Help us, gracious Lord, to walk in the path of your love. Amen.
There was a notoriously callous businessman who said “One day, I intend to go to Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments, just as Moses did.” Reportedly, Mark Twain responded, “We would all much prefer that you stayed here and kept them.” And that’s the tension with these ten sayings that God gives to Moses – we hold them in high esteem, and that’s about it. You’ve all heard of the fights about putting plaques of these up in schools and courthouses – but when a child cheats on a test, rarely does the detention slip read “Breaking the 8th commandment and stealing answers” nor does a judge ever dismiss a divorce case and say “The defendant violated the 7th commandment against adultery and this case is now over.” When given the chance to put these words into practice, many fall short. And even when it comes to knowing the content of these supposedly central tenets of our faith, one survey found that Americans are more likely to be able to name the ingredients of a Big Mac than they are to list the Ten Commandments.
My hope in this sermon is not that you be able to list all ten, but I do hope that maybe we’ll think about them differently. Names matter. If we call these the Ten Commandments, we’ve already begun to interpret them – commandments are rules to follow. But Scripture doesn’t refer to these as commandments. Rather, they are a part of the Torah, which means teaching. Instead of calling these the Ten Commandments, we would do better to call them the Ten Teachings, or the Ten Words, as they are often referred to in Judaism.
Reading these as commandments turns them into things we do or not, things we feel bad about ignoring, a measuring stick that we will often come up short against, another burden to worry about. But these words are not rules or regulations given by a demanding God. No, they are gracious teachings intended to lead us into abundance and flourishing. These teachings help us to more fully love God, our neighbor, and ourselves, which puts us in alignment with the God who is love. Through these ten words, God teaches us about a life worth living.
And it all begins with the statement: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” God does not say “I saved you and now you owe me and have to play by my rules.” No, these words begin with God reminding the people that they are in relationship with God. It’s not “I am the LORD” but “I am the LORD your God;” not “I’m in charge, so obey me,” but “I’m the one who chose you, loves you to the end, saved you, and brought you into freedom, and I want nothing more than for you to thrive in this freedom.”
Which begs the very important question around which the rest of the Old Testament orbits – what is freedom all about? As Americans, we’re probably more obsessed with freedom than even these newly liberated Hebrew people. And just like them, we misunderstand and misapply our freedom with the result that we end up being enslaved by the very idea of freedom. Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. And if that’s the definition we want to go with, we’ll never be free. I am not free to live in the 18th century. I am not free to be 6 feet tall. I am not free to have the sun rise in the west and set in the east. And I’m not even free to change my interests or thoughts – sure, I can change my habits, but I can’t control my thoughts and passions. I can do my best not to act on impulses and desires, but I’m not free to choose not to have them. Freedom, some might say, is merely the illusion of control in a world that is mostly uncontrollable.
Biblically speaking, freedom is not about being able to do whatever we want, rather freedom is about being able to live as God intends. Freedom is about being free from the restraints that prevent us from knowing, loving, and serving God. This is especially the case when one of those restraints is our warped view of freedom and choice. If we think that freedom is about being able to pursue our desires then we end up chasing something with as much substance as the mist. And what we chase after is typically not good, healthy, or holy, leading us to be enslaved to some other image or ideal, which is called an “idol” in the second of the teachings God gives us. Instead of freedom being something that we possess and use for our own distorted purposes, we would do well to understand freedom as the liberation that we are given by God to live as the creatures we were made to be. These Ten Teachings are intended to usher us into that sense of liberation.
These teachings come in chapter 20 of Exodus – so fairly early in the story. The people have been liberated from Egypt, fed with manna in the wilderness, and given water from a rock, and that’s it. They have not entered the Promised Land, they have not been given any instructions on how to build the Temple. We might read this as God taking care of things in order – they need to get out of Egypt and they need to be kept alive, and the very next order of business is that they need to be taught what the shape of freedom looks like. Without understanding how to enjoy and use this liberation, we will quickly end up enslaved to something else.
There’s a story that comes out of 1989 Romania, just after there was an uprising there in which the president had been ousted, the people felt a sense of being freed from the oppression they were under. But when a reporter asked someone on the street about the situation, the person responded with a truth not only about the situation on the ground, but the human predicament: “We have freedom, but we don’t know what to do with it.”
