Free

Scripture: The Third Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

I AM the Lord your God; you are to have no gods before Me.

You are not to make for yourselves any false idols.

You are not to use the Name of the Lord your God in vain.

You are to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

You are to honor your father and your mother.

You are not to murder;

nor to commit adultery;

nor to steal;

nor to bear false witness;

nor to covet.

The Ten Commandments are not about you. Let’s get that out of the way up front.

So often in preaching—such as I heard on the radio just this past week—the Ten Commandments are presented as a sort of self-help guide. They have become for us a spiritual checklist or workout plan, in which sin is likened to excess fat that we must sweat off to shed—fat being, after all, the last recognized sin. We’re told that if we could just follow the Ten Commandments, we’d be so much healthier. If we could just follow the Ten Commandments, life would be so much fuller. If we could just follow the Ten Commandments, then God would know that we’re the real go-getters, the true believers who are serious about our faith.

And to a certain extent that’s all true. But then, if we could just follow the Ten Commandments, Jesus wouldn’t have had to come, now would He?

If we take the Ten Commandments and make them all about us, what we need, what we do, then we’ve already dropped the ball. Remember what Jesus said; remember how He summarized the whole of the Law and the Prophets. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Love God, love neighbor. That is the whole of the Law and the Prophets. It’s about them. Not you.

In the Exodus, God led His people Israel out from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. And as soon as He set them free, He gave to them a list of founding principles that vividly illustrated true freedom for all mankind. We tend to think of freedom as the elimination of external constraint: the ability to do whatever we choose; or, worse, the supposed right to avoid any consequences resultant of our choices. But that is not freedom in the biblical sense. God offers us a higher form of liberation, and we find it in the Ten Commandments.

The Commandments are traditionally divided into two tables: those dealing with our relationship to God, and those dealing with our relationship to our neighbor. The first table describes a person who is free before God. The free man worships only the one true God, the Creator rather than the Creation, for the one true God is Himself Goodness and Truth and Beauty; and to worship Goodness and Truth and Beauty is to be utterly and completely free.

The free man does not make for himself false idols, that is, false objects of worship, such as money or power or status or sex. To worship such things above all else is to grow beholden to the desires of a fallen humanity, rather than to the Creator’s will for our eternal flourishing and joy. The free man does not use the Lord’s Name in vain, for knowing the Name of God is our lifeline of hope and prayer and transcendence. To misuse such a gift for vile cursings is to profane the very source of our life. The free man honors the Sabbath and keeps it holy, for he is not a slave to toil and time and worldly gain, but knows when to rest, when to contemplate Creation and honor the Creator. The free man sets aside time to nurture his relationship to God. Else what is freedom for?

The second table of the Commandments has to do with our relationship to our neighbor. The free man honors mother and father because he is free to reciprocate the love he has been given, and also to free the elderly and the vulnerable from fear of want in their time of need. The free man does not murder, for he is liberated from petty hatreds as his neighbor is liberated from suffering and fear. The free man does not commit adultery, because fornication is enslavement to the flesh, while freedom consists in lifelong fidelity, honor, love, and trust.

The free man does not lie, for the truth has set him free from falsehood. The free man does not steal, because goodness has liberated him from injustice. The free man does not covet, because he is freed from envy to rejoice in the blessings given to others by God. He is free to recognize his neighbor’s joy as his own joy, and his neighbor’s loss as his own loss. This is the freedom offered by God.

So many of the freedoms we seek today have to do with liberating our passions from external constraint. But our passions are only healthy—and indeed are only fulfilled—when we properly master them, rather than letting them master us. The greatest threat to our freedom is not outward authority but internal pride, the tyranny of the ego. God wants us to be free, so that we can be truly and fully human.

Another way to think about the second table of the Ten Commandments is this: it is primarily concerned with revealing the distinction between persons and things. Persons are endowed by their Creator with innate value, regardless of age or health, regardless of what they can produce or consume. The value of a person is not based on what they can do for you. Persons are made to love and to be loved; they are ends unto themselves. Things, on the other hand, are created to be used, and to be used specifically for the greater good.

There is a hierarchy of being, mind you—animals have more value than plants, which have more value than rocks—but our foremost concern must always be for our fellow human beings. Society falls apart when things are loved like people and people are used like things.

To murder someone turns a person into a thing, a human being into a corpse. Adultery likewise makes a person, meant for loving relationship, into some object of desire that you wish to utilize, to consume, to satisfy your own needs. Mistreating the elderly is to dismiss human beings as disposable once their productive years are deemed complete. Stealing victimizes someone in exchange for something. And coveting directs hatred and envy towards a person over the things that they possess or the positions that they’ve attained.

All these lies enslave the soul, and God will have none of it. People are always of ultimate importance; things are always secondary. What message could be more relevant, and more liberating, for our society today?

When I hear some self-righteous preacher boasting about how much holier-than-thou following the Commandments has made him, or how the Ten Commandments ought to be used as a litmus test to determine who is and who is not within the compass of God’s good graces, I often ask myself: Is this person truly free? Or has he simply co-opted the Commandments for personal glorification, enslaving himself to a false idol of his own image, content with looking down on his neighbor rather than lifting his neighbor up?

Because at the end of the day, folks, none of us can truly keep the Commandments. Not the way they ought to be kept. All of us violate them in ways great and small, all the time, every day. The spirit, after all, is willing, but the flesh is ever weak. I do not love God with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind and all my strength. I do not love my neighbor as myself. I am in bondage to sin, and cannot free myself.

Thanks be to God, where we have failed, Jesus Christ has succeeded. Jesus, the only Man to perfectly love God, freed from all graven images and false idols. Jesus, the only Man to perfectly love His neighbor as Himself, never treating people as things to be used, never treating things as more loveable than people. Jesus perfectly fulfills all Ten Commandments. Jesus is our one true image of a perfectly free Man. Even under thorns, even on the Cross, even in the Tomb—Jesus Christ, true Man and true God, is perfectly free.

And it is this perfect freedom that He pours out for us now, through no merit of our own. He loves us simply because we are His people, the work of His crucified hands. And people were made to be loved.

Thus shall we know the Truth, and the Truth shall set us free.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.