All material copyright 2005.
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Durham, North Carolina

(919)489-4974
For staff e-mail call # above
or e-mail Gail

Comments, corrections and suggestions about this website are welcome.
E-mail Web assistant

FROM GOD: HOW TO LIVE

Exodus 20:1-17

Matthew 22:34-40

March 15, 2009

Betty Berghaus

A message came to me from God - well, through the committee that picks the lectionary passages, and also through the (might I say, and I really mean it) wonderful new Head of Staff who said, “Let’s preach on the Old Testament passages this Lent.” Anyway, the message that came from God said, “Preach about the Ten Commandments. Make it brief. Make it good. Do it!” Okay, went my conversation with God, and with myself, everyone knows the Ten Commandments. We’ve known them since we were little. They’re everywhere – on bookmarks and key chains, on plaques that can hang in homes or offices (Well, if you don’t work for the government). They’re famous in a movie by the same name with Charlton Heston as Moses. So it’s not like I have to explain what they are. But, continued my conversation with self, they’re huge! I can’t explain the 10 Commandments in 15 to 20 minutes. Besides, what new could I say about them? Or I could take 15 to 20 minutes just to talk about ONE of them! And you know, lots of folks see them as archaic, old law, replaced by the new law of God’s love in Jesus Christ. And so my conversation with God and self went on and on, and the challenge was on. So let’s do it!

The people of Israel were in trouble and turmoil, both in the story preceding the giving of the Ten Commandments, and in real life at the time this book of the Exodus was readied for the people of God. In the biblical story, the people of Israel had been freed from slavery in Egypt with miraculous events, like the parting of the sea that let the Israelites go through but poured over the Egyptian army chasing them. But food and water were scarce in the wilderness in which the people wandered, and they grumbled to Moses. They complained that their life in slavery was better than this wandering life in the desert. They argued with Moses, and they probably argued with one another. In Egypt, they lived under the laws of Pharaoh, though they lived as slaves to the Egyptian people. In the wilderness, they had no laws by which to live. Moses chose men from among them to be officers or judges, and Moses tried cases himself. But keeping the people of Israel in order in the wilderness was not an easy task.

In real life, the people of Israel were most likely in the exile when they began to hear this book in its entirety. And so they too were enslaved in foreign lands and enmeshed in foreign ways. The people with whom they were living worshiped many other gods, and had very different religious and cultural practices. And some of the people had adopted these different ways of worshiping and living. This was the setting into which God came with the 10 Commandments. God told Moses to gather the people, to consecrate them with cleansings, and to tell them to stay at the foot of the mountain. The mountain was wrapped in smoke and cloud, and there was thunder and lightning, and the people were afraid. Moses left the people and went up the mountain, as instructed by God. And then God spoke to Moses in what we always refer to as the Ten Commandments. After they were given, the Bible says the people were so frightened that they wanted Moses to speak to them, not God. Then came pages and pages of laws that expanded on the words of God. But these 10 Commandments were given as the direct words of God to the people of God.

The Ten Commandments are often referred to as the Decalogue, which means “ten words,” or “ten terms.” People see them as moral or ethical laws or standards. Though some think the 10 Commandments are obsolete, most faithful people see them as a means by which God’s standards for living were first revealed. Martin Luther said, “Anyone who knows the Ten Commandments perfectly knows the entire Scriptures.” (Hauerwas & Willimon, p.13) We think we know them because we have heard these commandments all of our lives. But thinking that we know them so well may be the one thing that keeps us from discovering what the Ten Commandments can say to us today.

Chris has been looking at the Old Testament passages as covenant, and many refer even to the Old Testament as the Old Covenant, and the New Testament as the New Covenant. A covenant can be a legal document, but it can also be a verbal agreement between two parties. Covenants with God, though, are different from covenants between people. For God initiates the covenants that God gives, and God gives the conditions, and even the signs of the covenants. The first covenant we recognize in the Old Testament came with Abraham, when God promised descendants and land. God also made a covenant with Noah, never to destroy the earth again, and the sign was the bow in the sky. The Ten Commandments gave conditions for the covenant with God to be God’s people. And there was the covenant with David, that the kingdom would continue through the line of David, and so it did, right to Jesus, according to Matthew. The New Covenant, of course, comes to us through Christ, and is celebrated in the Lord’s Supper, where we remember Jesus’ words declaring the cup to be “the new covenant” in His blood (See I Cor. 11:25). A covenant, especially with God, is indeed a big deal!

The true purpose of this covenant, given in the Ten Commandments, may be best stated right before Moses ascended the mountain to receive them. God told Moses to tell the people: “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. 19:4-6). Lest anyone think these words are obsolete for Christians, we hear very similar words in the New Testament: “Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood…” (I Peter 2:4). Our Presbyterian Book of Order talks of “the priesthood of all believers,” meaning that we are all ministers to one another and to the world. And so the purpose of the Ten Words, or Commandments, is not to list laws that we must obey - or else! These words prepare us to be people who reach out, in God’s name, to the rest of the world. They prepare us all to be ministers, one to another.

