What's it all for and how does it happen?

 

Exodus 15:22-16:36, Exodus 19:1-20::21. Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Leviticus 25 David Brooks recently had an article in the Atlantic where he said he’d been obsessed with two questions: Why are Americans so sad? and Why are Americans so mean? He says, there are lots of theories, most of them at least partly true. But, he opens, “The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.” He writes that restraining our selfishness, welcoming our neighbor, disagreeing constructively, and finding purpose in life are not things our culture is currently intentional about learning and passing on. We don’t collectively address the question, what is life for? Humans need practical guidelines for a meaningful existence. We need moral formation -  to be formed into something and for something.   In our ongoing narrative, the Israelites have been led out of slavery into wilderness. These are the descendants of Abraham and Sarah: blessed to be a blessing to the world. But for centuries they’d been formed as slaves, for the benefit of the empire. They were disposable, existing for work by a system that stripped them of personhood and gave them daily patterns of living that reinforced this definition. They were slaves. They knew how to do this. Now they’re free. How do you be free?  They’ll need a new understanding of what life is for, and some practical guidelines for a meaningful existence.   The first time I preached on the Ten Commandments at Lake Nokomis, Owen was four and Maisy was one. The day before, in a fit of frustration with his baby sister, Owen threw a Star Wars action figure at her.  “No throwing things” isn’t a rule we’ve needed in our house for a long time, and time-outs are a faint memory (except for self-imposed ones), but back then, throwing things led to an immediate time-out.  After Owen’s grueling four minutes on the time-out chair, I knelt down in front of him and asked him if he knew why he had to sit there – my line of the often-repeated script. He avoided looking at me and parroted his line of the script,  “Because I threw something at Maisy. Sorry.”  But something stopped me this time, and since I had his attention, 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.  That first year this blew the Ten Commandments wide open for me. Because the ten commandments are not actually grammatically commands  - they are descriptive – they portray the way life in the household of God works. In this house, we do not throw things at people, we don’t take other people’s things without asking. Here is what life looks like when people are honored and respected, all people, in a safe place where everyone can grow, and play, and not be afraid.   This is not just a list of rules, it’s not even just helpful moral formation, it’s a relationship upheld by God. You are no longer slaves, you are children.  So first, before even the words themselves, God claims them as children by caring for them in the wilderness. The first story today is about how God gave the Israelites manna for breakfast and quail for dinner, and provided water where there was none. Every day God gave them just what they needed for that day, and no more. If they tried to save it up it went rotten. But every seventh day was for rest, so the food from the sixth day could carry over. We’ve called this period in their lives “Trust training school.”  For 40 years they practiced being cared for, received belonging to God – I am trustworthy, I will take care of you. And then, in that place of upheaval and unknown, God gives them a word. Like the word that spoke creation into being, and the word that will become flesh and dwell among us. God’s word always brings life.  The majority of the Ten Commandments address Who is this God and what is God up to? “I’m the God who saved you and called you my own and cared for you and looks after you. I give you your name and identity and freedom. I am trustworthy and I expect you to trust me. I can’t be possessed or controlled, only encountered. I am who I will be, and I say who you are – not anything else that would enslave you or totalize you. So respect me. And then God says, you’ll forget you belong to me, and forget who you are for each other and what life is for, so every single week every single person stops working, to enjoy life and rest, just like I did when I created the world, because life is for joy and connection. You are not slaves defined by endless production, you my are children held in my love and called to bless the world. And then the commandments turn to, What is a good life and how do we live it? The moral formation part, practical guidelines for a meaningful existence. And with simple “We don’t throw things here” language, they talk about how to treat each other: in this house we hold one another as sacred and valuable, we uphold other’s dignity and personhood and treat people with respect, honesty and fairness instead of jealousy, greed or envy. In this home, God says, everyone has what they need, and we practice belonging to each other. But to notch it all up a level and really hit the message home, we’ve got another story from the law where God commands that every 7th year is a big, year-long sabbath for the soil, and every 49 years this sabbath thing becomes a mega sabbath jubilee celebration year. The whole gameboard gets wiped clean and reset. Master and marginalized, insider or outsider, generational wealth or poverty, it all disappears. Momentum crushed, balance sheet zeroed out. Only God can tell us who we, not what we’ve achieved or lost, not how people see us or our role in society, not our smart investments or poor choices. We are children, not slaves. And the earth is God’s beloved creation, also not meant to be endlessly worked. So in case we begin acting like what we do is more powerful and permanent than it is, God writes in a reset button. Come back home. You are my children, here to bless the world.  When God gave the law, God said, Here is what life is for. Here is how you live it. This is not hypothetical and idealistic. This is concrete and practical. The only way to life fully human, fully alive, fully who you are made to be, the only way to be free, is inside the perimeters of God’s love and order. Anything outside that makes us into slaves, steals our joy, binds us in patterns of destruction and division and isolation. For 16 years I’ve loved the ten commandments and insight I received from the experience of Owen’s time out.  But this time through I hear something different in that story. I hear a four year old's honest cry of anguish, how he knows it’s wrong to throw things, but when she takes his stuff, he forgets.  And I feel that part.  We’re sad and we’re mean. And we can wish we weren’t sad and try not to be mean – but most of the time we forget what to do. We agree they are good rules: let’s be kind and forgiving and generous. Let’s restrain selfishness and disagree constructively and welcome our neighbor. Yes, yes to all of it. Let’s do those good rules. Let’s practice them and be formed by the practice. But I still forget. I forget when a stranger is short with me, or something doesn’t work like it should, or people say dumb false things, or when I feel judged, or even when I’m just in a hurry.  I forget when I’m insecure or afraid, and I forget most often with those closest to me. When I’m interrupted or impatient, when I get stressed or anxious about things outside my control, when life feels overwhelming, I forget.  We need moral formation. Thank God for the places we learn to practice kindness and civility. Seriously, thank you, God. How will we ever remember unless we practice? But more than practice, I need a savior. I need someone to bring me back home, because sometimes I can’t find my way. I’ve practiced striving and self-protection so much for so long, that it’s hard to just choose to live what I know to be true. I forget.  But God gives more than good moral formation. God gives God’s very self.  To the Israelites God said, I will care for you, I will lead and guide you, and you will care for others. You are no longer slaves, you are my children. I make that so. You are those whom I am with. We are children of God in the household of God. We are those whom God is with. And Christmas is the concrete promise come to fruition in flesh and blood, God is with us. GOD is with us. The word made flesh to dwell among us. Jesus comes to make us fully at home in love. And when we are fully at home in love, that feels like joy.   Joy is a gift, we can’t make it happen. Jesus said that the point of all his teaching is that we have his joy. His joy – not that we try to act joyful or produce joy out of thin air. Jesus enters our death, our impossibility, our deep, existential forgetting, and takes it into himself. And Jesus give us his life. Jesus is fully at home in love, and the inner life of Christ’s own complete belonging to God and belonging to the world is for us. We can be at home in love. Even in pain and suffering. Even in disappointment and confusion. Even in our failure to live up to the values we believe. We drawn into life that doesn’t come from us and will not end with us, that is beauty, and wonder, and mystery, and awe, and delight and sorrow shared, poignant and powerful. And those moments when life eternal breaks through tangibly grabs us, we taste joy. We forget to forget. And we are remembered into life by God who is with us. So together we will practice. Freedom instead of slavery. Rest instead of relentlessness. We will turn our hearts to our creator and seek to trust in the I AM who holds the world, and we’ll help each other with the  kindness and generosity and peace too. But we will undoubtedly also forget.  So, Jesus, God with us, be with us here and set us free again. Speak a word that brings life. God who comes in, come into our places of stuckness and forgetting, remember us into life and bring us back home into love. Amen.

