When I was a student at Virginia Seminary in Alexandria, I enjoyed visiting the many historic 18th-century churches in the area. With their red brick, white trim, and clear windows, these churches from our Anglican heritage look quite similar to our building here at St. Thomas. Inside many of these churches, though, on the wall behind the altar and the pulpit, the Ten Commandments are carved onto big wooden tablets with beautiful lettering, sometimes painted in gold. There is something comforting about seeing God’s golden, foundational Words tying together pulpit and altar during worship, something fitting about keeping them constantly before our eyes as a gathered community in the church.
The Ten Commandments, really called God’s “Ten Words” in Hebrew, are the human side of the mutual Covenant relationship that God set up with the children of Israel. Christians, adopted into this relationship in Jesus Christ, are, in these divine words, tied together with God and with our neighbors by bonds that God promises never to break. Even though we are constantly falling short of living up to these words, constantly in need of repentance and return, God, in today’s reading from Exodus, sets up the guidelines that keep us close to God and to one another. As Martin Buber describes it, God’s first three commandments tell us how to love the God of the community; the next two commandments tell us how we are to live temporally in community, as time is divided by days and by generations, as words that address the “one-after-the-other” part of our relationships; and the last five commandments tell us how we are to love one another in community, as words that address the “with-one-another” part of our relationships.[1] The message is clear: You shall love the Lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself, and here, in rather general terms, is how you are to do it.
But the commandments don’t just tell us what to do. They are set in the framework of God’s faithfulness. Before God speaks God’s “Ten Words,” God says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” If we stand before God as part of the Covenant People, we belong to God, to the God who “brought us to himself,” to the God who is creator and redeemer of the universe. We belong to the God who is constantly setting us free, constantly liberating us from worldly powers and from the enslaving entanglements of our own making. Kathleen Norris writes that the commandments show us that we have a relationship with a God “who does not exist as a convenience, magically giving us what we want … but a God … who loves us enough to care when we stray. And who has given us commandments to help us find the way home.”[2]
Understanding the commandments more as God’s support of us than as a way to condemn us, is why I cringe when I see all those little Ten Commandment signs in peoples’ front yards on the rural road to All Saints’ in Leitchfield. I do not claim to know the minds of those who put out such signs, but the little yard signs strike me as mainly an exercise in finger-wagging. “OK, sinful world out there,” they seem to sneer, “look at how far you have fallen! The good, holy, Christian people in this house know better. We have it all figured out and can tell you exactly what you need to do and how you need to do it. If you’re not one of us, just keep moving along and stay off our grass and out of our home.” We must always struggle not to resemble the evil tenants in today’s parable, who forget that they are working their Master’s land, producing wine for the joyous heavenly banquet, and not protecting the fine installations of their own territory.
The gold lettering in the colonial churches, on the other hand, is still a public sign, but to me, it seems different. Its presence behind the altar of our churches seems gently to pull the covenant community forward to rightly ordered lives, encircling us, guiding us, reminding us of the promises that seal the covenant on both sides. Engraved at the heart of our community home, the words are unifying rather than divisive. "Follow in your lives the God whom you encounter here in God’s Word and Sacrament," the golden commandments seem to say to us, "not because you need to 'be good,' but because we belong to each other."
We give back to God as good stewards of all that God has given us for the same reason: we give not because we need to “be good,” or to justify ourselves in any way, but because we belong to each other, and all that we have really belongs to God. (I bet you were wondering how and when I would tie this reading to stewardship!!) To God, it doesn’t matter what we are giving or how much we are giving at any specific time. As in all that we do, it matters that we recognize, in the depths of our souls, that all that we have and do, belong to God, and that we respond freely out of love every chance that we get. Our stewardship campaign should be like the golden tablets of God’s framing Words in the colonial churches: reminding us that we belong to an upholding God who claims our whole selves and our whole lives, yet who sets us free.
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