As you may know, I retired from teaching at Lindenwood University a few

Transcription

1 A version of this sermon manuscript was preached by the Rev. Dr. Alan Meyers during worship at Oak Hill Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, MO on Sunday, Oct. 8, Texts: Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, and Philippians 3:4b-14 As you may know, I retired from teaching at Lindenwood University a few years ago. But I still do some teaching there part time. I teach Old Testament in the fall semester and New Testament in the spring semester. So, I'm teaching Old Testament right now. This time, I have only one student -- only one signed up for the course -- so it's what we call a tutorial. I'm giving my student the midterm test tomorrow. And I always give students beforehand a review sheet, a list of the items they really need to know for the test. On the review sheet for the Old Testament midterm this time I reproduced an old cartoon that shows Moses, with the tablets of the Ten Commandments in his arms, facing the Israelites. And one of the Israelites has a hand raised, and Moses is saying, "You bet they'll be on the final exam!" Because, of course, the Ten Commandments are an important part of what we've been studying. After the cartoon I put, in parentheses, "They'll be on the midterm test, actually." The Ten Commandments are important not only because they'll be on the final exam or the midterm test. They're a very basic part of Christian teaching. We

2 2 could talk about the Ten Commandments endlessly, we could study their meaning and their application to our lives for our whole lives long. What can the preacher say about them in one sermon? I don't know whether to be happy with our Pastor Erin or not that she left me to preach on the day when the Ten Commandments come up in the Lectionary -- it's a big job. So, I thought about what to say -- and I prayed about it, as always. And I decided that it would be good to talk about what in our Reformed tradition we call "the three uses of the Law." The Ten Commandments are the basis of what is called "the Law, " with a capital L. The Law is God's direction and guidance given in the Scriptures. There's a lot of direction and guidance, a lot of rules and regulations, in the Bible. But somehow it has always been felt that the Ten Commandments are the basis of it all. Everything else, all the other commandments and rules and regulations, are all just commentary and explanation, of these basic commandments, the Big Ten. The Ten Commandments are the essential part of the Law. This year marks the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. And so it's a good time for us Presbyterians to look back to see what the Reformers, our

3 3 ancestors in the faith, to see what they had to say about things. And they had quite a lot to say about the Law, that is, the Commandments, and what use the Law has in our lives. John Calvin, a great leader of our Reformed tradition, said that God gave us the Law for three reasons. I'd like us to look at each of those reasons here this morning. (By the way: what Calvin had to say about the Law was somewhat different from what Martin Luther had to say about it -- not entirely different, but somwhat different. Maybe sometime our resident Lutheran scholar Korla can tell us about Luther's teaching on this, sometime during this anniversary year of the Reformation. But, this sermon's going to be about Calvin's idea, the Reformed idea.) O.K., so: why did God give us the Law? Why did God give us these Commandments? What use are they? Well, the first use of the Law is to kill, to kill us, to destroy our sense of self-sufficiency, to deflate our self-righteousness. See, no one can keep the Law perfectly. The more we understand about what the Commandments really mean, the more we realize that we cannot do what they tell us to do. We may think we can at first. The Commandment says, You shall not murder. And I may think, well, I haven't killed anyone. But Jesus says, in Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus says, if you're even angry with someone, if you call somebody a fool, that's like committing murder. Friends, I have a reputation as a mild-

4 4 mannered man, but by that understanding of murder, I have committed murder many times. Jesus says, the Commandment says "You shall not commit adultery," but if you've even looked at someone lustfully, you've already committed adultery. It seems that God is not concerned just with what we do externally. God looks on the heart. God cares about what we think and feel, God cares about our attitudes and our intentions. The Law is an inward thing. It has to do with our inner lives, as well as our observable outer lives. That's why there's a Commandment that says, You shall not covet. Coveting means intensely wanting something that belongs to somebody else. Coveting is obviously something that goes on inside us. It may lead to an outer action, it may lead to stealing, or adultery, or killing. But in itself coveting is on the inside, in the heart. And God desires obedience on the inside, in the heart. Again, Jesus says, the greatest commandment in the Law is that we should love God with our whole heart and soul and and mind and strength. And the second greatest is that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Who of us can say that we have loved God, or loved our neighbor, like that? We have all failed to love, time and time again.

5 5 And so, if our relationship to God depends on keeping the Law, keeping the Commandments, we are all in big trouble. But, the Reformers said, see, God gave us the Law to show us that, to show us how we cannot make it on our own. We need God. We need God's mercy. We need God's grace. We need God's forgiveness. We need for God to make us right with himself, because we cannot do that ourselves. And the good news is God has done that. God has done that in Jesus Christ, who bore our sins in his body on the cross. He took our sin and our death and our separation from God, and in exchange he gave us his righteousness and his eternal life and his closeness to God. What we have to do is accept all this in faith. To be right with God, we don't have to keep the Law -- no one of us can do that, anyway, only Christ can. To be right with God, what we have to do is put our faith in Christ. This is what Paul is talking about in our reading from Philippians today, where he says, I don't have "a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith." This is called "justification by faith alone." We're put right with God by faith alone, not by the Law. This precious teaching is what Paul taught in his writings in the New Testament, and it was recovered, brought to light again, in the Reformation. And so the Reformers said, the purpose of the Law and the

