The Missing Line

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,

Sunday 11 October 2026

 

Exodus 19.3–7; 20.1–17
Matthew 5.17
 
If some of us have a nagging sense of déjà vu this morning,
          we're not imagining it.
 
Back in August we spent our summer series
          on the Ten Commandments,
          and now, barely two months later,
          the lectionary has marched us straight back up Sinai.
 
It's tempting to think
          somebody wasn't looking at the preaching plan.
 
Those of us who missed a week or two in August
          because we were away
          can at least take comfort:
          after the sermon on the Sabbath,
          that probably counts as obedience.
 
But the Bible got there first.
          The commandments are given twice:
          once here in Exodus,
          and then again in Deuteronomy,
 
when Moses stands before the next generation
          on the edge of the promised land
          and goes through the whole lot again.
 
And as he does, he says something remarkable:
          "Not with our ancestors did the LORD make this covenant,
          but with us, who are all of us here alive today"
          (Deuteronomy 5.3).
 
The commandments aren't a syllabus
          we complete and tick off.
          They're meant to be heard again and again,
          until we hear them as spoken to us,
          now.
 
Israel was told to talk about them
          at home and away,
          when lying down and when rising up
          (Deuteronomy 6.7).
 
By that standard,
          two months between sermons is a bit slack.
 
And there's something interesting
          about that second telling.
 
In Exodus,
          the reason given for the Sabbath is creation.
          In Deuteronomy, Moses gives a different reason:
          "Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt"
          (Deuteronomy 5.15).
 
When the commandments are repeated,
          the memory of Egypt doesn't shrink;
          it grows.
 
That's worth holding on to,
          because not every repetition of the commandments
          does that.
 
 
In classrooms across Louisiana and Texas this term,
          children are sitting underneath a poster.
 
The law says it has to be a decent size,
          and it says exactly what the poster must contain.
 
It's the Ten Commandments,
          in the old King James wording,
          and it begins like this:
          "I AM the LORD thy God."
          Full stop.
 
Then straight on to
          "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
 
Something's gone.
          In the Bible that first sentence doesn't stop there.
 
It carries on:
          "I am the LORD thy God,
          which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt,
          out of the house of bondage."
 
Somewhere between Sinai and the state legislature,
          that line was cut.
          Somebody decided it wasn't needed.
 
Now, before we get too comfortable
          tutting at America,
          it's worth remembering
          that we've done this too.
 
In 1604 the Church of England ordered
          that the Ten Commandments be set up
          at the east end of every parish church,
          where the people could best see and read them.
 
Plenty of those boards are still there,
          gold lettering on black.
 
They went up in a church established by law,
          in a country where Baptists and other dissenters
          could be fined or locked up
          for meeting on their own terms.
 
Within a few years Thomas Helwys,
          one of the very first English Baptists,
          had written to King James to remind him
          that "the king is a mortal man, and not God,
          therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects".
 
He died in Newgate prison
          for his trouble.
 
There's a pattern here.
          Whenever the commandments get taken up
          by the powers that be,
          the first thing to go
          is the story.
 
The law that set slaves free
          gets turned into a rule
          for keeping people in their place.
 
And the line that goes missing,
          every time,
          is the one about Egypt.
 
So this morning
          let's put it back.
 
 
The story starts, in Exodus 19,
          not with a command
          but with a memory.
 
The people have been out of Egypt for three months,
          and they're camped at the foot of a mountain
          in the middle of nowhere.
 
Before a single word of law is spoken,
          God tells Moses to remind them of something:
 
"You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,
          and how I bore you on eagles' wings
          and brought you to myself"
          (Exodus 19.4).
 
Notice what it doesn't say.
          It doesn't say "I brought you to this mountain",
          or even "I brought you to the promised land".
 
It says "I brought you to myself".
          The destination of the exodus
          isn't a place;
          it's a relationship.
 
Grace comes first.
          The rules come second,
          and they come as the shape of a love
          that's already been given.
 
