Ten Commitments
Exodus 20: 1-4, 7-9, 12-20
A World Communion Meditation by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church   

World Communion Sunday ... a challenging, promising, audacious day.

It’s clear that in so many ways World Communion is not a reality.   We are divided and torn and separated in countless ways. And yet it’s also clear that in the promise of World Communion lies our hope.

Our Scripture Lesson this morning is the account of Moses bringing the people of Israel 10 words from God, words we know as the Ten Commandments.  On their journey to becoming a people, to becoming God’s people, the Israelites gathered at Mt. Sinai. Out of smoke, fire, cloud, lightning, thunder, earthquake, the first words they heard were these Ten Words.  

Mt. Sinai is between Egypt and the Promised Land.  God delivered the people out of slavery to Pharaoh and into the wilderness. Freed people, they could choose whether to live in covenant with God.  Both liberation and law were gifts from God, for these ten commandments, these ten words, showed, in the words of Wendell Berry, “the responsibilities without which no one can be legitimately free, or free for very long.”

These ten words show how to behave toward God and how to behave toward each other.  At Mt. Sinai, all the people chose commitment to these ten words.  All the people -- as community and as individuals.

I like “ten commitments.” Commitments freely made in gratitude and hope.  Commitments are also what turn words into action.

Christians and Jews share the ten words in different listings in sacred texts.  Muslims do not list the ten words in the Koran, but honor the Mosaic Code.

Somewhere in the human spirit there is an understanding, a deep knowing/memory that there are ways of being in the world that lead to life ... and there are ways that do not.

In his book Losing Moses on the Freeway, former war correspondent Chris Hedges writes, “The commandments do not protect us from evil.  They protect us from committing evil ... The commandments hold community together ... The commandments call us to reject and defy powerful forces that can rule our lives...”

In the first four commitments, the people remember who God is and enter into covenant with the God who brought them from slavery.

In the other six commitments they choose to live in response to such a God.  They enter a covenant with each other ... committing themselves to ways that people who belong to God treat each other: with honesty, respect, and faithfulness; without violence, envy, and with the health and humility of Sabbath rest.

With every new generation, the people of Israel remember and reimagine the Exodus story, freedom from bondage, food from heaven, encounters with God’s words and ways.  At every moment of crisis, failure, exile, oppression, the people recommit themselves to the ten words of Exodus.

The word testament means covenant – ongoing relationship between God and God’s people.  For Christians, Jesus is the new covenant, the fulfillment of the law.

Living authentically in covenant relationship with God and each other means aligning our desires and actions with our core identity and beliefs.  

Audacious, imperfect, promising.

Hear these ten words for people living in covenant with God and each other:

#1  There is one God.

#2  We do not pray to things we make.

#3  We do not use God’s name to swear.

#4  We rest on the Seventh Day and keep it holy.

#5  We respect our parents.

#6  We do not kill anyone.

#7  We do not have sex that violates loving partnership.

#8  We do not steal, withholding from others that which is rightfully theirs.

#9  We do not lie about someone else.

#10 We do not desire what belongs to someone else,

letting desires control us.

Polish filmmaker Kryzsztof Kieslowski created a series of ten short films called, “Decalogue,” showing the complex and important ways that the ten words of the Book of Exodus speak to the human predicament.  Kieslowski said, “For 6,000 years these rules have been unquestionably right,... and yet we break them every day.  We know what we should do, and yet we fail to live as we should.”

What happens when we “break” one of the commandments?  Does lightning strike? No. But there are consequences. We are diminished. We cause pain to others and to ourselves.  We reduce the likelihood of community flourishing.

And so every day we pray the two prayers Anne Lamott writes that she uses the most:  “thank you, thank you, thank you.” and “help me, help me, help me.”

The commandments we receive ... and the commitments we make ... help make of us authentic individuals and a whole people of God.  The commandments we receive ... and the commitments we make ... serve the greater good, and strengthen the hope that World Communion might someday become not only hope’s promise ... but lived reality.  In that hope and reality let us prepare to come to the communion table that, particularly this day, stretches around the world.  Amen.