Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 Psalm 19
Philippians 3:4-14 Matthew 21:33-46
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
When we went to Ohio for my niece’s wedding last month I had forgotten how publicly faith is often displayed in the Midwest. The hotel we stayed in was only a few miles from the Creation Museum and every day at breakfast the hotel lobby was filled with people who were wearing their faith, literally, on their sleeves. T-shirts that said things like “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” Or Souled Out for Jesus…s-o-u-l-e-d out. Get it? Or my personal favorite, “King James Version: The Original”. Really? Not the Hebrew Bible or the Greek New Testament? And the other thing I had forgotten about were the billboards along the highway….numerous billboards….displaying the Ten Commandments and declaring that this is a “Christian Nation”. God Bless the USA. Now, I have nothing against God blessing our country and every other country. But if this is a Christian nation, isn’t it unusual that specifically Jewish scripture has been so publicly cited as example? The ten commandments. They were issued by Yahweh, by God, to the people of Israel, specifically to Moses. As Christians, we were not given ten commandments, we were given two: You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and you shall love your neighbor as yourselves. But loving God with all that we are and loving ourselves and loving our neighbors is often harder than following a list of do’s and don’ts.
And even on this list of do’s and don’ts, as a society we only adhere to two of them…only murder and stealing are against the law. All of the rest are pretty much part and parcel of our daily being. Some of them are even wound into the fabric of our economy. If we did not covet what our neighbor’s have….if we didn’t want to keep up with the Joneses, our whole economic system would collapse. Our national figures…movie stars and political officials…commit adultery and we rush to buy magazines to read all about it. Sabbath keeping is a thing of the past to be certain. And needless to say, we have made idols of our many possessions and our status.
In essence, though, we have looked at the commandments that God gave to the people of Israel through our own eyes…through our own experiences…through our own way of being in the world. We treat them like a law, like the speed limit, for example, and God as the state trooper who will pull us over and write us a ticket if we break them.
We have misunderstood the commandments. They are not a legal code at all, they are a covenant between God and God’s people. God didn’t say “look, here are 10 rules…do this and you win.” God told them to keep the covenant God was making with them so that they would be living as God’s holy people, set apart for God’s distinct purpose (Exodus 19: 5-6.) God’s covenant with the people was based on the relationship between God and the people. “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…” You are my people. This is who God is. This is who God’s people are. And this, this is the way we live in relationship.
In the second reading this morning, Paul is making clear to the church at Philippi that righteousness, being in right relationship does not come from us nor does it come from the law, but that it comes from faith in Christ, the righteousness of God based on faith. We tend to think of faith as something that we have or don’t have…that we have a lot of or a little of. But, Jesus says that we only need faith the size of the smallest of seeds, the mustard seed. We think that it’s all up to us to have enough faith when Martin Luther says that faith in itself is a gift from God. So, thanks be to God, it is not up to us at all. It is not a matter of us having enough faith or following all of the rules, life in the kingdom is about being in relationship….relationship with God AND relationship with God’s people and God’s creation.
This covenantal relationship with God is not unlike a marriage; in fact the language of marriage is used throughout the New Testament to describe the relationship between God and the Church. When we get married, we say vows to our spouse. Others witness them, but those witnesses are not expected to follow those vows. They are not included in those vows. We are not professing our love and fidelity to anyone other than our spouse. In this same way, the Ten Commandments apply to those who live in a covenantal relationship with God, and because we have been adopted into this relationship that Israel was born into, they apply to us as well. But they are still not rules. They are, if you will, vows between us and God – that this is how we will try to be faithful. They are a profound outpouring of our commitment to live as God’s faithful people. And we need these curbs in order to be able to be about the business of the Kingdom of God. We should avoid murder and theft, adultery and covetousness. We should keep Sabbath and look to God alone, not to other idols. Our salvation is not dependant on it, but our well being may be. God’s love for us is not conditioned upon it, but they do offer some boundaries.
Our relationship with God is created, just like any other relationship, by growing more deeply in knowledge, in time spent with, and in loving relationship with God. We don’t come to worship to visit with our friends or sing our favorite hymns or listen to our wonderful choir….we come to worship to know and love God. That’s it.
We study God’s word together in order to know God better. Just as you enjoy spending time with those you love so that you might come to know them better, so our relationship with God deepens and grows.
There are times in life, though, when we become afraid or uncertain and we try to take matter into our own hands. Rather than trusting in the promises of God, we trust in ourselves or the promises of the world. And in those times, going back to these commandments, these covenantal guidelines, can place us back into relationship, can point us back in the right direction. Even when we are uncertain of anything else, we understand things as basic as these. This sacred covenant with God offers us a return to a relationship that is faithful and filled with grace and compassion.
This weekend your Church Council gathered together in retreat to consider what was ahead for Luther Memorial. Where was the Holy Spirit leading us? How were we hearing the call of the Spirit? How were we hearing one another? How were we living in relationship with one another as the Body of Christ? Our key verse for the weekend was from the end of the second reading today. We read from the Inclusive Translation, Philippians 3:13: “Sisters and brothers, I don’t think of myself as having reached the finish line. I give no thought to what lies behind, but I push on to what is ahead.”
In any relationship, it can be fun, even special to remember the past. We all look back over photo albums and recall the way things were. But we can never go back there. We cannot recapture a single moment. That doesn’t take anything away from those times; they are gifts. But like Paul, our lives and our lives together are what is ahead. What we do next, no matter what that is, is what we push on toward. And they will be gift. They will be gift because they have been granted to us by the God with whom we live in a blessed covenantal relationship. They will be filled with the love we have for God. They will be filled with the love we have for one another and all of the people whom God has created. And they will be filled with the love we have for ourselves, caring for ourselves in good and healthy ways.
What would it be like, if as the people of God, we pressed on into living more deeply in this relationship? What if we let go of the past, not forgetting it’s blessings, but no longer bound by the old hurts, the old expectations, the old resentments? What if we lived as people not constrained by rules but forgiven and freed by the grace and mercy of the God who calls us beloved children and beckons us to live in loving relationship, through the gift of Jesus Christ? Then the world would turn upside down as love, not fear, became the rule of the day. It is that day for which we long, for which we pray, for which we press on. May it come quickly. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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