The Liberated Life

Exodus 20:1–4, 7–9, 12–20

I didn’t realize when I started preparing a sermon on the Ten Commandments a couple weeks ago that war would break out in Israel and Palestine. Maybe you’ve been glued in horror to social media or the news keeping up with every terrible detail. Maybe you’ve been avoiding information so as not to feel more anguish at the atrocities. Yesterday, I found myself sneaking regular updates but unable to give voice to it with my children. What do I even say? How do I explain what’s going on and why it’s happening? What do I want them to think about it? I was overwhelmed. And my only prayer was: Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

There is a temptation in these moments, especially for “professional” Christians like me, to speak and act as though we are experts. But I’m not an expert. And I haven’t had enough time amid everything else I’m responsible for to research things and be able to lay out a truthful and just evaluation of what’s happening there. So, tonight I won’t attempt to narrate what’s happening, or explain this or that action, or provide broader context, or try to justify anything. Instead, based upon the scriptures we’ve heard read, I will confidently say this: Humans were not made for kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder. Humans were not made for occupation, apartheid, theft, or poverty. Humans were not made for terrorism, displacement, and colonization. Humans were not made for war.

War is hell, and Jesus Christ has overcome hell. He conquered it along with Sin, Evil, and Death. This means no one else needs to die in order to set the world right. No matter how justified such deaths might seem. So, I encourage all of us to pray for the cessation of all violence, the establishment of true justice, and the gift of true peace for all the peoples in the Holy Land.

I could say more about this, obviously. I could have tried to rewrite my whole sermon. But I think it’s appropriate now to turn to the word of God, particularly when that word, assigned to us providentially by the lectionary, tells us what it means to live a healed, liberated, and fully human life. So, let’s move our attention to the Decalogue or Ten Commandments. The good news I want to proclaim for us tonight is this: God made us for freedom, and the liberated life fulfills the Ten Commandments.

When talking about the Decalogue, one of the problems we have to face at the start is our general misperception of God’s Law. The truth is, most of us don’t think of the Law as liberating. If I were to ask you what you think of when I say “God’s Law” or “the Ten Commandments,” it’s unlikely that your first thought will be of freedom or liberation. (If you do, bless you. I think you’re among a fortunate minority of readers in the western world.) The majority of us hear God’s Law and we think of “negative” things: judgment, punishment, conformity, limits, and the like. We think of legalism. We think of the opposite of grace and mercy.

This is because law and liberation are not related concepts in our mind. To have the latter, we think we must be rid of the former. Like Elsa in the snow storm, we think the only way to be free is to “Let it go!” Let it all go. Then we’ll be truly free. But, with no disrespect to Frozen, this way of thinking is antithetical to the scriptures.

Did you notice how our psalmist tonight spoke about God’s Law? Did you hear just how positive the characterization was? The psalmist calls God’s Law perfect, sure, right, and clear, even more desirable than gold and sweeter even than honey. As desirable as gold and as sweet as honey, things that enrich and give pleasure.

And what does the Law do according to the psalmist? It revives the soul, makes the simple wise, rejoices the heart, enlightens the eyes, and keeping them is a great reward. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t often thought about the Law of God in this way. And that reveals just how much we’ve misunderstood the point of the Law and its place in our Christian lives.

You and I tend to think of freedom as freedom from constraint—the ability to do what you want when you want with whatever you want. But the wisdom of God’s people through the ages has been that true freedom is freedom to be what God has made you to be. Freedom to be a full human being living a full human life. This kind of freedom comes about ultimately through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit in God’s kingdom.

And what does that liberated life look like? It looks like fulfilling the words of God, which we call the Ten Commandments. God made us for freedom, and the liberated life fulfills the Ten Commandments.

With this understanding of freedom in mind, let’s press deeper into the Decalogue itself. Our first step is to pay close attention to their historical context. As you know, they did not magically appear in the world. And, despite the monuments constructed all over the United States, they were not originally written in English! Instead, the Decalogue was given to a particular people in a particular time and place. That does not mean they don’t have universal significance. They do. But it does mean we will misunderstand their purpose if we don’t read them in light of their context.

The first line is the key to understanding the purpose of the Ten Commandments: “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.”

Israel is a people emerging from centuries of slavery in a foreign land. They have been living for generations under an oppressive and exploitative system. That system, with Pharaoh at the top, has dehumanized them and turned them into commodities. They’ve been treated as disposable bodies useful primarily for advancing the interests of the Egyptian empire. They’ve been robbed of the opportunity for rest and satisfaction, living every day under threat of violence and death. Their needs have been ignored and their limits constantly transgressed. And, to top it all off, they’ve been told this system is divinely ordained.

Now, this is not to say that the Israelites just passively accepted their treatment. The story of the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, shows us that the Hebrews used their agency in various ways to subvert the empire and reclaim some humanity. But the fact remains that the majority have been living dehumanized, commodified lives for hundreds of years in a foreign land under the reign of foreign gods.