6 6 Commandments is, first of all, to show us that we need God's grace and we need faith to receive it. John Calvin said there's a second use of the Law. This is the political or civil use. What does that mean? Well, if human beings are going to live together in society, there have got to be some rules, some laws, to keep order. There's got to be a law against people killing each other. There have got to be laws protecting property, that is, forbidding stealing in all its forms. There have got to be marriage laws -- marriage and family are important to civil society. And so on. In civil society we need laws. Most people, I think, would agree with that. Well, in the Ten Commandments, we have laws in a very basic form -- laws against killing, and stealing, and adultery, and even a law against perjury, against lying in court. One writer has said it very well: the Ten Commandments represent the minimum requirements of community. You know, in our First Reading today, the situation is, the Israelites have just gotten out of slavery in Egypt, where they weren't free to run their own lives -- they could depend on their Egyptian masters to tell them what to do, they didn't need laws of their own. But now, they're free -- they're on their own -- and they need some basic principles to live by, they need to know what are the minimum

7 7 requirements of community. And so God gives them the Ten Commandments to show them how to be an orderly society, how to be a community, a community under law. And in that way, the Commandments are good for us, too. What it comes down to is, that the Reformed tradition thinks that the laws we live by in society, insofar as it's a just and proper society, the laws we live by have their origin in the will of God. The laws are not our human invention, they're God's gift to us, insofar as they are good laws, insofar as they reflect the Law with a capital L. To that extent the laws of society are the laws of God. And what this has meant is, that Christians who follow the Reformed tradition have great respect for the laws of the land, the laws of the city and the state and the country they live in, and they try to obey those laws. I liked what Pastor Erin said in her message in the Oak Hill newsletter this month, where she said, "I am a rule-following girl." I read that and I said, Erin, you are a typical Reformed minister. Reformed ministers try to follow the rules, to follow the laws -- at least as long as those laws don't work too much against the Law of God. But when the laws of the land, or when the behavior of those who are supposed to enforce the laws, when those things are not in keeping with the Law of

8 8 God, sometimes people in the Reformed tradition have rebelled against the laws of the land, or against those who are charged with enforcing them. Do you know who the only minister, the only clergyperson, to sign the Declaration of Independence, was? It was John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister. Signing the Declaration of Independence was a rebellion against the laws of England and a rejection of King George as a tyrant. And I'm sure John Witherspoon believed he was following the Law of God when he signed that Declaration and when he supported the American Revolution. Lots of other Presbyterians supported the Revolution, too -- one British soldier wrote home, "Do not call this an American rebellion. It is an Irish Scotch Presbyterian rebellion." I'm just sayin', friends, I'm just sayin'. I'm just sayin' that when a Presbyterian leader finds it necessary to resist injustice in society, to engage in active protest, even disruptive protest, against it, she or he is in a great tradition, following in the footsteps of John Witherspoon and many others. The reverence for the Law that we have in the Reformed tradition may actually make us work against unjust laws or unjust enforcement of the laws.

9 9 What about the third use of the Law? Calvin said the third use of the Law was the principle use, it was the most important use. The third use of the Law is as a guide for the redeemed. The Law is a guide for people who have already been put right with God in Jesus Christ, to teach them how to show their gratitude. I've heard it put this way: Christians don't keep the Commandments in order to be saved; they keep the Commandments because they are saved already. You know, sometimes someone does something wonderful for you, something you're so grateful for, and you say, Is there anything I can do to show my gratitude? Well, we should say that to God. We should say, Lord, you gave us Jesus to save us, to put us right with yourself. You redeemed us at such great cost, you've given us this free gift of your love. Is there anything we can we do to show how thankful we are? And God answers, Well, there is something, as a matter of fact -- I've got this list of Commandments here. Try these. Do your best to follow these. You won't keep them perfectly, but keep trying. I will help you by the work of my Spirit in you, as long as you try to keep these Commandments in faith and in gratitude. Calvin says, we need to expand a little on our understanding of what it means to follow the Commandments. For example, "You shall not steal" means more than just don't literally steal. It also means to share what you have with the needy, because God cares about them, too, and God gave you what you possess in

10 10 order that you share it with them. To withold it from them is like stealing from them. And, the Commandment says, "You shall not commit murder" -- but surely that means that you must not only not kill your neighbor or do your neighbor any bodily harm. It might also mean protecting your neighbor from being killed or harmed by someone else, and protesting when your neighbors have been killed or harmed unjustly. It must also mean that you must actively do your best to see that your neighbor's wounds are healed, that he's taken care of when he's sick. (In our time that might mean standing up for a reasonable universal health care plan.) A good thing to do during your devotional times is to meditate on things like this. What can I do, in the Spirit of the Commandments? The apostle Paul says, in Romans 13:9, that the Commandments are all summed up in the Commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. They're all summed up in that -- but maybe specific Commandments can give us specific ideas as to how, exactly, to love our neighbor. I really like that reading from Philippians that we have this morning. It seems to me to be in the Spirit of the third use of the Law, in the Spirit of joyfully trying to find out what God wants us to do, and joyfully trying to do it, forgetting any past failures, knowing we're forgiven for the past and encouraged and empowered to try again. Paul writes, " this one thing I do: forgetting what lies

11 11 behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus." So: the Reformed tradition says, there are three uses of the Law God gave us. Use number one: to show us that we really can't make it on our own, that we need God's grace in Jesus Christ. Use number two: the Law of God is the living heart of all good laws of society, and so it guides us as to what just and good laws are. Use number three: to show us how to live our lives so as to please God in gratitude for God's love for us in Jesus Christ. May the Law of God indeed be useful to us, and may we be led by it as we live our lives in joy and thankfulness to God. Amen.