Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
October 2, 2005
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
There are clear rules in our grand-daughter’s house. Evi can’t leave her bedroom until its 7:00 AM. She takes off her shoes before going upstairs and puts them in the front door closet. Her blue security blanket doesn’t go outside. When she’s in her car seat, she knows to put on her own seat belts. She knows to not to eat in the family room so she tests her parents by slightly putting her little toes on the carpet. And now she has a reward chart where she gets a sticker to put on a row of circles when she does something well. Evi is learning to follow the rules. And Yeh Yeh does not dare try to break the rules when he’s at Evi’s house!
Moses and the Ten Commandments
We’ve been focusing on the Gospel lessons in Matthew for the past few weeks. But when the Old Testament lesson assigned for today is from Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments that have been in the media spotlight in recent years, I decided to explore the meaning of this theme for our lives today.
Permit me to first put our Scripture in context. The Lord has just delivered Israel from Egyptian slavery. God has called Moses to go to Pharaoh and say, “Let my people go into the desert that they may worship me.”
Pharaoh says to Moses, “We have some wonderful ministers here with us. If you want to have a service, I’ll send one of my court chaplains down to the ghetto this evening so you can have a service, sing some of those spirituals that you people do so well. Just be sure you’re back at work on Monday morning.”
Well, Moses and the people didn’t like the Pharaoh’s ministers. There are negotiations, plagues, flies, frogs, insects and the like. Finally, Pharaoh says to the children of Israel, “Get out of here and don’t come back.”
That’s where this Scripture comes in. Israel is out in the desert, free from Egyptian slavery, ready to worship. But it has been so long since anybody has worshiped the true and living god, they’ve forgotten how. Is God into high-church like the Episcopalians or low-church worship like the Baptists? Moses says, “I’ll go up on the mountain and get directions for the service.”
“Well, we’re all here, ready to worship. What sort of worship did you have in mind?” Moses asks God.
There is lightening, smoke. God says, “Write this down.”
Many of us have read about the controversy on the proper place the Ten Commandments has on our own lives. Some believe that they should be displayed in public places claiming that our system of laws has been based on them originating from the founding of our country. Others who believe that any religion including Christianity that we hold dearly for ourselves should have no infringement in our public places fearing that this would eventually lead to opening the door of threatening the freedom of all religions to practice freely. This is what we call the separation of church and state.
The argument of the proper place the Ten Commandments has on our society will continue to go on for many years to come. But I must say that the politicians who want to put the Ten Commandments in every courthouse or classroom need to recognize that you can’t have the rules without the God who gives the rules and forgives us when we fail to keep them. And on the other hand, we know that we can’t have a romantic, new age kind of mushy form of a contemporary spirituality without a God that gives us rules to worship him with ethics and substance.
But as we ponder this issue, the question we need to ask ourselves is how are these rules lived out in our personal lives?
Framework for Living
As people of faith, we must not only follow the Ten Commandments but how do we live out the Greatest Commandment Jesus gave us, as well as all of the virtues of a Spirit-filled life as Christians.
It’s true that the commandments contain a list of rather daunting “thou-shalt-nots,” but these 10 rulings are not meant to drag us down into negativity. In fact, they are intended to give us a very positive framework for living our lives especially when we are in the deserts of our lives and we have forgotten how to worship God. The first four commandments provide us with guidance for our relationship with God, and the last six explain what it means to have a healthy relationship with each other.
You can think of the Ten Commandments as being two pictures, instead of one. After all, God used two tablets of stone to deliver the commandments to Moses. The first picture shows how we worship God’s majesty. The second picture is on how we love one another. They are equally beautiful; equally well-crafted. Jesus thought about two pictures too when he said that the greatest commandment called us both to “love the Lord your God” and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt. 22:36-40).
In the first picture, the rules instruct us to have no other gods except the Lord, to avoid idolatry, to refrain from misusing the name of God, and to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. These are simple and straightforward; forming a clear picture of what it means to be in a right relationship with the Lord. This is what it means to worship God in majesty when you have forgotten how to do it.
For us today, these commandments can certainly be challenging for us. We find ourselves bowing down to the idols of Wall Street and Hollywood and the Department of Defense. When we struggle to maintain a Sabbath day, we can be counter-cultural fighting off the fast-paced, over-programmed, always-connected, and ever-accelerating 21st century.
When we tap the energy and source of worshiping God rather than the powers of this world, we are leading healthier lives when we take time to rest, instead of working around the clock seven days a week. When we worship God as the source of meaning and purpose instead of the materialism and power and control that we see in our country today, we come to realize that ultimately it’s God who prevails at the end. These commandments are given to us to help us, not to hurt us.
