St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, January 10, 2010

Ancient Commandments for a Modern Day – Rev. David Mundy

Exodus 20:1-17 Matthew 5:13-20

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Last weekend the six-month exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Royal Ontario Museum came to an end and by all accounts it was very successful. A number of you went to the exhibit and learned that these scraps of animal skin covered in Hebrew writing are the oldest biblical documents we have, dating back to a couple of centuries before Jesus. Until these scrolls were found in the Judean desert in the 1950's, the oldest biblical texts still in existence were more than a thousand years younger.

The scroll fragments on display at the ROM kept changing but the one small piece that got the top billing, if we can put it that way, was the Ten Commandments. There was lots of advertising on television telling you to get right down there because the commandments were only going to be on display for eighty hours. I felt like some fast-talking guy named Vince was saying that we better act soon because they couldn’t do this all day.

Then there were the guest speakers about the Ten Commandments including Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author of God is Not Great: How Why Religion Poisons Everything. We have to question whether he would offer a sympathetic view of the commandments. Getting Hitchens as a speaker strikes me as being a little like inviting Billy Graham to address a Nietzsche convention on Why God is Dead.

While Hitchens was an odd choice, what was impressive about all the hoopla was that in our modern, fairly secular society the Ten Commandments still matter enough to expect that people who can’t read a single word of the text to come and look at it in a darkened room.

And we know that the vocabulary of the commandments still emerges in our culture. Someone will offer that new regulations or guidelines are not “carved in stone” a direct reference to the tablets on which the commandments were first inscribed, according to the biblical texts.

This past week I listened to a police spokesperson describing the new stricter and more costly enforcement of certain traffic laws. To make his point he said “basically, thou shalt not run a red light.”

From time to time someone suggests an eleventh commandment to give weight to their cause such as “you shall not spoil the planet on which God has placed you” There is even a children’s book called The Eleventh Commandment: Wisdom >From Our Children.

Just to remind you, the commandments emerged during the wilderness sojourn of the Jewish people after they had escaped slavery in Egypt. Scholars don’t agree on when this happened or even if it did happen, but the dating is generally 1200 to 1300 years before Jesus. Under the leadership of Moses and his sister Miriam and brother Aaron the Israelites were able to throw off the shackles of tyranny and begin to live with the promise of freedom in a new land. Part of the story tells of Miriam leading the people in dance and song as they crossed the sea of reeds and entered the wilderness. Of course freedom has its price and people began to realize that there were dangers and uncertainty along the way. Moses lived with the constant challenge of a community on the move which often looked more like a dangerous rabble than God’s chosen and obedient people.

According to the book of the Exodus, the crucial time came when Moses went up to the smoky, trembling top of a mountain called Sinai and came down with a distilled list of directives which he had received from God. The commandments represent a renewed covenant or promise between God and God’s people.

Some of you may wonder “really – it that the way it happened?” Whether we believe in this story literally or not, the ten commandments became the essence of the moral and ethical code of the Jews and have continued to speak to countless generations until the present day.

Or so I am suggesting to you. What do you think? Do the ten commandments still resonate with our lives? If you are saying “yes” then I imagine you could recite them all. Well, maybe not. A couple, or five? More important than reciting them, we need to ask whether we really want to apply them to our lives. On one of his adventures our organist Doug found a pillow which he brought back for me. The caption is “The Ten Commandments are Not Multiple Choice.”

Our challenge is to develop a workable moral and ethical framework which is based on our faith traditions, and to make it a goal to adhere to that framework, even when it may be inconvenient or when we are in the midst of our own personal earthquakes.

Just a few weeks ago Maclean’s magazine, which is Canadian, ran a cover article on what they call the new morality in our country. Canada is certainly a much more liberal society than the United States but it was interesting that while there are more liberal perspectives on issues such as homosexuality and abortion, much of the supposedly new morality is actually rooted in our ancient religious traditions. As an example, 85% of Canadians feel that adultery is wrong. The other 15% are guys nicknamed for big cats.

