October 8: "The Law of Hope"

THE WORD IN SCRIPTURE  Exodus 20

THE WORD IN THE GOSPEL  Matthew 22:34-40

One of the Pharisees, a legal expert, tested Jesus. “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”

MESSAGE

Time for a pop quiz! How many of you know, by heart, the Ten Commandments? I’ll give you a minute to think about it, or jot them down. Then we’ll check our answers.

While you’re thinking, I’d like to offer some background to today’s reading from the book of Exodus. It’s three months after the Hebrews were liberated from slavery and had left the land of Egypt. They had started their long journey toward the land God had promised their ancestors. And now, they found themselves in the wilderness, at the base of a high and imposing mountain called Sinai.

A couple of days earlier, the people had watched Moses climb the mountain, where he experienced what we call a theophany – that’s an appearance of God that Moses could perceive and hear. God gave instructions to Moses and told him to relay those instructions to the people. So Moses came down off the mountain and told the people that this is what God had said:

“If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession. The whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”

When the people heard this, they said, “Everything God has spoken, we will do.” This is known as the Sinai covenant: the people would obey God and God would make them a holy people.

Three days later, the mountain was covered with thick clouds and thunder and lightning and smoke. And then God spoke to the people, laying out a set of conditions for the covenant. And those, of course, are what we all the Ten Commandments.

Time to check how well we know the commandments.

1. Do not have any other god before God.

2. Do not make yourself an idol.

3. Do not take the Lord's name in vain.

4. Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.

5. Honor your mother and father.

6. Do not murder.

7. Do not commit adultery.

8. Do not steal.

9. Do not testify or fear false witness against your neighbor.

10. Do not covet.

So, how did you do?

The Ten Commandments seem so simple and straight forward. They seem like very logical and rational ethical rules for ordering human society.

And yet, the commandments are somewhat controversial. In our country, there are ongoing debates about whether it’s appropriate or even legal to display the Ten Commandments in public places such as courthouses. Some people would argue that because the commandments form the ethical and moral basis for our legal system, it’s proper to display them. But others say that because the commandments are inherently religious, displaying them on government property violates the separation of Church and State.

Personally, I don’t think the commandments should be displayed in courthouses or other government areas, mainly because they don’t really represent the moral basis for our laws. For instance, the last time I checked, it was not against U.S. law to worship gods other than the God we worship, or to take the Lord’s name in vain, or to cheat on one’s spouse, or to covet, or lust after, things that belong to other people.

In fact, only three of the ten commandments are included in our set of laws: we have laws against stealing, killing, and giving false testimony (it’s called perjury). But as for the rest of the commandments, they don’t seem to have much influence on behavior in our society. There aren’t any legal consequences or criminal punishment for, say, watching football on Sunday instead of going to church (ha, ha) or for failing to honor one’s parents.

But the Ten Commandments are so much more than just “rules” that we must follow out of fear of criminal or divine punishment. I’d like to take a closer look at these commandments and what they meant to the people who first received them.

We need to remember that the Hebrew people to whom God gave these commandments had just been liberated from 400 years’ worth of captivity and slavery in Egypt – a place where the people had been used, exploited, and exposed to the abuses of a kingdom in which some people had value and others had little or none. Throughout their time of captivity, the Hebrews had not been able to become the kind of people God wanted them to be because they had not been free to govern themselves or make choices about how to live their lives. They had been at the mercy of the Egyptian system of morals and ethics, which were oppressive and unjust.

So here they were – newly liberated, in the wilderness at the foot of the great mountain. They were a people waiting to be gathered and formed and shaped into a people of God – their God, not any of the gods of Egypt. They didn’t quite know yet what life together as the people of God would look like. They didn’t know yet what God expected of them or how to order their communal life in a way that would be pleasing to God. They were nervous and anxious about their future.

But then God comes to them and offers them this list of commandments – clear, concise rules they were to follow in order to become the people God wanted them to be.

All they had to do was “keep calm and follow the rules,” and then God would be pleased, and they wouldn’t have to worry or suffer divine punishment.

I think that most people today understand the commandments simply as rules to be followed . . . or else. All those “You shall nots.” Rules that prescribe and demand our obedience, and that rely on our fear of punishment if we break them.

But God gave these commandments to the Hebrews – these recently freed captives, these people waiting in expectation for God to shape them into a holy nation – God gave them these commandments not so they would obey God out of fear, but so they would have a vision for a new kind of social order – a social order that was grounded in God’s own character. To the Hebrews, these commandments represented not just a set of rules to be followed; they also represented a self-revelation from God’s own self about how they should “practice” becoming people of God.

The commandments were God’s protest against the ways of life the Hebrews had known in Egypt, where some lives were valuable, and others were disposable. The commandments represented a revolutionary possibility in which the people and God were bound to each other in this extraordinary vision of a new way of living and being and thriving. The commandments were so much more than just rules; they were a source of hope and encouragement.

Of course, we know that the people start

ed breaking the commandments pretty much as soon as they got them, and people have been breaking them ever since. Just this past week, the commandment against killing was broken in a particularly shocking and appalling way.

But in the light of this and countless other examples of tragic commandment-breaking, we have a choice: we can either look at how the commandments are broken in so many ways in so many places by so many people, and become despondent over how much we as human beings have failed to obey the “rules.” Or, we can remember that God is full of grace and mercy, and is always faithful to the covenant to be our God and to help us become people of God, no matter what.

We can either view the commandments as something punitive and disciplinary, or we can see them as something full of potential and God’s covenantal promise.

We can see either them as a gauge of how far we fall short of God’s intentions, or we can see them as a ray of hope, as possibility, as a vision of what God still hopes for us.

I hope we can look at the Ten Commandments with the same sense of joy and gratitude as in the psalm that we read earlier:

“The commandments of the Lord are perfect and pure and right. They revive the soul, rejoice the heart, and enlighten the eyes. They are more desirable than fine gold, and sweeter than honey.”

Like the Hebrew people, we still aren’t sure what life as people of God really looks like in practice. We’re still learning, we’re nervous about the future, and we know we still have a lot of things to work out. And yet . . . we still wait with expectation for God to shape us into the people we were created to be. And we still have hope that when we follow God’s sweet commandments, when we let go of all those false gods that clamor for our attention, when we do our best to love and honor God, and when we treat others with respect and kindness, we will move ever closer to that beautiful vision of what we could be, of what the world could be.

The Ten Commandments really are that simple.

But, you know what? Jesus made it even simpler. When someone asked him which was the most important commandment, he said, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. And you must love your neighbor as you love yourself. All the Law depends on these two commands.”

Love God. Love others. Live into the vision with hope and expectation. That’s it! Amen.