Anna Wiley, Seminarian, October 8, 2023
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Episcopal Church is not known for having a lot of easy, straightforward answers to difficult questions, so you might be surprised to learn that in the back of the Book of Common Prayer, we actually do have a catechism, a helpful teaching tool with simple questions and answers explaining the basics of our faith. There’s a section explaining the Ten Commandments—it offers useful paraphrases that boil down the central teachings of the commandments: our duties to God, and our duties to our neighbor. But it’s the last question of the commandments that really interests me: “Since we do not fully obey them, are they useful to us at all?”
It’s a good question, and not one that I think has an obvious answer. We live in a culture that’s justifiably suspicious of rules and authority. We know that laws are often unjust, and that religious rules can be used to hurt and manipulate. Our cautious perspective on legalism even shows up in our Prayer Book. One of my favorite collects from the Evening Prayer service has us ask God, in the traditional language, to give us peace so that “that our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments.” But the modern language changes the phrasing, so that we ask God for “our minds may be fixed on the doing of your will.” It’s a significant difference. The new wording suggests that doing God’s will is more of an organic process of discernment, rather than a matter of obedience to fixed rules.
But in my own practice, I’ve actually tried to embrace rules. There’s a reason that Old Testament law governs every aspect of Israel’s life, from how they act to what they wear to what they eat. Structuring life according to rules, even ones that we may not understand, can be a way of remembering God even in the mundane aspects of our lives, of growing in our awareness that God is with us in everything that we do. I do my best to live by a Rule of Life, a set of guidelines structuring how I pray, how I relate to others, how I take care of myself. That kind of Rule is borrowed from monastic communities, who needed common guidelines to shape their life together. At its best, a Rule of Life provides a comforting rhythm to guide me in my relationship with God and other people. But there have also been times, particularly during seasons of grief and hardship, when trying to keep a rule has felt oppressive and anxiety-inducing, less like a helpful tool and more like a list of all the ways I’m failing. Are rules any use to us when we can’t keep them?
Some of the commandments are certainly straightforward enough, self-evidently true. It’s easy to see the wisdom in refraining from lying about our neighbors, or from stealing, and not terribly burdensome to obey those proscriptions. But others are less clear. Should Christians follow Jews in setting aside a full day of Sabbath to rest, pray, be with family, and even refrain from using technology? Or does coming to church on Sunday fulfill our Sabbath obligation? Or is the important thing not really about any particular rule, but about the underlying principle, the idea that rest is holy and we weren’t made to be constantly hustling and producing and achieving?
And then there are the commandments that seem impossible to keep. God tells us not to covet, and surely we can see that purging ourselves of envy is a worthy goal, but our whole society is structured to make us covetous. We live with a near-constant barrage of advertising, with images of people who are better looking, happier, thinner, calmer, and just generally better than we are, and we could be like them if only we had this one product that would make us complete. We can’t open a social media app to see our friend’s baby pictures without scrolling past a seemingly-infinite stream of ads targeted directly at us, sometimes eerily personal, often playing on our very worst impulses and desires. Sin isn’t just something we can deal with in ourselves as individuals—it infects all the systems and structures in our society, making it far too easy to long for things that hurt us and other people.
And it gets worse. If we think, maybe we don’t always honor our parents, but at least we’re off the hook when it comes to murder, Jesus disabuses us of that notion, too. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not kill,” Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother or sister shall be liable to judgment.” And perhaps some of you remember Jimmy Carter’s unfortunate Playboy interview, when he confessed to committing adultery in his heart many times.” A strange comment for a president to make, but there’s no denying that what he saying was right on as far as Jesus’ ethical teachings go. No one is without sin.
Which brings us back to the question from our catechism. “Since we do not fully obey them, are the commandments useful to us at all?” I’ve withheld the answer for quite awhile now, and I hope you’ll bear with me just a little longer, because I think to understand why our church still sees values in these commandments, we need to be attentive to the fact that God did not just give us a list of rules; God gave us a story.
When God begins to speak to Moses on the top of Mt. Sinai, the first thing God says is not a commandment at all. “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” We can’t understand anything that follows without first meditating on that statement. The invisible, infinite God, beyond all human understanding, has revealed himself, come down in fire and smoke and the music of trumpets. And that God is not just the high deity who created the heavens and the earth. He is your God, God who chooses to be with us and for us. And that same God is a liberator, a God who rescues his people, topples oppressors, frees them from bondage. God is speaking to this people because he has already saved them, redeemed them, and freed them. They could not save themselves, any more than they will be able to keep God’s commandments by themselves. But God’s voice cuts through all their fear, all their unwillingness, the chains with which the Egyptians bound them and the chains with which they bind themselves. It’s no wonder the people tell Moses that they are afraid to hear God’s voice. They can shut their eyes to the lightnings, the fire and the smoke, but there is something more fearful about the voice of God laying a claim on their lives, telling them that they are to be a new kind of people. But that same claim on their lives means that they are not alone. God redeemed them before they learned a single commandment, not because they were good, or special, or because they deserved it, but because God heard them crying out.
Which brings us back to the catechism. “Since we do not fully obey them, are they useful at all?” And the answer: “Since we do not fully obey them, we see more clearly our sin and our need for redemption.”
And because this is a story, not a list of rules, we know what happens next, that for the Israelites, “not fully obeying” the commandments sounds like a bit of an understatement. We know that before Moses has even come down from the mountain, the people have already rejected the gift of redemption that God has given them, that they’ve made a golden calf to worship and that Moses smashes the tablets in his rage. And we know that God gives them the commandments again, that He is still their God when they turn away from Him and reject Him. We know that the entire Bible is a story of God’s people turning away again and again, of failing to understand and failing to do the right thing even when they do understand. And God turns back to them again and again and again.
That is the free gift of grace that God offers us. It’s the gift that little babies receive when they’re baptised, marked as beloved before they’ve learned anything about who God is or how to serve him. It’s the free gift we receive every time we realize we’ve made a mistake, and God welcomes us back before we’ve even begun to figure out how we can make amends.
The commandments teach us our part in the story. They teach us how we can respond to God’s goodness toward us. They teach us that redemption doesn’t just free us from something, but frees us for something, frees us to follow Jesus, not with fear, but with humility and gratitude and love. And above all, the commandments teach us that God’s grace always precedes and follows us, that we’re called and redeemed long before we’ve done anything to deserve it, and called back no matter how many times we stray.
Amen.