Other Commandments: Temples, Getting Closer, and What We Can Hear

Cognitive behavioral science tells us that when we are in the heat of the moment when we are busy with adrenaline and excitement, we don't process instructions the way we do when we are at rest. If you see a person is running where they shouldn't be running, and you yell ‘don't run’, what our minds hear is RUN! We can't process the don't part of the instruction in that moment. In today's lesson from Exodus we are invited into a framework for an undiminished human community, or as it is more commonly known, the Ten Commandments. The people of Israel have come out of Egypt, out of slavery, and through the waters in the life-defining Exodus event. They are now in the desert, A people on a nomadic journey of many years trying to figure out who they are, and how to live together and survive. This set of commands is intended to shape our life together. Shape it into something that looks like the compassionate God who delivered us.

These commands set the framework for a bold attempt to locate the best ways to live around our fidelity to God and God's priorities. Even though the wilderness setting is anxious, This revelation doesn't seem to come from a place of fear and hurt. If anything it's trying to reduce the systems of adversity and alienation. Most of the Commandments are phrased from that do not stance, and we teach them over and over from the place of stillness because it would be hard to hear in the context of crisis. And we teach many of them from negation ‘you will not’ and ‘do not’ because there are times when saying ‘do not run onto the field’ is much clearer than the verbal gymnastics of ‘help us maintain the integrity of the game and keep all guests and players and staff safe by staying inside the guest seating area.’ However, I want to look more closely at two positively phrased Commandments: Sabbath and Elders.

In this day and age with all of our expected productivity and demands for perfection, Sabbath may be the most unfollowed commandment. The sabbath God invites us isn’t just for the elites, it is for all. It is a day of leveling the playing field. The servants have to rest. The women who do most of the household chores have to rest. For a people who had been slaves in Egypt and will later find themselves in Exile and trampled under the foot of Empire again and again, for any vulnerable people, the guarantee of rest is liberating. Sabbath is about healing and freedom and interrupting the systems that demand go go go. God calls us back to Sabbath, to honoring each other and the real weight of the gift that God believes we are.

Then we are directed to honor our elders. It says parents, but let us choose to expand its neighborhood just a bit. This word to honor in the Hebrew it means to give weight to, it is a word that implies heaviness. Honor does not demand that we obey blindly. To honor is to treat the wisdom of those who have lived before us and longer than us with hefty seriousness. I do wonder however if this one needs a footnote. Perhaps that quote frequently attributed to Chief Seattle: remember that we are borrowing our today from our children's future. In a recent interview sociologist, Brene Brown said: People are hard to disregard close up; so move in, get curious, get closer. Make connections, try to discover how we are enmeshed with each other in ways that are bigger and deeper than any of our ideas or borders are.


Part of the point of these Commandments is setting a space where we walk with God, A framework where God's presence and intention for our life is made evident. And paradoxically one of the primary points that John is trying to share in his gospel lesson today is that Jesus is the framework and shape of God's presence in this life. In the scene today we are at the rebuilt Temple with its holy of holy chamber and porticos and hallways teeming with people. A few years ago I realized how close the measurements of this sanctuary are to the measurements of the Jerusalem Temples. It is easy for us to imagine ourselves in the Temple if you just look around. Imagine the tables set up in the narthex, and sheep and oxen in the atrium. At this moment in the gospels, during the festival of the Passover, imagine it would be as busy as an arena on a game night. Now in this space and in the middle of this busyness, John wants us to see that the uncontainable God who is supposed to be held by this structure, this same God is in the whole life of this man who is here In this Jesus from before the beginning began.

With him we have the concrete presence of the absolute aliveness of God and an authentic, compelling and creative witness to who God is and who God is calling us to be. However, it is our enmeshment with the powers that be and fence builders of the world that are thrown into chaos by Jesus’ very presence. Our response to this truth-telling and brilliant holy life Is panic. The mob response to his closeness and his difference Is to cast him out to try and resolve our shame and dismay and chaos with a scapegoat. Jesus will be found at the center of a terrible game that is a murderous lie. The systems that keep us running, keep us blind and harmful and never able to sit still, these mechanisms are hidden from us because we are knee deep in them. But in Jesus’ death, we can see it. He is the victim who judges all of our unjust systems of grind and push and pull and kill. Jesus will turn the tables over and send the critters out into the streets. Jesus will expose all the little accommodations to the ways of God. All the little ignorances that give the authorities their power. Can we open our hearts and be set free from unquestioning participation in the systems of death?

I found myself wondering this week if the lovely framework of commandments covers all the complexities of contemporary life? In many ways, the whole set is broad enough to include all sorts of complexity that the Ancients could never have imagined. On the other hand, if you look at our history the people of God maybe we could have used a couple more operating instructions. One of the things we struggle with over time is fear of the other, our anxiety about the stranger, the widow, the different person who we continue to exclude and diminish. Maybe we could use the command to not fear the stranger. To see every neighborhood as a temple, every person in every neighborhood as precious and revelatory as any holy mountain could ever be.

The new commandment I'd really like to have is: don't be a jerk (or a troll or a bully). The problem is if you're being a jerk, you're probably caught in adrenaline and anger and loneliness and in that moment like that, we are the child who is running who can't hear the don't part of the command. In Martin Luther King, Jr’s book Why We Can’t Wait he outlined ten duties participants in the Birmingham protests were to abide by. I wonder if they can help us, Help us shape our lives as temples of the presence of God, Help us confront the systems of diminishment that grind and scapegoat every day. These are the duties (slightly interpreted), let us pray them together:

Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus
Remember that we seek Justice and Reconciliation not victory
Walk and talk in the manner of love for God is love
Pray daily to be used by God in order that all might be free
Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all might be free
Observe both friend and foe with the ordinary rules of courtesy
Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world
Refrain from the violence of fist tongue or heart
Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health
Follow the directions of the movement and of the Captain.

In the name of our Lord and Captain, Amen.

Lent 3  B
RCL
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington