3rd Sunday in Lent
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
I understand that the age of COVID saw a revival of interests in sea shanties. One commentator picked up on that. He took the shanty “What shall we do with the drunken sailor?” and made it “What shall we do with the Ten Commandments?” He points out that most people know about them but are not really interested in them.
If they do come up in public conversation, it’s usually a fight over where they can be posted, not how they should be fulfilled. They had to be removed from in front of an Alabama courthouse because they violated the separation of church and state, not because someone noticed the contradiction of posting the commandment to not kill in front of a courthouse that could sentence someone to death.
Today, in our series on covenants, I am glad we have a chance to take a closer look at the Ten Commandments.
By the way, a word about the numbering of those commandments. You might have noticed that the Jewish faith and various Christian denominations have different ways of numbering the individual commandments. This stems from the problem that God announces “ten words” to Moses, but then gives him more than ten. So some of them have to be bundled, and which ones get lumped together varies from faith group to faith group. Hence the variation in numbering.
When we think of the Ten Commandments, most of us think of them as law. After all, they are commandments. They stipulate how we are to behave. The fact that they so often get posted in public places underlines this attitude towards them: they are rules for good living. Thus, they have been secularized.
As I did my sermon research this week, I realized how important it is to see the commandments in their original context. First and foremost, that context is the relationship between God and people.
By the time God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, God has already been in relationship with the people for a very long time. The beginning chapters of the Book of Exodus tell us that God has seen the suffering of the Hebrew people; God cares about them and their miserable life as slaves in Egypt.
God has given Moses, and through him the Hebrews, the divine name; up until now God had always refused to give his name; now he reveals it as ‘Yahweh’.
God has gone to battle for the Hebrews. In a war of plagues, God proves to be stronger than Pharaoh, who finally has to let the Hebrew people go.
God has saved the Hebrews when they were trapped between the Egyptian army and the sea. In a powerful miracle, God splits the sea and rescues them all, bringing them safely to the other side.
God has provided food and water in the wilderness for the people. Daily he blesses them with manna. Repeatedly, God produces water for them, even out of a rock. God cares for their daily needs.
God has promised them a land of their own, where they will be able to live in blessed shalom: in peace and justice and freedom and wholeness and safety.
All this God has already done for the people by the time they get to Mount Sinai and receive the Ten Commandments as part of a covenant with God. These rules don’t come out of nowhere; they are part of an established relationship full of blessings. And the commandments don’t come from just anyone; they come from the God whose love and care the people have experienced repeatedly, including in a very powerful way just a few weeks prior.
That’s why God opens the giving of the Ten Commandments with these words: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” God begins by highlighting the relationship he already has with the people.
God doesn’t use the introduction we have heard so far in the Bible: I am the God of your ancestors Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And God doesn’t refer to his role and power as the creator of heaven and earth. Instead, God keeps this really personal and relevant to the people standing before him: ‘I am the God who has just set you free. You know me! I am that God who loves you and cares for you; who heard your cries and set you free; who guides you and feeds you every single day.’
It is this God personally known to the people who now gives them the Ten Commandments. God doesn’t even call them commandments or laws, he calls them ‘words’. These ten words are to shape the lives of the Hebrew people as they live in relationship with God and one another.
These ten words are a gift from a caring God. Think about the fact that these people have just escaped slavery. They and their ancestors for as back as they can remember have been slaves. Their Egyptian overlords regulated every single aspect of their lives, told them what to do and when to do it, where to live and how to work. Everything was regulated for them.
Now they are free. Nobody gives them order any more. That’s great! But none of them knows how to govern a people, either. That’s a problem.
I remember when the wall between East and West Germany came down three decades ago. The East German people lived under an autocratic regime. The government assigned everything from kindergarten places to jobs to doctors to retirement homes. Everything was restricted and regulated. The people chafed under such conditions.
Then the regime fell and the wall came down and the whole nation rejoiced in the newfound freedom. Before too long, however, East Germans were struggling. They never had to apply for a job. They had never owned property. They had never needed to choose between several political parties.
They were overwhelmed by this freedom and ill-equipped to handle it. Many fell prey to crooks or followed autocratic politicians. It was a rough transition.
The Hebrews around Mount Sinai are in a similar situation, a time of transition from being slaves ruled by others to being free persons with self-rule. God gives them the Ten Commandments to help them cope with the transition and live with their freedom.
Freedom is not anarchy. Very few people can thrive in anarchy. If you have ever been around children who were raised without any rules, you probably witnessed some very unhappy children; because of their wild behavior, they met rejection every which way and didn’t know why. The total absence of rules leads to chaos.
From the beginning of creation, God has fought against chaos. God is a God of order, because where there is order, there is safety and predictability and justice and peace. That’s what God wants for the Hebrews. That is why God gives them rules to live by.
Imagine living in a nation where everyone obeys the Ten Commandments all the time. Wouldn’t that be absolutely amazing? No more violence. No more theft. No more infidelity. No more jealousy. No more lying and rumors. All elders taken care of. How I would love to live among such a people!
That’s what God wants for his beloved children.
Now, God realizes that this is aspirational on his part. After all, God knows us. Ever since Adam and Eve, people have not done so well following God’s rules. However, God is unwilling to give up the vision. He is leading the people towards a Promised Land that is actual land, and towards the kingdom of God that is the blessed way of life in the presence of God.
God gives the people the Ten Commandments to show them how to live the blessed life before him; how to live as God’s people. God is their God, and they are God’s people, and that means something. The Ten Commandments reveal the character of God, and by following them, God’s people reveal God’s character to the world. Every time we pray ‘your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, we commit ourselves to living by God’s rules, enacting God’s will, making God’s kingdom become real in the world.
We do it in gratitude towards the God who has already blessed us in countless ways. We do it to reflect the covenant we have with God since the day of our baptism. We do it because it blesses both ourselves and our neighbors and communities to live according to God’s guidelines.
We do it because we discover that only in our covenant relationship with God can we find true freedom. Only when we put God first and give God authority over us, can we make truly free decisions that lead to life and blessings.
I will explain this truth by looking closer at the commandment to keep the sabbath.
When Moses first returns to Egypt to get his people out of slavery, he tries to organize the Hebrew overseers. Pharaoh sabotages this effort by giving the salves extra work. In Exodus 5:9 we read Pharaoh’s words, “Let heavier work be laid on them; then they will labor at it and pay no attention to deceptive words.” And it works. When Moses tries to relate God’s promise of liberation, they “would not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit.” (Ex 6:9) They are overworked, and they cannot think straight. Thus their toil and slavery continues.
We know that feeling of being breathless and overworked, right? And when we are stressed out, we can’t think straight. We can’t think creatively. We can’t think rationally. This makes us easy prey for rumors or angry rallying cries. Or it just makes us apathetic, without energy to do anything about our situation. In a way, we are captive.
God does not want his beloved children breathless and captive to bad ideas or false ideologies or damaging behavior patterns. Therefore, God institutes a day of rest for every man, women, and child. God wants us all to have the chance to catch our breath, rest our bodies, refresh our brains, feed our soul, and spend time with the God of our lives.
Then we are much better equipped to keep God as the main authority over our lives by which all other claims will be judged. We are better able to resist false ideas and to stand up for God’s rules for life. We will be better able to maintain our freedom in God by keeping God’s commandments.
Please give the Ten Commandments a closer look this Lenten season. Receive them as the guidelines for our covenant relationship with a loving and caring God. Trust them, follow them, believe that they will lead us towards shalom, towards the justice and safety and peace we all yearn for. Amen.