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| The source of the issue |
When
I became a parent I became an expert on the law. This happens to all of us who
travel that path through life. You spend your youth looking for exceptions to
the law. You spend your young adult years testing, bending, and maybe even
breaking the law to see what happens. Then, there comes a point where perhaps
you settle down and have a family, and your entire perspective on the law
changes. Suddenly, the law exists to keep your children safe, and there is
nothing more important.
Now, I’m not talking specifically about
the laws of our country, though perhaps those may play a role. I’m mostly
talking about the rules we establish to help our children grow. But our kids
don’t understand how wise we are, and so they don’t always listen. They bend
the rules; they break the rules; and then we have to figure out what we’re
going to do.
Seriously, please tell me what to
do.
You follow through, right? There are
consequences. You take something away that they want. We do this with Natalie,
and it always has the same effect:
she gets worse. The effect of the law pushes her further down the path to
self-destruction. So, what next? Well, we’ve gone down that road, so now we
need to commit to it or else she’ll sense weakness. So, we take away something
else. She behaves worse. We are backed into a corner, so we start bargaining. “You
can earn back that last thing if you just start behaving.” She doesn’t care, because
she’s not reasonable. She rejects the premise of the law entirely. So, we have
no choice but to take away one more thing. Pretty soon we’re out of things to
take away, and it’s like, “Natalie, if you do that one more time we’re going to
take away… the air!” Or “So help me God, you’re not going to eat ever again!”
You see the problem. The law may be
valuable but it is insufficient to make her a better person. How many days has
she missed out on TV? How many times has she been sent to her room? Things get
real confusing when we talk about the things she loves, because what does she
love most in the world? Homework. She loves
homework. So, what are we going to do: Threaten to take away her homework?
The problem is that Natalie is never going to get what she
deserves. Parenting is not about what is fair—certainly not for us—so you can
imagine a little of what it must be like for God. All of us are children of
God, and all of us fight the rules tooth and nail. We come before God kicking
and screaming, “Really, God, I’m not that bad! Certainly not like those other
people!”
The Ten Commandments exist to order your life, but they do
so by doing one thing and one thing only: They condemn you. They tell you, “You
are guilty.” Like Natalie, we don’t care much for that. So, it is always
tempting to run off to the New Testament and find the happy unicorn of grace.
That unicorn is as wonderful as you imagine, but it truly is a unicorn—a mystical
beast—without the hard edge of the law.
The Ten Commandments are difficult
to approach with a congregation of people who come here today in very different
places in life. Some of you don’t need more law in your life. You feel the
effects of it already. By the way, this is why I don’t lean heavily into the
law at funerals. I’ve been to those funerals before where the pastor uses the
opportunity to preach a kind of “turn-or-burn” theology, repent or spend
eternity in hell, but not only do I believe that is not how faith works, it’s
also misunderstanding the emotions people bring to a funeral. I don’t need to
preach the law at funerals, because you already feel its gravity. The law of
the world is death, and funerals are the one time when I know we are all feeling
it. It’s why I love preaching at funerals. Since we share the weight of the
effects of the law together, we can proclaim the freedom and hope of the Gospel
with reckless abandon.
This is not as easy on Sunday
morning. Some of you need the law more than others. You need to feel a little
guilty—maybe a lot guilty. Some of you might be abusing someone; some of you
might be abused. Some of you might be holding a grudge that is eating away at
you; some of you might feel the weight of a grudge levied against you. Some of
you came this morning to hear the good news even though you really need the law
to set you straight; some of you came today to hear the law, because you are
operating under the premise that you need to become a better person to find
hope. Most of us come not knowing what we actually need.
This is the trouble. We need the law. The Ten Commandments are
an example of it, but it goes far beyond that. We already know we should not
have other gods, we should not steal, commit adultery, honor our parents, that
we should not covet, and honor the Sabbath. We know all that. What we don’t
always realize is how we are breaking those this very moment. We don’t
understand all the ways we are guilty, or, conversely, we imagine we are so
guilty that we can never be forgiven. This is the flip side—we also need the Gospel. You need both law and
gospel.
