In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
God has a great plan for your life. That’s the gist of the modern-day heresy known as the “prosperity gospel.” You can find many books on the topic in the Christian “self-help” section of bookstores or you can watch this message preached on television. The claim goes something like this: God will bless you with health and wealth if you have faith and give money to the church. This is a heresy because it confuses humans for God and makes grace something that is earned. So if the phrase “God has a great plan for your life” makes you uneasy, that’s a good thing. But we can’t get around the fact that it’s true – God does have a great plan for your life.
God’s plan for your life might not be about houses, good parking spots, or being cancer-free, though some so-called preachers might promise you that. God’s plan isn’t quite so specific, it’s not as if God has your life mapped out for you – what jobs you will have, who you will marry, what house you will buy. No, God’s great plan for your life is bigger than that. God’s plan for your life is that you love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and that you love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a great plan that will lead you into peace and purpose. It won’t always be an easy plan to follow, but it is the plan that God has for each of us.
And what does that plan look like? You don’t worship other gods. You don’t take God’s name in vain. You keep the Sabbath. You don’t kill. You honor your marriage vows. You don’t steal. You tell the truth. You respect your parents. God’s plan for your life looks a lot like the Ten Commandments.
You’ll recall that over the past several weeks, our first readings have all been coming from Exodus. The Hebrew people were enslaved in Egypt. And God heard their cry and liberated them from slavery under Pharaoh. They passed through dry land across the Red Sea and are now on their journey towards the Promised Land. Israel had been enslaved for so long though, they had forgot what freedom was really all about. So God wants to remind them what it means to be free.
It’s a lesson we could stand to learn from as well. We think of ourselves as citizens of the “land of the free,” but do we really know what it means to be free? Freedom isn’t about having the ability to do whatever you want. Those of you who are married know this to be true. In a marriage, you simply can’t do whatever you want. And all joking aside, a good and healthy marriage would never be described as “slavery” or following rules. Rather, many couples would say that their relationship gives them joy, and friendship, and is the only place that they can truly be themselves. That is what freedom is – it’s not being the master of your domain, it’s not the ability to act without consequence; no, freedom is the gift that allows us to live the abundant life which God intends for us all. Freedom isn’t about having unlimited options, rather freedom is about being able to commit to what matters most.
One scholar has said that at the Red Sea, God took Israel out of Egypt, and on Mount Sinai, with the giving of the Ten Commandments, God took Egypt out of Israel. God has brought the people out of slavery, and intends for them to thrive in this freedom. It’s not so much that the Ten Commandments are rules as much as they are wisdom. It’s like when I teach my daughter to look both ways before crossing the street. Is it a rule? I guess you can call it that, but it’s not about legalism, it’s about keeping her safe. This is what the Ten Commandments are.
God knows that we are vulnerable to chaos, and the commandments are intended to order our lives around God’s peace and love. Just look at our political system, look at Las Vegas, look at climate change. Our world is full of chaos because we regularly break all of these commandments and things are out of order. We have a propensity for self-destructive habits. Later in the Old Testament, the prophet Hosea says that it is because the people have broken the commandments that drought and famine have come upon the land. It’s not about punishment, but rather as consequence. Sin and chaos distort our relationships, we put our focus on the wrong things, and so certainly calamity follows.
Let’s take just a brief look at what these commandments actually say. The first is that “You shall have no other gods before me.” I wish we still believed in other gods. Today, when people ask “Do you believe in God,” the only response is “Yes” or “No.” No one responds with “Which god are you asking about?” Israel knew there were other gods out there, and this commandment isn’t about pretending there is only one god, it’s about not having any other gods before the Lord who brought them out of slavery in Egypt.
What is a god other than a force that is larger than us, around which we structure our lives? If that’s a working definition of a god, then money is most certainly a god that we put before the Lord. So is work, so is reputation, so is being right. These are gods, and there’s nothing healthy or helpful about denying that. This commandment though reminds us that things are going to get out of order if we chase after these other gods. None of us are free of all attachments and the first commandment reminds us that God has brought us out of slavery, not to serve other masters, but to find our fullest freedom in God.
Next is “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” This isn’t a prohibition against having God depicted in art, though it’s been misinterpreted that way throughout history. Rather, what’s key to this commandment is the “for yourself” part. God is not here to serve us, so we ought not to turn the God who created us, redeemed us, and sustains into an idol that we use for our purposes. The thing about idols is that they are static. But the Lord is a living and breathing God, not something that can ever be pinned down into an image for ourselves. Chaos comes when we think we’ve got God figured out enough to cast in bronze.
