Exodus 20:1-17
March 26, 2000
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
V-Chip
Every morning when I open up my SF Chronicle, I can’t avoid seeing and reading the regular stream of violence and horror that happened in the Bay Area and in our world every day. Let me read some to you…
A group of San Francisco eighth-graders hatched an elaborate plan to poison their teacher with nail polish removal. The girls had a signal: two coughs and a sniff. That meant the nail polish remover should be poured into the teacher’s water bottle. Fortunately Matthew Podwoski, a language arts teacher was back at the James Lick Middle School this week.
In Denver, a homeless teenager has been found guilty of manslaughter in the beating death of a homeless man, one of a series of attacks last year that sent a wave of fear through the city’s street community.
Authorities now believe that about 530 people were burned alive in southwestern Uganda last week by their religious leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. Relatives of the deceased believe that when members asked for a refund of their donations and money was running short, the mass murders were to avert a rebellion.
I wonder if there ever has been a day in our world when there was not one bad thing done against another person.
And when you turn on the TV today, you encounter more of the same things you find in the papers: violence, adult content, and raunchy language. Green Acres and the Cosby Show have given way to the Simpsons and South Park.
So for parents to block the kind of objectionable programming that they don’t want their children to see, there’s a new technology being installed in all new TV sets sold next year called the V-Chip. It’s not important for us to know how this chip really works, but for some kids, it’s a parent gimmick to keep kids from having fun!
The V-Chip is the latest Silicon Valley invention to do what the Ten Commandments did for the Israelites in Moses’ days.
Public Posting
When our judicial system deals with so many crime-ridden cases a day, a judge in Alabama fights to have the Ten Commandments on the wall of his courtroom in order to say that the law enacted in his court is based upon the law of God.
Public posting of the Ten Commandments is probably not a bad idea. Certainly no harm can come from keeping the world’s most respected moral code in constant view. But who are we kidding? Is this stopgap measure going to lower the crime rate, curb the violent impulse, reduce teenage pregnancy? No way. It didn’t change behavior 3,500 years ago in the Sinai wilderness, and it won’t do it today in our postmodern wilderness.
Others defend the commandments as a means of calling America back to basic morality, a universally valid code of conduct, those unbending absolutes upon which all people of good will can agree.
While one can understand such desperate acts in the face of this morally chaotic society, this may be a misuse of the commandments. The commandments so displayed on the walls of U.S. courtrooms are not the same commandments of the God whom Christians worship as the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is not easy to rip the Ten Commandments out of the Sunday context and try to apply it in the society out there.
Moses and the Ten Commandments
This is the context. Israel is in slavery in Egypt. Before Moses, a murderer minding his own business in Midian, a bush bursts into flame. There’s a voice:
“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their
cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that
land to a good and broad land” (Ex. 3:7-8).
Here is no deistic “unmoved mover” of a God. Here is a God who hears, intrudes, acts, calls. God says to Moses, “I am going to deliver my people and guess who is going to help me?” Moses protests; God insists. Moses is told to go to Pharaoh and tell this most powerful man on earth to let the Hebrews go. Why? Because God is against slavery? No. God demands freedom from Egyptian slavery so that the Hebrews may go out into the wilderness to sacrifice—to worship God.
The hard-hearted Pharaoh resists. There are negotiations, confrontations, frogs, plagues, gnats, and much death. Finally Pharaoh relents saying, “Take your flocks and your herds, as you said, and be gone” (Ex. 12:32) Israel leaves toward the desert. There at last they are liberated, free at last!
Well, not quite. The Hebrews have been liberated from Egyptian slavery in order to become enslaved in God’s plan. They are called into the wilderness to worship God. But it has been so long since anyone has worshipped the true God that they have forgotten how. Is worship of the God of Israel high church or low? Should incense be used? What about the kinds of robes we should be wearing?
So “The Lord summoned Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up” (Ex. 19:20). There the Lord opens the conversation by reminding Moses of what has been done for Israel, thus indicating who God is:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20-2-3).
