It has been 3 months since Morgan, Vivienne, and I made the trek with all of our belongings to the little community of Freeman. Though we have had some time to get to know the area around Freeman well, we still have a lot to learn, a good amount of local wisdom to glean from all of you. In fact, just in the last couple of weeks, I showed my lack of local wisdom by taking a wrong turn off of old route 44 south on 440th Avenue, thinking that I was headed toward the portion of 282nd street, on which the Koerners and Waltners live. I was simply trying to pick up a copy of our winter bible study booklet for our next Wednesday evening gathering, but I never made it there. As I am sure all of you who have a good amount of this deep local wisdom would know, after 1 mile south of old 44, 440th Avenue is not maintained, so as I continued driving south, the road got slippery and mucky because the top inch or two of mud and gravel was thawing while the portion of the road beneath it was still frozen. Well, in case I haven’t embarrassed myself enough, I drove all the way down that second mile to the waterhole that makes up the intersection of 282nd and 440th. After I worked my way out backwards from this mucky moment at the intersection, I turned around and tried to get back, finding out that in these conditions, I was not going to make it out of the valley created by Turkey Ridge Creek. So there I was, sitting on the side of the hill, thirty feet from the crest, hoping and praying that if I could just creep up a little farther, my little Volkswagon Jetta would get me out of this mess. Mud and gravel were caked into all of my wheel wells and splattered along both sides of the car, what would soon dry and become signs and symbols of my mistaken sense of direction. With my ego having taken a hefty blow, I called Todd Koerner, who was already wondering what was taking me so long, and I explained that I had headed south on the first rather than the second mile to get to his home. He knew exactly where I was, and asked me if he needed to bring a tractor or his pick-up truck. You know that you really went down the wrong way when a local farmer asks if he needs to bring out a tractor to pull your 4-door sedan from the muddy center of an unmaintained road. I apologized profusely for my ignorance and arrogance; Todd was gracious enough to come pull me out with his pick-up truck. If my ego were not already covered in mud, Todd unintentionally buried it as far down in the mud as it would go. Todd brought the bible study booklet along with him, a sign that neither of us was terribly confident that I was yet going to make it to his house. After pulling me that 30 feet to the crest of the hill, I thanked him countless times and headed back to my office as he headed back to the farm tasks that I had so rudely interrupted. Now, Todd said that he wouldn’t tell anyone if I didn’t want the ensuing embarrassment, but I decided it was just better to get it out in the open and face the laughs and heckling at my expense. I duly deserve it.
Deep wisdom, our Lenten topic for this morning, is the third in our series “Deep and True.” As we come to the 1-year anniversary of our continued struggle with COVID-19, we have asked ourselves how the last year as brought clarity to our lives. What have you seen, heard, or experienced to be the deepest and truest parts of our existence? Two weeks ago, I explored God’s desire for deep relationship with us and all of creation. If anything has been highlighted in the past year, deep, authentic relationship leads to thriving and flourishing people and church. Last week, I reflected on one of the core attributes of relationship: deep commitment. Our commitments keep us in the game even when it feels like it’s not worth it. We look to God, who models relationship and commitment for us in his covenants with Noah and Abraham.
This morning, we think deeply and truly about wisdom. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and even the prophets of the Hebrew testament all agree that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, that awe of God brings insight to our lives. I have heard lots of sermons about standing in awe of God as creator and sustainer of this universe, of seeking God out and obeying God’s commands as wisdom, but I do not remember the connection being made by teachers and pastors in my past between these sayings in Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets and the moment that we read about in Exodus 20. In Exodus 20 verse 20, God has just finished speaking the ten words or commandments and accompanied those words with thunder, lightning, a trumpet’s sound, and smoke. Moses tells the people that the Lord has come to put the fear of him upon them as his covenant people. So when we correlate fear of God and wisdom, we must immediately remember this story, the people at the foot of the mountain before the God that called them out of Egypt into covenant relationship. Freedom from slavery, freedom into covenant.
