So,
today I knew I wanted to start this sermon talking about what is the good life,
and so I did what any self-respecting pastor does these days and Googled it.
“What is the good life?” I asked the Google, and it responded with a 2012 article
from Forbes. Goodie, I thought. This was exactly what I was looking for.
According to this Forbes article the good news—the secret of happiness--is based
on ten golden rules (sound familiar?). If I’m to sum up these rules briefly
(which may be difficult because they are decidedly more wordy than the original
Ten Commandments) they are essentially this: Have new experiences, be responsible,
don’t do evil to others, and be kind. As it turns out, with some minor tweaking
this Forbes article essentially took the Ten Commandments and modernized them
by making them positive (be and do this rather than “do not” do that) and by
contextualizing them in such a way that each piece of advice drips with this
magic elixir of our modern lives that we call freedom.
This is extremely
typical of our postmodern world, which considers the good life
to be the one where we are most free to choose whatever life we would like and
whatever things we would like to fill that life. Freedom has become the symbol
of the highest advancement in our society, more important to us than wealth, or
even companionship. Our troops fight wars for our freedom; our politicians
attack one another for limiting freedoms; we spout the line “It’s a free
country” as if it’s a truism. The implication behind all the freedom talk is
that the best life for you and for me is one where we are unencumbered by rules
and free to do anything and everything we want.
This
may get politicians elected, but it is also a big fat lie. The good life is not
being free to be all things. Rather, freedom only means anything when we choose
to become bound to things that matter. A really good example of this is when we
go shopping—or, better said, when you go shopping, because I hate shopping. But
whether you like to shop or not, shopping is the ultimate example of the perils
of freedom, because shopping presents a set of choices that promise a reality
that is endlessly unfulfilling. Whenever you buy something, you convince
yourself that the thing you have is more valuable than it actually is because
you own it until, gradually over time, reality sinks in and you realize that your
freedom to purchase a thing only results in your bondage to the things that you
buy—either that or you just keep buying new things that make you proportionally less and
less happy.
Whether
it’s buying clothes or dating that person you like, freedom only means
something when we use it to become bound to something. In different ways we are
all captivated, and held captive, by the enormity of the life choices we are
forced to make. The reason we have rules, laws, commandments—that sort of
thing—is because we often make terrible choices on our own and, worse still, we
tend to make choices that hurt other people. The Ten Commandments attempt to provide
boundaries for our choices. They absolutely limit your freedom. They tell you
not to kill, not to steal, not to have sex with somebody else’s significant
other, to care for the elderly, to take a day off, and to respect your neighbor
and your neighbor’s stuff (not to mention all the business about having no other gods before me--see the lesson from two weeks ago). These are fundamental limitations of our freedoms,
but actually they are only the beginning.
See,
if you read the whole Bible you are going to discover again and again how God
seeks to limit your freedom, so much so in fact that it will seem as
if God gave us the law because he wants us to have no fun. Unfortunately,
that’s how scripture is often treated, as if Christians are these stuffy
rule-touting bores who are out to ruin everybody else’s good time, and of
course the worst part is that many of us have done our best to live up
to that reputation. When people read the commandments they often imagine a
stereotypically pietistic life from fifty or eighty years ago: parents who
didn’t allow dancing or playing cards, let alone alcohol, and don’t even begin
to think about holding hands in public! That’s one of our primary images of the commandments: rules that we know we should follow to be “good” Christians, even though
we know the majority of people around us only follow those rules in public… and
only between the hours of nine and five. This is one of the reasons why many
young people of my age (especially men) feel absolutely no connection with God,
because they still have this image as their predominant view of what it means
to be Christian: don’t drink, don’t party, don’t think impure thoughts.