The article points out that more than 60% of Canadians still identify strongly with the Christian faith, even if they don’t go to church. And in the article they speak with Kerry Bowman, a bioethicist at Mt. Sinai – the hospital, not the mountain. Bowman offers that the ethical issues of our day may have become more complex but our responses are rooted in an ethical core that is ancient. Our tradition says that the ancient source is God, and the ten commandments are rooted in that relationship with the God revealed in the Judean wilderness.

What we may really balk at is the notion that a good part of that traditional moral code is connected to the word no. The Ten Commandments are often described as the “thou shalt nots” because they majority of them tell us what we are not supposed to do. Since we are part of a culture which is all about affirmations rather than prohibitions, why would any of us want to hear “no” or “don’t” from our dusty old bibles. Yet most of us learn eventually that part of our ethical framework is formed by what we choose not to do as well as what we choose to do. It begins when we are children and it never really ends.

Have I told you before about driving with one of our daughters a few years ago here in Bowmanville and coming up to a stop sign on a quiet corner where drivers tend to roll through? Her comment was that this sign was “stoptional. ” Our society may be “stoptional” but the ten commandments still encourage us to come to a full stop at times, not as a form of punishment but for our own good.

If we are willing to concede that the ten commandments still have meaning and value for our day, we can still ask how they fit into Jesus’ message of love and acceptance. We might be more inclined to point to the beatitudes, that collection of blessings which Jesus offered to the crowds than we are to the much more stern commandments. The Christian message is about grace, the overflowing love of Christ, not icky rules and regulations, right?

Well, our gospel reading today follows immediately after the beatitudes in Matthew chapter five, and what does Jesus say? First of all he tells us that we are to be a light to the world, then he says we will be salt – not too much of course because it’s bad for our blood pressure – just enough to add flavour to the diverse stew of our culture.

The next part might surprise you. Jesus says that he didn’t come to throw out the old commandments but to enhance and deepen them. I don’t know about you, but when I listen to that passage I have the feeling that Jesus is saying that we aren’t to do the minimum in observing the commandments but as much as we possibly can to bring them to fulfilment, to their fullest flower. And Jesus goes on immediately to speak about bearing false witness and murder and adultery – all part of the ten commandments. He actually asks more than the law originally required.

Following Jesus is not just a big hug. It is a costly way which leads to abundant life. The people of Israel journeyed through the wilderness on the way to the promised land and it took them a whole generation to get there. Our faith journey is not physical, but it is deeply spiritual and despite the twists and turns we allow our relationship with the Christ who came to fulfil the commandments, not abolish them, to be our moral compasses.

We don’t like to admit that we can make wrong choices – didn’t we use to call them sins? – but I can’t begin to tell you how many people have sought me ought through the years to talk about their regrets for decisions they wish they could take back. We may have to say no, or listen to God say “no” in order that our lives may become a powerful “yes.” Yes, we are called to be salt and light in our families and in our workplaces and everywhere life takes us.

And the good news always is that in Christ we can be forgiven for the wrong turns in the wilderness. God will begin with us again and renew the covenant promise of our faith.

Over the next five weeks we will preach on at least five of the ten commandments. Instead of hurrying past them in one sermon we will take the time to explore their meaning for people who live and work and relate to one another in the year 2010. Each week we will listen to them again, choosing a different version for each of those weeks.

Here is the challenge for you this morning. By the end of those weeks, commit all ten to memory. It’s really not that difficult to do!

Today we will give you the opportunity to choose the five you would most like to hear more about in a sermon. I have mentioned before that someone has offered that because the ten commandments were carved in two tablets of stone we are tempted to think of them as dead weight we have to haul around with us. Instead we should imagine them as two wings lifting us above the haziness of everyday life to give us a perspective we constantly need.

They may be ancient commandments but they can still speak to our modern time and we will explore this together.