Pastor Detweiler’s sermon from Sunday, March 15, 2009:

Exodus 20:1-17

“The Ten Commandments do not represent what we have to do to be God’s people, but rather what we do because we already are God’s people.”

A good news-bad news joke about the Ten Commandments: Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and says to the people, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I got him down to 10. The bad news is that No. 6 (adultery) is still in there,” he said to a crowd that had been busily breaking No. 6 while they waited for Moses to come back down the mountain.

To our culture, as the opening joke makes clear, the Ten Commandments seem foolish, an attempt to take the fun out of life, to hem us in. That may be the way people view the Ten Commandments in popular culture – as a burden rather than a gift – but it is not the way Christians and the descendants of Abraham view them. The Ten Commandments are what we do because we already are God’s people, not what we have to do to be God’s people.

Their purpose is protecting us from harm, and protecting the relationships, both those with family and with God, that are crucial to sustaining human life and community. They are not taking the fun out of life. They illustrate how God’s wisdom works against the expectations of this world.

In the fall of 1989 the communist governments of the nations of Eastern Europe collapsed one at a time in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It took until Christmas Day to reach Romania. That day the repressive president and his wife were tried and executed. Suddenly no one was in charge there. The next day reporters from western nations entered the country, looking for people who could speak English whom they could quote. One such person summed up not only Romania’s predicament, but the human condition: “We have freedom, but we don’t know what to do with it.”

The Ten Commandments are a gift to those who have been set free. They show us what freedom is and what to do with it. The people of Israel had been given their freedom in the Exodus. The Ten Commandments were God’s way of helping them keep that freedom, keeping them from descending into a different form of slavery.

Popularly, freedom is having no limits, being able to do what we want when we want. Of course, it is not possible to live that way. There lots of stories in the news of celebrities who tried to live that way and found it a trap. The desire to live without limits is a misplaced religious impulse, a desire to be more than we are. It is an expression of the image of God in us, and it needs to be focused on God. When we turn it inward – focusing on ourselves – we are trapped in our own finite, limited nature. The God who gave the Ten Commandments and who sent Jesus wants us to experience fulfillment and joy. That comes in relationship to God and to each other, not alone. The Ten Commandments show us how to live in relationship to each other and to God.

The opening statement of the Ten Commandments – “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt” – is a promise, a declaration of God’s love. God wants us to be joined to him, to be holy as he is holy. “Holy” does not mean “pure,” but united with God, having our will subsumed in his.

Martin Luther says in the “Large Catechism” that the point of the Ten Commandments is to answer the question who or what will be our God. “A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in him with our whole heart.” We are all ruled by something. What will it be? Will it be the God of Israel and Jesus, or the gods of this world, of success and having, of our house or family? We choose, he says, and what we think about and trust in above all else is our god. But a god other than that of Israel and Jesus is an idol that will let us down.

Most of us have idols, though, and often they are things which we just take for granted. A few years ago one of our children interviewed my father for a school project. One of the questions she asked him was “what did you want to be when you were growing up?” His answer was difficult for our kids to comprehend: “I didn’t think about it really. I just wanted to have a family and serve God somehow.”

There was no career goal for him. His goal was simple: to serve God through family and work, whatever that might be. For our children who have been asked to imagine careers or occupations they might pursue almost since they started school, this was a shocking revelation. They/we took for granted the idea that a career could be the most important thing – a god of sorts – for one’s future.

At the beginning of the Vigil of Easter on Easter Eve, we start outside by lighting a fire from which we light the paschal candle. As we do that there is a prayer that begins: “O God, you a like a refiner’s fire …” In the ancient world gold was refined by heating it hot enough to burn away the impurities. The first commandment: “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” is like a fire burning off what is impure and unimportant, what gets in the way of our relationship with God, of our being holy as he is holy.

The Ten Commandments may seem foolish, an attempt to take the fun out of life, to hem us in. That may be the way people view the Ten Commandments in popular culture – as a burden rather than a gift – but it is not the way Christians and the descendants of the Abraham view them. The Ten Commandments do not represent what we have to do to be God’s people, but rather what we do because we already are God’s people.

They are not taking the fun out of life but instead protecting us from harm, and protecting the relationships, both those with family and with God, that are crucial to sustaining human life and community. They illustrate how God’s wisdom works against the expectations of this world.

The God who gave the Ten Commandments and who sent Jesus wants us to experience fulfillment and joy. That comes in relationship to God and to each other. The Ten Commandments show us how to live in relationship to each other and to the God who raised Jesus from death.