Exodus
20:1-17
Every so often you meet the ranting and raving, angry
kind of atheist who gets in your face and is determined to ridicule anything
that has the remotest connection to religious belief. This is the guy who blames every act of
terrorism not only on a specific religion but even on religion in general. This is the crusader who goes after
institutions because someone within one of them has done something that the
group itself would decry as wrong. This is
somebody who doesn’t see the difference between the UMW holding a bake sale to
raise money to house a mother and child fleeing abuse from Creflo Dollar
demanding support because he needs a new plane.
I’m not going into any of that today.
More often, though, you do meet someone with honest
questions and realistic observations who finds herself or himself wondering
whether there is any kind of solid basis for making hard decisions, when people
that they admire and trust often come down on different sides of the same
question. They aren’t trying to rip
anything down. They’re trying to make
sure that they do a good job building something up, so they inspect the
foundations.
Good for them!
One of those people is Bart Campolo, who is the son of
Tony Campolo, who preached here one Sunday last year. They have a book out called Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on
Christianity between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son, where they
go back and forth on such matters in a respectful and loving way that (I
believe) we can all learn from. In this
book, Bart Campolo writes,
“I am always mystified when
Christians ask me how I can trust any moral code not grounded on the fixed and
absolute moral authority of God. That’s
exactly the point I’ve been trying to make:
Nobody decides to trust a moral code because it is objectively
justifiable or divinely inspired. In
fact, nobody decides to trust a moral code at all. We don’t choose our understandings of right
and wrong and where they come from. We
absorb these things as children, and only rationalize them for ourselves and
one another long after the fact.”[1]
Apart from changing the
word “rationalize” to the word “understand”, if he asked me about this, I would
agree with him.
But before I would say that everything is relative, I
would refer back to a text as basic as the Ten Commandments and point out how
they begin.
“I
am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of slavery…” [Exodus 20:2]
The Ten Commandments do
not stand alone as Ten Useful Life Hacks or Ten Ways to Improve the World. The Ten Commandments come to us as part of
the history of God’s intervention in human life prior to the giving of this or
any other portion of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. They are part and parcel of our experience of
God’s care, not just to us as individuals who are told, “Do this and don’t do
that,” but to a people who hear them as, “Because I care for you, here is how
we can all live together.”
Bart
Campolo has a sense of this when he says that
“moral development is just one part
of that much larger process sociologists like my father call socialization,
whereby we human beings learn to understand and interpret ourselves and our
lives not only from our families and our neighbors but also from the cultural
norms and values that surround and define us.
Religion is an important part of any given culture, of course, but so is
every other human construction, like language, trade, agriculture, marriage, medicine,
technology, colonialism, and warfare.”[2]
Where what I would call a
biblical approach to that departs from his is in the way that he puts all
influences on an equal footing, when religion does indeed make a claim – not that
the other influences are not there and not to be considered – but that the
claims of a God who frees his people from all other claims and allows them to
see them clearly, those claims are stronger and to be honored above all others.
In the full story of the Exodus, it was the needs of
Egyptian agriculture that meant storage had to be built for grain, and so the
Pharaoh was justified in forcing the Hebrews into slavery as construction
workers. It was the fears of the
Egyptians that a greater number of Hebrews would somehow taint their culture
that led them to go along with genocide as a means of population control. When the Ten Commandments decree,
“Remember
the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six
days you shall labor and do all your work.
But the seventh is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any
work,” [Exodus 20:8-10]
they speak to people
whose labor and whose bodies had been terribly abused by slavery and all that
goes along with it in all its forms. When
they say,
“You shall not murder,” [Exodus
20:13]
they are spoken to people
whose children had been ordered to be destroyed at birth”.
Just because someone doesn’t consciously recognize or
formally honor the gods of the Egyptians, or of the Canaanites whose lands the
Hebrews would later claim for themselves, or of the Persians and Greeks and
Romans who would later conquer that land and its inhabitants in turn, doesn’t
mean that they don’t need to hear the commandment that taught the Hebrews to
beware any god that demands tribute before offering blessing:
“You
shall have no other gods beside me.
You
shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in
heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under
the earth. You shall not bow down to
them or worship them.” [Exodus 20:3-5]
Obedience to God may
often mean disobedience to earthly authorities, and I don’t just mean
governments. Even direction as simple as
“You
shall not covet” [Exodus 20:17]
if taken seriously would
put the advertising industry out of business.
Bart
Campolo, like a lot of other people, people very much like you and me, mistakes
loyalty for blind obedience when he says,
“For me to blindly follow a divine
commandment seems like a way to shirk the hard work of deliberation and evade
responsibility for the intentions and consequences of my actions.”[3]
It’s hardly that. Following often requires exactly that type of
deliberation. Just ask anyone who
wrestles with issues about capital punishment or when and if their conscience
allows them to go to war.
Taking the Commandments within the whole scope of the
story of God’s dealings with his people points to God’s initiative that frees
his people from all kinds of slavery and, as Christians, we include in that the
freedom from sin and its aftermath that God brought about when Jesus died and
rose from death. What some see, divorced
from the story of God’s grace (to use the theological term), is just a bunch of
rules to be followed or else. What we
see is the best ways to respond to a loving God by reflecting his grace to
others. The last chapter of the Campolos’
book, the only one that they wrote together as father and son, Christian and
humanist, contains things that they agree on and notes that
“we human beings have always needed
and used stories to make sense of the world and find our place in it. If you want to touch somebody’s heart and
mind in a way that actually changes their life, you have to tell stories.”[4]
It may seem that there
aren’t too many stories about the Ten Commandments but here is one of them.
“As [Jesus] was setting out on a journey, a man
ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to
inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good
but God alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall
not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You
shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.” ’ He said to him,
‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’ Jesus, looking at
him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give
the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then
come, follow me.’ When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving,
for he had many possessions.” [Mark 10:17-22]
What God did that man
really follow, and why? And how about
the rest of us?
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