Exodus 19:3-7 & 20:1-17
Every other Tuesday morning a group of men gathers in the downtown offices of the Kirkland and Ellis Law Firm to study scripture. Most of them are members of The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago and somehow, in ways too convoluted for a sermon, I got recruited to attend and help keep the guys biblically and theologically on track.
It is mostly led by the laity but every once an awhile one of the retired pastors who attend steps up to lead. I chose last Tuesday because I was preaching here and wanted to do a good job. ☺
The first question I asked them was: “How would you preach this text?”
One of the brighter lights in this group responded (and I am not making this up!) “I would probably find the equivalent in a couple of other religions and societies: Buddhism, Hinduism, the code of Hammurabi and see what they have in common.”
Now I ask you, when was the last time you heard a sermon on the code of Hammurabi? Probably never and your not going to hear one today because I like you a lot and I’d like to be asked back.
Instead we are going to ease ourselves into shallower waters, much shallower waters, by beginning with what the children and I were talking about together with Calvin-ball.
It was a game invented by Bill Watterson for his two comic strip characters - a young boy who was an only child named Calvin and whose best friend who was a stuffed Tiger named Hobbes who could be seen in action only by Calvin and the readers of the comic strip.
It is not that Calvin-ball didn’t have any rules it is just that Calvin and Hobbes made the rules up as they played. So, one moment a tree would be the goalpost and the next, on a whim, it would be the fence, or a fireplug, or the house. Inbounds and out-of-bounds lines would change at a moments notice. What was fair and what was foul was always open to interpretation and reinterpretation. It was a crazy game that usually ended up with them getting hurt, getting angry, or getting in trouble.
If you are like me and have been walking around with your stomach in a knot over what has been going on in our nation and metropolitan area since we have seen each other1 I suggest that it is because we have found ourselves caught up in a game of Calvin-ball where rules are enforced or unenforced on a whim and there is no longer any in-bounds or out of bounds causing people - sometimes innocent and sometimes guilty - get hurt.
If you are like me and have been walking around with your stomach in a knot over what has been going on in our nation and metropolitan area since we have seen each other1 I suggest that it is because we have found ourselves caught up in a game of Calvin-ball where rules are enforced or unenforced on a whim and there is no longer any in-bounds or out of bounds causing people - sometimes innocent and sometimes guilty - get hurt.
The fact of the matter is that we need rules and the Ten Commandments are a very good place to start.
They are known to our Hebrew sisters and brothers as as "the ten words", "the ten sayings", or "the ten matters".
They are words about two very important matters: How we are to relate to God and how we are to relate to our neighbors.
Legend has it that the first three - which deal with our relationship to God - were inscribed on one of the two tablets Moses carried down from the mountain while the other tablet contained the “sayings” about how we are to relate to our neighbors.
People have viewed them through Christian eyes as being cruciform. The trunk of the cross being the three that talk about God and the crossbeam the other seven about how we should live our daily lives.
We know them.
They are words about two very important matters: How we are to relate to God and how we are to relate to our neighbors.
Legend has it that the first three - which deal with our relationship to God - were inscribed on one of the two tablets Moses carried down from the mountain while the other tablet contained the “sayings” about how we are to relate to our neighbors.
People have viewed them through Christian eyes as being cruciform. The trunk of the cross being the three that talk about God and the crossbeam the other seven about how we should live our daily lives.
We know them.
Those of us who come from the Lutheran tradition and endured confirmation classes memorized them along with Luther’s explanation of them in his Small Catechism to the point where the words: “You should so fear and love God” send shivers down our spines. Not because of our fear of God as much as having to stand in front of the class and recite them from memory.
We know that they are the framework upon which almost all civil law is built. And if we read on in Exodus we see them forming what almost looks like a civil code that covers almost everything from marriage rites to property rites to what you should do with the local psychic. The answer to that last one is the very extreme, “put them to death.”
Hebrew scholar Michael Carasik, known for his The Bible Guy blog reminds us:
We know that they are the framework upon which almost all civil law is built. And if we read on in Exodus we see them forming what almost looks like a civil code that covers almost everything from marriage rites to property rites to what you should do with the local psychic. The answer to that last one is the very extreme, “put them to death.”
