THE POWER OF A HEART’S DESIRE

 THE POWER OF A HEART’S DESIRE 

 Exodus 20:17; Matthew 22:34-40

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife…”

We have arrived…arrived at the end of this four-part sermon series on the Ten Commandments. Have we learned anything beyond what we already knew about the Decalogue before we started on this July journey?

One of the biggest ideas that I hope you caught was that the Laws are not there to restrict our lives to the point of boredom and oppression—the laws are there to explain how we are to be in relationship with God and with each other.

A second major idea is that the 10 Commandments teach us what is expected of us morally, physically, and spiritually—in order that we can experience what lives lived in the freedom of Christ look like, feel like, and yes, even taste like.

A third important message regarding the Ten Commandments is that Perfect Love is God’s design—so much so that God put it in writing and used his own finger to do so. With Laws written in stone it makes it kind of hard to argue the point, doesn’t it?

Jesus summarizes all the law and the prophets with the commandment to love God with all your hearts, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor, you know, as yourself. That’s an order hard to fill for anybody, even we Christians who have had the privilege of hearing and reading the gospels and the letters to the new churches.

Humanity is always the weakest link in God’s design, so much so that it makes me wonder if our character flaws are not also part of God’s grand design. If I have learned anything throughout my faith journey, my studies and my life’s path it is that God wants us to rely completely on him for our every need.

Oh, but we are proud of our self-sufficiency, and even the best of us can be virtually vulnerable to the wiles and guiles of our hearts’ desires. That’s when things get ugly.

“The desire of our hearts will lead us astray. We are to love God. We are to love neighbor. We are not to desire our neighbor’s spouse or house….and we cannot do it.”1

1 Jacobson, Rolf. “Commentary on Exodus 19;1-6; 20:1-17.” Narrative Lectionary. www.workingpreacher.org. June 15, 2014. (emphasis mine)

The sheer and staggering numbers of faith-personality seminars, retreats, cruises, as well as the Christian self-help books that smother the market are all clear demonstrations of our desire to find SOMETHING to conquer the elephantine word of the day: covet.

The importance of the coveting commandment is made abundantly clear by the numbers: the covet word is the only admonition to be repeated twice. If God says something more than once, we best be paying attention to it.

Covet: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s spouse.” We are not supposed to long for, be jealous of, or take anything that belongs to somebody else.

We are not to beg, steal or borrow—and we know this, right? It’s not the obvious coveting that I think we have to be so careful about; I think it’s the more subconscious kind that can really lead us away from the finger of God. “Many (perhaps most) big sins start when we set our gaze on something that belongs to another.”2

2 Ibid.

We are pretty familiar with biblical coveting:

 Adam and Eve coveted knowledge, wanting to be like God. So they bit and consequently lost paradise. David spied Bathsheba bathing: he wanted her, he got her; they made a baby, and Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, ended up gored through the heart, literally.

 King Ahab and Queen Jezebel coveted neighbor Naboth’s vineyard. When he refused to give it to them, he ended up planted in the garden, not tilling it.

 Do I have to mention Samson and Delilah? How about Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5? While all the other believers were selling everything and putting all the money in the common purse, Ananias kept some of the profit for himself and his wife…well, you guessed it, they both ended up dead, too.

Coveting can lead to physical death. Yet, I think we should be “lasered” in on spiritual death that coveting is known to cause. It sneaks up on us; it slithers around—waiting and watching for our most vulnerable moments, then the fangs come out. We’ve all seen huge corporations coveting power and finance and politics.

But what about you and me? Haven’t we been caught in the clutches of the claws of covetousness, from time to time?

I remember a summer as a young teenager, when I strained my gaze out my bedroom window toward a neighbor’s yard. They had a swimming pool there, and I could hear all the fun they were having. I wanted a swimming pool more than anything!

When I went to work for Houghton Mifflin when I was 19, one of the first things I bought was a swimming pool for the family; yet somehow it wasn’t as great as I remembered. The pool was filled with water, but it wasn’t filled with fun and friends and family, which is what I was really wanting.

The interesting, tricky piece about coveting is that we want some thing that we believe will make us happy, will make our longings or sorrows disappear, will fulfill our hearts desires.

We can be fooled by the power of our heart’s desires: never, ever underestimate the power of the heart’s desire to lead us to places and people where we should not go.

The only place and person to whom we should go is God, for he spoke all these words, “I am the Lord, your God.”

 Only God can deliver us from our Egypts, from the places where we have become enslaved. Living the commandment faith keeps us from falling victim to coveter’s deception.

 Only God has the power to lead our hearts to God’s deepest desire for our lives, finding and fulfilling the freedom that comes from God to us in the expressed love of Jesus Christ, who died to buy us back from all the things we thought would buy us happiness.