Can't seem to get it right

Devotion for Being Apart -
July 5

This summer, I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

Romans 7:15-25

Paul's letter just got awkward.  The renowned teacher has been talking about God, and the church, and big ideas about faith, and now he’s suddenly talking about himself. But he’s not saying things he's proud of, he’s talking about what he’s not proud of – where he feels helpless or lost.
It’s a little too personal, like he’s had one too many, and the deep down feelings are coming up and, we want to say, Paul, dude, it’s ok, and try to get him back on track to with the big ideas. Or tell him to save it for his therapist’s office.  Besides, instead of good news, this kind of feels like bad news.  Or like he’s telling us this bad news to set us up for some good news, but we’re clearly not there yet.  It’s uncomfortable to stop here. Let’s get to the gospel!

But one thing we Presbyterians believe about scripture is that it’s all gospel - It’s all good news, even the “bad news.” Each time we open the bible, God can speak truth to us.
So we’re sticking here today with Paul’s personal lament about knowing the difference between good and evil, and even wanting to choose good, but watching himself choose evil anyway.  An inner battle between sin and the law.

Just before this part, Paul explains that the law of God is good – it shows us how God designed human life to work best, connected to God and each other, so it’s a gift to us. But once we know, we are also suddenly aware of how often we choose not to live that way.

It was easier not to know right from wrong, just to be selfish or ignorant of the ways we contribute to disconnection and brokenness.  Doing harm to ourselves and others because we didn’t know better, feels better than realizing all the harm we’ve done.  And worst of all is knowing, and continuing to do it anyway.

And once we start to have this awareness, we often look back at our previous self, or at those who are where we were, and feel disgust or contempt.  How could we have believed what we did, done what we did, said what we did?

I think about this when it comes to language.  Imagine we’ve just learned that a word or phrase we’ve used a lot is racist, which is to say, it contributes to brokenness and disconnection.  First of all, with that new awareness comes shame and regret, for having used the word.  Now we have the law, in other words, we know this phrase is bad and we add it to the list of words we should not use.  This is a helpful list, it guides us toward respect for others, so we are on board with the law.  We can see how life would be better if everyone followed the law and avoided the words on the list.