The same can be said of the second picture of the Ten Commandments, despite the repeated “thou-shalt-nots” that it contains. There is an enormous amount of guidance and direction to be gained from these final six commandments, despite our natural tendency to rebel against any limitations on our human freedom.
You may have heard the story of what happened when Moses came down from Mount Sinai after a long day of negotiating with God. He looked tired, but the Israelites were anxious to hear what he had to say.
Moses said, “I have some good news and some bad news…The good news is that I got him down to only Ten Commandments…
“The bad news is that he wouldn’t budge on the adultery issue.”
Whether the flashing red stop light appears in front of adultery or stealing or gossiping or covetousness, we don’t like to be told and hear the “thou-shalt-nots.” But let me remind you again that these commandments were not given to make your life difficult but they provide a positive framework for the living of a good life in relationship to our neighbors.
When we honor our parents, prohibit murder, resist adultery, turn from stealing, speak with truthfulness, and refrain from envy, then we find ourselves much better able to love our neighbors as ourselves. The keeping of these commandments moves us into relationships that not only reflect the will of God, but also provide us with a much happier and healthier lives.
Sure, we might joke about the “adultery issue,” but we know the real destructiveness of adultery to marriages, families, and communities. We may think that a little stealing is no big deal, but then we pay inflated prices to cover the cost of theft in stores across the country. We may think that telling a little lie can’t hurt anyone but then we realize that what we told falsely has caused hurt feelings and shattered relationships. We may believe that “thou shalt not covet” is an old-fashion notion, but then we realize that we’re being eaten up by the envy we feel when we watch all of the home improvement and makeover shows.
People talk about “breaking” the Ten Commandments, but that’s not exactly right. We cannot actually break anything as solid as the law of God, even when we engage in serious sinfulness. Instead, it’s more accurate to say that we break ourselves against the Ten Commandments. Think of the commandments as big slabs of stone that we smash ourselves into—we crash into these rocks and we hurt ourselves through acts of adultery or stealing or lying or envy. When we collide with the commandments, we’re gonna get hurt.
Unbridled Freedom
The reason behind our disdain for the “thou-shalt-nots” is that we are living in an age of liberation, autonomy and unbridled freedom. We get our directives, not from on high, off a mountain and two stone tablets, from the God who created us and the world and therefore ought to know something about it, but rather our ethics arise out of our “personal experience,” from our enlightened consciousness, “flying from the seat of our pants,” or “what seems personally right for me.”
When we only rely on our own opinions of what’s right and wrong, we realize that we are confused and lost our way. Did you know that the meaning of “Torah,” the Hebrew name for the Old Testament means “the way,” or better still, “the finger pointing the way?”
We have wandered away when people can blow up innocent civilians and say they are doing it for justice. We have wandered away when marriage vows are made and broken with ease, without concern for collateral damage. We have wandered away when our identity and self-esteem are so much wrapped up on materialism and social status that we have made these things especially in our society worshipping idols.
Many of us here probably think that people who end up in prison have often been abused, who suffered from self-esteem, or became associated with people who were corrupt. But a prison chaplain said, “Not, true. Most people here are not in jail because they think too little of themselves, but because they think too much of themselves. They are brilliant. Everyone else who has a job, or follows the law, is a chump. Most of them get here because of the arrogant idea that the rules are made for everyone else but them.”
Our unbridled freedom has enslaved us to other masters. The reason behind the Enron debacle is that we have a bunch of arrogant people who think that they are just too smart for conventional accounting practices and that the rules are made for uncreative dummies. They saw themselves above the law. That’s the reason for the disaster.
It may be true that the Ten Commandments are given to us in a way that we are not invited to argue with them. “Do not kill.” “Do not steal.” And in light of our desire to discuss things out to the point when we feel we are satisfied, the commandments are given to be obeyed simply because God commands our obedience to them. Yet, in obeying these Commandments, our lives are more fulfilling and better than they would have been if we had not obeyed.
God Loves Us
For Moses and the Israelites, the Ten Commandments were directions to worship God after they have forgotten how to do it. The Commandments freed the children of Israel from being enslaved to gods more cruel and demanding than the one true God Yahweh. And for us, the Ten Commandments and summarized by Jesus teaching of the Greatest Commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt. 22:37-39) show us that for every generation, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel of morality, decency, and directions for the good life.
The reason why Evi’s parents have rules is because they love her. They want her to be safe and healthy. Thank God, not everything is up for grabs. God loves us enough to give us rules. Let’s go and follow the rules of God!
Let us pray.
Lord, we give you thanks, that you loved us enough to reveal your will to us. You cared for us enough to show us the way. You trusted us enough to entrust to us your kingdom. Give us wisdom, despite our innate foolishness, to follow the way that you show to us. Guard us from the folly of thinking that we can make up our own rules rather than to follow yours. Forgive us when we stumble and wander from your way. Amen.