In
the name of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
When I saw that this would be our reading this
morning, I was both delighted and apprehensive. There is such a depth to this
passage from Exodus, it is a sort of a preacher’s playground. But anytime such
a familiar passage is read, it can be quite the challenge because we all have
so many assumptions about the text. And this is perhaps most true for the Ten
Commandments. You can find them on plaques and they are often memorized in
Confirmation classes. We often read them a list of ten rules, divorced from
their context and their meaning. And in that process, we lose the beauty of
these ten words from God.
While a fine sermon could be preached by going
through the commandments one at a time to better understand them, this morning
I’d like to consider them as a whole. I might be giving away my political
leanings by saying this, but you’re going to figure them out eventually anyway.
I enjoy watching the political satire program hosted by Stephen Colbert. A few
years ago, he was interviewing Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, who was fighting
to have the Ten Commandments displayed in the US Capitol building. Colbert
interviewed him and asked him “you can’t think of any better place to display
the Ten Commandments?” Westmoreland said that he couldn’t. So Colbert put him
on the spot and asked him to name them. Immediately, he had the look on his
face of a student who forgot to study for a test. He came up with “don’t lie,
don’t cheat, don’t steal” before he had to admit that he couldn’t name them.
And this isn’t to poke fun at a politician, but rather is the perfect example
of what happens when we dislocate a Biblical text from the Bible- all meaning
is lost.
The way we use the Ten Commandments today actually
violates the Commandments themselves. God says that we are not to have any
idols, but isn’t that exactly what we do when we want to enshrine them in our
schools and courthouses? We make them into a graven image. Consider the fact
that, as far as we know, Israel never displayed the Ten Commandments anywhere.
They were not inscribed in the Temple; in fact, the tablets on which Moses
wrote them were hidden away in the Ark of the Covenant. The place that the Ten
Commandments were supposed to be on display was in the people of God. The world
was to see a group of people who did not practice idolatry, who rested on the
Sabbath, who didn’t steal or kill and know “these must be that group of people
who worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
First and foremost, the Ten Commandments are about
identity. The Hebrew people were liberated from slavery in Egypt and were
journeying through the wilderness to the Promised Land. But it had been a long
time since they had known freedom or been able to worship God on their own
terms. In a culture that placed so much emphasis on origins and lineage, being
a homeless people was confusing. And they were not too clear on exactly what
this God of theirs was all about, or how to relate to God. So Moses goes up the
mountain to ask “so God, are you into contemporary worship, or would you prefer
a high church liturgy?” And God says “you listen to me, I am the Lord your God,
I brought you out of slavery in Egypt, I paid for you. You are mine.” And then
God gives, not a list of rules, but rather an identity to the people.
I know that our reading this morning had a lot of
“you shall not’s” in it, but’s not a faithful translation of the text. Martin
Luther once said that when God speaks to us, that God uses baby talk. There
aren’t explanations or debates. And that is the form of what God says to Moses,
he says “you respect your parents, you no kill, you no cheat on your spouse,
you no steal” and so on. This is what it means to be liberated by God, this is
what it means to be the people of God, that you have this identity. These
aren’t rules to follow, but instead an identity to claim. When Jesus summarized
the Law, he said “you love God and you love your neighbor.”
Some of you may be familiar with the idea of a Rule
of Life. These are a set practices that are often used by those in religious
orders to pattern their lives to accord with their faith. Rules of Life might
include daily prayers, service to others, and giving thanks before bed for all
the blessings of the day. These aren’t rules to follow in the sense that they
are optional or can be broken. The speed limit is a rule, but as we all know,
it is easily and often ignored. But Rules of Life are more descriptive than
they are prescriptive. They do not tell us what to do, but rather they shape
who we seek to be. If you want to be a prayerful person, you must pray. If you
want to be in good physical shape, you must exercise. If you want to be a good
parent, you must love your child. There is no getting around this. And in this way, the Ten Commandments are given, not as rules to follow, but as a Rule of
Life that will shape the people into the holy people of God.
