University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

Exodus 20:1-17
A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham
University Presbyterian Church
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
June 20, 2010

            A few years ago a national poll asked people across the nation if it should be permissible to display the Ten Commandments in public buildings like schools and courts.  Three-quarters of the respondents said, "Yes." About the same time another poll asked people who identified themselves as members of a synagogue or church to name the Ten Commandments.  Those numbers were not as impressive.  Less than three per cent could name all ten; less than a third of them could name more than five, and one in five could not name a single one.  All right, take out your pencils... the ushers will provide blank sheets of paper, and let's see how you do. 

            I'm just kidding. No pop quizzes today. But it is a sad irony.  As a people we seem often to be more concerned with making sure the commandments can be displayed for others than we are with claiming the commandments for ourselves. Some years ago, when the North Carolina legislature was debating a bill to allow schools to post the commandments in classrooms around the state, a reporter called me as part of a poll of "religious leaders" and seemed genuinely surprised that I did not favor the legislature's actions.

          I told her I had three reservations. I said the first was a concern that might have seemed out of step with the democratic spirit, but I said I thought we needed to take great care in exercising the power of a majority when it comes to matters of faith and practice.  The Ten Commandments are part of sacred scripture for the Jewish and Christian communities, which together form the largest religious grouping in this country.  As a majority, we may well have the political power to enforce our sacred texts on the minority, but that does not mean that such enforcement models Christian wisdom or compassion. A tyrannical majority may well do a great deal to harm the faith, due to the ill will they create.  As Frederick Buechner once said, "It is amazing the lengths to which the friends of God will go to make enemies for God."

            The second reservation was related to the first, I said. Any time the state adopts a sacred text in a secular context, the greatest risk is not to the state, but to the text. Removed from its setting, removed from the sacred story that surrounds it, that text loses its power and becomes merely platitude, subject to scorn and ridicule from those who do now know or share the story. Within the story of the Exodus, for example, the commandments of God brought life and direction and guidance to the people. Placed on the wall of a school or in the rotunda of a state courthouse, perhaps they would do the same, I said, but I doubted it. My teacher Patrick Miller once said, "We should ask ourselves if we are giving more energy to guarding the Commandments than to teaching them, to worrying about whether they are "out there" than making sure they are "in here."[1]

            I told the reporter my final reservation had to do with how the commandments would be printed for public viewing.  Not the font, mind you, but the text. Imagine the commandments on the wall, I said.  Where will the text begin? Will it begin at verse one: "Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage?"  Or will they simply begin with "You shall have no other gods before me?" To choose the latter and remove the laws from their context is to remove them from their heart and soul and thus to offer but a heartless shell.  On the other hand, to leave them in their Exodus context would surely infringe upon the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment.  Either way, something important is lost.

            My reservations with legislatively-mandated displays had to do with all those concerns.  But that is not to say that I believe the commandments are unimportant or irrelevant. I think they provide a critical piece in the puzzle of our understanding of God's expectations for our lives. We teach the commandments to our children here; we ask our Confirmation Class to memorize them.  And why?  For lots of reasons, but let me share a story to illustrate at least one of them.

            About eight years ago in early May a UNC student made an appointment and came by to see me. She was a graduating senior and she came to say goodbye. She was not one of the PCM students, with whom I had talked before, but I recognized her as a familiar face from the congregation. She said she wanted to tell me a bit about herself, about the strained and sometimes dysfunctional family within which she was raised, about the eating disorder that had almost consumed her. Then she said she wanted to thank this church and me because this church had been for her a place where "boundaries" could be discussed, where not only grace, but expectation had been shared, and where she could find the first real taste of a loving discipline for her life.  I'm not sure that others would make the same discovery here, but that young woman helped me to see an important role for the church from which we too often shy away...the role of providing structure and discipline and order and expectation.

            Too often, I think, we see such guidance as burdens we lay on people rather than as the gifts they can be.  And so it is, too, with the way we think about the Ten Commandments.  So I offer today a more positive understanding of the commandments from Sinai than we sometimes get - commandments that are provided not as burden, but as gift. For think about it: that God would provide us with God's own will and intentions for our lives is a gift beyond all imagining.

