The Law and the Land: Part One

"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 20:1-2

"[Jesus] is God himself coming into the very depths of human existence for the sole purpose of striking off the chains of slavery, thereby freeing man from ungodly principalities and powers that hinder his relationship with God." -James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 1968

So, I've been thinking. We all have. We've been thinking about Baltimore. About racism. About inequality, not just here, but across the country.

I've been thinking, and trying to be careful not to speak outside my realm of experience--I didn't grow up here, and even if I had, there's a good chance I would only have experienced one of what a colleague of mine called the "two Baltimores", historically divided both by race and by income--so I've tried to do a lot more listening than talking. I think that's a good policy for anybody, but especially for middle-class white guys like myself, it's a necessity right about now, if we're even going to start the process of changing a broken system.

As a Christian, part of my listening process is listening for God's voice: in scripture, in prayer, in the voices of my brothers and sisters in Christ. So as I've been listening, I've been wondering if God might have something relevant to say to us in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17). It's an interfaith text: it's from the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, held sacred by both Jews and Christians. It's a text on which we Lutherans, as grace-focused as we are, have committed to do a lot of study. When we baptize kids, we promise to teach it to them. Luther wrote a short household book about them, meant to be taught by parents to their children, which in recent times many Christian families have "outsourced" to pastors, gathered around pizza with middle-school aged kids. It's the text that some Christians insist should be displayed in every courtroom across the land. So, as we listen to these words from God, I think they can and do have something to say about our "rules of engagement" in talking about inequality and systemic racism.

The First Commandment actually isn't a commandment at all. In fact, in Judaism, the first "word" of the ten is, "I am the Lord your God." This is a proper name: what we read in English as "the Lord" is the word YHWH, in Hebrew, "I am who I am", or, "I will be who I will be". It could be viewed as a deliberate dodge on God's part, when Moses asks God's name, as if to say, "You don't get to pin me down like that. I am who I am, and I'll be who I'll be." Except that, unlike when YHWH first calls to Moses from the burning bush, the Israelites already know at least one thing about YHWH--that YHWH has brought them out of the land of Egypt. That they are free people now, and that is YHWH's doing. Whoever else YHWH is, YHWH is the one who chose to liberate this nation of people from slavery. That is how God chooses to introduce God's self. The preamble to any other laws to be set forth. Setting people free is central to God's identity. I kind of wonder if that's on all these plaques some Christians want hanging above judges' heads.

And then we get to the Commandment itself: "You shall have no other gods before me." And if you ever were a squirmy middle-schooler in a Sunday School classroom, you probably know that this does not just mean you're off the hook if you don't have an incense burner and a statue of Baal or Zeus in your locker. It means, as Luther says, "We should fear, love and trust in God above all things." And then, if you're around my age, you probably did some sort of collage of magazine photos of various different stuff that can become your "god", like sports, friends, video games, money, etc...

But coming back to this as an adult, something rings true here: there are a lot of really important things about our who we are as a people that still have to take the back seat to God. Stuff that defines us as Americans. Stuff that many of our fellow Americans have lived and died for. Our rights. Our liberties. Our freedoms. Our constitution--which, though a very important document, and which I celebrate as a gift from God, was not divinely inspired. Capitalism and free enterprise. Hard work. Justice. Paying your way. This stuff is a big part of the American identity. But it's not divine. It's not God. It's not the one who freed the Israelites from slavery, and it's not the one who took on flesh and took our sin to the cross. And therefore, we can not put our ultimate trust in any of those things, and still call ourselves people of God.


Please understand, everything I just listed (and probably more that you can think of) can be a way that God's blessing is known and shared with people in our time and place in history. But they need to be held separate from God. They need to be looked at in God's light. We need to ask the question--especially when 20% of Americans own 85% of the wealth, while the working poor in Baltimore are getting targeted first for water shut-offs--"how might YHWH feel about this? Would the God who split open the sea to lead a nation from slavery to freedom, feel totally fine with the kind of wage-slavery that exists in some parts of our country?"


Short summary: God liberates. And American culture is not God.


And if you really think about it, that's actually some pretty darn good news, because to look around the world as it is, and think that what you see is God's best hope for humankind, would be a depressing thing indeed.