God was reminding Israel, “I paid dearly for you. You have been brought out of slavery, not in order to be free from all expectations, but rather in order that you might more fully belong to me, that you might worship me.”
How to worship? Here begins the list of the commandments. “Don’t have idols.” “Don’t steal.” “Don’t have sex with other people’s spouses.” The notion of worship for God is peculiar in comparison with other gods. Some gods are into war, or sex, or gold. Here is a God who wants a holy people, a family where everyone is a minister.
God said to Moses:
“You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’
wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep
my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed,
the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy
nation” (Ex. 19:3-6)
The important word here is “therefore.” Because a people has been saved by God, therefore this people is to be a nation of priests. When Exodus says that Israel is to be a “holy nation,” it means a people set apart, “resident aliens.” When it says “priests,” it means that Israel exists for the sake of the whole world, to intercede, to make a sacrifice, and to mediate, to live in such a way, in obedience to the commandments, that other less enlightened and obedient peoples will say to themselves, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” (Deut. 4:6).
The Commandments and the Church
This description of Israel found in Deuteronomy is repeated in 1 Peter describing the early church.
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,
in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of
darkness into the marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).
The phrase, “in order that” has the same meaning as “therefore.” Because Jesus has saved us from our sins, “in order that,” “therefore,” the way we live as God’s own people teach the world the meaning of God’s love. By the grace of God, even Gentiles like us have been brought into Israel’s vocation to be priests to the world in the name of God and Jesus.
The Ten Commandments are made for all people, but the way the people discover that is by seeing how the commandments are lived out in the people of Israel and the church. Through our joyful obedience and worship of the true God will others come to know the meaning of the commandments for their lives.
The Ten Commandments must be read and lived within this understanding as our vocation of a saving God. Today we live as those who have been chosen by God, called, claimed, possessed, owned by God that we might proclaim, in word and deed, what God has done. We live by the commandments as a way of worshipping the true God. When we thus worship the true God, we show forth to the world the sort of people God is able to produce. Our little lives are caught up in the great purposes of God for the world. We become commandeered for purposes beyond ourselves. We, for whom lying, deceit, falsehood, and even killing come quite naturally, are transformed by our obedience into a people of the truth.
We, who were slaves, have become free. But that does not mean that we are free from all attachments, free to “do our own thing.” As one of the Jewish prayers put it, “We were freed from being slaves to Pharaoh so that we might become slaves to the Torah.”
The commandments are not general guidelines for humanity in general. They are a counter-cultural way of life for those who know who they are and whose they are. Their function is not to keep American culture running smoothly, but rather to produce a people who are, in our daily lives, a sign, a signal, a witness that God has not left the world to its own devices. We have the Ten Commandments because we have been delivered and redeemed by God. We are delivered and redeemed by God because we have the Ten Commandments. The commandments are both a gracious reminder of who we are and an abrasive prod to be who we ought to be.
When Christians talk about morality, we begin by talking first about the church, by what it means to worship God. As a community of forgiven people, we keep coming together to worship God. This is why the commandments make sense to us and through us it makes sense for the world.
The Commandments are about God
But before the Ten Commandments are about us, they are about God.
You know someone by the way the person speaks. Some say they can still tell that I am from Boston.
We know the true and living God because this God has refused to stay aloof, unconcerned, and out of touch. Our God could have stayed on Mount Sinai, hidden in the clouds, silent. Instead, the true God called Moses to him and had him write down what would please God. Our relentlessly self-revealing God has spoken “ten words” to us and is thereby known to us. Before the words, and behind each word, is a God, the sort of God who tolerates no rivals like Pharaoh, a God who does not leave us alone to stumble aimlessly in the wilderness but graciously gives us the law “for our lasting good, so as to keep us alive” (Deut. 6:24)
This is not the God that the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments tragically took 530 lives in Uganda last week.
The God who gives us the commandments wants us to have “lasting good and wants us to be alive.” He is also the God who would give us Jesus.