Life under such conditions will have a profound impact on individuals, families, and communities. Human beings aren’t meant to live under oppression like that, but many do. And when they do, unless there is concerted efforts otherwise, their bodies, minds, and souls conform to those constraints.

We know this from human experience. You can get used to wearing too-tight corsets—many women did for many years!—but your rib cage, lungs, and other internal organs will be seriously impacted. You can get used to having your feet bound—many women did for many years—but your bones, muscles, and ligaments will suffer for it. And you can get used to living in a much-too-small space that cramps your body, but your back, shoulders, and neck will pay the price.

What is true of bodies is also true of souls. After hundreds of years of enslavement, God’s people were wounded, twisted, and malformed. And God knows this.

So, God rescues Israel from bondage in Egypt and brings them into the wilderness. After many days of providing for their needs, proving his love and faithfulness, God assembles them at Sinai for a kind of marriage ceremony in the desert. They are going to become God’s covenant people. And the first thing God must do is give them a clear vision of what their newfound freedom means—what life in relationship with God looks like.

Remember: They’ve been living less-than-fully-human lives, forced to accept endless work, scarcity, and violence as a normal part of life. But now God is going to make them into a kingdom of priests who will show the world what God is like and what humans are meant to be. So, God gives them ten words, or ten commands, to show them what the liberated life looks like.

The first three commands of the Decalogue pertain to Israel’s relationship with God:

1. You shall have no other gods before me.

2. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

3. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

I think you could summarize the point of these commands like this: God is God and you are not; therefore, honor God as God. In other words, don’t attempt to manipulate, control, or commodify God with idols or with vows. God is radically free and has freely chosen to be God-for-Israel. So, they are not to try to usurp God’s freedom or make God into their slave. God says to Israel: “I will not be mistreated and used in the way you were mistreated and used in the land of Egypt. So, don’t try.”

The fifth through the tenth commands pertain to Israel’s relationship with each other: Human to human, kin to kin, life to life.

5. Honor your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is
giving you.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female
slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

I think you could summarize the point of these commands like this: You are human; therefore honor one another as such. Do not undermine each other’s humanity, violate each other’s relationships, take from each other, or speak untruth about each other. In other words, Israel must not treat one another as they were treated in Egypt. They must not allow their new life together to be marked by the same exploitation and injustice that characterized their lives in Egypt. Why? Because that’s not what it means to be human. That’s not what it means to be free. And that’s not what it means to be in covenant with God.

Now, if you’re listening closely, you’ll have realized that I skipped a commandment. I did that on purpose. The fourth commandment, coming between the first through third and before the fifth through tenth, goes like this: “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work.” I saved this for last because, believe it or not, I think it might be the most important law in the Decalogue. Let me explain.

Old Testament scholar Patrick Miller has called the fourth commandment the “crucial bridge” that connects all ten. The fourth looks back to the first three commandments, recalling the God who rescues and rests. And the fourth looks forward to the last six commandments that concern the neighbor. A life free of malice, covetousness, lust, and hatred is a life of rest alongside one’s neighbor. And everyone—God, self, all members of the household, and neighbors— share rest in common on the seventh day.

Sabbath is a practice meant to remember who God is and who we are before God. Also, regular communal rest—a rest that the whole community engages in—provides the social reality for the new community of God’s people. The people of Israel are trading life as dehumanized commodities for life in humanized relationship. They are trading life characterized by anxiety for a life characterized by peace. And both these things are dependent upon the regular observance of Sabbath.

Have you ever thought about how many of the things we consider “neighborly” are dependent upon having time when you aren’t working or hustling or commuting? Accompanying a friend to the hospital, bringing a casserole to a family member, mowing a sick neighbor’s lawn, watching children for an exhausted single mom—all these things require having time and energy to give away. And we cannot have such time and energy without regular periods where we cease our work and rest. For many of us, it’s not that we don’t want to be good friends or neighbors, it’s that our schedules and obligations actually prevent us from doing so. Busyness and neighborliness are mutually exclusive realities.

For Israel, freedom from slavery in Egypt meant freedom to be in covenant relationship with God, which is characterized by a life expressed in the Ten Commandments. Not freedom from all constraint, but freedom to be what they’re created to be in God. Not freedom from God’s will, but freedom to fulfill God’s will. Not freedom from all limits, but freedom for fullness of life with God and neighbor.

Now, you might be wondering: That’s fine for Israel, but what about us? What does that have to do with Gentile Christians today?

For us, New Covenant Gentiles, freedom from Sin, Evil, and Death means freedom to be in covenant relationship with the same God who rescued Israel from Egypt. And our covenant relationship with God looks very much the same: characterized by a life expressed in the Ten Commandments. This is what the liberated life in Christ looks like, too. Not freedom from all constraint, but freedom to be what you’re created to be in God. Not freedom from God’s will, but freedom to fulfill God’s will. Not freedom from all limits, but freedom for fullness of life with God and neighbor.

