“We Still Need God!”

A Sermon based Upon Matthew 22: 24-46

By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, D.Min.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Year C: Proper 10, 8^th Sunday After Pentecost, July 10th, 2016

“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." (Matt. 22:40 NRS)

THEME:  In this sermon you will be introduced to the most basic reason we still need God, even if you think you already have all the answers.  This reason is revealed to us in the Ten Commandments.

The Irish playwright and playboy Oscar Wilde once wrote that there are two great tragedies in life:  “One is not getting what you want, and the other is getting it.”

Do we really know what we want?  Are we happy with what we have or who we are?   Isn’t it ironic that at the same time most of us have everything we need, know everything we want to know, and even when we are doing mostly what we’d like to do, we’d also like to have even more (win the Lottery), we can’t live without having more and more information (Cell Phones), and no matter how much we’ve already accomplished or experienced in life, we can still feel as if we haven’t accomplished, experienced, or done ‘enough’ (We have very long ‘Bucket Lists’).

WHICH IS…THE GREATEST?

But what is ‘enough’?   Isn’t this part of what lies behind the question in our text today: “Teacher, Which commandment in the law in the greatest?”  (Matt. 22:36). Of course this was not a real, honest, question, but a ‘trick’ attempting to put Jesus to a ‘test’ he might fail.   A similar, but more honest question had already been put to Jesus in by a sincere, rich, young, important man who seemed to have everything and who had ‘kept all the commandments’ since his youth.  But even with all this, he still felt the need to ask Jesus: ‘what good deed’ he could do to ‘have eternal life’ (Matthew 19:16).  With everything he had, he still felt he didn’t have enough.  

In his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough”, the very creative Rabbi Harold Kushner, once told of a reading about a young man who left home to find fame and fortune in Hollywood.  He had three dreams when he set out---to see his name in lights, to own a Rolls-Royce, and to marry a beauty contest winner.  By the time he was thirty, he had done all three, but he was a deeply depressed young man, unable to work creatively anymore despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that all of his dreams had come true.  By thirty, he had run out of life goals.  What was there for him to do with the rest of his life?

Well, what is it that we are supposed to do with our lives in the first place? What should life mean, if anything?  If you ask the average person what is most important, Kushner said, without hesitation, most will answer ‘family’.  But how much time and energy does the average person really invest with ‘family’ or even with friends?  And in this day of changing values, who is to be considered ‘family’?   Also, others will say that the meaning of life comes from being happy, but the more people try to find happiness, the less happy they become ( Based on H. Kushner, Pocket Books, 1986, p. 15-17).

Even the most gifted and talented are not immune from the great need and struggle of what it means to be what nun Joan Chittister called a “healthy, holy, wholesome human” in this world.  The great modern Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once reflected about people like Joan, who go into monasteries.  He asked frankly, “Are these people stupid that they go figure out how to live and survive?   What problem are they trying to solve?

Wittgenstein asked this question very honestly, because two of his own brothers committed suicide; and a third fled to America, where he once jumped from a boat and never surfaced again.  Wittgenstein, though a very brilliant and gifted thinker, was very familiar with the thought of ending his own life too.  He had inherited a fortune, coming from one of Vienna’s wealthiest families, and was considered a genius by most thinking people of his day.  But in spite of all that was promising for him, he came to realize the great solution for his problem could only be found in making the problem disappear.  So, in the summer of 1920, after a year of deep despair, he became an assistant gardener at a monastery outside of Vienna to try to come to grips with life.  Later, the despair would return, but he learned that ‘the remedies for the despair of life cannot be found in pharmacies’ (From “Left Hand of God”, Adolf Holl, Doubleday, 1997, p. 97). 

We live in a culture that has much to offer--more than any other than has ever been---but it is also a culture more drug induced, image conscious, fad crazed or self-absorbed than ever.  The answer to what life means, what is right, or what is ‘enough’ will not be found either in ‘pharmacies’ or in any other of our major distractions, addictions or cravings.   But if the answer to life is not found there, how can we find it?  Dare I even suggest to people who are already much too religious that we ‘still’ need to find the answer for our life in God?    What should/could this ‘answer’ look like?  What does it mean to find God?

WHICH COMMANDMENT?

