March 26, 2000
With this year's lectionary being the way it is, you will hear the ten commandments both this Sunday and the next. This week it is the scripture reading and next week the decalogue as part of our liturgical cycle in the Prayer Book. Certainly, we have heard a lot about the Ten Commandments lately in the papers, from those who want them posted in every classroom to those who say it is a silly group of rules written by men to enslave women.
Some would claim these are great rules of living, rules to live by; but I have to tell you I think all of that is terribly wrong. We need to look first at the historical circumstances and then at God's reason and purpose behind the ten commandments. Remember, this is the foot of Mt. Sinai. The nation of Israel has just come out of Egypt. They are not the brightest bulbs in the marquee. They are a group of ex-slaves wandering in the desert, following a murderer. They have gone from absolute constraint with every event in their lives being dictated by somebody else (namely the government) to no government at all — especially since Moses has disappeared up on the mountain and hasn't been heard from in over a month.
They had gone to near anarchy when the Ten Commandments were first given to Moses by God. At the foot of the mountain, the people aren't so sure they're happy about having followed Moses. After all, he had been run out of town with a murder warrant against him. He came back carrying a walking stick that had the unsettling habit of turning into a snake from time to time, and everytime he went in to talk to the pharaoh, something bad happened. Moses then called them out into the desert, leaving everything behind in the dark of night to go to a land that God would show them.
They were pretty happy to be out of there until, of course, the food began to run short and the water dried up. Then they complained, "Oh, that we were back in the flesh pots of Egypt where we had plenty to eat and drink. Yes, we had to work a little hard in the construction trade, but you know, life was good then, nice and stable and secure." Job security is a given for slaves, and they longed for that.
To this semi-literate band of unemployed construction workers, God gives the Ten Commandments — not as a new set of shiny shackles to enslave them again to someone else, but as a statement of our freedom, as a perimeter, or if you will, around a society so that by observing them, we can live in safety with each other. We know what is expected of us and we know what we can expect from other people.
We appreciate creation and that we have been given the resources that are available to us. Those things are given to us if we can remember ten things. Now granted, some construction workers (including myself from when I was in construction) don't have all ten fingers anymore. God gave Ten Commandments because they had ten fingers — five to remember their relationships with God, and five to remember their relationships with other people. If you had a finger left over on either hand when you were trying to remember, then at least you knew you were missing something. Then you could go back and try again to remember or ask somebody, "What is my thumb for?"
Ten simple things. They started violating those only a little bit after Moses received them and before he gave them to the people. The first one that God told us to do was to maintain single minded devotion to one God. The second was to never worship anything that you make. Why would the creator worship something that's been created? It doesn't make sense. When Moses comes down the side of the mountain, they have already violated the first two. They have longed for a multiplicity of gods from Egypt, and they have melted down their jewelry and made a golden calf which they are now worshipping. Moses literally threw the book at them, shattered the tablets, and then had to go back up the mountain to cut himself a second set.
The third commandment — do not invoke God for your selfish purposes. If you call in the name of God, call to enlighten you for his purposes. Do not invoke his name for your purpose.
The fourth one — just as it is important for you to make a date with your beloved or to set up a golf or tennis match with your friends to renew your relationship or love for each other, also set aside a time for renewing your love and relationship with God.
The fifth commandment which is on the Hebrew tablets with the first four, and on the Christian tablet with the second five, is to honor your father and your mother. This is the one commandment with a promise and I believe properly belongs on the side of our relationship with God, not because our parents are deities, but because they are storytellers.
Years ago, I read a book that said this commandment is better understood as, "You shall show deference to the elders of the community because they contain the memory of who you are." Certainly, in the time before printing, storytelling of family lore was the way in which people knew their own roots. I submit to you it is still the way we know our roots. My nephews and nieces started a little project a year or so ago. Whenever they were with my father (who is now 89 years old), they ask him to tell them stories, not just about their dads, but about him and his dad — to recover in the family the roots of what that family is. We tell the stories over and over again so that we can remember that we are God's creation, the beloved children of God, the redeemed nation of God, the adopted children of God.
The second five have to do with life in society. How do you maintain security in society? Very simply, you do not take another person's life; you do not take another person's spouse; you do not take another person's stuff, and you do not lie about it; you do not even yearn for what does not belong to you. If you can do those five things, you will get along with other people pretty well. It makes sense.
