Ten Simple Rules
Rev. Mark A. Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
October 6, 2002
Exodus 20:1-20, Matthew 21:33-46
My father gave me this when I was a kid. It’s his copy of the Official Baseball Guide for 1957. There are many things I like about this book, other than the fact that it’s full of teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Milwaukee Braves, the Washington Senators, and not a single team west of the Mississippi except the Cardinals.
Actually, the thing I like the most about this book is that it has the complete rules of the game of baseball. From the obvious ones like Rule 1.02 “The object of each team is to win by scoring more runs than the opponent.” to the obscure ones like Rule 7.08(f), “Any runner is out when after he has acquired legal possession of a base, he runs the bases in reverse order for the purpose of confusing the defense or making a travesty of the game. The umpire shall immediately call ‘Time’ and declare the runner out.”
Sports and games are driven by rules. When someone introduces us to a new game or a new sport, the first question we ask is, “What are the rules?” We realize how much rule dominate our life.
We’ve got rules of the road: drive right, pass left. There are other rules about cutting into traffic; conventions, rules. Rules are not always written, but differ from place to place. I get a lot of complaints about New York drivers. But, they are following rules, just different ones. One being, if you leave me enough space for my car, I’m going to take it. We understand things by looking at the rules as we move from one place to another.
There are societal rules. Every single episode of Seinfeld was about societal rules; all those little things of life, the way people interact. Although we cannot list all of the rules, we definitely know when they are broken. We have rules in religion; some more obvious than others. Some people say they like their church because there is no liturgy. But there are still rules; if there are normally four songs, and one time there are only three songs, people will say, “That’s not the way we do it.” There are rules in our lives, rules that permeate who we are as a people and how we relate to each other. Rules are what it’s all about.
Then we come to the Old Testament lesson: the Ten Commandments. They are rules of society, religion, everything. Admittedly, we spend a little too much time focusing on just these ten; there are actually 613 commandments in the Hebrew Bible. That means that there are 603 other commandments that also deserve equal weight and attention. These ten are perhaps the most ancient articulations of the Hebrew Law; echoes of something earlier. These are the ones we focus on. They come out of a certain context.
When we encounter Moses at Sinai in our scripture tonight, it is in the middle of the wilderness experience of the people of Israel. Liberated from slavery in Egypt, they find themselves wandering the desert of the Sinai peninsula and the are taken to a mountain called Horab; God’s holy mountain; the mountain where God appeared to Moses in the flaming bush. Moses goes up and receives the law from God . The Ten Commandments are the cornerstone, the heart of what law is. He comes down and delivers this covenant, this compact, this legal contract, to Israel in its wilderness experiences. So it is after the Exodus, but before delivery into the promised land, that the Israelites receive these laws. This is part of the agreement that God sets up with Israel; that he would be their God, and they would be his people. This is when this relationship is formalized.
Just a little aside: We always see Moses with two tables with 1-5 on one and 6-10 on the other. In reality, it was 1-10 on both sides because it was duplicate. All contracts were made in duplicate; basically, the Israelites kept God’s copy.
What we are dealing with is a contract, in duplicate, carried around in the ark. That is the context of what is going on. The Ten Commandments are often viewed as guidelines, and rules and principles; stereotypical rules. Sometimes judges put them in their court rooms, people hang them in there offices. And then there’s Dr. Laura, a noted Biblical Scholar, who writes the book on living with the Ten Commandments as ‘life principles.’
You get the idea that the Ten Commandments are the quintessential rules. Sometimes that makes us uncomfortable because as Christians we like to think we have a religion without rules; that we have faith and grace, and we don’t need all of the rules. Paul tells us that as Christians, we are liberated from the law. He may have meant something else; Paul certainly did not condone lawlessness. In one of his Epistles, he writes to a congregation where a man who has taken up with his mother-in-law. Paul is clearly offended by this because it violates the law, but these people understood that Paul had told them they were free from the law, so they figured all bets are off and they could do whatever they like. But we are not exactly there yet. Paul was talking about something else. We fall into the trap that legalism, and law, religious rules, that those were somehow that old religion, ‘Judaism had that stuff, we don’t need it.’ People sometimes read too much into tonight’s New Testament lesson, thinking that Jesus was casting off an old and worn religion in favor of a religion full of grace; easy grace.
