Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost - 18 September 2005 – Rev'd Harvey Smith

Ten Commandments 

Google has an estimated 3.47million jokes on the Ten Commandments. This is the first that I found.  

The Ten Commandments display was recently removed from the Alabama Supreme Court building. There was a good reason for the move. You can't post
Thou Shalt Not Steal,
Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,
and Thou Shall Not Lie
in a building full of lawyers and politicians without creating a hostile work environment. 

A quick recap from last Sunday and the Exodus. We remember the three strong transformative Exodus verbs: God brings out, God delivers, God redeems. This Exodus event led to a covenant agreement between the people of Israel and the God who acted so strongly in the Exodus. That covenant was then fleshed out in programmatic ways by the statement of the 10 commandments.  You recollect how Moses went to the mountain and in that place God delivered to him these ten commands. So we can add another verb to our list.  We worship a God who commands. And what is it that God commands? 

What the Ten Commandments try to do is to establish perspectives, procedures, policies, and institutions that will generate Exodus-like social relationships. What is not wanted is a return to the pre Exodus social and economic conditions of exploitation and brutality within the community.

This linkage to the Exodus suggests that the commandments are policies to create a society that practices God's justice instead of pharaoh's injustice, and to establish neighbourly well-being instead of coercion, fear, and exploitation. The Exodus, so Israel asserts, is not a one-time rescue; it is the liturgical memory that continues to propel the tradition of com­mand in Israel and the ways in which Israelites will relate to God and to each other. 

If we ask of the Ten Commandments what "policies" are indispensable in order to preclude a return to pre-Exodus exploitation, we might think of three particular ideas. 

First, the possibility of a viable alternative to Egyptian slavery requires a Holy God who, as a critical principle, makes absolutely sure that there can be no other claimant to ultimate power. Thus the first three commands (Exod. 20:2-7) assert the oddity of God, who has no utilitarian value and who cannot be recruited or used for any social or human agenda. The God who commands Israel is an end to be honored and obeyed, and not a means to be used and exploited. 

If we pause there just for a moment. The first three commandments are clear.  They are about God who is to be honoured and they are about the obedience of Israel to this particular God. But questions of honour and obedience sit strangely in today’s society. Rather, we are encouraged to develop our autonomous selves with our chief point of reference being what is right for me. The commandments challenge and deny that theory. They ask me to choose what is right in the light of my obedience to a holy God. The Exodus story asserts that dignity, freedom and well being are all found in our obedient relationship with God. This might be question number one arising from our engagement with these Ten Commandments: how do I engage with this holy God in terms of command obedience? 

A second challenge comes via leaders in our government. Through the national media we have been watching the interaction between the government and members of the Muslim community. Within that interaction our leaders have said very clearly that in their view Muslims have an obligation to this country to first of all be good Australians and then in a secondary fashion, be good Muslims.  

Clearly the same strictures apply to Christians. The government claim is quite clear. In its view our first allegiance is to our country and the values it espouses.  

Now in the past we never saw any difficulty in thinking that a good citizen and a good Christian was not one and the same thing. That was because we inextricably linked the two ideas, much to the detriment of our Christian witness.  

In a recent interview the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams has said that the modern secular state needs a distinct community of faith as its critical conversation partner. In the view of the Archbishop this role of the critical conversation partner has been of enormous importance to the well being of the secular state. He further went on to suggest that the followers of the Muslim religion should adopt a similar stance in our sort of country as well as in countries where the Muslim faith is dominant.  

We should not forget that when the challenge posed by our government is put in an extreme form you then see how martyrdom came to so many of our brothers and sisters in the faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King were not the only two martyrs of the 20^th century let alone the hundreds of thousands who preceded them.  So another question arising from the commandments might be: Who has my first loyalty? God of the Ten Commandments who revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ or the values and commitments of and to my country?  

When we look at the commandments concerning human social relationships which are numbers five to ten, they seek to make human community possible by setting limits to the acquis­itive capacity of members of the community - the capacity to seize and confiscate by power or by cunning what is necessary to the life of our neighbour. The commands require that the entitlement of other members of the community sets a limit on the autonomous capacity of any member of the community to take what another must have in order to live. This set of limitations has in mind both the protection of persons and the protection of property. It is important to note that we may imagine that the protection of property is to be understood in the first instant not as a rule of property, but as a defense of the weak against the rapacious capacity of the strong. 

If we pause there and think a moment rather than being a series of prohibitions, these commandments invite us to think about what it is that our needs in order to live? Perhaps we might think about water usage in this way. What are our rights to water and what are the rights of our neighbour? Similar questions can be asked of all the basic commodities of life.  

Third, special attention may be paid to the fourth command on Sabbath, where we find at the core of creation the invitation to rest. The Sabbath command looks both back and forward. 

It looks backward to the rule of God and imagines that God on the seventh day was either spent and needed rest - thus vulnerable - or was serenely situated in creation and able to be at ease. Either way, the conduct of God on the seventh day is in sharp contrast to the world of pharaoh, in which there is no rest but only feverish productivity.  

The command on Sabbath also looks forward: to a human community peaceably engaged in neighbour-respecting life that is not madly en­gaged in production and consumption, but one that knows a limit to such activity and so has at the centre of its life an enactment of peaceableness that bespeaks the settled rule of God.  

In today’s world of frenetic activity with increasing pressures to produce more and more in shorter and shorter timeframes how can we demonstrate in our lives the principle of the Sabbath day of rest? One of the concerns raised about the new industrial legislation is this whole question of how people recharge their batteries through having access to regular weekly rest days which we used to call the weekend. And how much does my desire to shop when I want and whenever I want become a contributor to my neighbours inability to have proper times of rest? I remember the time in England when I went to the shops on a Wednesday afternoon and found them all closed. On checking this out I was told that workers who enabled Saturday morning trading were compensated by having Wednesday afternoon off. My most recent visit to England showed that this reasonableness was no longer part of the life cycle of workers today.  

The Sabbath day of rest also brings into view what does it mean to have enough? At what point do I keep striving with an enormous workload which ensures megabucks in compensation but my children grow up without a Father or even perhaps a mother?  

To return to our starting point: If we ask of the Ten Commandments what "policies" are indispensable in order to preclude a return to pre-Exodus exploitation, we might think of three particular ideas.  

The first three commandments assert that the God who commands Israel is an end to be honored and obeyed, and not a means to be used and exploited.

The last six commandments seek to make human community possible. They do so by setting limits to the acquis­itive capacity of members of the community who by power or by cunning take what is necessary to the life of our neighbour. 

The in between fourth commandment asks us: how much is enough?

How we live with these questions and challenges will be our witness to our neighbour. 

Harvey Smith