"Ten"
Rev. Matthew Miller
It is, I suppose, the nature of the world of commercial pop culture that we live in that according to a survey not long ago more people could name the seven ingredients that make up a Big Mac sandwich from McDonald’s (two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun!) than could name all ten of the Commandments.
Even if not everybody can repeat all ten of the commands that God gives to the people of Israel from Mt. Sinai, we know they’re important. We can’t get that indelible Cecil B. DeMille image out of our heads of Charlton Heston in his flowing middle-eastern robes and his bushy white beard hoisting a pair of divinely charged stone tablets over his head. If nothing else, they are iconic. But there’s a certain irony to it all.
On the one hand the Commandments themselves, printed and re-printed, framed and mounted on walls, etched into granite monuments are so familiar that we pass them by without notice.
On the other hand, many of the folks who are so adamant about displaying them, might not even be able to tell you all ten of them. It’s a little like going to church. You can’t drive more than a mile without passing a house of worship. And people will go to great lengths to keep a church from being closed. Yet the whole reason churches are closing, and going bankrupt, is that fewer and fewer people could tell you just why church is so important. They may think church a good thing (although certainly not everyone does) but they can’t tell you why they think that.
In the days and weeks that followed the shootings at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, there was all kinds of talk about what could have been done to prevent this horrible act of violence. We were living in Denver at the time, so these discussion hit pretty close to home.
People talked about how the boys who had done this terrible thing were outcasts who had been bullied and belittled by the more popular castes in their school. It was suggested that their love of first-person shooter video games was partly to blame for their casual disregard for the lives of their fellow students. Then there were some in the religious community who said that perhaps if the schools had been allowed to post the Ten Commandments, that none of it would have happened.
Fast forward about twenty years, and that is exactly what the states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama have done. One Texas teacher that I know of posted a copy of the Bill of Rights from the United States Constitution next to it, highlighting the first amendment in that Bill of Rights.
Then there was Roy Moore who rose to become the Chief Justice of the Alabama State Supreme Court, and was known as the Ten Commandments judge. Shortly after being sworn in as Chief Justice, Moore commissioned a two-and-a-half ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments to stand in the central rotunda of the state judicial building. In dedicating the monument, Moore declared that it would, “mark the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land.” Ultimately all the sound and fury surrounding such displays, and those like it, may wind up signifying nothing. The United States Supreme court rightly ruled that Moore’s display violated the constitutional prohibition against government establishment of religion, and the monument was removed. Appeals of the classroom displays have yet to make their way to the country’s top court.
Unlike that classic television commercial where someone’s chocolate ended up in someone else’s peanut butter, and vice versa- the mixing of church and state are not two great tastes that taste great together.
Each one may certainly inform the other, but a religious faith that depends upon a civil government to prop it up is not worthy of devotion. And a civil government that uses religious faith to prop itself up, as Christian Nationalism seeks to do, is nothing short of blasphemous. God is in the business of saving and blessing all kinds of people- not any one nation. The problem with making the Commandments a kind of national moral icon is that by doing so we run the serious risk of divorcing them from their story.
Ten rules hung on a wall, or carved into stone may be symbolic of something, but that symbol is largely meaningless without the story that comes with it. Without the story, they’re just one more set of dos and don’ts. With the story, we begin to understand that what makes them so powerful is the way they point us to something important about what God values, and how our life with God is caught up in our lives with one another.
The story begins, however, not with the Commandments themselves (as so many are prone to do). The story begins with God hearing the cries of his people, sending Moses to talk to Pharaoh, breaking the bonds of slavery and leading the people to freedom. It is then, and only then, after they have seen the wondrous deeds of God, after they have witnessed the parting of the sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s mighty army, after receiving bread in the morning and quails in the evening when they feared they would starve to death, after water poured from the rock in the middle of the desert wilderness- only after all that, can they begin to listen to what God has to say to them. And even then, it’s hit or miss.
But only after all that, can they begin to know more about the God who has heard them, rescued them, provided for them in their need, and is leading them into a future that is prepared for them. So when God speaks from Mt. Sinai it is not first and foremost to establish the moral foundation of law, it is to reveal to the Israelites just who it is that saved them from the yoke of slavery and oppression, and the shape of the future they have been freed for.
This is the one who said to Moses, I AM; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But more than that, I AM, the one who did these wondrous deeds, and rescued them from slavery is their God- the only God they need, the only God they should worship. This is not one more god among a host of near eastern tribal deities. This is not some god that can be carved in wood or stone, to be replicated, enshrined and owned. Nor is this some god that can be casually invoked, like a dog you whistle for that comes when you call it. When you speak of this God, you don’t do it to prop yourself up or to secure the religious vote. You don’t speak of this God as a means to your chosen end, but with the reverence due the one who is both our beginning and our end.This is the maker of heaven and earth that we’re talking about, the one whose life is the source of all life.
And in order to remember this God, in order to remember that the world and everything in it indeed revolves around this God who is the creator and not around us the created, we are commanded to set aside one day out of seven and mark it as holy. For one day a week, at least, we are to suspend the illusion that we are in charge and rest in the knowledge that, thankfully, we are not. God is. But that is only half of the equation.
It turns out that who God is to us is inextricably tied to who we are to one another. Who are we as a people for whom the Lord alone is God and no other? Well, we are people who honor the role of our parents, both when they look after us and when it is our turn to look after them. And since the God we worship breathes life into all things, we are also people who revere such life and do not willfully take the life of another.
This same God orders families through the bonds of matrimonybinding us to one another in marital fidelity- so we are a people who honor that bond by honoring our spouse, as well as the marital bonds of others. We are a people who do not take what is not ours to take, whether that is someone else’s material goods, or simply their good name by speaking falsely about them. In fact, not only does taking what someone else has destroy who we are to one another, wanting what they have does the same thing. So, we are a people who understand that getting what we want isn’t nearly as important as wanting and giving thanks for what we have.
These words God speaks are about so much more than a list of rules set in stone. They establish for us a clearer sense of who God is and who we are as those whom God has rescued from slavery to sin and fear of death; who we are as a people made for each other.
That is ultimately the point of them. Not as an end in themselves, one more idol enshrined in stone, but as the way in which we come to live into the fullness of what it means to belong to God, and to one another.