We
tend to think that the opposite of a devout life is a life of debauchery: drinking,
smoking, sex, drugs, all that stuff. But both of those lives are based on the
imagined reality that freedom is what matters: either the freedom to choose to
abstain or the freedom to indulge. History has offered us countless examples of
people who have reacted to the piety of their parents by becoming free spirits:
we call them hippies, or Wobblies, or Occupy Wall Street, anarchists,
reformers, radicals, romantics… In reaction to
that imagined reality of the good life as the one where we abstain from fun, these
free spirits have decided that the definition of “fun” is being able to do
anything we choose any time we want to do it. The problem with unlimited
freedom is that it assumes that human beings are able to reliably choose good
things both for themselves and the people around them when, in fact, it’s more often
the opposite. We are forever overvaluing immediate pleasure to the detriment of
our eventual happiness. A world without rules is not so much an Eden as it is a hell.
As
it turns out, freedom doesn’t seem to make us very happy at all. Have you ever
noticed that some of the people who talk up freedom as if it is their A#1
God-given right are the same people who don’t live a particularly varied life?
They have the same “fun” on the weekends and are about as predictable as the
end of a Vikings season, and the aftermath tends to look just as ugly. It
always astounds me that we want the freedom to choose, and yet we choose to do
things the same way we’ve always done them. And this is true of the most
liberal and conservative person alike.
It’s
like when friends who live in a big city marvel that I can get by in the middle
of nowhere because there’s nothing to do, and yet these same people who talk up
all the things they can do in the
city rarely actually do any of it. They have the same routines, and sure, maybe
those routines include orchestras, or Starbucks, or other things we don’t have in Kittson County, but the fact remains that it is
a very predictable routine. They don’t go to all 101 great things to do in Minneapolis; nobody does.
This
should tell us something about ourselves: namely, we are not our happiest when
we are at our freest. We willingly choose to limit our freedom all the time. The
idea that freedom itself is a thing to be pursued is a lie that advertising
agencies want to sell you because it makes corporations a good deal of money.
They want to tell you that buying a 72 inch television is about freedom; that buying
a fancy new mower is about exercising freedom; that wearing the latest,
trendiest piece of clothing is about freedom, but what they are not telling you
is that the very act of purchasing that item is actually giving up your
freedom; you are becoming bound to a thing and it should not be done lightly.
They don’t tell you, for example, how happy you will be when you rid yourself
of that item at a rummage sale ten years down the road.
Of
course, making purchases isn’t in itself bad. It’s OK to have an identity
informed by products, but it’s a problem when your identity becomes indistinguishable
from the things that you buy. And that’s really what the commandments are trying to
help you to avoid, because human beings get attached to all sorts of unhealthy
things that will not only make you less happy in the long run but will
ruin your relationships with the people you love. Those things include, but are
not limited to, material things that others have and you want, people who you
find attractive but are attached to somebody else, and even lifestyles that you
want to emulate even though they are unrealistic caricatures of reality. These
are what God is concerned about—not because God is a jerk who creates fun
things but doesn’t want you to partake in them, but because God knows that what
you are calling “fun” is more about rebellion than it is about happiness. God
just happens to know that we will absolutely make the wrong choices if we
convince ourselves that freedom is the key to happiness.
But
there’s a huge caveat to this message that I would be remiss if I didn’t
address. These commandments? They are for you.
The greatest abuse of our freedom is when we hear God’s law and immediately
apply it to somebody else, ignoring our guilt entirely. The Ten Commandments exist as a guide for your own benefit long before they are shared with others. If
you are more concerned with telling others that they should not steal, murder,
or commit adultery than you are with hearing that message applied to you, then
you have taken one step on the road to becoming a tyrant. These are meant for
you to hear; not for you to feel better about yourself in relation to others.
And that really gets to the heart of the
trouble with freedom: we act as if the world revolves around us and the
importance we put on freedom allows us to think like that. But God wants us to
experience a different kind of freedom—the freedom of loving others—because
that’s the kind of freedom that will actually
make us happy. Freedom that binds us to one another in love—that’s something to
fight for, and it’s exactly what God wants of us. You are free—all of you—but
there is only one way to make that freedom attractive at the end of the day,
and that is going out and loving a world that is in need. That’s what God wants
of you; that’s what will make your faith attractive to others; that is Ten
Commandments in a nutshell.
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