            A parent sets limits for a child -- a bedtime, television restrictions, fixed telephone privileges, a curfew.  Why does the parent set such limits?  To be mean?  To make life difficult for his or her child?  To make his or her child the laughingstock among that child's peers?  Okay, some of the young people out there are nodding, "yes." But the real answer to such questions is, of course not.  The parent sets limits for the health, safety, development and well-being of the child.  Does the child give thanks for such limits and respond with happy submission?  It didn't happen in our household!  And probably not in yours.  Because human beings love to push against the limits, children will always dislike the order and discipline a parent tries to instill into the family.  But we also know what happens when there are no limits: there is also no safety, no well being, and in the long run, no genuine joy and happiness.

            Just so, God offered at Sinai the order and discipline God intended for the human family.  Limits.  Boundaries.  Structure.  All so that the family might be kept safe and secure, and so that the well being of all God's children might be assured. The giving of the Law at Sinai did not abrogate human freedom. Genuine freedom flourishes within boundaries as secure as these, for within the boundaries there is room for improvisation. Pat Miller says we should think of the Commandments as "simple rooms with a great deal of moral space for living under their direction."[2]

            Bob Shelton says such boundaries are like the guardrails on the bridge across the river.  The road may be wide enough that we may question the need for them, but should we stray too close to the edge, they keep us safe.^[3]  The commandments are gifts of God's love and care for the well being of God's children.

            How do we know this to be God's intention?  How do we know that the commandments are not just the whims of a tyrannical Lord who would keep us enslaved to the Law?  It is, in part, because the commands are given within the context of God's saving action in leading the Hebrew people out of slavery, and, in part, because we know the character of the Law-Giver. 

            As I mentioned earlier, the commandments are framed by a preface which is central to any understanding of what follows: "Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord Your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery...."  Only then do the commands begin; only after the reminder of God's grace and goodness toward the people does God then set the boundaries and limits that will keep God's people whole and safe and secure.  That's why I've always been so uncomfortable with removing the commands from that context and putting them in a black, plastic frame and hanging them next to the light switch in a school classroom. I cannot believe doing so is going to help anyone to see God's purpose in the commandments, without which they lose their life-giving power; and their best capacity to help people act more responsibly.

            Why?  Because the way one understands the One behind the commandments has a significant impact on the way one regards the commandments themselves.  Here, in these well-worn words from Exodus, we come face-to-face with the God whose desires for us are rooted in redemptive, liberating love.  And knowing God in such a way makes all the difference in how we understand these commands.  They are not the imperious demands of a tyrannical despot, but the gifts of God's graciousness, staking out the boundaries of our freedom for our own sake, so as never to leave God's people without an indication of what it means to be a community of faith, without a direction in which a person of faith could walk, without some instruction regarding the life of faith.  The law is thus fundamentally a gift, not a burden.

            Tom Troeger has a wonderful hymn that, in our hymnal, is set to a tune that is almost unsingable. We'll sing it in a few moments to a more familiar tune. But let me share a couple of verses with you (words only).

            The line, the limit, and the law
            Are patterns meant to help us draw
            A bound between what life requires
            And all the things our heart desires.

            We are not free when we're confined
            To every wish that sweeps the mind,
            But free when freely we accept
            The sacred bounds that must be kept.^[4]

            God's law is fundamentally a gift, and not a burden.  Sensing the gift of their spaciousness, we then can hear the commands of God and keep them not out of a sense of forced obligation, but out of deep gratitude and affection for the God who gives us life and breath.  And such a relationship is the very point of the Law in the first place. That's where the Law begins. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." That's where the Law begins.

            The Talmud, that old collection of Jewish civil and religious law, says at one point very simply: "God wants the heart."  Not blind obedience.  Not casual observance.  And surely not sullen and reluctant concession.  God wants the heart. A heart formed in relationship with God. God's commandments won't be kept simply because they are written on some poster and hung on a wall; they will be kept when they are written on our hearts. And my guess is... only then.

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[1] Patrick D. Miller, "Is There a Place for the Commandments," Theology Today, January 2004, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3664/is_200401/ai_n9358819/?tag=content;col1

[2] Miller.

^[3]As quoted by Dean Thompson at the 1993 meeting of the Moveable Feast in Malibu, California.

^[4]Thomas H. Troeger, "God Marked a Line and Told the Sea," 1986, The Presbyterian Hymnal.