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