Welcome
Good morning, church. I’m Pastor Ashley Dargai.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
Tonight is the first meeting of our new book study for Dear White Christians by Jennifer Harvey at 7 pm on Zoom. I hope you can join us.
You should have seen in your eblast and Facebook information regarding next week’s in-person worship, including COVID-19 protocol. Please review it if you plan to attend in person. We will still be live streaming if you plan to worship from home. The Reopening Committee has said from the beginning that if the pandemic worsens before our Oct. 4 worship, we would postpone, so please make sure you check your eblast and Facebook to stay up to date.
Make sure to check the links in the comments for various resources including ways to give financially to the church. Like and comment this video to let us know you’re here.
We continue our worship series on Exodus, what we’re calling, Things Are Different Now. In this series, we’re taking lessons from Israelites on being surprised by God, on learning to be a new community, and on trusting in God’s provision. Today, we stand at the base of Mount Sinai with the Hebrew people as they get a glimpse of who God is.
Let us prepare our hearts for worship.
Children’s Moment
Read selection from The Children’s Storybook Bible by Desmond Tutu.
My daughter Annie sometimes needs help going to sleep. So we came up with the 4 rules of bedtime to help her remember that it’s actually quite simple to go to sleep.
The 4 rules of bedtime are:
1. Stay in your bed
2. Be quiet
3. Close your eyes
4. Go to sleep
Every night we go over these a couple of times throughout our bedtime routine.
The other night, I had turned off the light and was coming to give her one last kiss and we went over the rules again:
1. Stay in your bed
2. Be quiet
3. Close your eyes
4. Go to sleep
And Annie, without skipping a beat added a 5th rule:
5. And no poop!
It’s definitely a good rule for bedtime. So now we have 5 bedtime rules.
These rules help Annie do something that is good for her, which is go to sleep. Sleep is where our body gets energy for the next day, it helps stay healthy and smart, it’s God’s gift to us to remind us that we are precious even and especially when we’re not doing anything!
Today, we read 10 Commandments, and these are rules, but they’re also messages to God’s people about what’s important: their neighbor, God, and remembering that they are loved just as they are.
Sermon
Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 (CEB)
Then God spoke all these words:
“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
You must have no other gods before me.
Do not make an idol for yourself—no form whatsoever—of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.
Do not use the Lord your God’s name as if it were of no significance; the Lord won’t forgive anyone who uses his name that way.
Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks,
Honor your father and your mother so that your life will be long on the fertile land that the Lord your God is giving you.
Do not kill.
Do not commit adultery.
Do not steal.
Do not testify falsely against your neighbor.
Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s house. Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s wife, male or female servant, ox, donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.”
When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the horn, and the mountain smoking, the people shook with fear and stood at a distance. They said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we’ll listen. But don’t let God speak to us, or we’ll die.”
Moses said to the people, “Don’t be afraid, because God has come only to test you and to make sure you are always in awe of God so that you don’t sin.”
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
I’ll admit, when I initially looked at my text for today, I was apprehensive because I figured the 10 commandments were a tired text. Everyone knows them. They’re too familiar, too rote to come alive.
But then I took to Facebook and Twitter.
I provided the prompt: “What is one of the 10 commandments? Wrong answers only.”
There were some great zingers such as: The first commandment is you don’t talk about the 10 commandments.
There were quite a few nods to old school church rules pertaining to dress codes and attendance requirements: “Thou shalt attend church Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night all the days of your life.”
There were thinly veiled jabs at various ideological positions—“Thou shalt vote for this political party or that one. Thou shalt keep out this kind of person from the church. Thou shalt not talk about religion and politics at the dinner table.” And so on.
There was a whole lot of snark, which I realize comes with the territory of social media.
I received over 200 hundred responses, which astounds me. Because I thought this text might be a drag. But clearly there is passion behind what the 10 commandments stand for. The 10 Commandments have become synonymous with the rules we hold most dear, so much so that our integrity as people of God is on the line. And according to many of the people who responded, the function of these commandments has been distorted and manipulated to exert control, to encapsulate God into one petty rule or one particular way of thinking.
So perhaps we’ve got something to talk about this morning after all.
