Sermon: decalogue & chaos

From Exodus this morning, we hear the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments that used to be a regular part of our liturgy.

When my father and grandfather were boys growing up in the Episcopal Church, they heard the Decalogue read in worship every Sunday morning. When I was a boy, we read, heard, and responded to the Ten Commandments at the beginning of worship one Sunday a month - - the priest reading each commandment, and the people responding to each, singing or saying, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.”

Mid-twentieth century liturgical reform feared making people uncomfortable talking about sin, so the Decalogue was moved out of the main stream in the Book of Common Prayer, and that’s the last that anyone in the Episcopal Church ever heard of the Ten Commandments.

You may know the holy stories of God dictating the Ten Commandments while Israel was forty years in the Wilderness with Moses. God gave them, God has not revoked them, although we’ve put them on the shelf (still available in case anyone ever wants to bother; but we do not want to bother, as they are tedious and constraining, and make us uneasy).

Lent is Time to put that back together, and I'll return to it.

Changing the subject, it would be a shame this morning to ignore Gospel John’s account of what Bible scholars call “Jesus cleansing the temple” - -

Coming to Jerusalem for Passover, Jesus is anticipating the Temple as a sanctuary of peaceful holiness. Instead, he finds a din of noise, and a den of thieves, a bustling marketplace of selling cattle, doves and lambs for sacrifice; of moneychangers converting Roman money (which was unclean and forbidden in the Temple), changing Roman coins to Jewish temple coins (for a profit). The Temple is a teaming hubbub of commerce.

Jesus goes berserk, shouting, “My Father’s house is to be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves!” He grabs a rope, ties knots in it, starts whipping it about; overturning tables, cages breaking open, birds escaping and flying loose wildly - - bleating, panicked animals darting here and there, spilled coins rolling everywhere.

Merchants and worshippers are stunned, and Temple authorities are furious at this outrageous intrusion.

? Why are you and I okay that Jesus did that? It’s because we and the gospel writers know who he is: folks in Jerusalem that day did NOT know, and are deeply offended at this brash clown from Galilee barging in and disturbing the peace.

All I want to take away from that gospel this morning is that OUR peace, which is the self-satisfaction of having things our way, is not GOD’s peace, which is the Ten Commandments kept as the way of life, the basic law of civilization, and standard of human decency.

Last Monday morning, as a Lenten exercise, anticipating today’s lesson, I read the Book of Exodus from start to finish - - again - - for the first Time in maybe thirty years. I'm not assigning it to you, but it's a great Lenten read if you care to take the Time. My Study Bible text is tiny print, so using the online site “Bible Gateway,” I read Exodus on my computer screen so I could make the print as large as I wanted.

There are several “ten commandments episodes” in Exodus. Unless you've studied in Sewanee's EfM program, you may wonder why Exodus can seem awkward, with redundancies, events repeated and seemingly out of sequence. That’s because it's the work of numerous oral storytellers over the centuries, and at least four writers (J, E, P, D) that scholars identify - -

but whoever finally wove Exodus together as a single document for Torah managed to patch in everybody’s version of this great salvation journey that begins with the good old Sunday school Bible story of Moses and the Bullrushes.

Exodus has been called the most important book in Hebrew Scripture, in that it reveals and explains God’s name; and it conveys the central theology that God knows and cares and responds, and in Israel’s history comes personally to save people who are suffering and mistreated. So - -

> God in the wilderness with Moses, remembering his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for love of the Israelites!

> God giving Israel the Torah, the Law as uniquely their treasure.

God has not revoked the Ten Commandments, which you can still find in the prayerbook, tucked away quietly lest you be offended or feel put upon and shamed as a miserable sinner. But Lent is Time for EXAMEN and self-awareness, and so, as in the Old Time, let’s rehearse the Decalogue again now.

The red Book of Common Prayer in the pew rack in front of you, page 317. I shall read each commandment; your response is in italics. Notice that the last response is different. Page 317, as you remain seated. Page 317.

The Decalogue: Traditional

God spake these words, and said:

 I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have none other gods but me. 