How many of you, after hearing the passage from Exodus this morning, have the image of a bearded Charlton Heston posing with two big stone tablets that have the ten commandments neatly engraved on them?
Yup, me too.
The Ten commandments are firmly lodged in our culture as a society thanks to art, film, and social commentary. How many fights have happened over where the Ten Commandments can be posted? Even people who don’t spend much time in church or synagogue probably know the basic essence of the ten “thou shall nots”
In our vernacular it would be: don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t covet your neighbour’s donkey and things, don’t take God’s name in vain, and don’t work on Sunday.
Honestly, at a very basic level the ten commandments are a pretty good list for how to live a good life – although I am not sure any of us are in a position to covet anyone’s donkey – but replace “donkey” with car, house, income, vacation, ability to sing on key… and then it gets applicable to our lives.
As you might imagine, there is more to the commandments than simply being a list of things we’re not supposed to do. Part of the underlying meaning comes into view when you consider where this passage falls in the history of the Israelite people. Over the last few weeks, we have been wandering the wilderness with Moses and the newly freed Israelites. We’ve heard about their crossing of the dry sea bottom of the Red/Reed Sea. We’ve heard about their complaints of thirst being answered by water from a rock. And we’ve seen hunger lessened by the gift of evening quails and morning manna. Now, they are weeks into wandering around Sinai, and they have the task of trying to figure out who they are as a people, as a community, as a people who have been changed and shaped by what they have collectively experienced.
Knowing this context, the intent of the commandments might become a little clearer. The Israelite people don’t really need a prescriptive list from God that basically says “here are the rules, follow them or else.” The wandering group of people need something more, they need to hear God saying “you are a community – with identity and worth – how are you going to live together?”
How are you going to live together?
It’s an important question to ponder as life reshapes and shifts around for the Israelites. I don’t think I am saying anything too risky when I say that this question is as important now as it was for our faith ancestors. For living in community can be both challenging and beautiful. We need community as a species and we love being in community. Well, we love it most of the time – usually we love it until we run into some kind of conflict, or disagreement of opinions or when someone consistently takes up too much space when they park or sings a hymn at the wrong tempo or wants to change the way we do things… In these moments community life can be bumpy. Being in community, I think you’d agree, is beautiful and life-giving AND challenging and lonely. More than anything, nurturing community means figuring out how to be in good and loving relationship with one another.
And that is what the commandments are trying to do. They are the covenantal boundaries that make community possible. Quick refresher on what a covenant is. Covenant (or Berit, in Hebrew) is an unbreakable bond with God where God is made known in love and mercy, and the people in return give worship, fidelity and obedience to God. God promises to be protector and guide in all things, and the people promise to follow and love God. This is more than a pinky promise.
If this is the case, then we begin to understand that the commandments are about more than rules and consequences. We begin to see that they are relational. They are concerned with our relationship with God, with one another and with ourselves. Don’t murder, lie or steal. Don’t use another person for your own purposes. Don’t treat someone else’s life, dignity, property or relationships as though they exist simply for your convenience. Underlying all these is a fairly radical idea: People Matter.
Other people’s lives matter. Their dignity and identity matter. Our relationships with each other matter. The ability for all creation to flourish matters. The commandments themselves, in how they are ordered, move from our relationship with God to how to live in good relations with each other. It’s a reminder that faith isn’t just a personal thing – it is also what happens between me and you – between us and our neighbours, between us and the stranger, between those who have power and those who don’t, and those who have enough and those we don’t.
In other words, the commandments aren’t about asking “did we follow the rules?”. Rather they are about asking “what kind of people are we going to be? What kind of community are we going to foster?” Those are big questions to bring to the table on this World Communion Sunday.
On this particular Sunday we are invited to look beyond our own congregation in order to remember that we are part of something much larger. There are Christians gathering around the world in places we may never visit, speaking languages we don’t speak, singing hymns we’ve never heard who are part of this vast, complicated, beautiful Christian community we find ourselves in. And that is comforting and humbling. Sometimes we forget just how big the Christian community is and how many different ways God has been experienced within it.
World communion Sunday invites us to loosen our grip on the idea of “how church is supposed to look” so that we might connect with the truth that there is no one right way to pray, worship or understand God. Christianity is bigger than any denomination or theology.
This idea of widening our gaze brings me back to something that was pondered about at Bible Study this week. The question was asked if the Ten Commandments were unique to the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). It might not surprise to you know that they aren’t. Across the world’s religious and philosophical traditions, human beings have wrestled with remarkably similar questions… how should we treat one another? How do we live good and just lives? Buddhism’s five precepts emphasize abstinence from taking life, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, false or idle speech, and intoxicants that could cloud the mind. Sikh teachings emphasize service, equality, honest work and sharing with others. Even the ancient Greeks engraved maxims for good living on the Temple of Apollon: know thyself, be overcome by justice, respect your parents, do not use an oath, follow a god, associate with your peers, nothing in excess, fear ruling…
Even in the secular world we have developed laws and human rights, we teach our children the golden rule, and we hold social expectations around honesty, responsibility, dignity and care for one another.
While there are profound differences in how the world’s religions understand things like God, humanity, suffering and faithful living, we can be curious and maybe discover that someone else’s questions might actually help us ask different questions of our own. Maybe that is one of the gifts of World Communion Sunday – the recognition that we don’t have to have all the answers on our own, personally or communally.
Which brings me back to the Commandments… these words of scripture aren’t about creating a community of perfect people… thank god! That would be exhausting and likely really boring. Instead, the commandments are given to us, a people of different ways of being and living and being faithful, as a way for us to figure out how to live together while recognizing that we are going to get it wrong, we’re going to disagree, we are going to covet our neighbours “donkey” once and a while… the point isn’t perfection. The point is that we have a way forward when we commit ourselves to doing the work of community. When we commit to community we can repair the broken points, we can apologize, we can forgive, we can learn and we can try again.
Perhaps this is where the commandments and the communion table meet. When we come to this table, we don’t come because we have everything figured out. We’ve broken a commandment or two. We’ve not achieved spiritual perfection. We come because we are human beings who need one another and God. We come because we carry hope and questions. We come because we are joyful and hurting. We come, because more than anything, we want to be together.
At tables like this all around the world, God’s people gather in all our beautiful complexity. Collectively we acknowledge that God’s table is bigger than what this building can hold, crossing cultures and languages, denominations and borders. Perhaps the gift of the commandments and the sacrament of communion is that they invite us to become the kind of people who make life together possible and who keep asking “are we becoming the kind of community where everyone can flourish?” instead of “have we followed the rules?”
This then becomes a community where there is room for all of us, no matter where we are on our journey.
World Communion Sunday reminds us that we are not alone. We are indeed part of something much larger than ourselves. And the Ten Commandments help us to understand that our goal is to create a community where we live together making room for all who enter it. Where we make room for dignity, freedom, difference without division. Where there is enough bread, enough grace, enough compassion and enough room for everyone to flourish. The Commandments and the eucharist are an invitation into the sacredness of community, which invite us to think about how we live together, caring for one another, making room and trying again when we mess up. It is an invitation to become, together, the kind of people who make God’s love visible and tangible in the world.
Amen.