St. Ambrose once said that the Church is like the
moon, in that it has no light of its own, but exists only to reflect the light
of Christ to a dark world. The Ten Commandments help to frame what this looks
like. And while I would not support reading them as a list of do’s and don’ts,
the intention is that we actually do and don’t do what they say. One of the
greatest ethical theologians of the 20th century, John Howard Yoder,
once told a story about being asked to write for a collection of essays
on the Ten Commandments. He was asked to write on “do not kill,” and he says
that he was so relieved to get such a simple Commandment. And he ended up
writing a two paragraph paper for a very well-known religious journal.
It is a reminder that these Commandments are
actually really simple to understand. I remember in seminary, when I took a
course in Christian Ethics, that we spent several lectures talking about
euthanasia, Just War theory, and the death penalty, and all of the complexities
of those ethical debates. But, at least the way I read it, God pretty clearly
says “you don’t kill.” I would consider myself a scholar, and I really enjoy
diving into the Biblical text and looking at all the different nuances of it.
But when we do so, it becomes rather easy keep these Commandments at an arm’s
length and convince ourselves that they no longer apply. But we are the people
of God, and this is what it means to be the beloved and redeemed people of God.
Not only do the Ten Commandments shape us and give
us our identity, but they also unite us to God. In the Gospel reading today, a
landowner plants a vineyard. The landowner put the vineyard in the trust of
some tenants, who kill a slave who comes to collect the crops. A larger group of slaves
then comes to insist on getting some produce, and the wicked tenants kill them.
Finally, the landowner sends his son. The tenants plot to kill him saying “if we
kill him, there will be no heir and the land will be ours.” Matthew then notes
that the Scribes and Pharisees are able to read between the lines and realize
that this parable is being told against them.
What is interesting to me about this parable is the
assumption that the tenants make- that if they kill the son, that the land will
become theirs. The law wasn’t quite that simple. In the Ancient Near East, if
the heir died, the land would only become the property of the tenants if the
landowner does not come back to claim the land. These wicked tenants assumed
that the landowner was a sucker who didn’t really care about the land. The
fatal assumption made by the tenants was that the landowner no longer was
interested or active. But Jesus notes, the Kingdom will be given to those who
work in vineyard to bring forth fruit. God may well provide the land, the
seeds, the rain, and the sun to nurture the crops, but laborers are still
needed for there to be a harvest. There must be a relationship between the
landowner, the land, and the laborers for this to work out. In the Resurrection
of Jesus, we most definitively see that God will not abandon the people or
forsake their relationship. Those who assumed that the landowner would not come
back to claim the land were wrong.
Our God is a god of relationship. God will not
abandon us or write us off. And this reality is what we see in the Ten
Commandments. God did not bring the Hebrew people out of Egypt to turn them
loose, but to bring salvation to the world through them.
It is also worth pointing out that the way the Ten
Commandments are introduced is very important to understanding them. God speaks
to Moses- “I am the Lord your
God.” What follows is the response to that reality. Consider the depth of that
statement- “I am the Lord your
God.” I am the One who created the world and all that is in it. I am the One
who made you and brought you forth from your mother’s womb. I am the One who
liberated you from Egypt. I am the One who blesses you. I am the One in whom
you live, and move, and have your being. I am the One in whom you will rest for
all eternity. Therefore, you no worship other gods, you keep the Sabbath, you no
covet your neighbor’s property.
God so deeply and profoundly loves us that the only
fitting response to such love is to do our best to return that love. St.
Augustine once said “love God, then do as you please.” And, in a very
simplistic way, that is what the Ten Commandments are all about. You have been
loved, so therefore love God, love your neighbor, love yourself.
The Ten Commandments are about the formation of a
people, the nation of Israel. God desires good for them, and provides these
Commandments not as burdensome rules, but as boundaries to their freedom so
that they might follow the path which leads to life instead of death. Though
when we often hear about the Ten Commandments today, it is in the context of a
debate about politics and religion, they are meant to be displayed in our lives
as a part of our identity as the beloved and liberated people of God. Jesus
tells a parable, reminding us that God has not abandoned God’s people. The Lord is our God, let us respond by
practicing the Ten Commandments and showing the world the transformative power
of love. Amen.
