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| The Ten Commandments on display at the Texas State Capitol in Austin |
Scripture can be found here...
In
the beginning was the Word.
In
1956 Paramount Pictures released the dazzling religious epic, “The Ten
Commandments,” starring Yul Brynner as the Pharaoah and Charlton Heston as both Moses and the voice of God. As part of the publicity for the film,
director Cecil B. DeMille placed monuments containing the Ten Commandments
throughout the United States. To accomplish this, DeMille joined forces with a
Minnesota juvenile court judge named E. J. Ruegemer, who had been erecting
displays of the commandments since the 1940’s. He did this based on his
conviction that the troubled youth of America needed a moral foundation.
Between them, DeMille and Ruegemer are believed to have been responsible for
anywhere between 100 and 2000 monuments, made of granite, shaped like the
traditional tablets of the law, and inscribed with the words we are about to
study and ponder for the next four weeks. And despite efforts to remove many of
these displays based on an argument in favor of the separation of church and
state, in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that the monuments could stay, and that
they were historical, and not merely religious. The case, Van Orden v. Perry,
was decided by a vote of 5-4.
And
here we are, studying these words together. Scholars have a hard time
pinpointing exactly how old they are—according to my reading, they may be anywhere
from 3,000-16,000 years old. And yet their significance continues to be hotly
debated. Are they general rules for living, applicable to all? Are they
commands to be upheld only by those who were part of God’s covenant people,
newly escaped from slavery, or do they include those brought into the covenant
by Jesus Christ? And why is it so hard for us to memorize them? (More on that
last one next week. There is a very good reason.)
Let’s
start at the beginning—which is to say, in the days and months leading up to
God’s and Moses conversation on Mount Sinai. The Hebrews approach Sinai freshly
released from captivity… newly freed from their four hundred years as slaves in
Egypt. God has led them out, across the Sea of Reeds (formerly known and
wrongly translated as the Red Sea), simultaneously freeing them and destroying
their enemies.
The
months in the wilderness have had their challenges—as you can imagine, issues
of food and water came up right away, and in both cases, God provided for the
people. Now, three months later, they have entered the wilderness of Sinai, the
area surrounding the mountain. Modern day scholars are not sure exactly where the
biblical Mount Sinai is located, though the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula
(part of modern day Egypt) is as good a location as any. It is notoriously hard
to say exactly where astonishing, holy things happen. Suffice to say, the
people camped out here, and Moses went up the mountain to meet with God.
In
the beginning was the Word.
God
begins with a reminder. Tell the people, God says, remind them—who I am. You
know what I did—I rescued you, I “bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to
myself.”
And
implicit in all that is: I changed the laws of nature for you. A sea parted.
When you were hungry, I sent you bread from heaven. When you were thirsty I
provided water from a rock. I was there for you. I was there for you.
I
swear, the Lord God sounds like an
anxious suitor, ready to propose. And, in a sense, that is exactly what is
happening. God is saying, “You are already mine. You are my people. Let’s take
this to the next level. This is a covenant relationship”—which, by the way, is
one way we understand marriage. First comes love, then comes marriage. Or, in
this case, first comes love—divine love as enacted in God’s works of rescue and
sustenance. Then come God’s claims upon our behavior.[1] Then
comes the spelling out of the terms of the covenant.
Unlike
what we would consider ideal in a modern day marriage, one party is entirely
empowered to spell out the terms of this covenant. Because this is the relationship God is
spelling out between deity and humans, God gets to do that. “If
you obey my voice and keep my covenant,” God says, “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. These are the words that
you shall speak to the Israelites” (Ex. 19:5-6).
In
the beginning was the Word.
Have
you noticed something funny about this passage? Have you noticed the complete
absence of the word “command” or “commandment”? Instead, God tells Moses,
“These are the words you shall speak.” And that is a faithful translation of
what we find in Hebrew. The Hebrew word for “word” is debar, or, plural, debarim.
These are the debarim I want you to
speak. This is why sometimes you’ll hear people refer to the Ten Commandments
as the “Decalogue,” which means, literally, the ten words.
Here’s
something fascinating. The word “word” is also translated from the Hebrew,
throughout the psalms, as “promise.” God’s command to us, God’s word to us, is
also God’s promise to us. God gives us God’s word.
“Then
God spoke all these words. I am the Lord
your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
slavery…” God’s claims on us are based on God’s claim of already having rescued
us. It all goes back to who God is, how we understand God.
But,
you know, we who are Christians, in Endicott, NY, in 2014, could reasonably
ask, “How does this apply to me? I wasn’t a slave in ancient Egypt.” And,
depending upon how your life has gone up to this point, the idea of God having
rescued you may or may not resonate, may or may not feel accurate. Are we
included in the covenant?
One
answer to this question has to do with how we view the Old Testament, the
Hebrew Scriptures, or what Jews call “The Bible.” Do we take the Hebrew
Scriptures seriously as God’s word to us? For the past two years I’ve been
using a preaching tool called the Narrative Lectionary, whose answer to this
question is, emphatically, Yes. The Bible that Jesus knew is our Bible too. The
story of Jesus makes no sense whatsoever without the context of the Bible he
and his ancestors clung to, the story of God and God’s people. And, though it
is pretty common to think of the God of Old Testament as being about law and
the God of New Testament as being about love, there is only one God, a God of
both law and love, though the stories we tell of God change over time. As we
hear in familiar refrains such as, “The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to
anger and abounding in steadfast love,” the God of the First Testament is,
indeed, a God of love. And as we see in this prelude to the Ten Commandments,
first comes love.
Another
answer to that question—does this apply to us?—can be found in your bulletin,
Question 90 from the Presbyterian catechism, Why
did God give this law? The answer is this:
[The
law] was the great charter of liberty for Israel, a people chosen to live in
covenant with God and to serve as a light to the nations. It remains the charter
of liberty for all who would love, know and serve the Lord today.
The Ten Commandments are God’s word, not
only to the ancient Hebrews, but to all who would love, know, and serve God
through our faith in Jesus Christ today. And the nature of these words is that
they contain both commands and promise. God makes a claim on our behavior, both
towards God and towards one another. And God promises that our living into, and
living up to God’s claim, will be a sign to the world that we are, in fact,
God’s chosen, precious, beloved children.
Those who are chosen and precious are
always exposed to standards of behavior, from teaching a toddler not to hit
when they are mad, to teaching a teenager to speak to others, including their
parents, with respect. To love another, even another who is not a child—a
parent, a partner, a friend—to love another is to enter into an agreement with
them about our behavior. In marriage we take vows—to love, honor, cherish, to
be faithful, in all circumstances. First comes love, then come our claims upon one
another. We expect the best of each other, and we promise to give the best to
each other, because we love.
In the beginning was the Word. It was a
word of covenant, which means it was a word of love, and a word of command, and
a word of promise. It was given in love, to further love. And whatever your
view on DeMille’s and Ruegemer’s displays (or of Charlton Heston’s acting or
activism), it is a word, and these are words, that are still living and moving
and having their being in us today. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Rolf Jacobson, “Commentary on Exodus 19:1-6, 20:1-17,”
Working Preacher, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2113, 6-15-2014, Accessed 6-17-2014.
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