Dear Friends,
When did you first learn about the Ten Commandments? I first read them in my grandmother’s antique shop, where there were a few framed needlepoint samplers with the Ten Commandments delicately spelled out in multi-colored thread. I loved my grandmother and her crowded shop, which was filled with so many fascinating treasures, and I spent a lot of time there after school. For some reason, those samplers grabbed my attention. The frames were worn and the cloth was yellowing, but they captured my imagination as I thought about all the hours that had been put into creating them and the families who had displayed them on their walls.
I certainly heard the Ten Commandments in church and Sunday School, but it wasn’t until I was preparing for confirmation and had to memorize them that I gave them much real thought. I think it would be hard today to find samplers of the Ten Commandments in dusty antique shops, and I’m not aware of confirmation class curricula these days that require kids to memorize them. I’d love to know what your earliest memories are of this story in Exodus and what you heard about the Ten Commandments from a preacher, teacher, or maybe a parent.
Before we read Exodus 20:1-20, I invite you to join one another across the miles that separate us in this prayer for illumination:
God who speaks to us, your law is perfect, reviving our souls; your commandments are clear, enlightening our understanding. May your Spirit illumine the Word we study today, that our eyes may be opened and our souls revived. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.
Before the pandemic required us to halt communal worship at church during Lent last spring, I was in the midst of a sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer. I anticipated doing another series in the fall, this time on the Ten Commandments, and devoting each of ten Sundays to a single commandment. I promise that when we return to corporate worship in church – and that day will certainly come eventually! – I’ll move that plan up from the back burner. I look forward to exploring each commandment in depth with you then. For now, since Exodus 20:1-20 is one of the Lectionary readings for this coming Sunday, I welcome this opportunity to use this note to look at the Ten Commandments as a whole.
This passage has also been called the Decalogue, which I prefer, or the Ten Words, which is the meaning of the word decalogue. When we refer to this passage simply as the Ten Commandments, I’m afraid we restrict its wisdom and potential and read it too narrowly as only a set of limiting rules. I know many people, including too many children like me at my grandmother’s shop, who hear the term and can think only of a small collection of confined, defined laws handed down by a controlling God whose purpose is to take away our independence. Read this way, the Decalogue is reduced to a set of moral principles that can be counted on the fingers of two hands. But they are so very much more!
I am by no means saying that the commandments aren’t important; they are, and they’re necessary for salvation. But if we don’t look beyond their role as moral imperatives, we would be unable to authentically discern how to live in the larger community of faith. John Calvin, who founded our Reformed tradition, did so when he described the “threefold use of the law,” the three uses for the Ten Commandments.
The first use is this: by showing each of us how we are to live before God and neighbor, the Commandments reveal sin we are often unaware of or hide from ourselves. They show us that we’re not the perfect, good people that we may think we are. They keep us from being smug and push us to confront our own shortcomings even when we think we have none.
Second, the words of the Decalogue serve an important civic function because they restrain us from falling into sin. Sin, as Calvin teaches, is never simply individual; it is corporate, social, religious, and institutional. If we understand that, we can see how the Decalogue helps to ensure that we will stay on the path to community and on the path that serves community.
Our ongoing discussions about the sin of racism, for example, are revealing the acute complexities of this sin in America. Systemic racism is profound and silent and often so deep-rooted that it’s hidden in the depths of our consciousness. Indeed, systemic racism is embedded so deeply that we often cannot see it; and even when we can glimpse it, we deny its existence. Only by recognizing both the individual and communal nature of this existential shortcoming can we ever hope to truly confront it and then work to overcome it. The shared nature of the commandments reinforces our obligations to obey them in all their nuanced parameters as they affect our personal, religious, and national identity. And as we share the pain of recognizing our complicity in the sin of systemic racism, the Commandments give us the courage to conquer it.
Finally, and most importantly to Calvin, the Commandments serve an indispensable, positive role in our Christian life. Calvin reminds us that they are, as Psalm 119:105 tells us, a “lamp unto our feet.” They guide us in our life before both God and our neighbors; they give us structure for our behavior and a means of genuine discourse with one another and with God. They enable us to aspire to live in righteousness out of an abundance of gratitude for God’s grace. On their own, the laws contained in the Decalogue or Commandments are fleeting; we must meditate on them continually in order to be open to God’s spirit and God’s inspiration and to live as God would have us live.
God’s divine intent is to guide God’s people. When we isolate God’s guidance on a beautiful sampler or in an assigned memorization task for confirmation, we lose the context, which can diminish the meaning and weight of that guidance. Thus, it behooves us to remember the context of these “Ten Words.” As Samuel Wells has written of the Decalogue, “God has done what Israel could not do for itself – he has given it freedom in the crossing of the Red Sea. He now gives his people a second gift – the means of keeping that freedom.”
Though it may seem counter-intuitive that a list of rules will preserve freedom, the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, do just that. They comprise the essential guidance that preserves, nurtures, and even expands the Israelites’ newly-given freedom. In earlier notes, we saw how the people of Israel and the people in Matthew become a congregation, a community. Newborn communities, much like newborn babies, cannot survive on their own. They need rules and boundaries in order to grow into true congregations. This is why the Decalogue is not so much a list of moral imperatives as it is a way of living in community and living gratefully in the presence of the creator God.
Rather than being a rigid, confining list of rules, the Commandments provide us with the means of living our lives abundantly. They enable us to find new ways to relate to God, family, neighbors, and even ourselves. We do this, as Calvin tells us, thanks to the threefold use of the laws in the Decalogue. First, the laws enable us to recognize our sin; second, they help us to avoid it as we live in genuine community with our neighbors. Finally and most importantly, to free ourselves of sin, we are called to continually ponder the Commandments; to do so deeply is to become aware of and grateful for the fathomless grace of God. Thus it is that within the God-given structure of the Decalogue, we can more fully and reverently live.
“If you notice something evil in yourself,” said Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), “correct it; if something good, take care of it; if something beautiful, cherish it; if something sound, preserve it; if something unhealthy, heal it. Do not weary of reading the commandments of the Lord, and you will be adequately instructed by them so as to know what to avoid and what to go after.”
Let us pray together:
Rescuing God, you brought us out of the land of captivity, out of the house of slavery. Forgive us when we unwittingly fall into the many forms of slavery that have emerged in our modern world. Remind us of your commandments so that we may live with individual and communal integrity. Forgive us through Christ, who redeems us from the brokenness of slavery that we might savor your presence, your creation, and your beloved community.
Holy Protector, you bring us out of slavery. Today, we pray for the release of those persecuted by cruel governments, by oppressive ideologies, by systemic injustice, or by global pandemic. We pray for the release of those held captive by crushing grief and paralyzing memories, piercing loneliness and deadening hopelessness.
With humility and trust, we ask you to make us aware of your divine compassion and care for us and all who suffer. We pray that all may know that you are the Lord our God, who brings us into the land of promise and the house of salvation, through Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.