This sermon on Exodus 20:1-17 was preached at St.
John’s Lutheran Church in Phoenixville as part of the series of community Lenten services. This year's theme is "Exodus: from Slavery to Freedom".
“The blood that Jesus
shed for me
Way back on Calvary,
The blood that gives me
strength from day to day,
Will never lose its
power.
It reaches to the
highest mountain.
It flows to the lowest
valley.
The blood that gives me
strength from day to day
Will never lose its
power.”
That
was the closing music when we were all together at Grimes AME Church last
Wednesday, and I’m grateful because it gives us a good lead-in to what I want
to share tonight. My assigned text is
the Ten Commandments, and we’ll get to them directly, but I ask that we
consider not just what they are, but why they are. That takes us into a tale of a high mountain
and of a low valley, Mt. Sinai, where Moses received the Commandments in an
atmosphere of grandeur and glory and awe, and the area at its base, the camp of
the Israelites who had come out of slavery in Egypt and were now trying to find
their way through an unfamiliar wilderness.
We all, at some point in life, find
ourselves in strange territory. We all
find ourselves in situations that are new and unexplored. At times that is perplexing and frightening. At the end of World War II, when the allied
armies liberated the concentration camps in Europe, there were some prisoners
who didn’t know whether to step outside the gates or not. As terrible, as hellish as the camps were, at
least they knew what to expect.
Sociologists and psychologists speak of “institutionalization”, which is
the effect that being hospitalized or imprisoned for a long time can have on
some people. Deprived of personal
decision for too long, having no significant responsibility for too long, once
independence is restored the former patient or ex-offender may not know how to
handle freedom. Of course, it doesn’t need to be that kind of extreme
situation. When a young adult goes off
to college or is holding down her first job and maybe is living on her own for
the first time, the question of how to live is right there. Mom and Dad aren’t telling you to brush your
teeth.
There were the Israelites, free at
last, out of Egypt, out from under Pharaoh’s thumb. So what should they do now? Where should they go? How should they live?
It would be so easy simply to
replace one autocratic leader with another.
It would be so easy to put Moses in the place of Pharaoh. It would be so easy to let him tell everybody
what to do. To some degree, they did
that. He clearly was the leader. Or was he?
Moses didn’t tell them which way to go.
What he did was point them toward God’s leadership.
“The
Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the
way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might
travel by day and by night.” [Exodus 13:21]
Moses
himself relied upon God’s leading to tell him pretty much everything that they
needed to do, all that God had in mind.
That’s why he responded when God called upon him to leave the people
where they were for awhile, and to go to the top of the mountain to have a
talk, to receive the Law, including the Ten Commandments.
Exodus gives us more than one
account of the situation, but Moses was up on the mountain for a long time, and
the people began to give up on him. The
mountaintop, looking at it from the foot of Mt. Sinai, was a frightening
place. There were clouds and lightning
and thunder, the mountain seemed wreathed in smoke, and Moses had left strict
instructions that nobody else was to go up there. And that was when things began to go
terribly, terribly wrong.
I don’t mean they went wrong for
Moses. He was up there in the very
presence of God, but it was an experience of glory for him. He was speaking to God face-to-face, or as
close to that as anyone had ever come.
There God was giving him the direction that he, and the people at the
foot of the mountain, were seeking. How
should they live? What should they do
with this newly-delivered freedom? God
was answering those questions, and in so doing would convey what it means to be
human, giving a sense of purpose and direction not just for the next generation
of wandering around the desert but also for all time. Centuries later, the apostle Paul would write
to the church in Galatia, saying,
“For
freedom Christ has set us free. Stand
firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
[Galatians 5:1]
What
Moses was receiving were directions for how his people could avoid re-enslaving
themselves.
What the newly-free often discover
the hard way is that slavery is not just something that is imposed from
outside. Some forms of slavery are ways
of life that we put ourselves into, all too willingly. While Moses was on the mountain, that is
exactly what was going on down below.
