Freed to Serve

Exodus 20.1-3 and Mark 10.17-22

A Sermon Preached by Dave Shull

September 25, 2005

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

“‘So Snape was offering to help him? He was definitely offering to help him?’

‘If you ask that once more,’ said Harry, ‘I’m going to stick this sprout--’

‘I’m only checking!’ said Ron. They were standing alone at The Burrow’s kitchen sink, peeling a mountain of sprouts for Mrs. Weasley. Snow was drifting past the window in front of them” (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, London: Bloomsbury, 2005, p. 306).

If you have never read any of the Harry Potter stories, this dialogue makes absolutely no sense to you. Who is Snape? Who are Harry and Ron? Who is Mrs. Weasley? And what in the world is ‘The Burrows’?

And even if you’ve read the first five Harry Potter books, and you know who all of these people are – and The Burrows is where the Weasleys live – this dialogue still doesn’t make much sense. Because you don’t know who the him is that Professor Snape is offering to help. And you don’t know why you should care.

Please take out your pew Bible and open it to the book of Exodus on page 66. You’ll have to share with your pew-mate.

This conversation between Harry and Ron is found right in the middle of the most recent Harry Potter book.

The conversation between God and the Hebrew people in which God speaks the ten commandments is found right in the middle of the book of Exodus. If you look, Exodus has 40 chapters. The ten commandments are right in the middle, in chapter 20. And just like Harry Potter, if we haven’t read the 19 chapters leading up to this point, we don’t know what’s happened so far, or who God is talking to, or why we should care.

In the first 19 chapters of Exodus, God summons Moses and says, “You don’t know me, but you and I are headed to Egypt to convince a tyrant named Pharaoh to free his slaves, who I find myself loving more and more every day.” It’s an amazing story of plagues, hardened hearts, a sea that parts, an enemy destroyed, dancing and singing the praises of the God who had heard the anguished cries of a people for freedom and joined forces with a murderer named Moses to liberate them. It’s an amazing story.

It’s here in chapter 20 that the writers who put the book of Exodus together do an outrageous thing. They connect the liberation from slavery to the ten commandments. And they say both acts grow out of God’s profound love for this people. Throughout the first 19 chapters of Exodus, God has been proclaiming, “Let my people go so they can serve me” (Ex. 5.1; 7.16; 8.1, 20; 9.1, 13; Ex. 7.16; 8.1; 9.1, 13; 10.3; in Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation and Obedience, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, p. 145).

Now, finally, the writers tell us how liberated Israel is to serve God. God is going to speak the ten commandments. But not as a punishment. The commandments assure Israel God loves her. They are proof that God has made a special relationship with this people. And God expects Israel to respond to this sign of Her love with glad and grateful hearts. This compassionate, powerful God has claimed them. And shown them how to be Her people: Remember I brought you out of slavery, says God, so have no other gods before me. Then, freed to serve me in love, you can create communities grounded in dignity and care for one another.

Aware of what has gone before, we can read these commandments in the 20^th chapter of Exodus and know why we should care. The gift of the commandments is the action of a loving parent who proclaims, “My children. I give you these words so you will make wise decisions, bless this world with kindness, and know no matter what you do, I will always love you.”

Thinking about the 10 commandments as a sign of God’s love reminds me of a Mad magazine cartoon I saw years ago. Jack and Charlie, two teen-age boys, are playing pinball. Charlie looks at his watch and says, “I gotta go. My parents said I absolutely have to be home by ten.” Jack says, “Man, I feel sorry for you. My parents told me I could stay out as long as I wanted.” As Charlie hurries off, Jack puts another quarter in the pinball machine and says to himself, “I wish I had parents like his.”

As we sit here long after God freed Israel and gave her the commandments, how do we, like Jack, receive them and be grateful to have such a loving God as a parent? How do we open ourselves to receiving the love and the call of this compassionate, powerful God?

