Morning Prayer: Tom Lyda Choral Amen Hymn of Faith *Your Words to Me Are Life and Health* Witness of Scripture: Exodus 20: 1-17 Anthem *If ye love me* Thomas Tallis. Chancel Choir Sermon *What Possesses?* David Spain
Recorded on March 3, 2024
It has been almost 40 years since Robert Fulghum released his best-selling book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. A collection of thoughts about living a good and meaningful life, Fulghum returned to kindergarten to review the lessons he was taught in the sandpiles of Sunday School and the playgrounds of primary school to see if they still held true 60 years later. What he found was wisdom for the ages: “Share everything; play fair; don’t hit people; put things back where you found them; clean up your own mess; don’t take things that aren’t yours; say you are sorry when you hurt somebody; live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work some every day; when you go out into the world…hold hands and stick together; wonder.”Fulghum observes that living these principles, extrapolated to adult life while more complicated, would make life better. And then from his adult perspective he wrote—“the kindergarten credo is not kid stuff.It is not simple, it is elemental.”Hearing those words immediately transports us from the carpet squares in kindergarten to the foothills of Mt. Sinai, when our biblical story provides a lesson that likewise is not simple but is elemental. We call that lesson the 10 Commandments.
Like Fulghum and every one of us along life’s way, our Hebrew ancestors were in their formative years. It had not been long since they had been freed from slavery under Pharaoh’s yoke, made a hasty escape from the fleshpots of Egypt, and were wandering in the wilderness headed toward a land promised but not yet realized. They were no longer slaves as Pharaoh told them; but it had been so long since they had heard any other name, they weren’t exactly sure who they were. So it is to be in wilderness wandering, which can certainly be a period in a people’s story but is also as likely to be a passage in each person’s life—whose we are and who we are--critical questions we all face from time to time. Not entirely erased but so distant in the back of their minds was a claim that had been made on them many years before. Back in the day, their great, great, great grandparents (who knows exactly how many greats it was) had been yoked not to slavery but to God. Actually, it was God who had become yoked to Abraham and Sarah as God said ‘You are mine forever, and I will always be with you so that you can tell the whole world that I, the Lord God, am for you and love you and want what is best for all of you to do well—nobody better than anybody else, but all of you my children.’ Covenant is what we call God’s pledge, and it enfolded our ancestors like grandmother’s knitted Afghan.
At some point along the way, people take that Afghan and start looking at the threads…they want to know what holds it all together. Covenant blankets Abraham and Sarah and every succeeding generation, but what goes into that blanket, what are the components of this fabric called covenant? Having been liberated from Pharaoh’s bitter entrapment, the Israelites now must learn a way of living that covers but does not bind them. Samuel Wells has written that God did for Israel what it could not do for itself—giving freedom in their crossing the Red Sea; and now God gives a second gift, the means of keeping that freedom with the Ten Commandments.Having a law to follow to maintain freedom and liberation might run counter to the impulse in almost everyone that chafes against any perceived limit; so it is helpful to remember the kind of commandment God gives at Sinai—the kind of law that liberates one to live within God’s covenant.
Frederick Buechner reminds us there are basically two kinds of law: “(1) law as the way things ought to be, and (2) law as the way things are. An example of the first is ‘no trespassing;’ an example of the second is the law of gravity. God’s Law has traditionally been spelled out in terms of category number 1, a compendium of do’s and dont’s that are the work of moralists and when obeyed serve the useful purpose of keeping us from each other’s throats. They can’t make us human but they can help keep us honest.God’s law in itself, however, comes under category 2 and is the work of God…like it or not, that’s how it is. If you don’t believe it, you can always put it to the test just the way if you don’t believe the law of gravity, you can always step out a tenth-story window.” (Wishful Thinking, p.50-51) What God offers at Sinai is category number 2, simply the way things are in the world of God’s covenant. Nobody has to follow it, and the sad history of the world attests that many have not through the ages, but ignoring these truths of the way things are yields consequences as easily discernable as ignoring what Robert Fulghum learned in kindergarten. The Ten Commandments are not simple; instead, they are foundational.
