on our backs for two months, ending in Britain, and eventually returning to Southern California via New York City.  When we left for the trip we had been married just over a year.

But here’s the thing – it sounds really exciting, and it was, at times. At other times it was incredibly boring. We were living on a shoestring and spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week with each other. We had no bills to pay, or errands to run, no communities we belonged to, no family, no friends, no expectations on us whatsoever, and at times the time seemed to stretch on forever.  The adrenaline withdrawal in those first four weeks was nearly enough to drive me mad.

Not only was the experience foreign to anything we had ever known, and without all the normal things of a normal life, we were living in true liminality.  The season of life we had been living in was concluded, and our future had not yet unfolded. Nothing awaited us when we returned- we did not have a home or jobs to come back to, and all of our friends had graduated when we did and moved away to start their new lives elsewhere.

The life we had known as students with part time jobs and full time studying and a breakneck pace had come to a screeching halt when we boarded that plane.  And what would greet us upon our return remained a mystery.

But some things happened in that liminal space.  Parts of me that had died before I left were let go, and the space opened up within me to see myself in a new way, to be redefined, reoriented, rearranged.   

After the exhilaration of Fiji and Hawaii, we landed in a flat in Melbourne, Australia for a couple of months.  While we were there Andy was working on his second graduate degree, so he was studying 7 hours a day and I was alone to occupy my time in a strange city with no connections or routines.  Having been through a painful and difficult time in the months before our trip, I didn’t trust God much when we set out on this journey.  And now, when I wasn’t distracted by sightseeing or spouse, I was stuck alone with God for hours and hours every day. 

I would walk through parks and sit in a coffee shop called “Lana’s” with my journal and vent my jittery anxiety and restlessness until I was settled enough to sit still.  And then I would feel open and alert. 

I can still remember the feel of the air on the streets of Melbourne, and the sound of the streetcars and the smell of the eucalyptus trees.  I was awake.  Present.  Coming back into myself, meeting God again.

And on that trip, in our extended liminal state, Andy and I learned a ton about living with each other.  We learned how to share.  We learned how an introvert and an extrovert can coexist; how to respect each other’s space, and how to find space for ourselves in unfamiliar terrain.  We learned how to budget, down to the penny, how to keep track of expenses and juggle plane tickets and train tickets and meals on a set amount that needed to stretch the globe. 

We discovered that most of our fights happened when we went too long without food, and that anger is often directly triggered by hunger and fatigue.  Without alarm clocks or obligations, we learned our own and one another’s sleep rhythms, and our most productive times of day, and we discovered just how much capacity we each had for adventure and ancient ruins before we’d need a big mac and internet cafe. We learned who was better with the map and who was better with the train timetables and how to tell each other over someone’s head with just a look that no, this hostel is probably not where we want to stay and yes, I’m right behind you if you bolt for the door right now. 

Through sea sickness and homesickness and heartsickness and tons of laughter and a few tears and lots and lots of walking side by side we learned things about life together in relationship that would have taken us years to figure out if the lessons were diluted with jobs and friends and schedules and bills and all the joys and struggles of ordinary life.  But in this intense liminality they were melded into us our being, and our being with each other, deeply and wordlessly, simply by the heat of constant proximity and duration.

And when we came home, without really knowing how I got there, I knew who I was and where I was going.  It was on this trip that I knew I was going to come back and be a minister. And we knew we would both surrender our hodge podge religious backgrounds and become Presbyterian. And Andy knew he’d do a Ph.D. and go on to teach. It took us all of 18 hours from the time our plane touched down to find an apartment and sign a lease.  And by the end of the weekend we were moved in and filling out applications, so eager we were to begin the next phase of our lives.

Now granted, we were not in a “wilderness” –as it is often described - I have known in my life times of suffering and loss, wondering where God is and what could possibly be the meaning of this.  This had been a time of healing and rebuilding for me, not one of tearing down.  And there are lots of ways to explore the wilderness as just that, as the Dark Night of the Soul and the place of loss.  But I am fascinated, at this telling of the story, by the wilderness as a liminal place, by its function as a threshold, an in-between spot, where both tearing down and building up occur.  And how often God’s movement of us from slavery to freedom, for whatever reason, involves wilderness.