So when the next verse says
          "if you obey my voice and keep my covenant"
          (Exodus 19.5),
          that "if" isn't a price of admission.
 
They're already out.
          The "if" is about how to stay free,
          not how to get free.
 
And then there's the eagle,
          the bird of empire.
 
Rome's legions marched behind it,
          and empires have liked eagles
          ever since.
 
But in the Bible
          the eagle's wings belong to God,
          and they're used for carrying people away from empire,
          not marching them into it.
 
When the Book of Revelation
          wants to describe God's people escaping the dragon,
          it borrows this image straight from Exodus:
 
"the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle,
          so that she could fly from the serpent
          into the wilderness"
          (Revelation 12.14).
 
Both times,
          the eagle carries people out into the wilderness,
          which is where a people
          learns how to be free.
 
And then God says one more thing
          before the commandments begin:
          "you shall be for me a priestly kingdom
          and a holy nation"
          (Exodus 19.6).
 
In Egypt,
          one man stood between the people and the gods,
          and that was Pharaoh.
 
Here the whole people is priestly.
          Nobody gets to stand over anybody else.
 
Baptists have been saying something like that
          for four hundred years.
 
 
The Israelites at Sinai
          already knew all about law.
 
Pharaoh had law.
          Pharaoh had quotas.
 
Make this many bricks.
          Now make the same number of bricks
          without the straw.
 
And when they asked for a few days
          to go into the wilderness and worship,
          Pharaoh's answer was:
          "You are lazy, lazy"
          (Exodus 5.17).
 
Pharaoh's law had no rest in it,
          no limit,
          and no end.
 
So when God gives law at Sinai,
          it's a counter-law.
 
And we can hear Pharaoh being answered,
          commandment by commandment.
 
"You shall have no other gods before me."
          Pharaoh claimed to be a god.
 
So the very first commandment
          is a political statement
          as much as a religious one:
          nobody who holds power over us
          is God.
 
The ban on idols goes further:
          idolatry is what happens
          whenever we take something we've built,
          an economy, an institution, a flag,
          and serve it as though it were ultimate.
 
The commandments begin
          by clearing away every false god,
          because false gods always demand sacrifices,
          and it's never the powerful
          who end up on the altar.
 
Then there's the Sabbath.
          One day in seven,
          nobody works.
 
Not you,
          not your son or your daughter,
          and then the list keeps going:
 
"your male or female slave, your livestock,
          or the alien resident in your towns"
          (Exodus 20.10).
 
A nation of former slaves is being told
          that they may never do to others
          what was done to them.
 
Rest isn't earned.
          It's something everybody gets,
          and it's shared all the way down,
          to the servant, to the ox,
          and to the stranger.
 
It's the first labour law in the Bible,
          and it's more generous
          than many of ours.
 
So the stranger is right there
          in the middle of the Ten Commandments,
          and later Exodus makes it explicit:
 
"You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien,
          for you were aliens in the land of Egypt"
          (Exodus 22.21).
 
The missing line
          again.
 
 
It's hard to read that
          without thinking about Britain this autumn.
 
Since March,
          anyone recognised as a refugee in this country
          is given thirty months of protection
          rather than five years,
 
and at the end of each thirty months
          their case is looked at again.
 
On top of that,
          the government has proposed
          that the road to settling here permanently
          could stretch to twenty years.
 
The name for this new arrangement
          is "core protection".
 
Think about what that means
          for a human being.
 
Someone flees a regime
          that wanted them dead.
 
They're examined,
          they're believed,
          they're officially recognised as a refugee.
 
And then they're told
          that for the next two decades,
          every two and a half years,
          they'll have to prove it all over again.
 
They can't quite set down roots.
          They can't quite plan.
          They can't quite rest.
 
It's a life without a Sabbath.
          It's the house of bondage
          rebuilt as a waiting room.
 
Some of us here know that waiting room
          from the inside,
          and some of us have sat alongside friends
          who've been waiting for the next letter
          from the Home Office.
 