We think we know the Ten Commandments, but living them and truly knowing them may be a lifetime endeavor. Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon wrote a book on the Ten Commandments, called The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Living, some years ago, when both were still at Duke Divinity School. They said that knowing the Ten Commandments “requires a lifetime embodiment of a set of practices peculiar to the church – practices such as confessing belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (H & W, p.18). There ought to be a warning on them, they said, declaring, “Do not try to obey any of these commandments alone” (H & W, p.19), for they are addressed to the individual, but most possible when lived out within the support of a community of faithful people.

What if we look at the Ten Commandments differently than we ever have before? What if we see them as a gift from God, rather than as rules imposed upon us? What if we see following them as a way of worshiping God, and of sharing the Word and will of God with others? To live the Ten Commandments may be to live differently than the world around us, to live counter-culturally, to be rebellious and not follow all the ways of the world in which we live. But perhaps they also give us a way to bend our lives toward a God who loves us enough to give us direction, and to enter into covenant with us.

Somewhere in my study this week, I began to see the Ten Commandments in a different way than I ever have before. We have traditionally categorized them as ten laws divided into two sections, the first four dealing with our relationship with God, and the last six with our relationship with one another. But Hauerwas and Willimon suggest that they all flow out of and reflect the first one: “You shall worship no other gods.” Given first in a world that worshiped many gods, our God was telling the people to give up those other gods for good, and to worship only the one true God. With each commandment, God explained just how to do that. First, throw out the idols, God said, for our God is revealed in nature, in other people, and in so many ways that we could not draw a picture or make a statue of God. Use God’s name only in positive, reverential ways, said our Lord. For even God has a reputation to uphold, and when we use God’s name lightly or improperly, we draw people away from the true nature and intent of God.

Then God spent a long time, the longest of the commandments, telling us to keep Sabbath. God reminded us that God observes Sabbath, and has from the very beginning of creation, if not before. According to Genesis, God made the earth in six days, declared it all good, and rested on the seventh day. God worked hard and then rested. Then God went to work again. And God expects us to do the same, to take the time to revive ourselves and to re-orient our lives towards God. Or maybe when we take Sabbath, we take time to listen to God, and we let God revive and restore us.

Next, in these 10 holy words, God got down to specifics about how we live with one another, because when we hurt one another, we also hurt God. Our relationships with one another reflect our attitude toward God. So if we love and worship God, we should have less trouble obeying these other commandments. They will naturally flow out of our worship of God. No one who lives in the love of God would kill, or commit adultery, or steal, or lie, because such acts would hurt someone else, and thus hurt God. These “do not’s” are simply and clearly stated, and yet in our modern world have deeper implications, like how we deal with abortion, suicide, sexual abuse, or even the way we use our money. And so in order to continue to live by these conditions of God, we need to participate in the community of faith that strives to interpret these words for our world and our lives today.

It would be fascinating, really (I promise!), to deal with each of these commandments to see how they apply to us today and flow out of our worship of the one true God. But you don’t want to be here until 5:00, and I don’t want to either! So let me just say a little more and then try to sum this up (No small task!).

All of my study this week helped me to especially see “Honor your mother and father” in a new light. The usual interpretation would mean that we act and speak respectfully toward our parents throughout our lives. But all of the sources I read pointed out that the most likely hearers or readers of this commandment have been and are adults - people who ARE parents, as well as who may still have parents. This may mean that we, as adults, care for our aging parents with more respect, and that would be good. But if we parents are the ones reading this commandment, perhaps it means that we need to act as those who deserve to be honored. If indeed these words tell us how to worship God, then we need to live faithfully and to raise our children faithfully. This too is best done by being a part of a caring and nurturing faith community, one that vows at baptism to help us raise our children to know and love God. So to be honored, we need to live in good and kind and loving ways, as parents, as neighbors, as friends. The Ten Commandments can teach us how to better live in our families and our churches, and even our communities, but they can also lead us to live as examples of holy living to the world around us.

Consider the Old Covenant of the Ten Commandments, then, as a part of how we live out the New Covenant as Christians. Jesus invoked them when asked by one of the Pharisees (who hoped to trap Jesus into saying something illegal), “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (Matthew 22:36). Jesus did not pick one law, but summed them all up, saying: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37-39) The second flows out of the first. When we love God with all our self, we will know that we are loved, and we will love others. It sounds simple, but it is not so easy to do. And so we do so together, as a community, a covenant people. And when we all get it right, just maybe we can change the world completely, to a place of love and peace that reflects a loving and peaceful God. Imagine that: our world transformed into a peaceful kingdom, and we could help to make it so, simply by worshiping God. It all starts here, here where we sing and pray and study and baptize and receive the Lord’s Supper. But it can go out from here with great impact, like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond. Glory be to God! Amen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fretheim, Terence E., Exodus (Interpretation Commentaries), John Knox Press, KY, 1991.

Hauerwas, Stanley & Willimon, Will, The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Living, Abingdon Press, TN, 1999.

Noth, Martin, Exodus, Westminster Press, PA, 1962.

Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. by Alan Richardson & John Bowden, Westminster Press, PA, 1983.