I agree with an Old Testament scholar who says the best way to make the Bible real for us is to put ourselves into the story and spend time there. We spend time in the world he story creates and experience life there. What is the world the story makes real? What’s different when you become a slave in Egypt? When God and Moses appear, and suddenly you are free from the tyranny of Pharaoh’s empire, what is freedom like? When you realize God has freed you because God loves you like you’ve never been loved before, what is born within you? When you come back to this world from the world of the biblical story, what do you notice? Which world is more like God’s dream for this world? Which world do you want to live in?

This past week, I tried to put myself in the world of Exodus. I worked under Pharaoh and heard the cries of my companions and my own cries. I experienced this awesome God freeing me. I imagined giving God’s love back to Him and sharing it with this world.

And I remembered Shawn.

It was the summer of 1981. Barely having time to change from my college graduation gown to my tee-shirt and shorts, I drove to New Hampshire to start my summer job. I was going to be a counselor at a residential camp for children with emotional disturbances. One of the boys in my cabin was Shawn.

His build, accent, and attitudes reminded me of a pre-adolescent Archie Bunker. The only thing I remember about his background is that, a couple years before, Shawn’s dad got mad at him and twisted his arm until it broke.

So Shawn was angry. As a ten-year-old, his vocabulary contained swear words I never knew existed. He was always losing privileges because he couldn’t control his mouth or his fists.

One evening, during the fifth week of this six-week summer camp, Shawn once again lost his temper at a meal. During our orientation, we’d learned that mealtimes were incredibly stressful, anxious times for these kids. One of the most popular ways for parents to punish kids is to send them to bed without supper. And these kids had been deprived of a lot of meals. They often lost control of themselves around mealtimes. It was really hard for these kids to trust that we would always make sure they had enough to eat, no matter how many rules they broke.

Even though he’d had five weeks of camp and knew he’d never go hungry, Shawn often couldn’t keep it together at meals. One evening at dinner he whacked the boy next to him. I immediately jumped out of my seat, pulled Shawn up from his, and escorted him out of the dining hall, so everyone was safe and so we could figure out why he’d been violent.

But Shawn was not in the mood to talk about his feelings. He was as agitated as I’d ever seen him. After he punched me in the stomach, I immediately laid down on top of him, which was the way we were trained to restrain kids who were too strong for us to restrain in the normal way. He tried to bite me and hit me. He told me how much he hated me.

After he’d used up his repertoire of insults, there was a moment of silence. I said, “Shawn. Nothing you say or do is going to keep me from loving you.” I didn’t expect the response I got. He redoubled his efforts to bite, scratch, hit, and knee me. He screamed curses at me. I don’t know how long that went on. Eventually, he wore himself out. His body relaxed. I began to release one part of his body at a time, to make sure he could control himself. Eventually he was able to sit calmly. So we sat for a while. I don’t think either of us said anything.

The dining hall had emptied long ago. Shawn and I went into the kitchen to make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and see what there was for dessert.

The next week, our last week at camp, Shawn kept control of himself well enough to earn a special treat of his choosing. So one morning, he and his friend Billy and I rowed out onto the lake at dawn. We fished and had breakfast. I still have a photograph of that morning. Standing on Blueberry Island, with his arm around Billy, Shawn looks like he’s king of the world. Something in him has discovered the world can be a kind place. And the only response he can make is to risk loving it back.

That summer, Shawn lived in a different world, and his life was changed. This compassionate, powerful God who wants Her children to feel loved delivered Shawn from slavery to his demons that summer. God used all of us counselors and campers – and I am convinced God also worked beyond and in spite of us – to free Shawn and others at that camp from the forces holding them in slavery. And though I’m sure he was not fully healed, Shawn had been freed. Not freed to do whatever he wanted to. That kind of freedom had convinced Shawn’s father it was okay to break his arm. Liberated for a moment from his slavery, Shawn was free to live in liberated obedience to the boundaries the camp had created. He received the camp’s 10 commandments not as a burden, but as a gift that ensures safety, predictability, compassion, and the possibilities for a new world. A gift that showed him such boundaries were our way of saying, “We love you.”

That is how God wants us to be as His children. God wants us to feel His love and to love in return. God wants us to hear the commandments as signs of an extravagant love that proclaims, “My children. I give you these words so you will make wise decisions, bless this world with kindness, and know no matter what you do, I will always love you.”

May it be so. Amen.