There were a few things going on
this week, so I suppose I (and you, too) could be excused if we weren’t paying
much attention to the news. But I was paying enough attention to note, as many
of you probably did, that our U.S. Attorney General made a foray into theology,
which turned out about as well as these things typically do when people try to
use the Bible as a weapon for their own ends.
Most of the time, issues like these
pass in the news cycle and it’s not worth a comment; not because it isn’t
important, but because it’s hard to be nuanced enough to talk about politics
without everybody slipping into their lanes. But today, as luck (or misfortune)
would have it, the scripture for the day just so happens to be right in the
same vein as the one in the news. Today, we talk about the law as it relates to
our relationship with one another, which means I have to pick a bone with Mr.
Sessions.
First, I feel compelled to say that
it’s tricky business talking about the law at all. For very good reason,
we-Christians like to focus for the Gospel; after all, it is the uniquely
amazing thing about being a follower of Jesus—it is the good news!
Nevertheless,
if you remember picking up the Small Catechism in Confirmation you might recall
a good portion of it has to do with the law and, specifically, the Ten
Commandments. Luther, who was the champion of salvation by grace through faith,
wrote in his introduction to the Large Catechism that, “He who knows the Ten
Commandments knows all of scripture.” Luther understood what we so often fail
to understand; that the good news of Jesus Christ requires the bad news of the
law. You can’t have one without the other.
We might find a clue why this is in
Romans 13. Yes, that very same Romans 13 that the Attorney General used to try
to justify the government having essentially whatever laws he wanted it to
have: In Romans 13: 8-10, Paul writes: “Owe no one anything, except to love one
another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments,
‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You
shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does
no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Of all chapters in the Bible, this
is the one Mr. Sessions used to justify taking children away from their parents.
There are several reasons why this is a poor choice, but chief among them is
that he fully misrepresents the role of the law for Christians. What is the
purpose the law? According to Paul in Romans 13 it is to love your neighbor as
yourself! And Paul gets there precisely through those commandments we read
today! Don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery; not because not-doing
those things will make you more holy (we’re fully sinners, after all), but
because that is what it looks like to live in the kingdom of God.
The
“No” of the Ten Commandments are met by the “Yes” of how we are to live as
followers of God. God’s Law exists to show us what love looks like in action—not
as a deterrent, not as vengeance, not to limit evil. As I preached at the
wedding for Brooke and Jackson on Friday, Jesus commands so that we might love.
That is obvious enough between two people who are getting married, but it is no
less real between us and every other human being who crosses are path. We are
to love without boundaries, because God has first loved us.
The law serves other purposes. It condemns
us by telling us we are sinful; it drives us to Jesus. But once the law has
shown us the truth about ourselves—that we are little sinners and that we need
a savior, and once we have seen that that savior is Jesus—the question is,
“What next?”
Well,
we turn to the second tablet of the Ten Commandments and we see: Love your
neighbor. That’s what’s next.
This past week I looked around at a
lot of familiar and unfamiliar faces as everybody descended on Hallock, some
for the first time in five years or longer. These were once our neighbors, and
I suppose many we still consider to be neighbors, even at a distance. I read
the Hallock Main Street promotion, which explicitly states that we are trying
to bring “new neighbors” to town. Nobody knows the need for neighbors like
those who feel the grip of scarcity, right? We want new neighbors in part
because we know that we are better when we are working together for the common
good and it requires a critical mass of people to do that. We love our
neighbors when we have something we want them to be a part of.
But what happens if those are not
the neighbors we get? And I’m not just talking about neighbors who behave
badly. Do we want neighbors who question us? Neighbors who don’t agree with our
vision? Neighbors who push us to change who we are? Do we want neighbors who
don’t share our identity? Who don’t believe what we believe? These are holy
questions, because they are hard questions.
The
Ten Commandments were first given by God to the Israelites, who were a refugee
people trying to assert their identity in a world where they had no land to
legally claim as their own. In a way, we are nothing like them. Those of us in
and around Hallock, who would love to see our area flourish, are people with a
place but lacking in people power. On the other hand, Israel had people power—the
Egyptians were using them to build pyramids, after all—but they had no place to
call home. The beauty of the Ten Commandments is that they are the same for
Israel as they are for us, and none of us get to claim that our power changes
God’s law.
What
matters is that God first loved us, saving us, in spite of us. Then, what
matters is that we love our neighbors, as only God can show us how.
If
I’m being truly charitable, our Attorney General did get one thing right: The
Law is the law and it is ordained by God for good. It’s just that he wasn’t
talking about the law that God had actually ordained, because God’s Law says,
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and love your
neighbor as yourself.” That’s how Jesus distilled it, anyway.
“And
who is my neighbor?” asks the lawyer to Jesus in that famous episode, an
appendix of sorts to the Ten Commandments, called the Parable of the Good
Samaritan. Jesus says, “A man was going down the road when he fell into the
company of robbers.” It is a story that, if you don’t remember it, you might
want to go home and read later, but I’m going to give away the ending. The
lawyer, understanding the story leaves him no other choice, concludes by noting
that the neighbor is “the one who showed mercy.”
“Good,”
Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”
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