It is not that simple. Christianity has rules in it. Jesus gives us commandments all the time. Explicitly, this is a new commandment I give you: that you love one another as I have loved you. Jesus has even asked which of the commandments is the most important. He lists the two that we know as the great commandments: “You should love the Lord God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength,” from Deuteronony. And, “You should love your neighbor as yourself,” from Leviticus. So clearly, at the beginning, we were not about tossing out the rules and laws of the Old Testament, we were about reinforcing them, and understanding them in a new way.
Christianity is not a lawless religion. However much we might emphasize grace, we still have rules. Rules for moral and liturgical conduct. We take whole courses at seminary on how to put services together. So, Christianity has its share of rules; that doesn’t necessarily make people uncomfortable with rules more comfortable with that, but sometimes all this focus on rules misses the point of what was going on at Sinai; what God was having done through Moses. As stated before, this is before the Exodus. God’s saving and miraculous actions happen first. God takes a people out of Egypt; a people who did not even know his name until Moses taught it to them again. We’re tempted to think, because we know this story, and we come in at the end of it, that God hands them a rule book and if they don’t follow, they’re in trouble. While there are certainly consequences for not following the rules, in God’s eyes the rules are the way the Israelite people live out their relationship with the God who started the relationship. It is not as if you can find these rules in the desert, pick them up and start doing them and by that deem yourself worthy to be in a relationship with God. God picked Israel and gave them a way that they could say thank you and show that they were a people of God.
Interestingly notable about the language of the Commandments is that in the translations we read we cannot get rid of the King James influence, it is such a powerful and moving translation and it still dominates every English Translation. But what the Hebrew says is actually not “Thou shalt not murder,” but, “You will not murder.” Not simply a command, not grammatically the way you make commands in Hebrew: it’s a statement, a declaration. “You will not murder,” the way a parent talks to a child, “You are not going to that party.” It’s not a question, not “Please don’t go to that party,” But simply, you’re not going. God is not demanding conduct as much as he is describing what the people of God should look like. You, the people of God will not murder, you will not steal, you will not covet. You will keep the Sabbath, you will honor your father and mother, you will have no other Gods before me. That is what it means to be the people of God. God is not issuing random rules as in baseball. There’s noting innate about three strikes and four balls. When baseball laws were first codified, it was eleven balls and three strikes, the pitching must not have been as good back then.
The ten Commandments and the whole of the Israelite Covenant are about what it means to be God’s people. The way this is made known to us is that the Ten Commandments start with a declaration: I am the Lord your God. In the Jewish tradition, that is the first commandment. They number them differently than we do. The Catholics also are different, with two about coveting. Different traditions number them differently and in the Jewish tradition, the first one is simply, “I am the Lord your God,” not, “You will have no other Gods before me,” (that is commandment number two). So, the Ten Commandments in their own structure, all the things that we are and are not supposed to do, ultimately point back to the God who issued them; to the God of grace, and the God of love who lifted his people out of slavery. The God that calls the people into a relationship with Him, ‘This is what it looks like to be my people. This is how you say Thank you. ‘
And so it is that we are on this World Communion Sunday saying thank you. The word Eucharist means Thanksgiving. So we come together to the Table of the Lord, and we respond. We are responding to the commandment Jesus gave us to “Do this in remembrance of me.” We respond at the Table of the Lord sharing communion with all people and all Christians world wide, remembering our common humanity, that the people of God are the people of the whole world. Those that know God and those that do not. It is our task in the meanwhile, while there is war to respond with peace. While there is violence to respond with compassion, hate to respond with love; because we respond to the grace first shown us, to love and to faithfulness. Following the rules not because they were forced upon us, but because they were freely and graciously given to us as a way in which we might show that we to, are the Children of God.
