Exodus 20:1-17

Letterman as built a career, in part, on our human fascination with lists. You probably won’t be surprised that on Internet there are several websites devoted to lists, many of them lists of ten things.  One has these lists:  “Top 10 Bizarre Food Ingredients.”  Also there are “10 Books that Changed the World, Top 10 Common Misconceptions, Top Ten Most Evil Men (and Top Ten Most Evil Women)” and this last one, the one most commented on by this website’s viewers, “Top 10 Bizarre Biblical Tales.” (See www.listuniverse.com)  The editors at Time magazine even made several “Top Ten” lists to help remember the year 2008:  Top 10 News Stories, you’d expect, of course, but also these:  Top 10 Campaign Gaffes, Top 10 Crime Stories, Top 10 Green Ideas, and Top 10 Political Lines.  They also had 11 other “Top 10’s.”  (http://www.time.com/time/specials/2008/top10) We humans, especially Americans, are fascinated with making lists. 

So, in the context of our fascination with list making, we might hear in today’s Hebrew Bible lesson that God likes making lists, too. The one from Exodus that Coralie read we often refer to as “The Ten Commandments,” but we might be forgiven to give it a more modern title, maybe “God’s Top Ten instructions for a holy life.”  Our ancestors in the faith actually called this teaching merely “The Ten Words” or “ten statements.”  Scholars call this passage by the Latin word, ‘Decalogue,’ which just means “ten words.”  (See here The Jewish Study Bible, Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors, Oxford University Press, page 148.) Perhaps God uses this form because God knows us so well, and knows our fascination for lists, especially lists of ten things.

It’s a good list, too.  It’s even a holy list, because it has taught the faithful for generations and millennia the core truth of our religious responsibilities.  These Ten Words, or the Ten Commandments, lie at the heart of Jewish devotion.  And because our Christian faith is an extension of Judaism, not a repudiation of it, these words are at the heart of our faith too. Yes, it is a list about actions, not so much about beliefs, and because it’s about actions, it is a helpful reminder that Judaism, and much of Christianity, too, is less concerned about what we think, what we feel, or even what we believe.  Biblical faith, especially the faith we cherish in the Hebrew Bible, is about doing.  And it is in the doing of our faith:  worshipping God, honoring parents, living honestly and justly with our neighbors, that we form our lives and honor our God.  This list helps us shape our lives so.  We believe, with our Jewish cousins that this is a good list.

And because it’s such a good list, we tend to focus on it as a list.  Each statement of the ten could be studied in itself.  “Have no other gods before me,” for example, the one many see as the first commandment, is a timely reminder that trusting the competing but false gods of our world – money, power, and fame come quickly to mind – is dangerous.  “Remember the Sabbath” is another timely instruction in a modern world that is hurried, structured, and often demonically structured by someone’s clock.  “You shall not murder,” while both simple and direct even in English, is even more so in Hebrew, which is just two words:  “NO KILL”. And yes, that applies to abortion clinics, nursing homes, the battlefield and death row.  This is not political posturing; it is theological affirmation.  In God’s holy heart, all human life is equally life, and all life is holy.  Here and elsewhere in this holy code, these ten commands, this Decalogue, all of us are indicted, offended, and challenged to live differently. The two little words in the command, “No adultery” also indict the sad and sorry state of sexual conversation and understanding – actually the lack of conversation and the lack of understanding – that predominant in our culture. I could go on, and if the point of the lesson was merely to instruct us, I would.  This is a good list, and we do well to know it and follow its instruction.

But listen; while this is a great list, maybe even the Bible’s “Top Ten” list, it’s more than a list, really.  This is much more than just a list of good, helpful, even holy instructions.  Here’s the problem:  seeing it as a list tempts us to think of it as the conditions upon which God will love us, rather than as the conditions we must attain to achieve a full and a holy life. We may be tempted to think that IF we live by these instructions, THEN God will love us. This is nothing new.  Lying here at the core of Israel’s Torah, some see it as the key to the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures.  And certainly Judaism reveres the law, its core principles right here and surrounded by 613 other commands gleaned from the other parts of the Torah.  And so do we.  But this is not a list of what it will take to convince God to love us.  God’s love is evident in this lesson, of course, but not at the end, after conditions are met.  The commandments are not given evoke God’s love; instead, they reflect the love of God.  God’s love for the people is evident from the beginning of time, from creation itself; this love doesn’t wait until the people fulfill the urgings of the Decalogue.  Listen to the opening verses:  “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…” Who is it that tells us how to live?  The God who has already proved a great love for us.  The God who gives the commandments, the ten words, is the God who has already set the people free, the same God who has brought them out of Egypt, and who feeds and cares for them in the wilderness.  This list doesn’t merely call for holy living on our part, it reminds us, first, of God’s faithfulness to us.  This list calls us to goodness, because God is already, and always, good to God’s people. Or, as I once heard a Christian scholar of Judaism remind us, there is grace here, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to imagine a faithful Jew saying, “For God so loved the world, that God gave the Torah, that whoever believe in it should not perish, but have life abundant.”  This is more than a mere list.

Being more than a list, the Decalogue is more than mere commands.  It also hints at belief.  Because our faith is formed, shaped and somewhat defined by our doing – that is to say, by our ethics – but faith is also about our being.  We are who we are by God’s grace.  Our faith is strong because God’s faithfulness to us is strong.  So we are accountable for what we do, yes, but also we are responsible for the believing that shapes our doing.  God’s grace shapes our world by shaping us.  The Decalogue invites belief, too.

In that vein, I close with a story.  Though he’s only seven years old, Tarak McLain, from Austin Texas already knows how he’s shaped by his beliefs.  He collects and distributes food to the homeless and raises money for orphans and impoverished schools. He’s a reader, too, who studies world religions, and Tarak says that one of his beliefs is that we should help the poor. In fact, though, or maybe because, he’s only seven years old, Tarak has many core beliefs.  One day he heard a radio essay in the series “This I Believe,” and he decided to write down his beliefs.  In the end, he had enumerated a hundred beliefs, which he then sent to the series editors.  They aired his essay, but they asked him to pare the list down to thirty, because of their time constraints.  For similar reasons, I want to share just ten of his.  I’ve picked ten because ten seems to be the right number, in light of our lesson.  And I’ve picked these ten because they I share them, and they seem connected to the lesson, too.  Here they are, in Tarak’s words:

I believe life is good.

I believe God is in everything.

I believe we’re all equal.

I believe kids should respect their parents.

I believe God is in good and bad.

I believe that God helps us to have a good time.

I believe we should help the poor.

I believe it’s OK to die but not to kill.

I believe war should stop.

I believe we can make peace.  (See “Thirty Things I Believe,” by Tarak McLain, in the series “This I Believe,” at the website, www.npr.org.)

The challenge of Lent, the challenge of faith, is that we might all know and live our beliefs so well.  God’s top ten words remind us of our blessings, and call us to such a life.  What we do shapes what we believe; and what we believe informs what we do.