Deep wisdom comes out of this formative experience, in which God calls a community of people to relationship with him and each other. The same thing happens when we choose to follow Jesus. Committing to God also means that you are committing to a living and organic community called the church, not the building, the people. Because of the hyper-individualism of our present culture, we struggle sometimes to show those who join God’s family that commitment to God and neighbor are intertwined in the messy body of Christ, the church.
Since Noah and the cataclysmic flood, God has known that brokenness and sin still plague all of creation. Also, God has promised that he will never attempt to eradicate sin again by allowing the chaotic power of water to destroy most of the created world. As I said before in my sermon about relationship, it is almost as if God realizes that healing human brokenness is going to require more than punishment, so God befriends and formally promises to stick alongside a particular family, the family of Abraham, continued on through his miraculous son Isaac. But since that last covenant in Genesis 17, a lot has happened. Israel had been enslaved in Egypt because of the famine that had forced Isaac’s son Jacob and his family many years earlier to move where they would not starve. God, then, calls this particular family again. This time though, their captivity in slavery requires God to show his power over Pharaoh’s empire and his providence in calling a leader that will mobilize the enslaved toward freedom. God uses Moses to lead the people from the oppressive burden of Egyptian labor into the wilderness, where God reveals his plans for them. At the foot of the mountain, the people hear and see God’s power all over again as they had in the 10 plagues in Egypt. Yahweh, the God that called Moses and led the people as a pillar of fire and cloud inspires the people’s dread. With the fear, awe, and memory of all that has brought them to this moment, the people hear from the Lord, who gives them instructions for what a life-giving community looks like even in the midst of brokenness.
Rather than thinking that these ten words that God gives to this new people are merely rules to follow, we must remember that God has been watching humans hurt each other and struggle to control their impulses for a long time. A flood didn’t fix the problem, so God tries a different tactic by relating to a specific group of people and showing them what right living and relating can look like between God, creation, and them. Deep wisdom at its core then is those actions and teachings that guide us in creating wholesome and hope-filled communities. When I read these 10 words, these 10 commandments, I think of them as warnings to all people of those actions that guarantee to disrupt, if not destroy, the life of a community and lead to at their worst, the death of its people. It is almost as if God tells humans in this moment that rather than destroying humans as punishment as he did in the flood, God is going to give them the warnings up front, the actions and thoughts to avoid so that when death comes, the people can begin to notice the direct connections between their actions and the terrible consequences that follow.
Let’s look at these ten warnings, these ten words, these ten commandments. The first four are focused on the community’s relationship with God. First, the community shall have no other gods, no divided loyalties. God says I have called you and committed to you, so no other gods can come between us. In the ancient world, every people group had their particular gods and mythologies that attempted to tell the story of humanity. Often, a community that won its battles, protected its land, fed its people, and sustained itself was thought to be in the right with the most powerful gods backing them up, while nations that could not do these things must have served powerless gods.
The same is true today when people correlate good experiences with God’s blessing and bad experiences with God’s punishment. Suddenly, having a good job or a house or a lot of land to farm or a large cattle operation can make us think that such a person has God on their side. We then tend to emulate that person, whether or not they are right. God tells his people, no matter what happens, I am still here. You will be tempted to begin worshipping other gods because it seems like they are more powerful than I am, but they are not. In the second commandment, God tells this new people to be true to who they are as Gods’ image-bearers. Do not try to make an idol, an image that you think I, as your God look like. You do not get to show the world what I look like by carving wood or molding metal. I have already shown the world what I look like by creating you, so do not sell yourself short. Inanimate objects have no power. You are my image-bearers so act in the world as I do with hope, love, and commitment.