“When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the
mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, ‘Come, make gods
for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up
out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ Aaron
said to them, ‘Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your
sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’ So all the people took
off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. He took the
gold from them, formed it in a mold, and cast an image of a calf; and they
said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of
Egypt!’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made
proclamation and said, ‘Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.’
They rose early the next day, and offered burnt offerings and brought
sacrifices of well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up
to revel.
The Lord said
to Moses, ‘Go down at once!’”
[Notice those words: “Go down.” That’s how Moses was sent to Egypt to lead
the people out of slavery. “Go down,
Moses! …Tell old Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!’”
Again, it’s time to go down and call
people out of slavery in the name of God.]
The Lord said
to Moses, ‘Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of
Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the
way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf,
and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, “These are your gods, O
Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”’” [Exodus 32:1-8]
Did
they, do we, really want to recreate the place from which we have escaped? The very first Commandment begins,
“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. You shall not make for
yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or
that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or
worship them…” [Exodus
20:2-5]
The
Commandments go on to offer an alternate vision of life – and this is what
makes them a positive thing, not a list of no-no’s. They delineate a community
of faith where the ways of Pharaoh and his ilk are excluded. Instead of a world committed to getting and
accumulating stuff, God tells us to take a day off and spend it with him. Instead of living in a world of violence and
force, we are not to kill. Instead of
playing power games, we are not to speak badly or bear false witness. Our most intimate relationships –
parent/child or marriage – those are to be honored. We aren’t even supposed to covet, to get
jealous of someone else’s possessions or good fortune. Just be glad for them.
Two weeks ago, Mick Jagger’s
girlfriend hanged herself. That prompted
Maureen Callahan, a reporter at the New
York Post, to write an article about what the headline called, “The Tragic
Side of [New York] City’s Glitzy Scene.”
“When Alex McCord was
cast to star in a reality series on Bravo in 2007, she thought it was going to
depict the lives of frazzled Manhattan moms.
But after the success of ‘The Real Housewives of Orange County,’ the
concept was retooled. It became ‘The
Real Housewives of New York City’ – a peek into the private lives of the city’s
wealthiest women. The mandate was clear:
Consume, consume, consume.
‘That first season,’
McCord says, ‘every single one of us went out of pocket and spent more money
than we made.’ Each Housewife got $10,000
for that first season, which didn’t cover the parties they were expected to
throw, or the clothes they were expected to buy, or the trips they were
supposed to take.
‘There is tremendous,
tremendous pressure among the Housewives to have the biggest, blingiest, most
tricked-out lifestyle,’ says McCord, who now covers the franchise on
TheStir.com. ‘I was absolutely shocked
when we first started doing this. We’d
finish shooting a scene and go for drinks or dinner afterward. And we stopped doing that because you
wouldn’t believe how many people skipped out on the bill.’
Over the franchise’s
eight-year lifespan, 12 Real Housewives have filed for bankruptcy, one has been
evicted on camera, several have battled substance abuse issues, one couple has
pleaded guilty to fraud in federal court, one husband has been indicted for
fraud, and identity theft, and one husband has committed suicide.”[1]
That’s
the stuff that was going on at the foot of the mountain, and the Lord would
spare us from it.
But hear this clearly: even if we
are caught up in it, and we all are caught up to one extent or another, the
Lord who brought freedom then brings freedom now. We are called by Christ into a new community
of faith, of radical trust in God, that lifts us from the base of the mountain
to the top, to communion with God, a place of joy and hope, where God’s ways
become our ways, because by the grace of Christ, God is all-in-all. The author of Hebrews says,
“You have not come to something that can be
touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a
voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. (For they could not endure the order
that was given, ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to
death.’ Indeed, so terrifying was
the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’) But you have come to Mount Zion and to
the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels
in festal gathering, and to the
assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of
all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new
covenant.” [Hebrews
12:18-24]
[1]
Maureen
Callahan, March 23, 2014 http://nypost.com/2014/03/23/scotts-suicide-reveals-tragic-side-of-citys-glitzy-scene/
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