Total freedom is just another way of saying anarchy and relativism. Total freedom in the way that we usually mean it means there is no such thing as truth and there can be no order. That sort of freedom run amok, which so many in our country seem to want, is just chaos by another name. Chaos is that which God brings order to in Creation, so for us to reject order in favor of freedom is to reject God. Really, it might be best for us, as people of faith, to strike the word “freedom” from our vocabulary because we so often misunderstand it. Instead, we can speak of “liberation,” which makes it clear that someone else has done the liberating and that the liberation has a purpose and a direction, instead of being the utter chaos of everyone-after-their-own-desires sort of freedom that we so often idolize.
So before the people arrive in a new land, before they set up cities, governments, and a Temple, before they establish rituals, norms, and customs, God wants to give a shape to their liberation so that it is directed towards true freedom which is found only by serving and being aligned to God. This is the purpose of the Ten Teachings. Again, they’re not arbitrary rules, or good advice, or helpful hints for better living – they are the shape of true freedom.
The first three are concerned with not trivializing or ignoring God. We are to not follow other gods, which could be things like power, prestige, wealth, or any other marker of success. Even good things can become false gods – family, vocation, serving those in need – these things are gifts from God, yes, but they cannot function as our God. Nor are we to make an idol of God, including “anything that is in heaven above.” Meaning that theology and religion can easily become false gods. When it comes to God, anytime we have more answers than questions, more certainty than mystery, we end up following a god of our own making instead of the God who has liberated us. Nor are we to use God’s name wrongly, meaning for our own purposes. We don’t invoke God’s name because we want God to be on our side, rather we ask the question of whether or not we are oriented towards God’s ways or our own.
These are the first three teachings because if we are not in right relationship with God everything else falls apart quickly. Imagine a solar system with no sun – nothing can hold together without that center that gives light, warmth, and mass. True freedom is about realizing that we orbit around God, not that we get to choose our own paths or energy.
The fourth teaching is about not making gods of ourselves. The teaching to rest is about having time dedicated to God, and, just as importantly, it is about the recognition that we have been liberated and we do not serve anyone else. Anyone or anything that demands all seven days of our week is a false god, and we will end up serving that person, idea, or thing. Not to mention, just as we need sleep to be our healthiest, we also need sabbath rest to flourish as God intends.
The final six teachings are about our relationships with our neighbors, recognizing that because we are not god, there are limits and boundaries that we should not transgress. The teaching about honoring our parents isn’t about nominating them for a parent-of-the-year award. Some parents are lousy. This isn’t a commandment about treating them nicely anyway, it’s a teaching about recognizing that we are contingent beings – that none of us created ourselves, none of us give ourselves an inheritance, none of us get to choose who we are. We receive our being as a gift, and that’s what the fifth teaching points us towards. If we forget that, and are so deluded as to think that we are the masters of our own lives, then there’s no way to be in a healthy relationship with others.
As for the rest of these teachings, again, if we give into our desires when it comes to vengeance, lust, possessions, wealth, or reputation, not only do we destroy our relationships with others, but we also become enslaved to our passions. For one, God desires for us to live in beloved community, and beloved community simply cannot exist where murder, theft, and lying run rampant. If we do not know what the word “enough” means when it comes to intimate partners, possessions, or prestige, then we will never be able to be satisfied with God’s love being the enoughness that we rest in. If we pursue every desire for more then we are not living as a liberated, but rather an enslaved, people.
In the midst of our stewardship campaign, it has to be pointed out that giving your money to the Church and charities is a part of what Gospel liberation is all about. The practice of our household is to give 5% of our income each year to St. Luke’s and another 5% to other charitable organizations that we want to support. Is that enough to redeem my relationship with money? No. The false gods of account balances, materiality, and capitalism still entice me. But we give as a part of our response of thanksgiving and from our intention to be liberated from the allure of more.
At their core, these Ten Teachings are a gracious gift from God that allow us to walk the way of true freedom. These are not commandments used to judge us, they are not rules that will determine what blessings or punishments we will be given, they are not burdens to restrict us. Rather, these teachings are the way of love that allow us to become a people who look and act like Jesus. They assure us of the blessing of having God as our God instead of having to find our own. They comfort us with the assurance that the world does not continue because of our hard work but rather because of God’s loving care. They give a blessed shape to our relationships so that we can enjoy the beloved community that we have been given instead of constantly climbing over one another in the never-ending and never-satisfying quest for more.
Sometimes in Rite I, we recite these Ten Words. To paraphrase the final response, upon reciting these Ten Teachings, we say “Lord, have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to these teachings.” We ask for mercy because we will fall short of them, and that’s okay because they were never something we were going to be measured against. Instead, these teachings are like the blazings on a trail or the markings on a highway, they are intended to guide us in the way of love. Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to these, your liberating and life-giving, teachings.