Having the commandments in our lives signals to us that this thing between us and God really matters. When we claim to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,” we have the responsibility to be partners with God in reclaiming our lost society. God is calling each one of us, not just certain leaders to help turn the world toward obedience, on how we have sex, how we handle property, and how we watch our words.
God speaks to each one of us in simple, direct words we can understand, addressing us where we live, where there are real issues about daily living. Here is a God who loves like wives and husbands love one another in marriage. God gets jealous for us. The relationship between us and God is not one of abstract, high-flown principles and ideas, it is a relationship between God who loves and a people who are loved enough to be told how, when, and where to return that love.
You know what I mean here. You’ve been there before. How many times have you found yourself advising your teenage child to go and apologize to Dad after a disagreement? You might offer suggestions about how to begin to talk, or when might be the best time, or giving him a big hug afterward.
God gets jealous for us when we don’t worship him. He helps us by giving us the Ten Commandments to show us that in this very close relationship he wants to have with us, these are the things that will make the relationship good and long lasting, make us stay alive. This loving God who delivers his people out of slavery so that we can worship him gives us a Savior born of a virgin.
Bending toward God
I think you and I would like to see stronger crime legislation and more guilty verdicts when it comes to the violence we see in America today. But posting the Ten Commandments in the nation’s courtrooms, I’m afraid won’t do it. Installing V-Chips in all the TV sets won’t do it either. Just like stamping our coins with “In God We Trust” and the Senate chaplain praying at the beginning of each session haven’t made our country any more Godly.
When we recognize that we are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” as the church of Jesus Christ, we begin to act a certain way because we believe a certain way. Our behavior arises out of our relationship to God.
After seeing the Karate Kid, the movie, I wanted to be like Mr. Miyake. I wanted to learn how to raise Bonsai. So for Christmas, Lauren bought me a Hawthorn bonsai with 13 little trees. When she saw it, it still had some yellow and orange autumn leaves that reminded her of the Fall foliage colors in Pennsylvania.
Some of you know that Diana Ming Chan is an expert in bonsai. She came over during our holiday open house and recognized that I needed help with my new Christmas gift. She sat down, eye level, and started to clip and pinch back the undesirable growth. She told me that this big one is the “papa” bonsai and this one is the “mama.” And they have 11 children! Next with old wires I had, she started to wire and bend back each tree so that they would grow straight up. She taught me to not have the branches cross the other trunks.
That was my first and only bonsai lesson. I only know the overall picture of what my Hawthorn bonsai should look like. I will still need to learn when and how to repot, what to feed the soil, how to pitch buds, how to cut the leaves and prune the branches, when to wire, and shape my bonsai to remain a work of art. You see, I appreciate the beauty of bonsai—“meaning planting in a tray,” but I still have a long way to go to learn how to maintain its harmony with me. Just like I want to bend the branches and the trunks of the bonsai to maintain its artistic balance, I see my life bending toward God.
The beauty and good news about our relationship with God is that God wants us to worship him. God said, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” I’m not saying that we bend the rules to fit our lifestyle, but that when we know in our hearts that it is God who is our Lord, we bend our lives toward him. Our obedience and knowledge of the Ten Commandments begin in the Sunday morning worship of the church. Here is where we affirm that God brings life out of death, order out of chaos, light into the darkness.
Like my bonsai being bend to reflect its beauty, we first come to God as his royal priesthood, God’s own people bending our lives toward God. And knowing all of the things I still need to know about maintaining my bonsai is like the rest of the Ten Commandments. Learning to be more obedient, more faithful, and even more moral will come because the commandments (how we ought to live) rest upon our worship of God (who is God) in our lives.
In this season of Lent, we bend our lives toward the Living God, free from the slavery of human bondage only to become enslaved as disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ!
Let us pray.
O God, we give thanks for the teachings of the Ten Commandments and pray that we worship you and you alone as our Lord. Continue to help us to bend our lives toward your plan in the world. Amen.