Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent
02/20/05
St. Luke’s Church
“Breaking the Law”
I was caught breaking the law
last year.
I’d like to tell you
that it was a bum rap,
but in fact I
was caught dead to rights.
The trooper who pulled me over on
Route 60 didn’t have to tell me why.
I was traveling faster
than the speed limit,
and faster than
the 5-10 mph cushion usually allowed by the police.
And so one evening I found myself
with a group of other law breakers,
bored and embarrassed,
in the Town of Charlotte Court,
waiting to
learn my fate.
I had not planned to go to court,
but the officer who
wrote my ticket encouraged me.
“If you show
up, you can get this reduced,” he said.
“But
I’m guilty,” I said.
“Just go,” he said. And so I did.
I found out, as a result, just
how the Town of Charlotte makes its revenue.
They write a lot of
tickets.
Then they
encourage people to show up and plea bargain.
The
reduced violation doesn’t affect your insurance,
but the fine stays the same.
As far as I know, this incident
has not turned me into a hardened criminal.
I still consider myself
a law-abiding citizen,
scrupulously
law abiding.
But I
have to admit I am not perfect.
I have committed this and (don’t
be shocked) other traffic violations in the past.
And, when you consider
the thousands upon thousands
of federal,
state and local laws that apply to me,
I have
probably violated some of them as well,
without even knowing it.
If my eternal judgment depended
on having a perfectly clean record,
I would be in trouble.
So would almost
all of us.
The Bible has a great deal to say
about the Law.
God gave the law to his
people in the 10 commandments
and the rest of
the 613 commandments contained in the Torah,
the
first five books of the Old Testament.
The law was a sign of the
covenant, the special relationship
that the Hebrews had
with their God,
and keeping
them, all of them, was a sacred duty.
The law of God had many things to
commend it.
It was simple,
straightforward and thorough.
It covered
every aspect of life
and
gave people clear guidance and direction.
There was just one problem—it
wasn’t working.
God intended this law to
bring his people closer to him,
to give them a
way to become righteous.
Instead the law drove them
further away.
Despite the best efforts
of generations of prophets,
people found it
impossible to be obedient to these laws.
Like me, they would try to do
their best,
yet eventually they
would fall short, slip up,
and there they
would be,
back
in town court, facing the music.
Fortunately for them and for us,
God did not give up.
He still wanted a closer
relationship with us.
Instead of
condemning us all for breaking his law,
God
decided to try a different approach.
Righteousness, he decided, would
be based
not on obedience to the
law,
but instead on
faith.
Over the years many people have
told me
that they see a
different God
in the Old and
New Testaments.
The Old Testament God, they say,
is all about wrath and anger,
while the New Testament
God is a God of mercy and love.
That’s
absolutely wrong.
What’s different is not God,
but rather God’s
approach.
And this new approach is the key
to understanding the whole New Testament,
from the teachings of
Jesus to the writings of St. Paul.
Paul, in fact,
finds this new understanding even in the Old Testament.
Abraham, he says, was not
righteous because he obeyed the law;
he was righteous because
he trusted God.
The same is
true of Noah, and of every great figure in the Bible.
My Lenten discipline is to
finally read the Purpose Driven Life,
and to write a daily
journal about it in my web log, or BLOG, for short.
If you’re
interested, you can read my entries.
There’s a link on our church website.
Yesterday I wrote about chapter
nine,
in which Rick Warren
discusses the faith of Noah.
Noah’s faith
saved the human race,
and
Warren uses him as an example of obedience to God.
But like nearly all of the great
figures of the Bible, Noah had his flaws.
After the Flood, as soon
as he got out of the ark,
he shocked and
shamed his family by getting drunk.
Abraham was the father of many
nations, the ancestor of our faith,
but on several occasions
he too fell short of perfection.
Remarkably the
Bible includes these unflattering stories.
I think this is intentional.
Because as great as
these Biblical heroes were,
their works,
their actions, did not save them.
Like
you and me they fell short of perfection.
Like you and me they needed God’s
forgiveness, God’s grace, God’s mercy.
Like you and me they
were saved by their faith.
So we come today to the famous
story of Jesus and Nicodemus.
Nicodemus was a leading
Pharisee,
and the
Pharisees were the group most obsessed with the law.
Nicodemus was attracted to Jesus,
to his teaching and his miracles.
But he was still
convinced that the law would save him.
Like most Jews
of his time, religion for him
meant
obeying those 613 commandments.
Jesus rebuked Nicodemus with the
most famous verse in the Bible—John 3:16:
“God so loved the world
that he gave his only Son,
so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish,
but
have eternal life.”
And just in case Nicodemus didn’t
get the point, he added,
“God did not send me
here to condemn the world [through the law],
but to save it
through [faith in] me.”
Jesus was not advocating breaking
the Ten Commandments, or any commandments.
But he was warning
Nicodemus
that if his
spiritual life was based on law,
it was
already dead.
The law, said Paul, ultimately
leads us to wrath
and to a false sense of
self-righteousness,
while faith
leads us to a living relationship
with
the living God.
Having faith does not mean,
however, that we become lawless and out of control.
True faith will always
take us further than the law.
True faith is
for those who have been born from above,
who
have a living relationship with God through the Spirit.
They don’t have to read a book to
know what’s right.
They don’t have to
memorize laws;
God has written
his covenant on their hearts.
They don’t do the minimum that
the law requires.
They go the extra mile
out of love and gratitude.
They turn the
other cheek, give their last two cents,
they
forgive 77 times, they love their enemies.
They refuse to keep score,
to be trapped in a
prison of legalism.
Instead they
are set free by faith
to
love God and each other not because they have to,
but because they want to.
And that fellowship of faith is
called the church.
It is open to everyone
who wants a relationship with God in Christ,
all those who
know that their righteousness
depends not on how good they are,
but instead on how good God is.
