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March 9, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Search for a Moral Center
A Series on the Ten Commandments:
"Habits That Keep Us Human"

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 25:1–10
Mark 1:9–15
Exodus 20:8–12

“Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. . . .
Honor your father and your mother,
so that your days may be long in the land
that the Lord your God is giving you.”

Exodus 20:8, 12 (NRSV)

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O holy God, by whose providence we are kept, we praise you for the constancy of your care. We know not what the future holds, but we know Jesus Christ and that of his kingdom there will be no end. Grant us strength and wisdom for the living of these days, to his glory, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Lent is a season set aside in the church for serious spiritual reflection on what it means to live as God’s people and to follow God’s path. On this first Sunday in Lent, we come to the second in a series of sermons at Fourth Presbyterian Church on the Ten Commandments, the great moral code that has mapped out the path to freedom for God’s people for thousands of years. Last week, we reflected on the meaning of the first three commandments: Always put God first. Never worship lesser gods. Do not use God’s name for your own selfish purposes or for purposes of magic. Today we come to the fourth and fifth commandments: remember the Sabbath day, and honor your parents. Next Sunday, with the reality of war immediately before us, the sermon will focus on the sixth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” The following two weeks, we will continue with the last four commandments. The series will end on March 30, which seems a long time away, almost as far away as spring seems to someone living in Chicago who comes from another part of the country!

I remember the story a Presbyterian minister friend of mine told about taking his family on vacation one spring break. The children were in the backseat of the car, and as the miles rolled by, they became more restless and impatient. One of his daughters kept asking, “How much longer? How much farther do we have to go? When are we going to get there?”

Finally my friend, though he is a Presbyterian minister known for his patience, lost it. He said, “Do not ask that question again. Do you understand? I do not want to hear it.”

There was silence for five or ten miles.

Then he heard a plaintive voice coming over the back of the seat: “Daddy, how old will I be when we get to the beach?”

You and I will be just about a month older when we come to the end of this sermon series and, I hope, a good bit wiser about how we, the beloved children of God, can live our lives to their fullest.

One of the most powerful moments in the Christian story occurs as Jesus emerges from the waters of his baptism. The Holy Spirit descends, and a voice from heaven is heard to say, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” If you remember nothing else about worship today, I hope you will remember that Jesus pleased God because of who God was and is. At this point, Jesus had done nothing. His ministry had not even begun; yet he was freely given the unconditional love and grace of God. It was that reality that empowered Jesus’ entire ministry, his faithful life, his sacrifice, his willingness to go all the way for God.

Was life easy for Jesus? Immediately after the moment of great clarity about his identity, he was taken off to the wilderness of temptation. “Temptation is whatever would distract us, or beguile us, or bully us off the path that God would have us take.” (1) If Jesus was susceptible to temptation, then there is no way in the world that you and I will ever be able to avoid it.

Today’s commandments address two temptations to which human beings are often subject. I can think of no more spiritually dangerous bully than the temptation to ignore the fourth commandment. “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.” I know it sounds to you like the most Harvey Milquetoast of all the commandments, but I want to challenge you to think of the fourth commandment as the pivotal one, the one on which everything hinges: our loyalty and devotion to God, and our commitment and responsibility to other people. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” If we do not engage in the discipline, the ritual, of being in the presence of God, we will become confused in our assumptions about how the world works and who makes the world go around.

I think of the artist from Asia who was commissioned by a Westerner to paint a picture. When the picture was complete, over in the left corner of the canvas was the branch of a blossoming cherry tree, and a small bird was perched upon a branch. The whole rest of the painting was a vast white space. The Westerner was very unhappy with the outcome. “Please fill up this canvas. That’s what I am paying you for!”

But the artist refused, saying, “Sir, if I do that, there will be no room for the bird to fly.”

How tempting it is to assume that we ourselves ought to take up all the room in the universe. How tempting it is to assume that there is no power other than our own power. How tempting not to allow room for the presence and work of God’s own Holy Spirit. Without time set aside to remember our place, we will forget to be humble, and to be human is to be humble in the presence of God. Every Sunday at Fourth Presbyterian Church, we have the ritual of reading a psalm. Today’s Twenty-fifth Psalm speaks of humility and reminds us of the goodness and faithfulness of God, who responds to the prayers even of sinners like us. God is willing to show us afresh the path to a righteous and whole life.

The fourth commandment is an antidote to pride, both personal and public. There is much talk afoot in our land about military might and moral righteousness. It seems to me that worship and Sabbath observance are crucial at a time like this so that we do not make the assumption that God and we are always on the same course. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways, sayeth the Lord,” in the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah.

Martin Marty has written the cover essay for this week’s Newsweek magazine (10 March 2003). In that essay, he expresses his hope that our current president will heed the example of a former president, Abraham Lincoln, who regularly sought God’s guidance during a terrible time of American history but was never afraid to acknowledge that “the Almighty has his own purposes.”

“Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy” so that there will be room in the human heart for humility before the God of all the nations, before the God of creation itself. The fourth commandment reviews the whole story of creation, the making of heaven, earth, the oceans, and then it tells us that God rested from the work that God had done. In the book of Genesis is the astonishing announcement that rest from work on the part of the Divine Creator was not something that happened after creation, but that on the seventh day, “God finished the work that God had done” (Genesis 2:3). The true completion of the Creator’s task and of all of our tasks is that of resting from the work of creation. That is indeed indispensable to the outcome and fulfillment of the task.

I think of stopping one evening at one of those take-out places to pick up dinner after a long day. There was a new person working at the cash register. She was having a hard time, struggling to add up my purchases. Toward the end of the transaction, she turned to her supervisor and said, “When do I get a break?”

The supervisor said, “We don’t take breaks here.”

How can we live without taking a break? We will cease to be human. The commandment says nonsense to working all the time. The commandment says, take your hand off the plow, turn your computer off, put the file back in the briefcase. (2) To a world that moves faster and faster, it says ridiculous. “There is more to life than increasing its speed,” said Ghandi.

I love the story, from the Jewish tradition, of a man who was running down the street. A rabbi hollered after him, “Why are you running?”

“I am running after my good fortune.”

“Silly man,” the teacher said, “your good fortune has been trying to catch up with you for years, but you have been running to fast to receive it.” (3)

The spiritual discipline of slowing down and letting your spirit catch up with your body, of letting God speak to you, has kept people human for thousands of years. I am not at all interested in Sabbatarianism or reinstituting laws about when stores can be open. I am saying we need time set aside regularly to remember that which is holy. Yes, it is a countercultural thing to do, to stop and think. If someone asks you an important question, and you are having trouble coming up with the answer, don’t you say to yourself, “Wait a minute, let me think?” It is only by being still that we can go deep into that which truly matters. (4)

Here is a spiritual discipline for you. One day a week, close that closet in your mind where you keep all your worries. One day a week, give the world a break from yourself. Here is an idea: have you considered for Lent setting aside one day out of seven in which you don’t buy a single thing? (5) Having one day a week where you do only that which is pleasurable? Order Chinese, put a flower in a vase, make love, play a game. I think of the wisdom of the writer of Ecclesiastes, “Better is one hand full of quietness than two hands full of toil, striving after the wind.”

Finally, let us look at the fifth commandment, with its admonition to honor our parents. Interestingly, this commandment was not addressed to little children who were supposed to be respectful of their mothers and fathers. It was addressed to adult children, reminding them of their responsibility to their parents for care if such care was needed. It is the only commandment in which the positive effects of obedience are mentioned. If you do this, “your days will be long in the land the Lord is giving you.” In other words, this commandment of generative love and concern lasts much longer than one’s own lifetime. Are there parents who are not worthy of honor? Of course. The point of honoring one’s parents is not that they deserve it, but that God has commanded it. It is what you do if you are a human being. No parent is perfect. I think of the thirty-five years now I have been a mother and all the things I regret and would change if I could. No one is perfect.

Here is another suggestion for Lenten discipline. If your father or your mother let you down when you were growing up, perhaps this season is the time to finally forgive them and give them permission to be imperfect. I think of the wisdom of Mark Twain, who wrote, “When I was sixteen, my father was just about the stupidest man I had ever seen, but by the time I was twenty-one, it was amazing how he had learned and grown in the past five years.”(6) Get some perspective on your parents. Remember that, at the very least, they gave you life, and be grateful for it. We do the right thing for others not because it is necessarily efficient or productive, but because this is the direction that moral people want to go. This is the path that God has told us is the path to the good.

I close with a difficult subject for those in the congregation who are perhaps reaching a time when you worry about being a burden on your own children. I remind you that we begin our lives entirely dependent upon the care we receive in our mother’s womb. To be human is to be needful at times of the love, help, and support of others. There is no such thing as what has been described as the “silver centrum myth”—that we will all spend our latter years until we are about 100 or 105 either going on a cruise or jogging around the lake. (7) We need to jog as long as we can, but for every human, the day comes when we cannot run, and sometimes cannot walk. To accept the love and care that others might give us with grace and dignity, perhaps this is the very best of all the human things.

So sisters and brothers in Christ, honor yourselves, and honor those who brought you up. Keep the Sabbath. Get some rest. Even as you strive to live the best life that you can, remember that it is by the grace of Christ, who lived and died and rose again, that we are saved.

Like a father you love us, O God. Like a mother you care for us. Deliver us from temptation, whatever temptation is nipping at our heels today. Allow us to live this day and always in joy and praise to you. Amen.

Notes
1. Austin Farrer, A Celebration of Gifts (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1970), as quoted by K.C. Ptomey Jr. in The Westminster Pulpit, 12 March 2000.
2. As suggested in Sabbath, Wayne Muller (Bantam Books, 1999).
3. Ibid, p. 48.
4. A similar point made in “Bring Back the Sabbath,” Judith Schulevitz, The New York Times Magazine, 2 March 2003, p. 53.
5. As suggested by Dorothy C. Bass, Practicing Our Faith (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1998).
6. As quoted by Albert C. Winn in A Christian Primer (Louisville, KY.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), p. 225.
7. Virginia Stern Owens, “What Shall We Do With Mother?,” Books and Culture. Reprinted in Best Christian Writing 2000, Wilson and Yancey, eds. San Francisco, p. 178.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church