Chris Taylor’s Sermon –10/5/08
The Law and Life
Exodus 20:1-20
I want to thank to so many of you for all the cards, and prayers, and food this past week. Bonnie and I felt enveloped by the love of our church family. What a blessing! My recovery from the bike accident is progressing nicely. If you’ve traveled Fox Chapel Road the last couple of days you may have noticed that the County has now placed the Chris Taylor Memorial Cone over the sewer grate that caused the accident. They’ve assured me the grate itself is going to be replaced. And as you might expect, I’ve picked up quite a few new nicknames this past week, names such as “Wheels, E-Z Rider, Bike-Man, and Lance Armstrong.” I had it coming…
Even without bike accidents and trips to the hospital, there’s been a lot of shaking going on these last couple of weeks. We are in the midst of an historic and very exciting election for President of the United States. At the same time, there is this incredible crisis going on with our economy. Wednesday night, investor Warren Buffet called it an economic Pearl Harbor. It is unlike anything he has ever seen before. He compared it to a great athlete lying on the floor in cardiac arrest.
The fall of that athlete has impacted almost every one of us, and its repercussions have been felt around the world. Many of us first became aware of the sub-prime crisis some eighteen months ago, back in April of 2007, with the fall of New Century Financial. Yet as recently as September of that year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was still hovering at a very healthy 14,000.
What a difference a year makes. Who would have thought that the sub-prime crisis would ultimately affect so many different segments of our economy? Or that we would see the fall of so many giants – from Bear Stearns to AIG; from Lehman Brothers to Washington Mutual?
Last Monday the Wall Street Journal shared the story of a man named Al DiTullio. He is a realtor on the other side of the state, just west of Philadelphia in Drexel Hill. He is 40, a widower, and the father of an eight-year-old daughter. His business, of course, has been hammered by the real estate melt down. On top of that, however, he had invested in companies like Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. Now he’s struggling to cover his daughter’s tuition and his upcoming mortgage payment. He’s trying to withdraw $51,000 in savings to help out.
“I am in dire circumstance,” DiTullio is quoted as saying, “and nobody seems to care or be able to help.” He’s hardly alone. The same day his story came out Congress refused to pass the bailout. Wachovia filed for bankruptcy. The market dropped 777 points, and $1.2 trillion dollars in assets were lost.
Millions of Americans have watched the value of our homes plummet, and their investments deteriorate. Pension funds have been hit. Companies are struggling to raise capital. Some of us are in a very similar situation to Grace Pace; 72 years old and completely dependent on her investment income. A third of that income was coming from Wachovia. While Wells Fargo’s offer of $7 a share certainly beats the alternative, that is still an 80% drop in Wachovia’s value from the beginning of this year.
So where do we turn? Where are we going to find some hope and some encouragement in a time like this?
We find it, I would suggest, in the same place that the people of Israel did in their journey through the wilderness. Consider their circumstances. They are in the desert, mid-way between Egypt on the one side and the Promised Land on the other. What do they have? They have absolutely nothing: none of the things that you and I take for granted; none of those things that we would think are essential to survival.
They don’t have homes. They left their homes back in Egypt. At best they’ve got simple tents to offer some shelter from the wind, and sand, and unrelenting Sun. There are no city walls behind which they can safely gather at night. There is no standing army. No place to plant their crops or barns in which to store a reassuring surplus.
Everything that they had counted on, in other words, has been stripped away. Where are they going to get their food? Where are they going to find water? They have nothing. They can’t possibly provide for themselves. All they have is God. But here is the great lesson that wilderness experience taught them: having God is all they need.
Here in our text they arrive, now, at the base of Mt. Sinai. It is a decisive moment. God is preparing them for life in the Promised Land. And it is here that God offers them those Ten Commandments that we call the Decalogue.
We usually associate the Ten Commandments with a series of prohibitions: “you shall not…, you shall not…, you shall not…” Indeed, eight of the ten are negative – telling us what we shouldn’t do. But to conclude as a result that the commandments or that this life of faith is all about what we have to give up or all about what we don’t do, is to get it all wrong.
I mentioned earlier that cone which has now has been placed over the sewer grate where I fell. In some ways that cone is like the commandments: in showing us where not to go it keeps us on the right path – the path that offers life.
A few weeks ago I was driving up from Washington, D.C. – on that section between the Maryland line and Breezewood. There is a lot of road-work going on there, and in one extended section the right lane has been torn out in preparation for being repaved. As a result, there is a six or eight inch drop between the left lane and the right. Road crews have placed cones between the two.
I hit that section at night, and it was raining pretty hard which made it difficult to see. People were in a hurry and pushing me from behind, so I was relieved when the cones finally stopped, opening up the right lane once more. I began to ease in. Suddenly the whole right side of my car dropped down, and the car itself began to bounce violently around. The road hadn’t been fixed at all. The pavement was still stripped away, and I found myself smashing in to these strange steel circles that were scattered around the right lane. Unable to pull back to the left because of the six inch ridge that separated the two lanes, I finally pulled over to the right and came to a stop.
I found out later that a tractor trailer had lost control in that section and had wiped out all the cones. The strange steel circles were the weights that had once formed the base of the cones. The absence of those cones had almost proved disastrous.
The commandments are like those cones. They are there as a warning. They are intended as a gift and blessing. In showing us where not to go, they keep our eyes focused where they need to be: on the good road, the road that’s going to help us get safely and successfully to our destination.
As the people of Israel discovered, just because we worship God that doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be some struggles and setbacks that come our way. Bad things do happen. It is part of the world in which we live. But what they also found is that precisely because God is still our God, even in those times when it feels like everything else has been stripped away God is still there; God is still very much at work; and knowing this God is ultimately all that we need. What they found, again and again, is that God is enough.
That’s what these commandments do. They turn our eyes back towards God. They remind us where we find life, and where we don’t. The life of faith isn’t all about prohibitions and what we shouldn’t do. We don’t focus on the cones when we are driving, or on the areas they set apart. The life of faith, rather, is all about that joy and hope and comfort that we find as we turn our eyes back towards the Lord. And what we find is that God is good. What we find is that no matter what our circumstances, and no matter what storms might come our way, knowing this God is all we really need. Everything else can be stripped away, but God will always be enough.
The Wall Street Journal, “At Reserve, Some Cash Is Still Hard to Pull Out,” September 29, 2008. C1
The Wall Street Journal, “Loyalty Pays a Bitter Dividend,” October 1, 2008, A1