When he was speaking at a Duke University commencement back in 1987,   then Veteran ABC News Correspondent Ted Koppel reminded the graduates that the human race was given ‘Ten commandments’ and not ‘Ten suggestions’. 

To understand better what Ted Koppel meant, you need to consider more from his critique of the ‘laissez faire’--anything goes’ culture of then and now: “We have actually convinced ourselves that slogans will save us.  Shoot up if you must; but use a clean needle.  Enjoy sex whenever and with whomever you wish, but wear a condom.  No!  The answer is no. Not because it isn't cool or smart or because you might end up in jail or in an aids ward, but no because it's wrong, because we have spent 5,000 years as a race of rational human beings, trying to drag ourselves out of the primeval slime by searching for truth and moral absolutes.  In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder.  It is a howling reproach (or reprimand).  What Moses brought down from Mount Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions." (http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/koppel.asp).

But, this whole idea of moral truth, moral absolutes or moral commands, especially believing that once, on Mt. Sinai, ‘commands’ came down from God, has become ridiculous for many.   ‘Why do we even need God at all’ has become the unspoken life-choice of many, even those with Judeo-Christian backgrounds, who have now become incredibly and stubbornly determined to live life on their own terms, without church, human, or divine authority. 

Because we are realizing that our world is far more complex than we were once taught and much more dangerous and demanding than we ever could have imagined,  many of us, especially our young, have become more distrustful and skeptical of any kind of established ideas, rules, or laws handed down ‘whenever’ or from ‘wherever’.  “No one can should or can tell me how I should or must live my life” is the prevailing attitude.  Strangely, even without belief in God, this extreme desire for a freedom from faithful or communal responsibility has become the ‘god-like’ mantra of our secular, morally troubled, non-commanded world.  Will a world without ‘commands’ be a better world?  As the evidence comes in, the final answer is still unknown.  And what is just as unknown, is what happens next.

The fellow who asked Jesus about ‘which commandment’ was a smart lawyer.  Yet interestingly, his question wasn’t about practicing law.  His question was asked as an attempt to ‘trap’ Jesus so the experts could discredit him.  But that did not happen, at least not on their terms.  Jesus turned the tables on them because with their very self-focused minds they had missed the simplest message of the law.  Jesus answered that ‘all’ of commandments and all the prophets pointed to two simple commands that focus on only one single word:  ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’….   Then, ‘the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself’  (v.37-38).   What those very smart, determined, even very religious-legal minded leaders had missed was the most important message of the law, then and now: The law is an invitation to personally know a loving, caring, compassionate God who commands love among his people.

When John Lennon wrote his famous song “All you Need is Love”, he was right about love, but he was still defining ‘love’ on his own terms.  The core human problem of what it means to find love is not just ‘the love we want’ to find, but it is to find the kind of love we really need.  This is not simply based on our terms, but is determined by Israel’s God who creates and calls his people to live in community commanded by love.  

YOU SHALL LOVE….

Answering in the most practical ways, the question of ‘what love means’ and ‘what love is’ is what the Commandments (especially the Ten Commandments) are about.   These are not laws, rules, or commands based upon the whims of a controlling, demanding, or difficult God, but they are the commands of this God who delivers his people from bondage and revealed to them how they must form healthy and holy lives based upon their greatest need for true and commanding love.   

The great reformer, Martin Luther once said that ‘the one who knows the commandments, knows the entire Scripture’.   That is a very large claim, but listen again to part of Ted Koppel’s speech to graduates about the why obeying the Ten Commandments are essential for life: “The sheer brilliance of the Ten Commandments is that they codify, in a handful of words, acceptable human behavior.  Not just for then or now but for all time.  Language evolves, power shifts from nation to nation, messages are transmitted with the speed of light, man erases one frontier after another; and yet we and our behavior, and the Commandments which govern that behavior, remain the same.”  (http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/koppel.asp).

The Ten Commandments are not simply laws and rules for living.  They are definitely not laws that you can imposed on a secular culture.  The truth is that these laws, as Jesus interpreted in his sermon on the mount, are laws that can never be externally enforced in any form.  Think about it.  How do your enforce a law against coveting?  How do you enforce honoring parents or keeping married couples from committing adultery?  While you may put people in jail for murder, you can’t make rules that keep people from having murderous feelings of anger in their hearts.  Of course the Jews once tried enforce these rules for their own culture, but that failed miserably.   They could neither enforce the horizontal aspects of the Ten Commandments just like they couldn’t perfectly live its vertical aspects.  

