Law, love, power, and death; the commandments pretty much have it all

Scripture: Exodus 20:1-17

A transcript of today's sermon
I’m going to do something crazy… I think I can do this out here… I don’t know [stepping outside the pulpit].

I’m going to do a recap of what we did on Confirmation on Wednesday. This is going to be a sermon, but it’s going to be a recap of a lot of what we talked about on Wednesday, so if I happen to drop dead in the middle of the sermon any of our ninth-graders here could finish it for me. So, I’m expecting really good sermon notes.

We talked about power on Wednesday—and we especially talked about power in terms of law and gospel—and today we’re reading about the Ten Commandments, which are fundamentally about the law. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about some of the same things we talked about with our ninth-graders. And they seemed to be able to wrap their heads around it a little bit, which was really kind of neat, so I hope that some of you can too.

When we talk about law and we talk about gospel we are really talking about two different kinds of power. The law is right-handed power. The gospel—Jesus dying on the cross—is left-handed power. 99% of our lives happen in the right-handed power world, so it’s actually really difficult for us to imagine any other kind of power. Right-handed power includes everything we do—studying for a test, playing sports, the work that we do. Anything that we do; anything that we are; anything that we work hard for—whether it’s a new job or a marriage, or whatever it is that you’re working at in your life—this is the right-handed kingdom. We live in that world 99—maybe 99.9—percent of our lives, and that’s what the Ten Commandments speak to.

The Ten Commandments are telling us how to live in that 99% of our lives. The insufficiency in the Ten Commandments is that they leave us there. They leave us in the right-handed kingdom, and they don’t themselves bring us across to the left-handed kingdom, which only happens when Jesus comes into the picture.

So, for example, there’s this great story in Matthew’s Gospel where the Devil comes to Jesus when he is in the wilderness. Jesus just finished feeding five thousand people; he goes off in the wilderness and there the devil finds him and tempts him with three different things. First, he says, “There are some rocks. Turn them into bread because you are hungry.” And Jesus says, “Man does not live by bread alone.” The Devil says, “Well, yeah, I understand that, but you do need to eat, too,” but Jesus refuses to do it. The Devil is speaking out of right-handed power; he’s speaking practically—you’re hungry; you need to eat—but Jesus responds with a left-handed answer: “We do not live by bread alone.”

Then the Devil takes him to this high tower and tells him to throw himself from the tower and the angels will come and save you. The Devil actually quotes from Psalms—if you’re looking for who is best at quoting scripture in the Bible, it’s the Devil; the Devil is always quoting the Bible—and so he says, “Throw yourself from this tower and these angels will come and save you.” And Jesus says, “Do not tempt the Lord, your God.” The Devil’s asking a right-handed power question—“Show your power.” And Jesus says, “Do not tempt the Lord your God.”

Then the Devil takes Jesus to the highest hilltop and shows him all the kingdoms of the world and says, “Together we can rule these kingdoms, and you would have the power of being a king over the whole world.” And Jesus just kind of silently laughs, like “We’re just not speaking the same language here. Sure, if everyone followed all the rules; if everybody followed the commandments, if they got it right all the time, then it would make sense for me to rule over this world as it is. Then we’d have new creation; we’d have the Garden of Eden all over again. It would make sense, and then devil, you wouldn’t really matter. You could speak right-handed power and it would be fine because everybody could follow all the rules. The reality is we can’t.”

In fact, there are two reasons why we are always messing up the Ten Commandments. The first is “You First!” This is when we hear a commandment and we say, “You first!” We think of someone who probably isn’t the most moral person in the world, and we hear about the Ten Commandments and we hear “Don’t steal” and we know this person steals so we say, “OK, once they stop stealing; then we’ll talk about me!” That’s a really human way to look at the Ten Commandments, and we do that in all sorts of ways. We look at a world and we say, “This world is broken.” We look at the world around us, and we see people breaking the rules all the time. People are stealing, killing, lying—some of them are breaking all ten commandments at once, if that’s possible. So we see that and we look at ourselves and we think, “We’re not that bad.” And so we never get them all.