In the third commandment, God’s deep wisdom is illuminated in people’s attempts to interpret God’s actions or invoke God’s name as though they know better than God does. Do not misuse my name or profane my name by saying something that you think I would or claiming my name as a miracle card that will get you what you want. Just because I am committed to you as my people does not mean that you will tell me what to do or that you will be able to interpret the world around you in whatever way that you want. As we talked about in Bible Study this past Wednesday, God is not a soda machine. God says to ancient Israel and to us, I am not you, but you are connected intimately to who I am. Your broken and selfish and self-centered ways of working in the world are not my ways so be careful not to make me look too much like you.
In the fourth commandment, God reminds the people that their need for value and purpose in this world is not based on their wealth or ability to accomplish particular levels of security. God is telling them to trust him, even when taking a day off may seems like the most unwise or wasteful action possible. In addition for employers, the purpose was to give rest to all of the parties involved, including the soil, the animals, the field workers, and the household servants. Current research even suggests that our bodies function on a 7-day sleep schedule, in which one can catch up on sleep lost during a 7-day period, but once beyond those 7 days, loss of sleep leads to significant health problems over long periods of time. What is even more interesting is that the command to take Sabbath has its rationale in the creation story, in God’s working story. God creates for 6 days and then rests on the seventh, so as his image-bearers in this world, we imitate God’s model of rest and work. Sabbath requires contentment, being satisfied with enough rather than more. It is being content with the bread that I need for today rather than seeking out ways to secure enough bread for the rest of my life at the expense of those who already struggle to get their daily bread. Think back a few chapters in Exodus to the manna that God provided for the people in the wilderness. Do we trust God for our daily manna?
In the fifth through 9th warnings, the focus shifts from relating to God to relating to each other. Honoring parents reminds the arrogant young of the community that a significant amount of wisdom resides in the experience of the elders of the community. As a younger person, sometimes I do get frustrated when I think that my idea is better than those who have more life experience than I do, but I also remember that experiences mold and shape us into the people that we are. We must always remind ourselves to keep telling and listening to the stories that make up our community, especially those stories that have profoundly affected our worldview.
In the next four commands, we hear the wisdom of observing human brokenness. When I read these, I wonder if, after years and years and years of watching human beings hurt each other, God is calling out to the creatures that bear his image to think more creatively about ways of resolving conflict and working alongside their neighbors. When things get bad, do not take another person’s life, do not find someone else to replace your spouse, do not lie or gossip or make up ways to discredit your neighbors, and do not take someone else’s property. The first four commands are ways of working against these last four actions before they even happen. But when people are at their worst, at least refrain from these worst responses.
Finally, in case you had thought that you were blameless on these ten warnings, look at your desire and your motives. What was between you and God and concretely between you and your neighbor has suddenly changed to looking directly at your heart. Your thoughts and desires and affections and motivations matter because they may or may not become the above actions. So finally, be content with what you have and where you are. Do not covet anything or anyone that belongs to your neighbor. Be content with enough.
When I started this sermon with driving down a muddy road, I thought that such a story oversimplified wisdom, but I was wrong. Deep wisdom prevents us from turning down the wrong road. It helps us realize when the road that we’re on is slippery and mucky, which leads us to repent of our distorted motives and affections. Finally, deep wisdom gives us the insight to admit when we are stuck in the wet hole of our brokenness. It calls us to look sincerely and redemptively at our lives and our communities. We learn and absorb this deep wisdom through the scriptures, especially the life of Jesus, but also through the collective experience of God’s family, the church. If I would have looked again at Todd’s address, noticed the warning signs of a muddy road, and called Todd before I went down that road, I could have avoided being stuck, but we are taught in our ultra-individualistic culture that doing so appears weak, stupid, or incompetent. But deep wisdom is revealed in those moments of humility, rather than arrogance, of listening, rather than assuming, of trusting, rather than anxious self-preservation. Deep wisdom gives us the strength to lean on our neighbors and on God when the world seems to be shifting beneath us. Deep wisdom disrupts our comfortable present and draws us into transformative and life-giving relationship.
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