Thanks be to God that our journey toward salvation is God’s heart’s greatest and most powerful desire. Amen.

July 27, 2014

First Parish Federated Church of South Berwick, ME

The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor

The Neighbor Laws

THE NEIGHBOR LAWS
Exodus 20:3-11; Matthew 22:34-40
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Have you heard about the new neighbor laws in California? You know that the entire state is in its worst drought since almost ever. Cities all over the state are now encouraging residents to tattle on their neighbors for wasting water.

Actually, tattling is sugar coating it a bit. The real goal is to shame people into not wasting water—on their lawns, on their driveways and sidewalks, on their cars, even in the shower—don’t ask how the neighbor knows you’re taking too long in the shower.

Shaming is immensely popular, too— residents have responded in droves, outing water wasters on talk radio shows, in the twittersphere, and via facebook, etc. Sacramento, for instance, has received more than 6,000 reports of water waste this year, up twentyfold from last year.

Drought-shaming may sound like a petty, vindictive strategy, and officials at water agencies all denied wanting to shame anyone, preferring to call it “education” or “competition.” But there are signs that pitting neighbors against one another can pay dividends and reveal drawbacks.
“In Santa Cruz, dozens of complaints have come from just a few residents, who seem to be trying to use the city’s tight water restrictions to indulge old grudges. ‘You get people who hate their neighbors and chronically report them in hopes they’ll be thrown in prison for wasting water,” said Eileen Cross, Santa Cruz’s water conservation manager. People plead water-waste innocence, and suspiciously ask: “Was that my neighbor? She’s been after me ever since I got that dog.”1
So much for “love your neighbor as yourself”; so much for the greatest commandment; so much for bringing out the best in one another! It’s far easier to focus on what the neighbor has that we don’t have, or what the neighbor’s doing that they shouldn’t be doing—or even better, what the neighbor’s getting away with that we want to do, too.

We can try to resolve the issue the California way, by shaming, but God’s way is far superior to any of our earthly efforts. When God gave the law to the Israelites in the desert, the Ten Commandments were meant to be a gift, not a curse, not a limitation, not a blaming/shaming kind of rule book. The Ten Commandments, as I’ve said over the last two weeks, “show us how a liberated people who have been freed by Jesus Christ from the powers of sin, the world and self can live a new life.”2
Many people are looking for new life. We’re bored, tired, overwhelmed, ashamed, guilty, troubled or some other combination of life events or situations that have really got us hurting, yearning, reaching, wanting a better life, a different life, another life. The thing is, we have life and God gave us life, and God gave us Laws to keep us free from the sin and circumstances that derail and shame and punish folks who stray from God’s plan for our lives.

1 In California, shaming the water waster. By Ian Lovett / New York Times News Service. Published Jul 5, 2014 at 12:01AM

2 The Second Table—Turned Toward the Neighbor. www.workingpreacher.org. June 29, 2014.
Let me say this, “the purpose of the Law is not ‘your best life now’ (the title of one of Joel Osteen’s books based on the theology of prosperity); the real purpose of the Law is for our neighbors to have their best life now because of the way we treat them, relate to them, encourage them. This is what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves.

The long and the short of it is, the Law isn’t about you or me. It’s about our neighbor. “And God loves our neighbors so much that God gives us the Law.” Yet, before we get our knickers all in a knot, the converse is also true: “God loves us so much that God gives our neighbor the exact same law.”3

Imagine a neighborhood in which all families loved the Lord our God with all their heart, and with all their soul, and with all their mind. If we love God, truly loved God, then how in the world could we ever engage in shaming our neighbor, grinding axes and retaliating for old grudges against our neighbor? That’s not love.

We cannot claim to love God and do ugly things to any other person.

You see, we have this neighbor law that’s as old as the faith of desert wanderers, and we cannot disregard or overrule the neighbor law because doing so is the same thing as doing it to God. Hating your neighbor is the same thing as hating God; loving your neighbor is the same thing as loving God.
Our love for God is not to be half-hearted or just pretend or only when it’s convenient or just on Sundays. We are to love God with all our hearts, with all our soul, and with all our mind—and let me tell you, it takes more strength to do all that than we can ever gather on our own.
Without Jesus to teach us, without neighbor to reach us, we are as lost in the desert as the ancient Israelites.