How do you enforce ‘no other gods’ or ‘no graven image’?   Of course, you can try, but finally these laws are laws that must be from the heart.

Because the Ten Commandments are laws of the heart and for the heart, they point beyond the mere obedience to outward laws to the one most basic human need and behavior which is most important, most foundational, and most necessary of all:  God ten commands reveal how we should love and how we must be loved.   As Jesus interpreted them for us,  these ten laws point to ‘how’ we must love God with all our hearts so that we will also know how to rightly love our neighbor as we love ourselves.  Nothing in the world is more important, more foundational, or more crucial for our continued human existence than knowing how this message of ‘love’ is revealed within these Ten Commands that have come from God.

The first time I ever explored a German city street, in that very ‘strange’ world, I found a name that was amazingly familiar, “Woolworth’s.”   When I was a kid, it was the only store in town that specialized in having a toy section.  I bought some of my first coloring books and model cars in that store.  So, when I came upon the name, which had long since disappeared in my hometown, I entered in to see if I found anything familiar. 

Upon entering the door, I came face to face with a large, life-size poster of an imposing, Lutheran Minister, dressed in dark, black robe, with finger-pointed straight toward anyone who would enter this store, with these very words printed in big, bold letters: “Du Sollst Nicht Stehlen!”   Even though, at that time, I hadn’t yet learned German very well, I knew instinctively what it said, “Thou Shalt Not Steal!”  It was one of the Ten Commandments.   But I found it most interesting that in a European culture, where less than 5 percent of the people ever entered a church to worship at any time, still found a need to post one of the Ten Commandments at the very front door of that store.   Even without acknowledging God, somehow, as the apostle Paul once suggested,

“What can be known about God is plain to them, …  God has shown it to them…  they are without excuse.  (Rom. 1:19-20 NRS).  “They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts…” (Rom. 2:15 NRS).

But if God’s law is written on our ‘hearts’, how do we get this ‘love’ Jesus commanded out of all those ‘thou shalt nots?   Why does God’s law explaining God’s terms for a relationship with his people begin with what people shouldn’t do, rather than what they should?  When Jesus was trying to renew the most basic spirit behind these commands--why did he have to  reverse ‘thou shalt not…’ into to ‘You shall love…’?   

I think we all should know ‘why’ already.  A healthy, growing, maturing life is always filled with some kind of moral development.   As parents, we too have to teach our children to understand the meaning of ‘no’ before we can teach them about ‘yes’.  And the greatest ‘moral development’ in the Bible, as in human life, is the development of the human person who grows up from the ‘must’ of the rule of law to the ‘must’ of the rule of love.   Jesus wanted his disciples to know that the ‘yes’ of love was even in the ‘no’ of the law that is still visible in Israel’s moral development.   Love is not automatic, and even love can become misguided and misunderstood, unless we keep our eye upon these most basic rules of law.  This is how both ‘law’ and ‘love’ work together to help us grow up in the perfect law of love, fully revealed as it was first commanded by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

So, now, you see where I’m headed for the next ten messages.  Next week I will begin a series of message on the Ten Commandments, which I believe, and I hope you will rediscover, that they reveal the basis of human law, but also point us to the way of holy, human love---which is love for God and love for neighbor.   To draw our attention to these Ten Commandments is still important, not for laying down the cold, hard laws of God, but for drawing us back into the fullness this loving, graceful, merciful God whom we still so desperately need to rule in our lives with love.  This is especially needed when it our great temptation to have our lives ‘distorted’ and ‘distracted’ away from God’s perfect and perfecting love.  

As Dag Hammarskjöld, once wrote, “God does not die when we cease to personally believe in Him, but we die on the day our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”  Love for God and for others, and even the love and respect we must have for ourselves, is all that raises us up from our ‘tiny little selves’ and keeps us from only being specs in the cosmos, where our lives ‘go back to dust—and all for nothing’ (Joan Chisttler).   That is what our lives are without God, but when we learn the laws of God, which can be reduced down to one law of love, we can discover that we do matter, because in God’s love we connect with the ‘eternal’ that is in each of us.    Amen.