To be clear, there are many differences between the Israelites’ situation in the wilderness of Sinai and our situation as Gentile Christians in Wheaton, IL. I am not saying they are the same. But I am saying the purpose of God’s Law remains same: To guide and shape us, by the Spirit’s power, into a truly liberated life. For Israel and for new covenant Gentiles, the Ten Commandments still answer the question: What does it mean to live as a free people? God made us for freedom, and the liberated life fulfills the Ten Commandments.

As I pondered the needs of our community over the past couple weeks, the fourth commandment, the Sabbath, is what kept returning to mind as the area in which we may need most to grow. If it is true that Sabbath is the linchpin for loving God and loving others, and it’s true that the liberated life is a life of rest, then it makes sense that we’d need to focus our attention there. So, let me wrap up by saying two more things for our community about Sabbath.

First, Sabbath is resistance. Resistance to what, you might ask? Well, resistance to the consumer capitalism that orders our society. We’re not enslaved in Egypt, but we are living under a broadly unjust and exploitative system. All of us have been taught from a young age that we are what we produce, what we own, what we consume. This way of thinking has taken root in our hearts and it now lives in our bodies. From billionaires to the chronically poor, from Fortune 500 CEOs to unpaid interns and unhoused neighbors, all of us are “uniformly caught up in and committed to the grind of endless production” (Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, 5). Under consumer capitalism, our daily lives are shaped by endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness (11).

In contrast to our lived experience, the God of Exodus, who is also the God of the Cross and Resurrection, says to us: “You are not what you produce or own or consume. You are my beloved. You are the recipients of existence—which is sheer gift. And you are recipients of my redemptive grace—also sheer gift. I have created you for freedom in relationship with me, one another, and the world. Don’t let anyone define you any other way, or force you to live any other way. Give yourself to rest together and learn from it how to be human together.”

Jesus Christ, the leader of the New Exodus, observed that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. Why? Because you can’t. It’s not that God won’t let you; it’s that it is impossible. You cannot give yourself to one way of life and the other at the same time. They are mutually exclusive realities. Jesus knows that we are enslaved to commodification and endless productivity, and into the reality he becomes, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, the “embodiment of Sabbath rest for those who are no longer defined by and committed to the system of productiveness” (12). So, Sabbath is resistance, especially when we commit to it as a community.

But, second, Sabbath is also an alternative way of life. Sabbath is an alternative to the non-stop, always-chattering presence of advertising and monetization and hustle (xiv). Instead of allowing ourselves to go on believing lies about our lives and their meaning, we must become aware of and practice what’s really real—about God, ourselves, our neighbors, and the world. And what’s really real is that we are always-and-only recipients of God’s grace. Existence and redemption are both gifts of a gracious, good, and merciful God. Only on the basis of our belovedness can we begin to construct, by the Spirit’s power, a truly liberated life. And embracing our mutual belovedness requires that we learn together how to rest.

So, Sabbath is our resistance. And Sabbath is our alternative way of life.

Now, you might be thinking: Why is she picking on consumer capitalism? I’m targeting consumer capitalism because as disciples of Jesus in Wheaton, IL it is the primary system within which we live and move and have our being. Whether we’re aware of it or not, consumer capitalism orders just about every aspect of our lives. And the affects are not altogether positive—not even close.

So, I’m not interested in having a theoretical discussion about the various economic systems of the world, and which is likely to produce the most wealth, the most consumer freedom, etc. Some people should do that, but that’s not my purpose. Instead, I’m interested in the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ to our people in our specific context. And in light of God’s Law, which Christ fulfills, it seems clear to me that the American way of life under consumer capitalism has led to widespread dehumanization, commodification, and misery. Because that’s what endless desire, endless work, and endless consumption leads to. God made us for freedom, and the liberated life fulfills the Ten Commandments. And for us to experience that freedom, Sabbath will be key.

Here’s the bottom line: If we do not learn to rest, we cannot love God or love our neighbors. If we do not learn to rest, we cannot experience the healing and liberation of God’s kingdom. Which is what all of us are longing for. Which is, in fact, what the whole world is longing for.

So, I know our minds are on the horrible violence in Israel and Palestine. And in light of that our humble work here may seem meager. But please don’t think too lightly of it. To cease our activity for a couple hours and sing these songs and pray these prayers and receive the Eucharist and share a meal is to proclaim the kingdom of freedom that has come in Christ amid an enslaved world. We give ourselves to these things trusting that God will take our meager offerings, bless them, and use them for the healing and liberation of the world. So that all of us, Jews and Gentiles, Israelis and Palestinians, will know the Sabbath rest of the fully human life free of anxiety, fear, and death. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.