Exodus 20: 1-17
For Anglicans the 10 Commandments have always had a special prominence.
Even folks who don’t do much Bible
reading would know about them in some detail.
Thanks to Charlton Heston in part, perhaps. In England
and certainly in Colonial America and all the way into the 19th
century it would have been rare to have a cross or crucifix above the Holy
Table. Most commonly in earlier times what
you would see in church as you sat in your pew on a Sunday would be the two
Mosaic Tablets, sometimes just marked with the ten Roman Numerals, other times
with the title of each commandment. You
still see this. On our annual little
after-Christmas vacation Susy and I go to church at St. Michael’s in Ligonier
and there even in a fairly modern mid-20th century church building
that’s what they have above the Communion Table.
The Catechism of our new 1979 Book of Common Prayer—popular reading, I
know-- on page 849 follows the pattern begun in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer
and reviews each of the Commandments
as we have heard them this morning in Exodus 20. A reminder that what that catechism was for generations
and centuries was something to be presented to young people after Evensong on
Sunday afternoons, in preparation for Confirmation. Something to be committed to memory. So the Ten Commandments were a part of the
essential core of what we would now call a Christian Education
“curriculum.”
And just to note that one of the innovations of the first American
Prayer Book in 1789 in the Holy Communion service was what we now call the “Summary
of the Law”—as we hear at the beginning of the service most Sundays, “on these
two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” This opening for the
service was composed as an alternative for use at simple service—now become the
default setting in Rite I services. What
is now in the Episcopal Church the
rarely used alternative, beginning on page 317, but in the English Prayer Book
tradition it still is the norm, again, and around most of the Anglican world,
is to begin every communion service with the full recitation of the 10 Commandments
in litany form. Every Sunday each commandment to be read by the presiding minister, beginning with
the phrase, “God spake these words, and said.”
And the congregation responding to each Commandment, “Lord, have mercy
upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this Law.” Some congregations still use this litany at
least in Lent. Still in our Prayer Book,
pp. 317-318. But my guess is that most people think our
Communion Sunday services run a little too long anyway, so I doubt there would
be much enthusiasm for using the full form on a regular basis . . . .
Our Inquirer Class this year is looking at the Sam Wells book, “What
Episcopalians Believe.” We appreciated
the humor of the comment on the back cover by Ian Markham, Dean of the Virginia
Theological Seminary, who said that this book helps to dispel “the myth that
Episcopalians don’t believe anything.”
In that context to say, my main point this morning, that until about fifteen minutes ago as these
things are calculated in ecclesiastical time it would have been absolutely
clear to visitors and inquirers and anybody who just happened to peek in at us
Anglicans and Episcopalians in worship and in Church School and in Confirmation
Classes and even in the architecture and design of nearly all of our churches even
to the most accidental tourist or visitor that “what we believe” as Anglicans
and Episcopalians, is that these “Ten Commandments” are of critical importance
at the foundation of what our faith and identity are all about. Not just a colorful story for the Sunday
School or the Charlton Heston movie. God’s
Word for God’s people, highlighted, underlined twice, worthy to be memorized
and inscribed not only on our memories but in our hearts--present day by day with
authority and treasured as a precious gift.
I’m not going to walk through them in detail this morning, which
perhaps will be a relief to you. But it occurs
to me that it might be an interesting series of Coffee and Conversation
hours. Ten weeks. Christians have been trying to figure out
just how to apply things like “Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy”
and “thou shalt not kill“ for centuries and
generations, and it might be really
something to take a slow walk through some of those conversations. Not
that we all come up with precisely the same understanding of what the
commandments actually mean, but to begin with the understanding that they do
have specific meaning, and that they are given to us, that they are for us.
“God spake these words.” Think
what it would be like to hear that at the beginning of every service. That
they are in some sense, these 10 Commandments, particularly and intentionally
for us, as we hear and receive them, and
as week by week we would pray that our hearts would be inclined to receive
them, and not simply conceptually and emotionally, but specifically and
effectively. To “keep” them. A significant word. It certainly means “obey,” but I think the
resonance is a bit broader. To hold on
to. To embrace and hold fast. “Incline our hearts to keep this law.” That
when we would pray on our knees week by week and day by day for forgiveness for
“things done and left undone” in the actual shape and behavior of our lives, as
we live day by day in our own thoughts and feelings and in our behavior, these
Commandments would be not exclusively but with priority the template we would
use to evaluate our lives in relationship with God and with one another. That these Commandments expressed in clear
ways the map God desires us and even directs us to be following. A resource that is precious to us-- to shape
not only our talk but also our walk. Not
only with our lips, but in our lives.
Not to say that being a Christian is about following a bunch of rules,
but that these words themselves are derived from what emerges in lives changed
by Christ. They are prescriptive and
proscriptive, about what to do and what not to do, but even more deeply they
are descriptive. That our response to
the call to follow Christ will bring
about and reveal in us lives shaped in this pattern, a Christ-like
pattern. This is what our encounter with
God’s love does to us, what it makes of us.
Transformed lives growing organically from lives transformed though
faith in Christ Jesus. Not that you
become a Christian by submitting to this obedience, but that as we are rooted deeper
and deeper into Christ, this is the life
that begins to take shape.
The first four commandments describing our relationship of loyalty to
and love for the God of the Bible, the God who created the heavens and the
earth, who lifted Israel out of bondage in Egypt and who in the death and
resurrection of Christ Jesus defeated once and for all the power of the Evil
One and opened the Way of Life Eternal.
Then Commandments 5-10 project the character of life aligned to God in
Christ. Each one of them we would note
in this Lent is about restraint, about letting God be God, about not falling
for the kind of temptations Satan offered Jesus in the Wilderness. The temptation that stands at the source of
all our temptations, to play God. To imagine that we are the center of the
universe. To imagine that life and death
are ours to determine, to imagine that
our plan for our lives and our relationships and our world have priority over
God’s plan, to imagine that our wants and hungers and desires are the point of
our lives.
Altogether, what is shaped here
in this passage from Exodus is a life grounded in the Gospel, where God is
acknowledged to be God. Where we are his
people and the sheep of his pasture.
Marked, again, by respect, restraint, humility, and care. Walking in the footsteps of our Savior. Love
the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.
Third Sunday in Lent. And simply
to say that from the days of the Apostles Christians have been a challenge to
the world not simply because of what we try to say about what we believe to be
true, but because of how in our desire to be faithful to that truth we then seek to live our lives. Countercultural, in every culture and across
2,000 years. Putting the love of God
into action. Walking the talk. Calling us back to the map. That as we walk in his footsteps in this Lent
and in all of our lives we would see before us a sign of God’s own character,
and to begin to live here and now the lives he will bring about in his kingdom.
Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering
and a sacrifice to God.
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