We talked about this very subject in
Confirmation this week, and I encouraged the students to think about how a
single word from scripture might be law to one person and Gospel to another.
Depending on where we are at, a spoken word may cause a sinking feeling in one
person’s stomach while another may feel that weight lifted by the very same
work.
Here’s an example from Matthew 5:48.
Jesus says, “Be perfect, like your Father in heaven is perfect.” If you hear
that as Gospel—as good news—you might
hear, “I can be perfect since surely
Jesus would not have given a commandment I could not keep.” But if you hear
that as law, you might hear, “I can’t be perfect so why even bother?”
So many disagreements between
believers stem from one group of people hearing scripture as law and another
hearing it as gospel. This happens all the time, and it informs everything—not just
our faith but our politics, really our entire worldview. For example, one
question might be whether immigration requires sterner laws or more abundant grace?
You could ask a similar question to every subject and we probably disagree on
the answers. Each of us is struggling with the question, “How should a
Christian live in the public sphere?” What does that even look like? Shall we
orient ourselves to the laws that demand conformity with Christ, or should we
live out of the Gospel freedom free from fear of a world that can only ever
kill us?
The one thing that seems abundantly
clear is that God gives us both law and gospel. In a million different ways God
tells you that you are a terrible sinner who deserves death, and then in Christ
God tells us that we are children of God saved by grace in spite of what we
deserve. You are simultaneously a sinner and a saint, but so is everybody else.
And everybody means everybody. Not just Christians. Not just Americans. Even
your enemies. Even the people who wish you dead.
The hard question is what to do with
the law now as Christians who have this grace that we can never earn. We are
all like parents struggling with our children and wishing they would just
behave. We look at the news and feel the hurt in the world and wonder, “Why
won’t they just behave?” But people don’t behave, because they are just like
us. That’s every parent’s worst fear and deepest truth: Our children are us.
But as Christians it goes deeper than that, because not only are we connected
in this way to our children, we are also connected in this way with all the people
we don’t like, including the murderers, and the despots, and the Yankees fans.
The hardest edge of the law is that we are all one.
“But surely I haven’t killed
anybody!” we argue.
“Perhaps not with a gun,” says the
law, “but by failing to feed all the
hungry, by wishing ill on those you despise, and by serving yourself, yes, you
have killed.”
“No!” we say, like the
five-year-olds of the world. We didn’t do any of that. The law is unreasonable.
More than that, it’s unattainable.
Exactly, says Jesus. Be perfect like my father in heaven is
perfect. That’s the law, and you can’t do it.
“But what about my choices?” we bargain. “I made better
choices than they did!”
Be
perfect, like your father in heaven is perfect,” says Jesus. Give it all away, says Jesus elsewhere
in Matthew (19:21). Not some, all. It’s not enough to be better than the
murderers; you have to be perfect.
“But
I can’t do that!” we reply, more and more agitated. “It’s impossible.”
Now
you’re getting somewhere, says Jesus. Now you know where the law leaves us.
You can’t do it, so you are no different than the sinners, the disbelievers,
the atheists, and the murderers. Not in God’s eyes, you aren’t.
This is so incredibly important,
because without this understanding of how little you are, there is no hope for
understanding how mammoth the Jesus’ gift truly is. If you believe you’re really
a very good person who’s just made a couple of mistakes, then you will always
believe in a Savior who is a mason patching the holes in your life. It’s only
when you remember that you are dust—nothing but dust—that you will come to see
the incredible gift you actually have. You have a Savior who doesn’t patch you
together. You have a Savior who raises dry bones, who breathes into dust, who
saves sinners! And if you don’t buy the law, then you won’t feel the release of
that grace.
As a parent I understand the law,
but I think I also understand my need for grace. It’s probably not a surprise
that our children do this to us, because we are children of God too.
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