March 15 manuscript

Everyone these days has a mission statement. Every organization publishes their mission, sometimes their vision and values as well. Some are complicated statements that try to encapsulate everything the organization is about. Target’s is “to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and an exceptional guest experience by consistently fulfilling our Expect More. Pay Less.® brand promise.” Some are just a few words, not even a sentence, like Mount Olive Lutheran Church over on Chicago, “Musical, Liturgical, Welcoming.” My home congregation, Gift of Grace, is somewhere in between, “To invest our whole selves in lifting up Christ for our neighbors, inviting them more deeply into the life of God.”, but we also have a vision statement and a list of our deepest values to supplement it. I don’t know where the mania for mission statements came from. I suspect that it grew out of the corporate world, and I know it’s something that is touted in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” I even know someone who, after reading that book, developed a mission statement for her family.
I make fun of this practice, especially when it gets taken to extremes. I am suspicious of mission statements because I often see organizations whose mission is bound to profit or “success” in a monetary or political sense. And these days, who isn’t skeptical of things that come out of the corporate world. But I also see the value of it. Particularly when an organization is faced with difficult decisions, as they all are eventually, a mission statement, can act as a guidepost. It can be help leadership narrow the options, based on decisions that were made when people were calmer, not panicking. Having done the work ahead of time, having a clear understanding of what this organization or community thinks is most important when trouble is not on the horizon, can lead to better decisions down the road when things get hairy or confusing. One congregation, for instance, found themselves in a major conflict over how to spend a large gift. But once they looked at their mission statement, if became clear. They had stated their priorities clearly ahead of time. Of course, the problem is that for some people, the values or mission statement is going to be something along the lines of, “Take what you want, when you want,” or “Money makes the world go ‘round,” or “winning isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing.” The concern in these statements is not for the neighbor, but for success by the standards of politics or economics or popularity. For some, these are guiding principles in good times or bad. For most of us, these worldly standards of success become default positions from time to time, even when they stand against our better judgment.
Because God was and is aware of that tendency in us humans, God took the initiative, writing a mission statement for us; we find it over and over in the Old Testament. Jesus summed up the mission statements of the Old Testament by saying that we are to love God with all our heart and mind and strength, and that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. That is the concise version. In case you hear that and ask yourself, “What does it mean to love my neighbor as myself?” a more detailed version is found in today’s reading from Exodus. This is perhaps one of the most familiar passages in the Bible, maybe so familiar that you zoned out a bit while it was being read. You’ve heard it before; many of you can probably even recite it, along with Luther’s explanations of it from the Small Catechism.
We usually call these 17 verses the 10 Commandments. Yet the word “commandment” does not appear in this passage anywhere. In both Hebrew and Greek this passage is known as the 10 “Words,” not the 10 Commandments. These are the Word of God, God’s mission statement for us, God’s vision for how we are to live in community. This becomes even clearer if we dig more deeply into the Hebrew version of these words. In Hebrew there is no way to say “You shall not.” Or rather, “You shall not” is the same as “You will not.” Many scholars have made the argument that our traditional understanding of the 10 commandments, “you shall” and “you shall not,” is a mis-reading, a mis-translation. For example, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that this passage would be best translated this way. “I am the Lord your God. I brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Therefore, you will have no other gods, you will observe the Sabbath, you will not kill, you will not steal, and so on.” In other words, God begins with a flat-footed claim – this is God’s people. God has already proven God’s care and concern for this people by bringing them out of slavery. But God knows that this people can have no idea how to live together in freedom. And so God is giving them another demonstration of God’s love for them: a vision statement, a way of living together in community that will help them live life fully and well.
This is not to say that these 10 words are not law. They are, rather, the foundation of the law, the vision on which the law is based. They are the guidepost that points us toward how to understand and to live the law. They are God’s instruction on how to live in relationship with and for God, in relationship with and for our neighbor. The mistake that we so often make is that we apply the wisdom of the world to these words of God, this vision of God. We begin to believe that by following this we somehow earn relationship with God, earn God’s love, earn even our very salvation. But, as Paul says, God’s foolishness is wiser than the wisdom of the world. The foolishness of God turns our worldly wisdom on its head. The foolishness of God loves us before we even hear these words in Exodus, or any of the commandments of the law that follow them. The foolishness of God is that God is a fool for love, for relationship, for reconciliation. So much is God a fool for us, that God took these words, and made them flesh. Jesus, God’s Word made flesh, is another way that God shows us God’s vision for our lives. He is the incarnation of God’s mission statement, of God’s vision for our freedom, of God’s word. In Jesus’ life and in his death, he showed God’s concern for us, and he demonstrated abundant life, lived for the sake of our neighbor. God turned the wisdom of the world, the wisdom that would send a man to death on a cross for the sake of political convenience; God turned that wisdom around, chose the way of folly, and used it to overcome death, to overcome sin, to bring us to reconciliation.
We can still work on our mission statements, and we can still look at them as guides for our decisions. But let’s hope that they grow out of God’s foolishness, and not the world’s wisdom; out of our baptismal calling to love and serve our neighbor, not out of our desire to succeed according to the world’s financial and political standards. Christ Church Lutheran’s mission statement is about living out God’s vision as this particular community, in this particular place, at this particular time. We have seen where the world’s wisdom gets us, as our financial markets crumble and economic ruin threatens. Now is an opportunity for us to speak out, to hold God’s foolishness as the heart of our vision, and to ask what God is calling us to do in the face of such a crisis. We have the chance to act according to this grand vision for community, for relationship, for freedom from the world’s wisdom, that God has placed before us as the basis of all the law. And we do so, not in order to earn God’s love or our own salvation, but because God has first loved us, all the way to the point of foolishness.