Hebrew scholar Michael Carasik, known for his The Bible Guy blog reminds us:
Everyone is familiar with the image, made famous in art and so much a part of how we think of the Bible that it is used in movies and cartoons, of Moses coming down the mountain with two stone tablets that have the Ten Commandments engraved on them. But not everyone remembers that, when Moses finally did come down the mountain, [in Exodus 32] he saw the Israelites worshiping the Golden Calf, lost his temper, and broke the stone tablets.2It is at this point it is almost as if a game of Calvin-ball breaks out.
Moses seems to be taking forever and the people conclude that something must have happened to him. So, they turn to Aaron and ask him to build for them a golden calf which he does. “The people exclaimed, ‘O Israel, this is the god that brought you out of Egypt.’”\\
It isn’t. But this is what happens when you are making things up as you go along. Suddenly you can make a god out of anything - gold, money, power, prestige, you name it and humanity can make a god out of it.
When inning becomes our god we can celebrate when our side wins and another side loses. We can tell ourselves then that the ends really did justify the means. Rules from God and even the rules we made up get changed in mid-game and people wind up, just as they did in Calvin-ball, hurt, angry or, when adults play, even destroyed.
Listen to how Eugene Peterson paraphrased the scene in The Message:
Early the next morning, the people got up and offered Whole-Burnt-Offerings and brought Peace-Offerings. The people sat down to eat and drink and then began to party. It turned into a wild party!
God spoke to Moses, “Go! Get down there! Your people whom you brought up from the land of Egypt have fallen to pieces. They made a molten calf and worshiped it. God said to Moses, “I look at this people—oh! what a stubborn, hard-headed people! Let me alone now, give my anger free reign to burst into flames and incinerate them.3
.
God is angry because at this wild, wild party the people had not only a good old time at the punch bowl but a good old time at the finger bowl. They were doing all the stuff to each other that God had expressly forbidden including treating each other like physical objects instead of human beings. If the first three commandments bit the dust with making of the golden calf the last seven were smashed to bits in the wild party that ensued.
I think that when we treat others like that God does get angry.
A conservative rabbi, Louis Ginzberg, stated in his book Legends of the Jews, that Ten Commandments are virtually entwined, that the breaking of one leads to the breaking of another.3
And it doesn’t take much to see that in our day either. Think of the turmoil we put ourselves through. A nation and a city on edge is no party. Being separated from God as we are separating into tribes that won’t even listen to each other is no picnic. This is Calvin-ball turned into something ugly when it gets played at this kind of high stakes level.
You and I know that. We know it is not right to be angry and divided from one another. We know it is not right to believe or disbelieve somebody because they don’t belong to our tribe. We know it is not right to kill one another by our words and certainly not by our deeds. We know we are breaking God’s heart and leading to our own destruction whenever we start to follow our own wills and ways instead of listening to God.
Another one of the guys in my bible study shared a cartoon from The New Yorker that shows Moses holding the commandment tablets and yelling at God: “Now, how about some affirmations to balance all this negativity?”
How about this affirmation to balance things out? Jesus said: “I give you a new commandment that you love one another just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
This means that we treat one another in a vastly different manner, see each other from a vastly different angle, feel compassion for one another.
More directly it means that we see every survivor of abuse as if they really were a faberge egg. It means we weep with and for the families of victims. It means we look beyond our tribal and political loyalties and reject those who would try to capture hurt and pain for their own political purposes. It means we love those who are injured in the process. It means that in all we do we strive for healing that love may triumph.
Saint Paul was right!
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.4At the end of every game of Calvin-ball Calvin and Hobbes, broken, bruised and angry as they might have been, make up. Their love never for each other never fails, never ends.
Let’s hope that we, all of us, everywhere, everyone who bear the name of Christ, can do as well or better, than a cartoon boy and his pretend tiger.
Thanks for listening.
_____________
1. This sermon was preached on the weekend when the McDonald/Vandyke trial concluded and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court was confirmed.
2. Mark Rooker, The Ten Commandments: Ethics for the Twenty-First Century. (Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Publishing Group, 2010), p. 3.
3. Michael Carasik, "The Ten Commandments," The Bible Guy, April 20, 2014, , accessed October 06, 2018, https://mcarasik.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/the-ten-commandments/.
4. Exodus 32:4. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]
5. Exodus 32:6-10. (MSG) [MSG= The Message]
6. Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, trans. Henrietta Szolt, vol. 3, 5 vols. (New York, NY: Jewish Publication Society of North America, 1969).
7. St. John 13:34-35. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
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