October 8th,  Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Exodus 20: 1–4, 7–9, 12–20
Psalm 19
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer.  Amen.
Long ago and far away, in the days when – most Sundays — we had Morning Prayer instead of Holy Communion in the Episcopal Church, at the end of every Psalm we would say, “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.  I grew up hearing those words, saying them and thinking about them.  Thinking, in fact, that the words I was hearing and repeating in church described a reality that would be mine forever.  “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”  That, I figured, was what faith was all about – something true, something rock solid, something eternal.  And I can’t help thinking about those words again this morning when I read the words that God gave to the Children of Israel on top of Mount Sinai as he gave them the Ten Commandments.  For these words, too, God meant to be everlasting.  Just as his love and care were everlasting, so he meant these ten words to remain with his people forever – like his own seal upon them.
For with great care, the Lord had just brought this people out of bondage in Egypt to safety across the Red Sea.  So, he was hardly about to abandon them.  In fact, with the very first commandment he reminds them of the breathtaking freedom he has given them: “I am the Lord your God who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,” he tells them.  (Exodus 20:2)  So,the ten commandments were meant to describe the life of holy protection God was giving those who had received his liberation.  “Because I, the Lord, am your God,” he was saying, “ you are free of the need to worship other gods, just to assure the fertility of your crops.  Because I, the Lord, am your God, unlike the pagan tribes around you, you are free to rest on the seventh day, the Sabbath day.  Because I, the Lord, am your God, as you enter into the land I will give you, you are free from the need to commit murder or stealing – just to establish yourself in that land.  For I will be with you, right beside you, helping you every step of the way.  You can count on this.  You can count on me.”
That’s the wonder of the Ten Commandments.  They lay out God’s plan to abide with his people, to be with them, every step of the way as they walk into the future he has provided for them.  And the best news of all is that these words are meant to be everlasting – extending even to us, who have already experienced some of the Lord’s freedom, some of his protection, but would dearly love to experience more.  For we too want to base our lives on truths we can count on.  Nowadays, though, that’s not the way most people think of these ancient words.  Instead, people tend to think of the commandments as a series of ironclad laws, given out and enforced by an all–powerful God to keep an unruly people in line.  “These are the rules,” they hear him bark.  “Now, keep them!”  No wonder so many people want no part of them . . . or so they think.
But God finds ways to remind us of the comfort we once knew when we allowed him to draw a bit closer to us.  Robert Wuthnow, an American sociologist who studies contemporary trends in religion, tells the story of Jack Casey, a volunteer fireman and ambulance attendant who, as a child, had to have some of his teeth extracted under general anesthesia.  Jack was terrified, but a nurse standing nearby said to him, “Don’t worry, I–ll be here right beside you no matter what happens.”  When he woke up from the surgery, she had kept her word and was still standing there beside him.¹
This experience of being cared for by the nurse stayed with Jack, and nearly 20 years later his ambulance crew was called to the scene of an accident.  The driver was pinned upside down in his pickup truck, and Jack crawled inside to try to get him out of the wreckage.  Gasoline was dripping onto both Jack and the driver, and there was a serious danger of fire because power tools were being used to free the driver.  The whole time, the driver was crying out about how scared he was of dying, and — recalling what the nurse had said to him so many years before, Jack kept saying — “Look, don’t worry, I’m right here with you.  I’m not going anywhere.”  Later, after the truck driver had been safely rescued, the man was incredulous.  “You were an idiot,” he said to Jack.  “You know that thing could have exploded — and we’d both have been burned up!” In reply, Jack simply said he felt he just couldn’t leave him.²
That’s the way the commandments work in our own lives.  First comes the experience of being cared for, the experience of being set free from something.  Then those details are preserved, in the form of a narrative of what then happened, of what then followed.  That’s what our own stories of God – or someone Godly, intervening in our lives — are about.  These are our testimonies.  And then, finally, comes a life – our own lives — shaped ethically around that profound story.  A nurse saying, “I’ll be right here beside you” becomes the action of a man risking his life for a stranger because he knows in his bones that he just can’t leave him.  “I am the Lord your God, who brought you . . . out of the house of slavery” prompts us to live lives shaped by the freedom created by that God. ³
You see, our own lives, our own stories are simply reflections of the story of God’s faithfulness to the Children of Israel.  That’s something you can believe.  That’s something you can trust – as you watch the Lord your God take you into a land of promise.  Just as He promised he would.  As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.
Amen.
¹  Quoted by Thomas Long in an article in Christianity Today called “Dancing the Decalogue” “March 7, 2006 issue”.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.
 
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