“Wonderful Words of Life” – Sermon on Oct 2, 2011
Oct 2, 2011
Scripture: Exodus 20
Then God spoke all these words: “I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery. You must not have any other god but me. You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. You must not misuse the name of the Lord your God. Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. Honor your father and mother. Then you will live a long, full life in the land the Lord your God is giving you. You must not murder. You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not testify falsely against your neighbor. You must not covet your neighbor’s house. You must not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female servant, ox or donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.
When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”
Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.”
Sermon: Wonderful Words of Life
by Rev. Doreen Oughton
The Book of Exodus tells the story of Moses and the people he led across the desert into the Promised Land. It starts with the Jewish people enslaved in Egypt, where they had fled famine generations before. Moses and his brother Aaron have been recruited by God to lead the people out, fulfilling the promises God had made to their spiritual ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that they would be fathers of a great nation, have descendants as plentiful as the stars in the sky. This fulfillment has been a long time coming. The Egyptian rulers had become increasingly brutal in their concern about the growing immigrant families. They began slaying Jewish children, instructing midwives to see that the sons did not survive their births. Indeed, Moses had only survived because his mother set him out on the river in a basket, where he was taken in by the Pharoah’s daughter. The labor required of the Jewish immigrant slaves was crippling, and the people cried out to their God to remember them. And so Moses was sent to demand their release from Pharaoh, and after a series of curses by God upon the Egyptians, Pharoah relented.
At this point in the story, the Israelites are not doing so well. They have been traveling through the desert for a long, long time. They have been quarreling with Moses, wondering why he has done this to them – taken them from their lives in Egypt where they at least had food and a place to sleep, out to the desert where each day’s meal and drink depended on the whim of God. No sign of any land of milk and honey in sight! They’ve tested God, finding that God did come through with manna, and when they complained about the lack of meat, with quail. They’ve endured battles with another group. Moses’ patience has been severely tried. But he is a true servant, and he continues to prod, cajole, encourage and help God’s people.
After all this, God calls Moses to come up Mt. Sinai to talk. The people knew what was happening because all the dramatic signs of an encounter with God were happening – thunder and lightning, thick cloud cover, trumpet blasts, smoke, shaking mountain tops. God signaled that this was a very important event. Through Moses, instructions were given for preparation and consecration of the people, priming them to be alert, to listen carefully. The people were warned not to get too close, but I don’t think Moses needed to worry. The people were glad to stay back. But I’m sure they were very attentive.
And Moses came back down to them to share the Word of God, or rather, the ten Words of God. He tells them that the first thing God spoke is the reminder that God has chosen them, that God acts and speaks as their God. God is establishing a covenant with them, a covenant begun in grace. Remember as you listen, God says, remember how I listened to your cries when you were groaning, remember how I have seen you through the desert, meeting all your needs. This seems important to me, this understanding of covenant versus contract. God did not say if you do x, y and z, then I will rescue you from bondage. God rescued them first, and led them to a land that was to be theirs. They were free, and God’s ten words were meant given to help them maintain that freedom, not to enslave them again. Bondage is no condition for God’s people to be in, but to be divinely bound, that is another thing altogether. The freedom God calls us to is not one of “anything goes,” or “do your own thing.” This freedom comes with boundaries, and I tell you, boundaries are not a bad thing.
In December 1989 there was a revolution in Communist Romania. There were street protests and violence, and finally dictator Nikolai Ceausescu was driven from power, then captured, tried and finally executed on December 25. In the period of the protests, from Dec. 16-22, 162 people were killed. From that time until a new political structure seized power, there were 942 deaths. As one woman told reporters, “We have freedom, but we don’t know what to do with it.” Such a statement about the human condition. And God knew it. God knew we need help to manage our freedom.
Now the God view of freedom, I’m pretty sure, is collective. It is for her people as a whole. God wants people to be free from enslavement and destruction, but wants them also to be free to thrive and create. God wants people to be free to re-bind themselves to this creative source of love. God wants them to be free to worship, to recall regularly who they are and to whom they belong – God. God wants to help them to create and nurture an alternative community, a community bound by loyalty to a loving, steadfast and trustworthy God. It is an alternative community, one not bound around common goals of wealth and prestige, which ultimately destroy and enslave. It is called to be a community where people can live fruitful, productive, and meaningful lives before God and with one another.
These commandments, while full of basic moral wisdom, are not meant to be a list of universal rules, all the world’s wisdom summarized on two stone tablets. They are sound guidelines, but they are so commonly violated in so many ways that it’s hard to believe they are the be all, end all. There are nuances, there are questions of discernment and situational concerns. The overall message of the commandments is about radical commitment to God and compassion for the neighbor. Could these blanket statements be less about proper behavior than about a people’s identity? Who were these people who followed Moses out of Egypt and across the desert? What was their relationship to God, to one another? This new community being formed in a new land is here called to have a character of deep love and loyalty to God that extends out to all, and it is a big deal. Huge.
As we consider the 10 commandments now we can ask the same questions. Who are we, people who gather in an alternative community to become the Body of Christ? What is our relationship to God and to one another? How do we show our loyalty to our loving, steadfast and trustworthy God? How can we be holy? How can we keep our freedom? If the answer is to truly worship God, we can learn more about what this means by paying attention to the commandments about that relationship. One mistake would be to worship a different God, a God that is not creative love, that is not about freedom and mercy and compassion.
Another mistake would be to worship an idol, something smaller than God, even made by God, confusing creation with creator. Our instincts and appetites, for example, are part of our human make up, created by God. But we sometimes make them our gods, we serve them rather than serve God. Or we don’t use them to serve God’s purpose for us, but exaggerate and distort them until we are again in bondage. Think addiction, greed, gluttony, the war machine.
Or we might we make gods of ourselves. If you think about the commandments about the Sabbath and honoring parents, you can see how they connect with this idea. If you think your work is so vital, so necessary, that you cannot stop and rest, you are making yourself too important. We need regular periods where we acknowledge that things are in God’s hands, not our own. And when we honor our parents, we acknowledge that we didn’t always exist, as God did. Our existence was contingent upon them. Without them there would be no us. Practicing gratitude for that truth, no matter what came after, is good practice for appreciating God as Creator. The remaining commandments, those that direct us on how to treat our neighbor, are predicated on getting the relationship with God right.
Sometimes Christians think of law as the old Word, surpassed or replaced by Christ as the new Word. It has been framed as a matter of grace versus law. But this is too simplistic and dishonors the importance of this epic moment in the spiritual history of Israel from which we all draw. It might be helpful to think of form and content. Laws give form to grace, and grace becomes the content of the law. It is like a cup of coffee. The cup without coffee is hard and empty. It triggers a thirst and reminds you that something is missing. On the other hand, coffee without a cup or some kind of container is impossible to take in. Likewise a strict and graceless adherence to the letter of the law is hard and more likely to fill us with longing than with satisfaction. But God’s grace can be an amorphous and abstract concept, no way for it to really have legs or hands and be lived out in a real way without the law. We are a people who have been granted bounded freedom, freedom with ties that bind us to one another and to this loving, steadfast and trustworthy God. And as we gather around Christ’s table to receive the Eucharist, may we be reminded that we exist as a community of gift in which both law and gospel are the good news of God.