The passage begins with God declaring God’s identity: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Now this is not God saying, “Hi, remember me? The God who freed you? How do you do?” This is a framing for the commandments as a whole, the context is that whatever follows has to do with the work of liberation that God began in Egypt. So the 10 Commandments strut out on this red carpet of liberation context.
These laws will come to shape a community whose common goal is not wealth or domination but rather a commitment to the God of liberation and the flourishing of one other. They have been liberated to further the work of liberation. We hear a similar refrain centuries later from the apostle Paul when he writes to the Galatians, “It is for freedom you have been set free.”
It’s hard to think of laws as freedom, as 21st century Western people. Freedom is one of the sacred statutes of this country. But the freedom we fly our flags for is not necessarily the freedom of Exodus, but rather a freedom of choice, an escape from laws that interfere with our personal lives. But the peculiarity of being a covenant community in God is that these laws are not for our own personal freedom; rather, they are for the freedom of our neighbors. Our lives are governed by ways that help our neighbors flourish. Not one part of our life remains untouched by God’s communal ethic of living.
The first three commandments have to do with God—no worshiping other gods, no idols, no using God’s name as a means to an end. These commandments are about our fierce loyalty to God.
This “no other gods before me” is interesting, because in those days, there wasn’t a strict monotheism in that only the God of the Hebrews existed. There’s an understanding that sure, there are other gods, but the Hebrew people would only worship the God who led them out of Egypt.
Additionally, the language of “no other gods before Me,” is ambiguous—because it could mean a hierarchy of loyalty, like God is first in line. But it could also mean “before my face,” as in, “Do not bring these gods in front of me, at my altar, in my house. No signs of other potential gods should be allowed in my space.” Today, too, there are many gods who compete for our hearts and they’re very good at it because the thing about gods is that they like to sneak in through piety, through virtues like frugality, safety, doing what’s best for our family, loyalty, consistency, patriotism, even justice and charity. We have many graven images for these gods that sometimes make it in to holy places without us even realizing. This commandment alerts us to the fact that there are many other gods, gods that will masquerade as noble things.
But we are called to be God’s people first and foremost, forsaking all others. Not Americans first, not our political party first, not our whiteness or our gender first, not the safety and success of our family first, God’s people first. So much so that our commitment to the world God wants may transgress these other sacred loyalties at times. I mean, Jesus, whose Bible included this text, transgressed his political affiliations, his family ties, his own religious power in a commitment to the coming reign of God, offending a lot of people and getting himself killed.
All my life I thought taking the Lord’s name in vein had to do with using God as a swear word, that God clutched her pearls if I said God instead of gosh, but come to find out God is a lot more upset about this holy name being used as currency. As the Hebrew people learned at the roar of the storm atop the mountain, God will not be domesticated, into our pet or our mascot. God will always be the wild burning bush defying our expectations and offending our sensibilities.
And speaking of misunderstood laws, bridging the God commandments and the neighbor commandments is the sabbath law, a command not just to take a nap on Sundays, but to disengage from the dominant systems of the world, like the system of Egypt that demanded endless productivity and consumption. You see the sabbath disrupts this cycle like a wrench in a wheel and affirms that just as God is not a means to an end, neither are humans, neither is creation itself. The dog-eat-dog world of empire dismantles community life. The Hebrew people would build another life, but they would not build it like they built Egypt. To be different, they had to do things differently. The laws of Egypt, no matter how benevolent, would never give the true liberation that God wrought for the Hebrew people, because the true liberation depended not on a competitive ethic, but a communal ethic, given by the law of God
And of course, we know the rest of the commandments: don’t steal, kill, commit adultery, covet, or bear false witness. Honor your parents.
The undercurrent of these community commandments seems to be that we don’t exist for ourselves. We’re not an island. We are always part of a community, no matter how much Egypt tried to turn midwives against mothers, or accidental sons of Pharaoh against his brothers. We exist in relationship to each other, even if our own contemporary culture prizes individualism and personal freedom above all else.
Martin Luther King, Jr. acknowledged this reality when he said, “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men [persons] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…”
We are all connected.
And Audre Lorde, a black poet and Civil Rights activist, wrote, “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.”
