Today, as we’ve been doing throughout this season of Lent, we focus on the Old Testament reading, the Ten Commandments. How many of you once memorized the 10 Commandments in Sunday School or Confirmation? (p.1160 ELW)
Why spend so much time today thinking about the 10 Commandments? Aren’t they a little outdated? Popular imagination has them etched on tablets of stone. I mean isn’t that a little archaic? I think that Exodus according to Charlton Heston is a little archaic, so the real thing is way older than that old movie is. Why did we even have to learn about them back in Confirmation? I thought Jesus gives the real commandments.
These are some good questions.
I’d like to reflect on the 10 Commandments this morning, as essential Christian material for our 40-day Lenten wilderness journey. Israelites were in the wilderness for 40 years, and got the commandments, right in the middle of that time. And here we are in the middle of Lent, being offered that same list of rules.
I don’t have to tell a congregation, many of whom are members or related to members of the armed forces, about the importance and goodness of rules and structure. And yet the 10 commandments are perhaps some rules, some structure for our lives that have been forgotten…reduced only to a faint reference to a few popular movies, like Charlton Heston’s or Mel Brooks’.
These rules, these 10 commandments, if they haven’t been abandoned all together or laughed into irrelevance, if they have been maintained in framed needlepoints by our front doors in our homes or thumbtacked up as Sunday School classroom poster art, I’m afraid they have really just been individualized in our culture. Something to be swallowed during childhood or adolescence…that hopefully it sticks. Like a tetanus shot. But they’re really just rules between me and God. Just privatized Christian citizen rules.
The 10 Commandments for the ancient Israelites, for Martin Luther in his Small Catechism, and for us today – the 10 C’s are about community life. (“privatized Christian”, btw, is an oxymoron)
Archaeologists have shown us that throughout ancient Near Eastern societies, commandments resembling these existed. Most cultures had morality codes etched in stone and written on papyrus, rules by which communities lived. The difference with the biblical version –the 10 C’s here—is that they connected community life to God. In other words, a violation of one’s community obligations—coveting, stealing, dishonoring the elderly, breaking Sabbath—these offenses to one’s community are offenses to God.
(That’s worth reflecting back on these archaic tablets…)
Offense to your community is an offense to God. You dishonor the poor, the immigrant, the stranger—for they are part of our community—you dishonor me, God says. And Jesus crystalized that one, but it was already in the OT! (“gotta be reading with blindfold” Woe to you who do not show hospitality to the alien and the stranger. Still part of Middle Eastern culture…) Offense to your community is an offense to God. So keep the rules, God says, Jesus says.
So where’s the gift in being told the rules?
[Community Garden rules – we’ve been laughing this week…]
Where’s the gift in stern and harsh commands?
Great illustration: yesterday, drumming that makes community workshop...
The space, the pause, the rest, gives shape. Rules give us a structure. They make room. There’s certainly a value to children, blending fingerpaints together together into a sludge of bluhh, but there’s no value of space, no definition. No boundaries or lines. Compare that to a Picasso, or a Gauguin, or an O’Keefe. What great artists do, is that define the space. Our Lutheran tradition talks about the law of God as a “curb” – the 10 C’s, summed up by the Greatest Commandment – love God – these are a “curb”. You can drive off the road in the desert, but thanks be to God for the curb that gives us direction. It gives us a road. And the road leads us back to the community, back to the villages and the cities, back to the poor, back to God, back to caring for our own bodies in healthier ways and back to caring for the earth, back to caring for one another. That’s what it looks like to love God: rooted.
And this is what’s got Jesus so upset today in our Gospel lesson. Why’s he gotta disturb the peace like that? Why’s he have to get all political? Just be quiet Jesus! This is what we do in church: we loose focus on community-directly-linked-to-God. That’s what we do. We start to think about how best we can profit ourselves—whether it’s making money or looking the holiest. That’s what we do, Jesus. So how dare you come in here and upend the tables of my successes.
[pause] If Jesus walked into your life what tables would he upend?
Well the question’s not “if”…this Lenten season. You have chosen to take on the discipline of Lent. Jesus DOES walk into our lives and upend the tables of our sin! The question’s not “if”.
God’s love is so good that it upends the tables of our selfishness, our brokenness, our distractedness, our laziness. Jesus comes in and crashes that party! And thanks be to God for that! That news is so good that we can’t help but say Halleluiah during Lent…did anybody catch that? We broke a great rule. God’s grace is so good that we bounced off of the Lenten road for a second. But that’s OK…we’ll just bump back on. If Jesus has an outburst, why can’t we, right?
The rules – not the halleluia rule, but the rules of the 10 C’s – the rules are an essential part of God’s love. They give definition to God’s grace.
Like any good parent. We make rules and enforce them out of deep, deep love, not vengeance. Rules give shape (like in drumming, or Lent, or gardening, or painting) to our families and our communities. Study those rules this week, honor those rules, endeavor to keep those rules. For in them, Christ offers us this incredible gift of definition to God’s grace.
Thanks be to God for the rules. Thanks be to Christ, who abides with us as we work to honor and keep them. AMEN.
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