And I don’t know about you, but I hate to be lost, to feel lost. I want to be found. I want the Lord to find me worthy of his name, but I cannot do it alone; and neither can you. We need God and we need each other; the only strength that will bind us with God and each other is love.
Friends, let’s leave shaming to California. God has given us a different and far better neighbor law: it’s a law about a greater love—love for God and love for other people. When we live by God’s neighbor laws, there will never be a drought of love among us. Thank God for the Law!
So, with the greatest commandment written on our hearts, minds and souls, we charter a new course, the best course, the heavenly course for our lives: freedom in Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen.
July 20, 2014

First Parish Federated Church of South Berwick, ME
The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor

3 The Second Table—Turned Toward the Neighbor. www.workingpreacher.org. June 29, 2014

The Call to be free 7/6

The Call to Be Free

Exodus 19:1-6, 20:1-2; Galatians 5:13-15

“…If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples…you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”

A woman has a problem with her closet door. Every time a bus passes by, the door would pop open. She calls a repairman to fix it. The repairman says, “I’m gonna see what is going on; just close the door behind me.”Meanwhile, the woman’s husband comes home from work, opens the closet door and finds the repairman. He says, “What the heck are you doing in here?!”The repairman replies, “Well, you’re not going to believe it, but I am waiting for a bus!”[1]

The other morning I had the car all packed, and I was ready to go to work when I remembered I needed one more thing from my bedroom closet. I rushed back in and opened the closet door and my cat Stella popped out! I wasn’t looking for her, but it sure is a good thing I remembered what I forgot! Otherwise, Stella would have had a hard, hot day stuck in there, and I might have had an unpleasant surprise waiting for me when I got home…sometimes you never know, like the husband in the joke, just what you might find when you open your closet door.

During this summer sermon series on the Ten Commandments, I will use the metaphor of a closet to explore the context, meaning and importance of the Law for Christians today with this clothes’ rack I had moved up from the vestry! Through the weeks ahead, we will find some strange, wonderful and even uncomfortable items in our closet that will bring light—good news—into our lives rather than perpetuate our secrets and shadows, which keep us behind closed doors.

I know that we can get a bit squeamish or downright frightened about looking into our spiritual closets. Yet, the first thing we need to understand is that God’s Law is for us a call to be a free people. While modern minds may conceive of the Ten Commandments as a rule book that hems us in, I suggest that we look at the Decalogue as God’s declaration of our higher calling to a greater freedom. How fortuitous it is then that we should begin this series on the weekend our country celebrates its declaration of independence.

Our forefathers signed their names with their own pens in hand upon a document Americans consider sacred, and with their signatures the 56 men set forth their deepest desire to live in a land where “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”[2] Abraham Lincoln later summarized the vision of our forefathers as the desire to live together in “a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”[3]

The preamble to the Declaration of Independence and President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address follow the same format that God declared before Moses on Mt Sinai. The first words spoken establish the “foundation-ship” of relationship. In the American documents, how people are to live together are set forth first.

And so it is with God in the Ten Commandments.  God establishes the relationship first. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” The Law is given only after the holy relationship is declared.

Christians tend to confuse the loving and faithful relationship that God wants from us with a drudgery of religious rules and rituals. Apologist Nathan Betts writes, “If the drive to live for God comes from a sense of duty, our faith will become one long arduous journey.”[4]  

The Decalogue is truly about God’s grace-intention to free us to live purpose-filled, liberated, and abundant lives, and its purpose is to help us fulfill our inherent spiritual desire to be in loving relationship with our God, not to coerce us into loving him.” There’s nothing freeing about coercion. God calls us to be free, and this calling is written in stone by a finger from the hand of God, not by a pen in the hand of a human.

The Law does not limit our freedom by telling us what things we are not free to do—though they do exactly that—the Law tells us what lives freed in Christ look like.

To live freed in Christ, truly, means live for him and with him, to listen to him, to receive him, to eat with him at his table, to stand by him in the hour of his passion—and to live the same way with our neighbors.  And we can only do this when we remember that through Christ’s death and resurrection we have been freed from the power of sin.

It is my hope and prayer that these next few weeks will find us reexamining our call to be free in relationship with God through Jesus Christ; to open the closet doors behind which our sin hides and shedding the light of the good news in such ways that we shall desire to live joyfully and obediently for God.

We are not meant to spend our days standing around waiting for a bus. It’s time to go behind the door, examine our relationships with God and our neighbors, and answer the question, “What the heck are you doing in here?

So…what’s in your closet? Come back next week and let’s dare to open the door to a new relationship with God, to whom we are a treasured possession, a priestly kingdom, a holy nation. It’s time to remember what we forgot! Amen.

July 6, 2014/1^st Parish Federated Church of S Berwick, ME/Rev Donna Lee Muise, Pastor

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[1] www.funnypart.com/funny/closet-repairman

[2] Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

[3] Lincoln, Abraham. “The Gettysburg Address.”

[4] Betts, Nathan. “Why the Rules Make Sense.” In, “A Slice of Infinity” June 6, 2013. RZIM.ORG.