Deuteronomy 5:1-6, 17-20
Last week when we celebrated Easter I talked about the fact that the Easter story is about life in two ways – an eternal life which overcomes death and a new and better way of living while we occupy these bodies we call ours. During the Easter season of seven Sundays, I want to focus on the second way in which we have new life in and through Jesus – a life for living today and every day. And I want to start by looking at the Ten Commandments, or as my favorite version calls them: the ten best ways to live.
Before we can think about the individual commandments, some of which appear in today’s reading, I want to back up a step and think about what these commandments are. They are part of one of many covenants that our spiritual ancestors understood as defining their relationship with God. And before we can talk about this covenant, we have to back up two steps and talk about who are spiritual ancestors were.
The earliest physical or historical evidence of the people known as Hebrews (or Hapiru) shows up in the land now claimed by Israel about 1200 BCE – or about the time we know as the Exodus from Egypt. This is the story our Jewish friends were celebrating as Passover, ending last night. Moses leads the people out of Egypt into the Promised Land, a process that required over 40 years and two different leaders, Moses and Joshua. It’s interesting that the records of Egypt, an empire which kept meticulous records, don’t mention this event. Maybe because they were embarrassed by it or maybe because our version of it is more precise than the actual events. At any rate, about this time several nomadic tribes, some from Egypt and some from farther east of this land along the Jordan River appear in archaeology and written records. They don’t seem to be a single nation but over time become a loose federation of tribes, each with its own ancestors. Scholars believe that as these tribes cooperated in warfare, and in settling in a new land they began to tell their origin stories in a way that braided them together. It’s like when our generation does an search on Ancestry.com and we have a “mother’s side” and a “father’s side” and more and more branches as we trace our history, but in the current moment, all these stories come together and are OUR story.
It's hard to reconstruct this weaving of stories because its roots are so ancient and the record is very murky. But it’s probable that those who came together about 3000 years ago told the story of being set free to come to this new place. And each group told ancestor stories with names like Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel. Over time these stories become one long story. These diverse peoples then become our spiritual ancestors. For the purposes of the next few weeks, we need to recall that they identified themselves as being the people of their God and they described that relationship by way of covenants they had made with God.
Covenants were familiar to these people because that’s how rulers made agreements in their time. We call them treaties and trade organizations in our time. They described what each party was going to do for the other, how they would relate to each other, and they started with a ceremony marking the beginning. Let’s recall some of the covenants that are part of our spiritual heritage.
There’s the covenant with Noah that says God won’t destroy all the earth’s creatures through flood. The ceremony of this covenant is the rainbow that appears after the storm.
There’s the covenant with Abraham that says his descendants will be the tribe that’s special to God. The first sign of this covenant is a ceremony in which Abraham cuts in half a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove and a pigeon, sets them in two rows, and while Abraham is in a semi-trance a “smoking pot and a flaming torch” move between the rows. The second sign of this covenant is the practice of circumcision.
There’s the covenant with Moses, which is represented by the Torah or law which describes how the people will act in daily life.
There’s the covenant with David that his descendants will rule Judah forever, which came to be represented by the hope for a Messiah King in David’s lineage.
We have to remember that covenants describe relationships. They are about the responsibilities each party accepts and what they will do as they keep the covenant. Covenants we enter into today include marriage and mortgages. There are neighborhood covenants that tell us what we can plant and what color our house can be (and in the past, what color our skin could be). We call baptism a covenant that defines who we are as a person of faith. So when we talk about commandments and covenants over the next few weeks, we’re going to be thinking about all the relationships which are a part of our lives and how they function.
I want to suggest one more way we think about these relationships to set a starting place. We are told that humanity was made in the image of God. Usually we think of that as God – the first being – taking dirt and making a sculpture that becomes a human, in God’s image. As we become more sophisticated in our thinking, we say that it’s not our bodies that are in God’s image (after all there are many different kinds of bodies) but our spirits. The soul which is the heart of our humanity is the image of God. Let’s take that one step further. My oldest daughter many years ago gave me a book which suggested that everything that IS comes from the essence of God. It described that by saying whatever was before the “Big Bang” was God, and the BANG was God exploding into matter which forms everything. In that suggestion the image of God is the DNA which determines everything about life and the energy which animates it. We are in the image of God because the stuff of which we are created comes directly from the being of God.
If we are all made of the substance of God, then we are in covenant with each other because we are all made of one life. We are connected in our very cells by who we are. Relationships become not agreements made between separate people or beings that last as long as we get along and end when we choose. If we are all part of one life, we can’t simply choose to go our separate ways because there’s no true separate. We’re interconnected by our very existence. We must then learn to get along.
So let me suggest that this is our starting place for the next few weeks: we are all creatures made in the image of God and connected to each other. What connects us is the essence of God at the very heart of our being. What we do about that is the way we form communities and live lives which reflect the presence of God through us. The questions we bring to this series are these: How are we to live together so we make God visible and known? And how does God live in this world through us?