Our part of the relationship

RCL Year B, 3 Lent   I started off my Lenten preaching two weeks ago talking about covenant, and the relationship we have with God and with each other. Our Old Testament texts through Lent all deal with covenant, from Noah to Abraham, Moses and on from there. It’s a great opportunity for talking about […]

RCL Year B, 3 Lent

I started off my Lenten preaching two weeks ago talking about covenant, and the relationship we have with God and with each other. Our Old Testament texts through Lent all deal with covenant, from Noah to Abraham, Moses and on from there. It’s a great opportunity for talking about relationship, a chance for us in this season to explore together what it means to be in relationship with God.

So far we’ve heard God’s side of the relationship. With the promise made to Noah after the flood, God pledged to love us no matter what, to be faithful to us even despite our unfaithfulness back. It’s an awesome gift of truly unconditional love, love that sees us clearly and truthfully and yet embraces us all the same. It’s hard for many of us to take that kind of love in. Last week the reading was about God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, that they would be the ancestors of a great nation and that God would be the God of all those people, the people Israel. It is again an unconditional covenant, not requiring anything in return from the people.

Today, however, we hear a further refining of the covenant, if you will. Now the covenant is being made with Israel through Moses, and our response is required. The Exodus reading today is about what is expected of us in this covenant relationship, in the Ten Commandments. We have all of us heard these commandments before, in church and out of it – there are those who want to post them in state capitols, and consider them to be so universal that all people should understand the laws they give. They do give the essence of the Law, the Torah, but the commandments are not in themselves a legal code or a set of rules. Instead, they set forth the terms of the relationship between God and God’s people, beginning with and focusing on our understanding of who God is, and ending with the basic requirements for functioning human society.

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: how many of you memorized the Ten Commandments? How many of you could recite them right now? It might be a little tricky – and not just because your memory is failing. It’s like trying to name the 12 apostles – it’s hard to do, because the names of the apostles vary in the different gospels that list them. The Ten Commandments are named in a section of 20 verses of Exodus – but pinpointing exactly how those 20 verses break down into 10 commandments is a little vague. Jews see it one way, Catholics & Lutherans see it another way, the rest of us see it still a third way. The first commandment might be, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’ Or it might be that plus ‘you shall have no other gods before me.’ The second commandment might be, ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol.’ Or that might be part of the first commandment. The last commandment might be, ‘You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.’ Or that might be two commandments, the first, ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s house’; and the second, ‘or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.’ So this set of commandments that Jews & Christians see as common to all of us, well, they’re not quite as universally agreed upon as we thought. It’s amazing that any ecumenical dialogue ever happens, when you think about it. There are so many things large and small to disagree over.

I don’t know if there’s much point to be made out of that, but it does perhaps gesture toward how we have a tendency to take scripture and turn it into our personal set of rules. You could in a very broad way read the Ten Commandments as rules to live by, mostly in reference to what not to do. Thou shalt…thou shalt not. But when you look at them more closely, that interpretation breaks down. The Jewish tradition has the first commandment as simply, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery. That’s not a commandment at all: it’s a statement from God of his identity and history with his people. There’s nothing for us to do – it’s simply about who God is. And on from there, the majority of the scripture passage has to do with God’s identity, God as the protector and savior of his people. God has authority because God has saved and cared for us: God is the one who brought Israel out of slavery, freeing people from bondage. God is the one who created everything that is. Having established that, our response should be obvious: why on earth would we worship any other god, or use God’s name for our own deceitful purposes, or fail to honor God with our rest and attention on the Sabbath day?

The second set of commandments all relate to how we treat each other. God chooses to make this covenant with the whole community of Israel, all of God’s people, not with a single individual. So it matters that the community stays healthy and intact – which is why the remainder of the commandments have to do with the basics of maintaining a stable and safe society, where people are not killing or cheating or stealing from one another, not threatening one another with their desire for what others have. Again, it should be obvious: Why would we want to mistreat other people, when we live in community with one another?

In other words, the commandments lay out our end of the bargain, the terms by which we live in the covenant relationship with God. But it lies elsewhere to lay out the details of the commandments and laws, and the consequences of disobeying them. Instead, the Ten Commandments give us the basic meaning of all of them, the description of what it looks like to live in relationship with God – and by extension, with one another.

Ok. So what does this have to say to us today? Think for a moment of the gospel scene we heard today, of Jesus’ righteous anger in the Temple. It’s a common Christian misconception that the Hebrew scriptures only deal with rules and legalities. Consciously or not, we can lump all of the Old Testament into one big erroneous document, corrected by Jesus’ coming and the writing of the New Testament.  But Jesus wasn’t arguing against all of Hebrew tradition when he lashed out at the scribes and Pharisees and threw the moneychangers out of the temple and told parables about loving your enemy. He was trying to realign people’s relationship with God toward actual relationship as it had been from the beginning, back to the covenants God had made with Israel and all of humanity.  After all, legally the moneychangers could be in the Temple. But the result of their work there was to extort money from the poor and to set up barriers to the worship of God, and that was what made Jesus angry. Jesus was trying to bring us back from focusing on the wrong things, the rules and the moralities and the do’s and don’ts that allow us to pass judgment on one another. He was leading us – is always leading us – away from too much tolerance of things that destroy relationship, things that allow the oppression and exploitation of other people and that prevent us from knowing God’s love. It wasn’t a new message: it was one meant to restore us to the relationship we were created for from the very beginning.

So do the Ten Commandments describe your relationship with God and other people? It’s interesting to note that though this covenant is between God and God’s people as a community, the commandments are addressed to the singular individual. Each one of us is supposed to be living this way in order for all of us as a community to be in relationship with God. So, do we? Take a moment to evaluate. Does your relationship with God look like a faithful, monogamous relationship characterized by love and respect, and intentional time set aside just to be with God? Does your relationship with other people – all other people – uphold and strengthen the good of all in the community? In other words, the Ten Commandments are not a lowest common denominator set of rules to follow – I haven’t murdered anyone today, so I’m doing ok – but instead a holistic picture of what right relationship looks like for us with God and our neighbor. Jesus nods his approval at the summary of the law that the lawyer gives him – love God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and your neighbor as yourself – because that really does sum it up.  Love, because God first loved you.

So perhaps our meditations for this week should be on the negatives, if you will: on what blocks and hinders our love for and from God, and for and from each other. If our relationships don’t look whole, then why don’t they? Have we forgotten or ignored God’s love and care for us in the past? Have we rushed past prayer time and other space that allows us to spend time with God? Have we let other things take God’s place of importance in our lives? And have we allowed envy and hatred, or lack of forgiveness, or selfishness with our time and money, to prevent us from loving and caring for all the rest of God’s children here on earth? It might be a good time to get clear of all of that stuff, to write it in a big old list and burn it, or put it in a mental basket and pray over it, or confess it to a trusted person and be absolved of it, and so to offer it up to God and let go of it. And to let ourselves be wooed back into love and relationship with the God who desires us and longs for us, always. May we all of us remember and live into that love beyond all loves, now and throughout our lives. Amen.