In order to be the people of God, the Hebrews have to stop being the people of Pharaoh.  You can take the people out of bondage to oppression, fear and mistrust, but it might take a wilderness to take the bondage to oppression, fear and mistrust out of the people.  That is to say, just because God saves them doesn’t mean they are suddenly fundamentally different.  The wilderness is filled with complaining and fear.  The urge to self-preservation is intense, the lack of cohesion and unity is palpable, and the distrust of God and Moses incessant.

So here they are, in this in-between place, for 40 years.  Letting go of the old, not yet ready to step into the new – existing between two existential planes- their identity in suspension, the death of all they’ve known behind them and the future yet unborn. They are no longer slaves. They are not yet free.

The wilderness is their detox, their reset button, their school of identity and purpose. They need to meet God again. They need to meet themselves again.

The people are going to have to get to know God out here where it is just them and God, face to face, for an extended period of time without any distractions, good or bad.  Who they are and where they go from here depends on this.  They cannot live as free people in a promised land if they carry their slavery within.  They must rely on God, and come to trust in God’s love and care for them, God’s relentless FOR-them-ness, God’s promise to be a different kind of Lord than the Lord they have known in Egypt. 

The wilderness is the place where there is complete dissolution of order as they have known it – and bad as it had been, at least it was order!  But in the process, the new structures are being constructed within them that they do not yet realize.  

And later on, they will look back and decide that this time – as hard as it was, as disorienting and uncomfortable and confusing as it was, was the most formative experience of their entire corporate existence. That all of who they are and how they live together came from this time.  

And even more, this time defined for them who God is.  No longer is God “the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. Now God is “I AM the God who delivered you out of the land of Egypt,” The God who will continue to care for them, even in the times when the promises seem hard to see and they feel all but forgotten.

And then, throughout the rest of scripture and through Jewish history the story of God’s provision in the wilderness became, especially during the exile, a source of great hope and identity.  It defined them as a people cared for by God, and taught them how to be this people with each other.  And it reintroduced them to God who is steadfast, even when we can’t see the way.  God who provides when it all looks hopeless.  God who leads us and never lets us go, even when we doubt and question and test. Remembering this story that defined and shaped them sustained them through future times of struggle, hopelessness and the unknown.

Who is God? Who are we? Who am I? Those are the questions that God’s story continues to explore, answering them in different ways as the story changes. But when our liminal stages come, – whether huge, drop off the grid-type wilderness experiences, or small, ordinary ones like the school ending or jobs beginning or new circumstances arriving on the scene - these are the questions that get front and center treatment.  “Who am I? Who are we? Who is God?” echo all throughout the thresholds and in-betweens. 

And most especially when it feels like we’re not going anywhere, when we’ve lost a sense of purpose, and what used to be is impossible to return to, (and even if it wasn’t that great we long for it because it was familiar), and what’s ahead is undefined and intimidating, but mostly we’re sick of feeling like we’re treading water and going nowhere -

Take heart.

You’re on a threshold. You’re in between. Something is dying and something new is being born.  Something is being worked out of you to prepare you for what you’re meant to be and do.  

The real struggle and challenge and promise and invitation of the wilderness is trust. Trust in the steadfast love of the God who is leading you.  Trust that you will not lose yourself forever. Trust that you are being held in the purpose of God, and that on the other side of this you will be changed.  

And even when you don’t feel trusting, and you can’t really say you know God is there, (for THIS part of the journey anyway), you’re not in charge and you can’t just step out of the wilderness when you feel like it.   So settle in for however long a haul it turns out to be with the God who is relentlessly FOR you.  

And don’t be scared to dwell for a time in the questions of the liminal state, for they are ultimately a gift: 

Who is God? 

Who are we? 

Who are you?