So, it is helpful to remember that when it comes to the commandments, God is not suddenly changing course and making covenant conditional; instead, God is saying here are the threads of the covenant fabric—this is what makes covenant the blanket that it is. You can weave other things into it; or use other threads all together, but then it is no longer God’s covenant. Here is what goes into the covenant that identifies you as God’s people and not Pharaoh’s minions; here is what it is to live so that nothing possesses you except God’s way that is offered to you. The commandments are a sacred, holy, faithful, deeply religious gift meant to give us a way to live beyond the myriad impulses of what tries to possess us.
The commandments, or the decalogue, or the 10 words as they have been variously called are short—one for each finger so that the kindergartener can memorize them easily—four of them you shall and six of them you shall not which basically cover the way it is and the way it is to be with God and with one another so that life will work as God loves for life to be. Each thread is worthy on its own, and yet if one of the ten were omitted, God’s blanket would be incomplete.
It has been said there is need only of the first commandment, and all the rest are simply commentary; or another way to say that is if we could live the first commandment perhaps the others would fall into place. You shall have no other gods before me, which is to say there are all kinds of things that seem god-like but aren’t. People who demand total allegiance or want total control; economic systems that claim ultimate value; ideologies that tolerate no nuance and villify difference—give your life to a little ‘g’ god like that and you are possessed and no longer free to love, worship, honor the God who brought Israel out of slavery and continues to this day to bring liberation to what oppresses and hope to who is marginalized.
You shall not make for yourself an idol which at first seems ridiculously obvious because to worship something we have made or to worship what is made rather than its Maker or to worship a god of our own projections would seem very easy to avoid. But it is not, because idols in all their forms are so easily accessible and don’t take near as much effort and don’t require much from us, and that is the key because what is idolized neither grows nor challenges us but only makes us a servant to it and a defender of it. Anything that is even a little lower than God if given ultimate worth is an idol, which can actually include some good things. It’s a tricky one.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, or as we learned it growing up don’t take the Lord’s name in vain which basically meant don’t swear and that is good advice; but then Jesus came along and said “Not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven,” which is to say just because you invoke God’s name does not make what you are doing just, sacred, or loving. God’s name is never to be used for personal or political gain. This is the way of heretical nationalism that invokes God’s name to justify the abuse of power, privilege, and province. A people, whoever they are and however they are constituted, are to serve God for the good of all rather than invoking God to serve only the few.
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy is the easiest one to ignore because there are so many payoffs—both economically and personally. We are needed and important and all of that is true. Sabbath is a gift to help us remember we are more than what we do and more than what is produced, and that there are great lessons to be learned about our place in the world by listening to and reveling in the world around us and the way God has set the entire gift of life in motion.
Honor your father and your mother which can be a challenge if one or the other is not particularly honorable or as is true for every parent, apt to come up short of ideal along life’s way; and yet it is a reminder that our lives are always contingent if not only on parents then also on others who have raised us, taught us, inspired us, nurtured us. We are never self-made—thank God there are others who help form us, and we live with deep gratitude for all those.
Don’t kill, don’t be unfaithful, don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, don’t lie reminds us that we can never be fully who we are by ourselves; we always need each other, we always need a community to help us be something more than simply self-focused. Each of these is a reminder that respect for the other, seeing the other not as an object for gratification or gain but just as much a child of God as we are, is what helps make life civilized. Lose any of these—the trust of your word, the dehumanizing of another—and life becomes brutish and frightening.
You shall not covet has always been a challenge because the sideways glance runs into comparison. In a consumerist ethos so accessible at our internet fingertips, envy has become stock and trade of perpetual dissatisfaction. It is an attitude that bleeds into every other aspect of life, where nothing is ever quite right or perfectly pleasing. It is the poison that possesses.
The God who loves us blankets us with this gift for living—not limits but outlines, not stringent rules but safeguards—elemental truths that years later Jesus came along and summarized by saying “Love God and love neighbor.” Live this way and you won’t worry about what possesses.