“I am the Lord your God, who brought you
out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other
gods before me.” (Exodus 20:2-3)
I was talking the other day to a friend of
mine whom I’ll call “Lisa” (because that’s her name). She was telling me about
her college-age daughter. “I think she thinks she’s a Kardashian,” Lisa
said. “I can’t believe the things that
come out of her mouth.”
My friend was lamenting a certain smugness
and feeling of entitlement that she’s observed in the young. Personally, I’m
not that sure that entitlement is only the purview of millennials. There’s something
in our sinful nature which makes us all feel
rather smug and entitled. I think America has become something of a nation of
Kardashians—it’s so easy for us to take blessings for granted and, turning
upside down the situation in the Gospel lesson assigned for Lent 3, Year B
(John 2:13-22), turn the marketplace into our temple (v.16). We want to be
noticed, we want to be praised for our uniqueness (as if that’s our own doing),
and we want to enjoy the “good things” even if we don’t know what the “good
things” really are.
That’s why it’s good for us on our spiritual
journey to go back to the Covenant at Sinai (Exodus 20:1-17) which the Revised
Common Lectionary marries to this week’s Gospel reading. If you’ve been following
these blogposts, you’ll note that the theme which has been running through the
Hebrew Scripture lessons this Lent has been the theme of “covenant”—the mutual
promise between two parties. In this case, the parties are God and us. In the
previous Sundays in Lent we’ve encountered the Covenant with Noah (God
unconditionally promises NOT to destroy the earth—even though He says nothing
about letting us destroy it), and the
Covenant with Abraham (God promises to bless us to be a blessing to the world,
provided we have the faith to believe Him).
This week, on Lent 3, God seems to up the
stakes a little. Yet, if you think about it, the Covenant at Sinai (the Ten
Commandments) is not really a demand God puts on God’s people in order to bless
them. God already blessed the people when He gave them the Law. The Law was not
a precondition for God’s mercy. The Law is meant to be a response to that mercy.
(Donald Trump must despise God, don’t you
think? Since God turns out to be such a lousy deal-maker. I mean, what good
businessman makes such one-sided deals which benefit the other party? Who gives
away a benefit before asking for conditions of granting it? If God were a
contestant on The Apprentice, Trump would
fire him in a heartbeat!)
Indeed, all of us are recipients of
blessings too numerous to count. On our crappiest day we are still part of the
wonder of human existence, still able to feel the breeze, look to the stars,
fall in love, and smile at a child. For some, circumstances are dire;
nevertheless, for every victim of war, oppression, famine, or sickness God has
provided a heart with the desire to rescue, feed, or bring healing. God never
stops being good because we lose the ability to see the goodness or because human
sinfulness has rendered the ability to behave virtuously impossible.
And let’s not kid ourselves. Our obedience
to the Covenant at Sinai—weak, incomplete, and grudgingly given as it always is—doesn’t do God any favors. God
will be God with or without our compliance. Our obedience is meant to be
blessing to us. How satisfying to say, “God brought me out of the land of
Egypt. I really love him for that, and I’m going to try to rejoice in that blessing
by loving God and loving everybody else, too!”
Think about it: Has God brought you out of
the bondage of Egypt? What is your
Egypt? Is it an oppressive relationship? Fear of privation when you lost a job?
A medical emergency? The grief of loss over a loved one? Addiction to drugs or
alcohol? Fear for your family? Perhaps you’re still in Egypt or perhaps you’re
yet to go there. But it might just be that you have come through a sea of
painful emotion which, at the time, seemed like it would drown you.
But it didn’t.
So how do you respond?
I’m always puzzled by the thinking of the
compilers of the Revised Common Lectionary, and I often don’t know why they
pair certain Hebrew Scripture readings with certain Gospel readings. What do
the Ten Commandments have to do with Jesus cleansing the temple in John 2? Fortunately,
the good Lutherans at 1517 Media (formerly Augsburg Fortress) explain it in the
gloss in their weekly church bulletin inserts:
“…because
God alone has freed us from the powers that oppressed us, we are to let nothing
else claim first place in our lives. When Jesus throws the merchants out of the
temple, he is defending the worship of God alone and rejecting the ways
commerce and profit-making can become our Gods.”
Okay. I’ll go with that.
Thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment.
I love hearing from you!
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