The commandment about the Lord’s name is a warning about what we associate with God’s name. Similar to the previous commandment, God is not something to be trivialized or used for our own purposes. The name of the Lord is a powerful one, not to be used lightly, not to be used in cursing each other. Anytime we become too comfortable with a word, it becomes domesticated and loses its grandeur. The day that the name of the Lord ceases to make us quake with awe and wonder is the day that we forget the natural order of things, which will lead to chaos.
The Sabbath has been called “a sanctuary in time” and is often seen as a bridge between the first three commandments, which are focused on our relationship with God, and the latter six which are focused on our neighbors. Sabbath is so important because it acknowledges that our salvation isn’t dependent on our work. But Sabbath is about more than simply having a day of rest – it is an incredibly egalitarian commandment that applies to all people – CEOs, janitors, children, even animals. And today, we might even say that automated manufacturing and drones should stop for a day.
Certainly, we need rest and the Sabbath commands us to have a holy rhythm of rest, worship, and work in our lives. But the Sabbath is about more than our rest, it’s also about resistance. The Sabbath reminds us that God, not the economy, is where we get our sustenance. Human economics is full of death-wielding chaos and commodification, but it’s also a necessity in human society. But for one day a week, we opt-out of this economy of death, of this practice of putting a price tag on everything, of measuring production and wealth. And as we practice the Sabbath, not only do we find much needed rest for our souls, but we also remind ourselves that God’s economy matters more than our own.
These next six commandments tell us that we need boundaries in our human relationships. We must respect our tradition, life, marriage, property, and truth. In honoring our parents, we remember that we are contingent beings who didn’t choose to create ourselves, but are members of a society. This commandment comes with a healthy dose of humility.
The commandment about stealing tells us that damage will be done when all we do is try to acquire more and more. The same is true for the commandment about coveting. The chaos of ingratitude, of jealous, of striving for the wrong things will infect our hearts and society if we’re always worried about getting more.
The commandment to not kill is often debated, as people like to parse out what exactly that means. Even the translation that we heard today renders it as “murder,” which is different than the broader “killing.” However we want to tease this out, what is clear is that life belongs to God. God is the only one who can grant us life, so God ought to be the only who takes life.
The meaning of marriage has changed dramatically over the past 2,500 years, but what remains is that marriage is a sacred relationship. If we can not respect the boundaries of marriage, then we have little hope in respecting the boundaries of any relationship.
The meaning of marriage has changed dramatically over the past 2,500 years, but what remains is that marriage is a sacred relationship. If we can not respect the boundaries of marriage, then we have little hope in respecting the boundaries of any relationship.
Truth telling is crucial to living in God’s plan for us instead of chaos. Words are not simply something to be thrown away, but words are powerful and we get into trouble when we forget this. When God created the world, God spoke. Words can start wars, just look at where we are with North Korea. Words can save, think of when some hears “I love you.” Words have great power, and when we misuse them, disorder follows.
You can see, these commandments aren’t rules to follow, they don’t tell us how to act. Rather, the Ten Commandments tell us who we are. We are the people of God, and these commandments remind us of that. They remind us how we are to be in this world, as people who are loved and liberated by God. The Ten Commandments are not burdensome laws, but rather they are a gift that shapes our lives, so that our joy might be complete.
And these commandments also reveal something about God. They tell us that God fiercely loves us because God wants us to experience the abundance of life that is intended for us. God trusts use our freedom responsibly.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that the challenge for the church is to preach these commandments with the same conviction with which it proclaims “Your sins are forgiven” or “God is love.” Can we proclaim to ourselves and the world that God has a plan for us, a plan of loving God and neighbor? Often, we run from these commandments because we read them as threats. Or we see them as rules to bend. Or we are self-deceived enough to think that we can order the world better than God has.
God has a claim on us. The Ten Commandments are God saying “I made you. I brought you out of slavery. I put my name on you people. And I didn’t do that to have you running off with other gods and living in chaos. I want you to have joy and peace, and you’re not going to get those things if you’re working yourself to death, if you’re serving other gods, if you’re killing each other, if you’re disrespecting your parents, if you’re fooling around with other people’s spouses, if you’re lying, cheating, and stealing.” God has given us a holy order by which to live and find joy, abundance, and peace, and to ignore this divine order is to bring about chaos in our lives and world.
The question is can we reclaim the Ten Commandments as being central in our lives, society, and faith? Can they be more than something we fight about putting up in courthouses? Can we talk about how to structure our communities and families around the Ten Commandments, not with shame or threats, but with compassion and mercy? Can the Ten Commandments be seen not as burdensome laws that restrict freedom, but as gracious blessings that allow us to thrive? Can we follow this great plan that God has given for our lives?