Last week we heard the Hebrew people complain of their hunger, looking longingly back at the meals they had in Egypt. But as people who had encountered God, they no longer fit into Egypt’s world. This fragility of the moment of hunger is the “temporary armistice” Lorde is talking about—Audre Lorde, not the Lord. The commitment to turn away from Egypt, from empire, can only be done if everyone is looking out for everyone else in the community. If they are helping the widows gather manna, if they are bouncing the babies on their knees while the mothers prepare the quail, if the sick are provided for, if each life is promised freedom, if everyone can be who they ought to be, as MLK said.
As people who have tasted freedom, their life from here on out means living into that liberation by declaring their neighbor’s lives sacred, by honoring the covenants they make, by making sure everyone has enough.
The God of freedom, it seems, is in our business. And asks that we are in each other’s business, to the extent that we make sure everyone is free, too. Not just free to survive, but free to flourish as a community. We can only be free if everyone is free, too. It’s a group effort.
The text ends when Moses tells the people, “Don’t be afraid,” but honestly, they are right to be afraid. They are out in the wilderness at the base of a formidable mountain. Lightning streaks the sky and thunder booms an amen to God’s commands. In other words, creation seems to understand the gravity of the moment. In Greek tragedies, the appearance of thunder and lightning signals something terrible is about to happen. In literature like Exodus, it means the Divine has showed up and declared who they are. So at the end of the commandments, all signs point to God revealing who God is, and if you remember, when God appeared to Moses in a burning bush however long ago on this very mountain, God gave a name: I AM. And now God is releasing more information on God’s identity and nature: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
I am the Lord your God who is committed to liberation.
Thunder, lightning.
PAUSE
I had hoped to craft a few lofty theological questions to get us thinking about how to apply these commandments to our 21st century lives, but instead I ended up word vomiting these questions:
How am I supposed to respond to God’s self-disclosure these days when all hell has broken loose? Like yes, God, I definitely see the lightning and hear the thunder, the climatic calamity is very clear as I choke on the smoke of the California wildfires, but I’ve got a lot going on at the moment with you know *gestures widely*, everything. And besides how am I supposed to live with my neighbor in mind when my other neighbor won’t even wear a mask? And how am I supposed to be committed to my community when my heart breaks in a million pieces every day at the death and theft of your beloved? How the heck am I supposed to get some sleep when I see this single garment of destiny MLK talked about being shredded before my very eyes? How can I even engage with others when they paint God across their God-forsaken banners, and how can I even look at myself in the mirror when I know I’ve done the same thing, and dear God, am doing it right this very second? *Sucks in breath*
Oh, dear, naive Ashley of last Sunday who thought the 10 Commandments would be boring. You were so precious. I could just boop your nose.
As my heart rate slows down, perhaps this is the thing. That these questions and worries are not a yoke for me to carry by myself. That because I am in covenant community with you, with the broader Church, that I am free to ask these questions. You are free to ask these questions. And we help each other navigate community life in light of these questions, together. We figure out, together, respecting the wildness of God’s ways, how to answer these questions. Rather than seeking to be right or best or smartest, we instead seek to be free together.
Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
Later on in the Torah, what we call the first 5 books of the Bible, God will give a lot more commandments and laws. And one portion will be regarding people’s first fruits. God will instruct them to bring their best to the altar to be given in service to those in need, to the priests, and for the purpose of communal celebrations. And part of the ritual of giving will be telling the story of their faith. It’s a long story that begins with Abraham and tracks through Egypt and their wilderness journey.
When we give, we add our chapter to that story, to the long history of God’s people, to the history of generosity and justice at Azle Christian Church. We affirm the legacy of God’s faithfulness and we pray with our hands, with our dollars, with our generosity that God will keep being faithful here.
If you have not already made a commitment to invest in the community of Azle Christian Church, I encourage you to consider doing so. There are several ways for you to help sustain the ministries of the church through your financial gifts—online, Venmo, text-to-give, or a good ol-fashioned check. See the comments on this video for details.
Finally, if you or someone you know is in need of help during this time, please contact our church office or get in touch with us through Facebook or email.
Benediction
For our benediction today, I invite you to give yourself a hug. Massage your shoulders a bit, rub your arms to get a little heat flowing.
Receive this benediction:
May the Lord our God who led the Hebrew people out of Egypt help us as we continue the long, slow work of liberation. May we continue this work together, as one, for each other.
Amen.