And the second reason why we can never get all the Ten Commandments right is because we never get past the first commandment. We never get past “You shall have no other gods before me.” The reason for that is that we can only look through the world through our eyes—I can only see the world as I see it; hear the world as I hear it; feel the world as I feel it. And so, time and again, I become god. It happens with every single one of us. We look at the world with our own eyes, and it’s not like we go out and say to ourselves, “I’m going to be God today.” No, but we do put ourselves before everything else, because we can only see the world from our own perspective. So none of us ever get past the first commandment.

There are a couple of different ways to talk about this difference between the right-hand and the left-hand—or the difference between the law and the gospel—and another way to talk about it is efficiency and love. Wendell Berry talks about it like this—I’m going to read a quote:

“In the world of love, things separated by efficiency and specialization strive to come back together. And yet love must confront death, and accept it, and learn from it. Only in confronting death can earthly love learn its true extent, its immortality. Any definition of health that is not silly must include death. The world of love includes death, suffers it, and triumphs over it. The world of efficiency is defeated by death; at death, all its instruments and procedures stop. The world of love continues, and of this grief is the proof.”

The world where we spend 99% of our lives is defeated in death. That is the world of right-handed power. We talked about this in Confirmation on Wednesday in terms that 9^th graders are familiar with, so we talked about sports—volleyball and football being our present examples. When you train to be a team, you train to be efficient. You are living in that world of efficiency, and if you are more and more efficient you win games, you play well. You go to sections, you continue to win games, and if you are efficient you win some more, and you go to state and if you are still efficient there you win the State Championship—you become a champion. So I asked on Wednesday, “What happens next—when you follow logical progression and become this champion of efficienecy?”

And one of our young people said, “You do it again.”

Next year you come back and do it again, and that’s right—you do it again and again until it ends. It might end at the end of high school, and it might end at the end of college; and it might end with an injury or with a loss or when you’re not good enough to do it anymore, but it’s going to end. And there are plenty of people who we know—and some of whom might be you—who still have never gotten past the end of their high school sports career. You know who these people are. They still talk about it all the time. And it’s not just sports careers: it’s their wedding day, or it’s their college experience, or it’s any number of experiences in your life that you’ve never actually grieved the loss of.

That’s because you’re stuck in that right-handed kingdom, failing to acknowledge that there is a way forward through grief. All of the things in our life end in death. It’s not just our physical death; it’s the death of our experiences; the death of our past memories; the things we can no longer recreate; the things that are not getting better anymore.

The other example I used with our kids—and I’m going to close with this one—is the fullest extent of right-handed power: a person pulling a gun on you and threatening you. If a person pulls a gun they are saying, “I have the fullest extent of right-handed power; I am going to use it to the best of my ability; I want to kill you.” I’m going to take from you the thing that it most important; I’m going to take your life. And if the right-handed kingdom is all that there is that is the fullest extent of power. If they kill you, that’s it.

We talked about it on Wednesday, and we asked, “What is the most powerful thing you can say to this person who is threatening to take your life?” Do you remember what it was? What was the most powerful thing you can say to a person who pulls a gun on you?

That’s right: “Shoot me. Take my life.” The person with the gun is saying that the most important thing is your life, but you’re saying—sure, you could pull a bigger gun, you could try to pull a gun faster, you could beat them up, you could try to run away, you could try to talk to them; all of these are right-handed ways of acting in that situation—the only way to move past that is so imminently impractical (and your parents are saying, “Don’t actually do this if this happens!”), but it’s the only way you can ever move past the right-handed kingdom, to look at the person who wants to kill you and say, “Yeah, I want to live. I love life. I want life, but, ultimately, the most important thing is not my life.”

That’s where the Ten Commandments leave us, because if the most important thing is my life I’m never getting there. I’m never doing what I need to do. I can’t follow all ten of them. I’m trying and trying and trying—and that’s good, it’s good to try—but at the end of the day if that’s where we’re left we’re all of us falling short of the glory of God. That’s why we need grace. And that’s where the Ten Commandments leave us, and that’s where I’ll leave us today.