Ten simple things to do, not in order to enslave the people, but in order to say if you will live within that safety perimeter, you will find freedom and life. That's the promise that comes in the middle — if you remember to do these things, you shall live long and have peace.
The Ten Commandments were given just as the people came out of Egypt and were fairly simple. But just like the Constitution of the United States, if you give people long enough, over time many complicated, obscure and difficult elaborations arise. By the time of Paul and Jesus, certainly, many things had been added. Each was probably added with the intention of improving on the original; with the intention of making life even more peaceful; helping us to become even more righteous before God; with the intention of making us more perfect.
But intentions, as you know, don't always have the desired outcome. The result of all the additional laws of Moses, as they are called in our Lord's time, resulted in making life more conflicted, more divisive and broken. By the time of Jesus, the fulfillment of the laws was possible only for the leisure class. You had to have enough money, intelligence and training to know what all the laws were, first of all, and then be able to pull it off.
When Jesus walked into the temple precincts today, he was outraged by what he saw. It's not because people were carrying on trade, it was because the trade they were carrying on was keeping other people from being able to worship God and to be able to renew their love for God. The money changers were there because you couldn't worship with Roman coins. You could not give them to God, nor buy sacrificial animals with them because they were embossed with the "graven image" of Caesar. You had to exchange it for Hebrew money and, of course, you were charged a little premium for that. So, if you didn't have a lot of money, you couldn't afford to trade your money at a great sacrifice.
And then you went from that table to the table with the animals to buy anything from a small dove to an ox. The animals had to be perfect specimens without a blemish and, of course, those cost a little extra. And then, of course, everybody needs to make a little profit on top of that.
So Jesus was wroth that when he looked around. Most of the people of the land could not worship God because all the added accretions of the law kept from them doing so. So yes, he did turn over the tables because he was angry; he mixed that tainted money of Rome with the Hebrew money; he chased out the large animals and told the people with the pigeons to take their cages and get them out of there — not because it was improper to carry on trade, but because it was improper to prevent people from being able to worship God freely.
Jesus says that the point of the law is not to add complication to life, it is to simplify life and it boil down to two things: love God and love each other! So, instead of trying to remember ten things, remember only two.
Paul, dear sweet Paul, in that wonderful reading from Romans (one that English teachers like to parse), comes across as so frustrated that he speaks to our hearts, if not to our minds. He says, "No matter how hard I try, I still can't be perfect, and I have to tell you, I had a Ph.D. in the laws of Moses, I had all the money I needed to pull it off, and I still couldn't do it. What I have found out is that everytime I try to do good, I mess it up. I cannot be righteous, but Jesus is righteous — it is Jesus Christ who gives us the gift!"
God gave us the ten commandments out of love. God gave us the ten commandments for our freedom, not because the Hebrew people had been bad down at the foot of the mountain and needed a new set of laws to constrain them, but because he loved them and he wanted them to learn to live a free life. We ex-slaves elaborated upon them in order to govern our lives more tightly, with less ambiguity, because we don't like ambiguity. But, everytime we try to eliminate ambiguity from the religious enterprise, we have either made God smaller, or we have made our lives smaller.
We have built cells for ourselves that are barely larger then our bodies, and bunks with shackles on the feet and shackles on the hands so that we can predict exactly what is going to happen next. We have done that ourselves. Predictability is not all that it's cracked up to be, and the Holy Spirit comes in and disturbs and disrupts just like Jesus does when he comes into the temple precincts. We can identify with Paul's lament in this passage today when he says today, "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?" And then he comes up with the answer immediately, "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
It's Jesus who overturns our complicated rigidity and, indeed, delivers us from this body of death. May we all let Jesus overturn our tables and drive out our money changers, disrupt our rigidness, so that we can recover in our lives both the spirit and the purpose of the law, to grant us freedom and love, to understand the gospel as the perimeter fence, the safe perimeter. Within it, we can live our lives of freedom and fulfillment in Christ Jesus our Lord, and let us never fear from walking right up to the edge of that perimeter and even making an opening in it, not because we're trying to escape from freedom, but because a lot of people out there don't know and love the Lord. If we can open it up, we can invite them in — to come into the place where they can know and love the Lord and that they can meet the Lord of life and freedom. AMEN
The Rev. Dr. Robert Certain
rgcertain@stmargarets.org
26 March 2000