Now having been given the law, we are awake, and aware in a way we were not before. So when we hear other people use the word or phrase we know should not be used we get upset, angry.  We tell them they should not use that word or phrase.  They, perhaps, are not under the law yet, have not been converted to see how that word or phrase causes harm, so they tell us to back off and mind our own business, they can talk however they want.  Well, that makes us even madder. So mad, in fact, that we call them some words and phrases off that list.  But that’s ok, because they don’t deserve respect because they are refusing to show it.
Now we are trapped right back in sin  - only this time, we are contributing to brokenness and division knowing better.

Or to bring it closer to home, I know how I want to treat my children, I have read all the books and articles that give me clear guidance for the parenting I believe in and choose to practice. But in the moment of flared tempers, or exhaustion, or frustration, all that goes out the window.  And I can see myself behaving in ways I absolutely do not believe in.  O wretched mom that I am!

Knowing what is wrong isn’t enough to keep us from doing wrong. The law itself can’t set us free. In fact, it first makes us more miserable.  Now, having this second, awakened self within me, I can turn and look at the yelling self and say, What are you doing? This is not how you should be acting! And that feels awful.

We are not slaves to sin anymore – we are not helpless to those urges that are self-serving or divisive, we are not ignorant of our behavior and its impact.  We agree the law is good! We delight in the ideals we stand for – that everyone would be upheld and respected, and we could work together and listen to each other. Of course this is how we want to live, we say.  But that doesn’t mean we do it.

The law can’t save us, Paul says. In other words, awareness, being woke, knowing what’s right, recognizing the difference between good and evil, this doesn’t keep us from doing evil. It can’t ultimately fix what’s broken.
The law is good and necessary, but it also creates one more thing we can become a slave to.  We go around policing each other, and living in harsh judgment of ourselves, thinking change can come from just more knowledge and insight.  Of course knowledge and insight are important – they move us forward. But the place we’re moved to first is a greater awareness of our sin, of the ways we are trapped. The law illuminates our need for something beyond us to save us, because, wow, it’s all so much worse than we realized.

The big good news is coming in the next part of this letter, but the little good news of this part is that if you feel hopeless because you’ve done so much work and learning, and tried to change, and keep feeling stuck, that’s normal. It’s actually good. You are actually on the way of transformation.  We, as a nation, in a new reckoning with our history and systemic racism, are on the way of transformation.  People starting AA, facing their addiction, are on the way of transformation.
Awareness of how bad it is, and how trapped we are in repeating the cycles of destruction or dehumanization again and again, even generation after generation, is part of how we are set free.

And here Paul models for us what we can do with that: We can confess it. We can repent of it.  We no longer say, “I didn’t know!” Instead, we say, “I knew, and I did it anyway.”  We can speak boldly of our sorrow and shame; we can claim our guilt as part of our story.  We don’t pretend we are perfect, or even enslave ourselves to the quest to be perfect. We confess our brokenness. We draw closer to the pain instead of trying to flee or fix it. We let ourselves say the deep down feelings that are coming up; we tell the uncomfortable truth.

This Christian life is a life of deep honesty.  And the hardest things to be honest about are not the things we did by accident. They’re the times we hurt others on purpose, or went against what we believe, or lied to protect our reputation, or turned away from someone instead of acting for them.

So instead of pretending we don’t need saving, and covering up or making excuses for the brokenness and division we contribute to, we can face it and tell the truth about it.
And instead of thinking the law can save us, we can admit how hard it is to realize how very far away we are from the goal, and how trapped we feel by the ever-increasing list of rules for doing it right, and how it can even can make more judgmental of others and ourselves.

In other words, instead of avoiding doing what’s right, or obsessing about doing it right, we confess. We repent.  We tell the truth about it and grieve it. We join Paul in the discomfort, and let ourselves feel how hard all this is.  And we boldly acknowledge that we need someone from outside this mess to save us.  Wretched person that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?  Paul says. Then his outrageous and hopeful whiplash declaration, Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Hear the good news: We can't get it right.
Amen.

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we can pray in this way, and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

A good way to end the day might be with an adaptation of the prayer of confession from worship:

God, I pause at the end of this day
to let my awareness catch up with me.
I can see the sin and brokenness within me.
I don't turn away, but welcome that awareness now,
and name now those places in us me, where I long for your healing and wholeness...

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy. 

And God, as I think about my relationships, with those close to me, and those I don’t know so well, I welcome awareness of the sin and brokenness between us.
Into all the ways I act as though we do not belong to each other, bring your healing and wholeness, especially....

Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.

God, I welcome awareness of the sin and brokenness around me. I lift up those places in my community, my country and your world, where I long for your healing and wholeness, especially....

Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.

Hold me in your forgiveness.
Speak to me your peace.
Rest me in your grace. 

Amen.