Folly
Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-22

March 19, 2006


Only once in three years does the Lectionary dare to venture near the Ten Commandments on this Third Sunday in Lent. Judge Roy Moore of Alabama is still driving around his flat-bed truck all over the US with a 2-1/2 tonne monument of the Ten Commandments, emphasizing that the Ten are literally the weightier matters of the law and that every day should be a Ten Commandments day.

Perhaps a reason we are only given a once in three years dose of the Ten is because they have become a burdensome load for many people’s souls. The Judge Moores want to make certain the Ten Commandments are weighing down on our consciences in order to keep a certain social order. So we either wince or make a joke when the Ten Commandments come rumbling by.

The problem with Judge Moore and our other adventures in hearing the Ten Commandments is that there is no context at all - just a list of ten “thou shalt nots.” It is no wonder people usually hear a pretty stern and intimidating voice reciting them in thundering tones. The context begins when a young Egyptian/Hebrew fugitive Moses, a violator of the sixth commandment-to-be, stumbles across a Burning Bush and a God whose name is I Am.

God didn’t appear to Moses for a mystical experience; God had a mission for Moses - to be the leader who would persuade Pharaoh to free his people from slavery. A weighty task, but when Moses first makes his bold case to the most powerful ruler in the world, he does not ask Pharaoh for freedom. He wants to lead them into the wilderness to celebrate a festival; in other words, the first act is to go worship. Pharaoh is not the first or last leader who sees worship as dangerous, revolutionary, and as nonsense. Pharaoh preferred people worshiping him, so worshiping a God he could not see or feel brought to his mind ideas and emotions he could not comprehend and so feared.

So plagues and boils and frogs and angels of death, all for the right to do this innocent, simple thing in which we are now engaged. Who would want to stop us from singing and praying and sharing a meal? Why do you think the early Roman Christians worshiped underground in those catacombs? Methodists and Non-Conformists were banned from worshiping legally in England for many years. Blacks in the South could not worship so that their masters could hear. Synagogues were closed in Germany. Falung Gong has been outlawed in China. No one finds worship offensive or dangerous. Free at last, free at last, to go into the wilderness to worship, at last.

And so they did, though not without military opposition, natural disasters, deprivations, and internal squabbles. Then they found themselves under the Mountain of God, Mount Sinai, with their leader Moses spending inordinate amounts of time on top of the mountain with an intimidating, thunder and lightning God. The preferable method would have been to get every Israelite up onto the mountain, face to face with God. But many of the people could not have withstood the presence of the Holy, too much God would have been their fate. So the idea was to have Moses and his brother Aaron represent them and relay God’s word back. God speaks, but how God speaks is fuzzy. Moses repeats the words, but not quite the way we have decided to remember them.

The feeling has long persisted that God brought them out into the wilderness in order to corner them - “Now I’ve got them where I want them.” The Ten words, almost everyone has been convinced, were intended to be a burden.

Yet God does not begin by declaring that these are commandments, but by a little self-identification for a people who have had 480 or so years to beat the memory of God out of them.

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” This is not ancient lore, passed down through generations by word of mouth. This is late-breaking news, this is the God who is working right now to change the whole world and the way they are living their lives. And it’s not over yet.

God wanted them in the wilderness to celebrate, to worship, undistracted by Egyptian oppressors, in order to mold them into a new community with a new identity based upon their relationship to God, to live a different and holy life. Such a community, such a holy life, is not some ancient Puritan suspicion that somewhere, somehow, somebody is having fun. God’s new community is not an easy one to build, but fun is allowed. It’s all in the way we use words.

“Thou shalt not” is forbidding, but God wants to describe how one goes about living in such a new community. There’s a different tone here: “I am the Lord your God who is involved in your life and got you out of slavery. You want to stay out of slavery? It won’t work if you go around being deluded into thinking there are other gods. Idols are nonsense and they won’t work either. And if you use my name as a way of backing up your wild ideas or your failures, it won’t do you any good. You want to be somebody different? Then religiously take a day off to give yourself some dignity and re-creation; I took a day off after creating you, so why don’t you?

“Now it won’t work in this new community if you go around treating your elders as if they don’t know anything. Nobody knows much of anything that hasn’t been passed down by older generations. Give them honour and respect, not grief, even when you don’t agree with them. It won’t work if go around killing other people, nobody’s safe then. It won’t work either if you get wrapped up in adulterous ways, for then nobody knows who to love. It won’t work if you’re stealing and lying or coveting everything your neighbour has because then who is going to trust whom?”

Now I am not going to smooth over Jesus’ tantrum in the Temple, as he tried to cleanse the sanctuary of its unholy commercial elements. What got to Jesus was that all of these conveniences inhibited, obscured, even prevented authentic worship of the One God.

If we are not able to worship, then who are we? In the name of God and of Christ and the Church, we do an awful lot of good things, but then so do others, and some of them ignore or want nothing to do with God or Church. What makes us distinct from the beginning is that we dare to worship - to acknowledge in all humility that we human beings are not the centre of the universe, that what we possess in talent, in intelligence, in possessions is due not to our good skills or good looks, but the Ground of All Being who sends us out into the wilderness to worship and be holy. Being holy means being distinct, being set apart for a different way of life, a different task, being special. God is the one who picks you out as special, in God’s incomprehensible, nonsensical grace, and for that all you and I can do, against the world’s complaints and suspicions and jeers, is to worship God. It’s only then that these Ten Words make sense.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan