THIS WEEK’S TOP TEN
A Sermon preached by the
Rev. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Text: Exodus 20:1-17
Our journey through the wilderness concludes today at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Three months into their journey, Moses has led the children of Israel to the holy mountain where he himself encountered God earlier. The time has come to establish a covenant of relationship between God and this people. God has not only liberated them from their captivity when God heard their cries and observed the oppression under pharaoh; God has also brought them out of captivity in Egypt to be God’s people. The 19th chapter of Exodus, which precedes today’s text, is full of the wonder and mystery of this God, who has chosen these people to be God’s own.
Moses goes up on the mountain to consult with God and God says to him, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, 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” (Exodus 19:3-6.)
There follow three days of great ritual flurry as the people prepare to meet their God. They are all clearly warned not come onto the mountain while God is present or they will suffer dire consequences. Finally, God appears. The text says, “On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud all the people in the camp trembled…Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended on it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently” (Exodus 19:16-18.) If they had been once impressed by the power and glory of pharaoh, they were now laid low in the presence of God.
This is all in some sense scene-setting in order for God to speak God’s words to God’s people. As impressive as these trappings might be, as clearly as they indicate that the people are not dealing with some mere human wielding power but the very source of all power and, indeed, of being itself, it is the words spoken on the mountain that carry the greater weight. Here the great God of the universe offers to human beings the opportunity to enter into a unique and life-saving relationship and gives them the guidelines to live fully into that relationship. Clearly, what is expected is faithful obedience. This may seem like a new bomdage, but what is different from their servitude to pharaoh is that, the theatrics of glory aside, the people are free to choose. God’s gift of the covenant may in some sense be conditional but it is freely offered out of God’s love and compassion for these people. These words from Yahweh promise to shape and to guide their covenantal relationship for time and eternity.
Unfortunately, contemporary culture has made something of a mockery of the Ten Commandments. We too often associate them with the Alabama judge who lost his job, objecting to the removal of a Ten Commandment monument from the court house, or with the fundamentalist and right wing citizens of Boise, fighting over a similar monument in a city park. Or maybe we see Charlton Heston, standing larger than life on the silver screen, receiving the clay tablets, while the music swells. Without understanding them or studying them, our culture has glorified these commandments, making an idol and a mockery of them; or else we have done the opposite and written them off, ignoring them as an ancient anachronism that has no meaning for us moderns.
Some of us have come to believe that they have been made irrelevant by the grace given in the incarnation of the Christ, that they are somehow superseded by the gospel. Is this so, I wonder? Jesus came from the same God (though perhaps he had a different understanding and relationship than did Moses and the children of Israel) and he is reported to have said that he came “not to destroy the law but to fulfill it.”
Last week I spoke about Walter Brueggemann’s argument that Israel brings a “core testimony” to their experience of God. We considered how part of that testimony is that Yahweh is the God who delivers, who brings people up and out and redeems. Today’s text contains another aspect of that core testimony – Yahweh is the God who commands. Brueggemann says “Commandment dominates Israel’s witness about Yahweh. Yahweh is a sovereign ruler whose will for the world is known and insisted upon. Israel as the addressee of the command exists and prospers as it responds in obedience to these commands” (Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, p. 181.)
Now wait a minute, we freedom-loving, independent-minded Americans don’t much like that kind of talk. And if you add in a free-thinking, soul-libertarian Baptist streak to the mix, we like it less. Doesn’t Paul say “for freedom Christ has set us free”? What is this talk of commandments and obedience and what does it have to do with us? That’s an old story, isn’t it? One we’ve left behind. I’m not so sure. I think that, like the children of Israel, we are free to choose. God has given us that freedom. We can choose to be in relationship (which means in covenant with God) or we can choose to make it on our own, wandering in a wilderness of our own selection, relying on our own resources.
My latest “treadmill book” (that is, what I read while on the treadmill and elliptical machine at the gym) is Thomas Merton’s classic The Seven Storey Mountain. In it he recounts his early life in the 1920s and 30s and his ultimate conversion from something of a libertine to Roman Catholicism. I must say I take issue with some of the overheated and overstated zeal with which the young convert describes his new found faith, but I believe that Merton himself mellowed with time to become a much more compassionate and understanding practitioner of his faith. What is interesting and relevant about his story for our purposes is his testimony to how lost and unfulfilled he felt in his freedom. His parents were artists, his family had money and privilege, even during the depression; he lived in France and England and the USA and attended private schools here and abroad. He seems to have had more latitude to live his life free of authority and control than most of his peers, and, I imagine, most of us.
However, what comes through is his ultimate world-weariness, his deep dissatisfaction with his free-thinking, free-spending way of life. In his early twenties, as a student at Columbia, he developed a medical condition, perhaps physical, perhaps stress induced that brought him up short. He reports “Now my life was dominated by something I had never really known: fear. Was it really something altogether new? No, for fear is inseparable from pride and lust. They may hide it for a time; but it is the reverse of the coin.” He goes on, “I had refused to pay attention to the moral laws upon which all our vitality and sanity depend…I had at last become a true child of the modern world, completely tangled up in petty and useless concerns with myself, and almost incapable of even considering or understanding anything that was really important to my own true interests” (Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 163.)
What strikes me about Merton’s testimony is how it is in letting go of his perceived freedom and misguided sense of self-sufficiency; it is in turning his life over to the God who made him and loved him and desired nothing more than to be in covenanted communion with him that he finds his true self and the real freedom to be all that he desired to be. It is that old irony that it is in letting go that we find ourselves free to grow beyond our fears, our dissatisfactions, our despair, our lost wandering in inhospitable deserts, thirsty, hungry and alone.
In returning to the God of the covenant, Brueggemann reminds us that, far from being odious and oppressive, when freely embraced “the new ‘command society’ of Sinai is one of dignity, freedom, and well being” (pp. 182-3.) He goes on “…the commandments are policies to create a society that practices Yahweh’s justice instead of pharaoh’s injustice, and to establish neighborly well-being instead of coercion, fear and exploitation” (p. 184.) And finally he argues that “the commands, rightly understood, are not restraints as much as they are empowerments. Those who obey are able to participate in the ongoing revolution of turning the world to its true shape as God’s creation” (p. 200.)
When I titled this sermon, I was thinking playfully of David Letterman’s daily top ten lists. Maybe the topic is not so playful after all. But what if we took these commands as a top ten list, reframed them from the negative to the positive, grounded the list as Jesus taught us to in love for God and love for neighbor, and used it as a daily reminder of what it means to be beloved children of the living God?
Here is my feeble attempt at a midrash on the text, this week’s top ten. Number 10 – Be happy and give God thanks for all the ways you have been blessed. You’ve got everything you really need. Number 9 – Tell the truth. It will always serve you better than any story you can make up. Number 8 – There is enough to go around. Taking from others will get you in trouble you don’t need. Number 7 – Be faithful and loving, compassionate and caring in all your relationships, especially with those closest to you. Number 6 – Life is precious and sacred. Honor and respect it. It comes from God and is ultimately in God’s hands. Number 5 – Respect the folk who have responsibility for you and care for you. Give them the credit they deserve. Number 4 – Make sure you have some regular time set apart to spend communing with God who desires to be in communion with you. Number 3 – Be careful with your speech. Speak truth always in love and with respect. Number 2 – Remember, images are just that and focus as well as you can on the reality of God who is beyond our knowing and is always more than we can imagine. Number 1 – There is one God above all and in all who leads us forth from any and every captivity into the light of a day that is ever new. If we freely chose to live like that what a radically different world this would be. God lead us on. Amen.