“This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward for what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”(Phil. 3: 13-14) In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Before the diocesan offices moved to Monument Circle a little less than two years ago, the bishop, her predecessors, and staff were housed for some six decades on 42nd Street at the Indiana Interchurch Center, sandwiched between Christian Theological Seminary and the art museum, and across the street from the woods at the north end of Crown Hill Cemetery.
When I started working there in 2017, I found the building was full of all sorts of curious relics that had accumulated over the years. In the front entryway, which no one actually uses, by the way, there was an enormous peace sign fashioned from green and black marble. Tacked to a bulletin board was a list of nearby restaurants where you could place a to-go order using cutting edge fax technology. And affixed to the supply cabinet where paperclips and ballpoint pens were kept, I found a refrigerator magnet reading “The 10 Commandments,” and below that, in bold italic type, “Not the 10 Suggestions!” complete with an exclamation point so the reader would know the admonition was serious. Below that was a paraphrase of the Exodus passage we heard a few minutes ago, and at the bottom, the name of the magnet’s producer, one Episcopal Church of All Saints in Indianapolis, Indiana.
I have no context for when or why this object was produced, or whose idea it was. I’ve never seen one around here, so I’m guessing it’s nothing that the congregation was particularly attached to nor has left any long-lasting imprint. But it struck me as weird that All Saints would have its name attached to such an item at all, at any time, and maybe it does you, too.
Set aside the scripture for a minute. Think about what the 10 Commandments are in our contemporary culture. When you see efforts to place them in stone monuments on courthouse lawns or in public school hallways, do you think, “Oh, those people are really into the foundational text of Jewish and Christian standards for appropriate behavior?” Or do you experience those efforts as a slightly less colorful version of the manufactured “war on Christmas,” expressions of self-righteous scolding, theocratic ambition, a lurch toward authoritarianism guided by Christian nationalism?
Now to be clear, I don’t think for a second any of that was the motivation of whoever put the sarcastic “not the 10 suggestions” subtitle on that magnet. Probably it was just someone who thought they were being clever. But it’s a real shame, isn’t it, when someone encounters the holy word of God, spoken from the mountain and carved into stone tablets, and finds not a sign of God’s loving kindness towards us, and instead a cudgel in the culture wars.
But the commandments are a sign of God’s loving kindness. You don’t need to look any further than the first one: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” Here God succinctly makes the case for the worthiness of our loyalty. Besides being the ground of all being, God is the guarantor of our freedom. The one who delivered Israel from Egypt loves us too much to let us lapse back into bondage, whether to a political power like pharoah or the antebellum south or any other malign influence that seeks to subjugate our bodies and souls.
So if we want to read and apply the commandments properly, we must read them in the same spirit God spoke them, rooted in the freedom God first desired for Adam and Eve in paradise at the beginning of days.
Can you
imagine a world where adherence to the 10 commandments was universal? Think
about what it would be like to live in a place where:
- Everyone
recognized that the ruler of creation alone is worthy of our ultimate
devotion, over and above
- the false idols
produced by corrupted hands and hearts: consumerism, nationalism, white
supremacy, unrealistic beauty standards, where
- the name of God
is never used to disguise division and belittlement as holy, where
- sabbath rest
outranks ceaseless striving, where
- there is peace
within families, and where fathers and mothers are worthy of their
children’s honor, where
- there is no
murder and no war, where
- spouses are
faithful, where
- there is no
theft and no one needs to steal to survive, where
- no one lies to
the detriment of others or for their own personal gain, and where
- envy and greed are unknown.
That sounds pretty good, right? A place where you might leave your doors unlocked, answer your phone without there being a scammer on the other end, and just enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as someone somewhere once said.
It is
for this reason that the psalmist writes that
The law
of the Lord is perfect - it revives the soul (Ps. 19:7), that
The
statutes of the Lord are just - they rejoice the heart (Ps. 19:8), that
God’s commandments bring light to the eyes (Ps. 19:8).
The 10 commandments form the scaffolding of a world that is worthy of our hearts’ longing - and we do have to long for that world, because it sure as hell isn’t the world we’re living in.
So what do we do about that?
Well, despair is one option. Not the one I recommend, though.
You could try changing what other people do, which, I mean, go for it?
Or you could try obedience. What would it be like if this whole church tried? I don’t mean to say we’re getting it all wrong - we’re not a pack of murderers and thieves for the most part, I’m pretty sure. I won’t presume to speak for you, but I do confess that I experience envy, that I don’t always enjoy the holy rest that is God’s gift, that I don’t always put God first, that I sometimes succumb to false idols. Am I really the only one?
Now obedience is not a fashionable word, I know. Mother Karen preached on that a year or two ago, and she’s still right. I checked TikTok and #obedience is mostly about dogs. But when it comes down to it, obedience is what happens when listening, trust, and action converge. And provided that you place that trust in one who is worthy of it, say the one who leads us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life, for instance, obedience can be expected to bear good fruit.
The wicked tenants in the parable Jesus tells this morning have a murderous scheme for seizing their landlord’s vineyard that relies on such absurd ignorance of how inheritance laws work that to call it harebrained is an insult to rabbits. Could they really have thought that by murdering two sets of servants and then the landlord’s son, that the landlord would be, like, “ok, I guess they can have the vineyard?” The text of this parable, which Jesus told in the Temple in Jerusalem in the presence of Jewish religious authorities, could be, and indeed has been, used to suggest that God’s favor has been taken from the chosen people of Israel and bestowed upon Christians instead. That reading is wrong and is contrary to a plain reading of the text, where Jesus says that the kingdom of God is for people, whoever those people might be, that produce the fruit of the kingdom. Can one who truly loves, who truly strives to obey the commandments, fail to produce good fruit?