We're not here to point fingers
          at people who are anxious about migration;
          those anxieties are real,
          and they're being exploited
          by people who ought to know better.
 
But we are here to say
          that a politics which turns insecurity into policy
          has forgotten the line about Egypt.
 
When a nation forgets
          that it was ever the stranger,
          it starts building the very thing
          it once escaped.
 
 
There's one more commandment
          worth lingering over,
          and that's the last one.
 
"You shall not covet your neighbour's house;
          you shall not covet your neighbour's wife,
          or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey,
          or anything that belongs to your neighbour"
          (Exodus 20.17).
 
It's a strange one,
          because it's the only commandment
          about something that happens inside us.
 
You can't see coveting,
          and no court can prosecute it.
 
And yet
          it's where the whole list has been heading.
 
The commandments climb.
          Don't murder.
          Don't commit adultery.
          Don't steal.
 
Don't bear false witness.
          And then the tenth
          goes underneath all of them,
          down to the root.
 
Why do we kill,
          and cheat, and steal,
          and lie about each other?
 
Because we want what our neighbour has.
          Often we want it
          precisely because our neighbour has it.
 
Our desires are borrowed.
          We learn what to want
          by watching each other,
 
and before long the neighbour who taught us to want
          becomes the rival
          standing in our way.
 
That's where violence comes from.
          It's as old as Cain and Abel.
 
Empires are just coveting at scale.
          Pharaoh's slaves were building store cities
          (Exodus 1.11),
          warehouses for surplus,
          monuments to more,
 
and an economy that runs on endless wanting
          will always need somebody
          to make the bricks.
 
So the tenth commandment
          isn't a fussy little rule about envy.
 
It names the engine
          that drives the whole house of bondage,
          and switches it off.
 
 
Which brings us to Jesus,
          sitting on another mountain.
 
"Do not think that I have come
          to abolish the law or the prophets;
          I have come not to abolish
          but to fulfil"
          (Matthew 5.17).
 
Christians have too often read this
          as Jesus dismantling a religion of law
          and replacing it with a religion of grace.
          That's not what he says.
 
He's a Jewish teacher,
          teaching Jewish people,
          and he tells them the law
          isn't going anywhere.
 
Besides,
          the grace was there at Sinai
          before the law was.
          It was there on eagles' wings.
 
To fulfil something
          is to fill it full,
          to give it its whole weight.
 
And if we read on in Matthew 5,
          we can see how Jesus does it.
 
"You have heard that it was said
          to those of ancient times,
          'You shall not murder'...
 
but I say to you
          that if you are angry with a brother or sister,
          you will be liable to judgement."
 
He follows each commandment
          down to the root,
          to the anger and the wanting underneath.
 
He does with every commandment
          what the tenth was already doing.
 
But there's another way
          Jesus fulfils the law.
 
When Jesus stands before Pilate,
          the religious authorities say:
 
"We have a law,
          and according to that law
          he ought to die"
          (John 19.7).
 
There it is again.
          Law with the exodus line cut out.
 
Law in the hands of temple power
          and Roman power,
          working together
          to get rid of a troublemaker.
 
Law used as a weapon,
          not a gift.
 
And on Easter morning
          God overturns the verdict.
 
The resurrection is God's judgement
          on every use of law
          to crush the innocent.
 
God doesn't side with the court;
          God sides with the condemned.
 
The one the law put to death
          is the one God raises to life.
 
That's the fulfilment.
          In Jesus,
          the missing line is restored.
 
"I am the Lord your God,
          who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
          out of the house of slavery"
 
becomes, on Easter Day,
          "I am the Lord your God,
          who brought you out of the grave."
 
The God of the exodus
          is the God of the empty tomb.
 
The commandments were always meant
          to be read in that light:
          as the shape of life
          for people who've been carried out.
 
 
In a moment we'll sing
          "We limit not the truth of God
          to our poor reach of mind."
 
It's built on the words of John Robinson,
          pastor to English Separatists
          exiled in the Netherlands,
 
who told his people in 1620
          that the Lord had yet more light and truth
          to break forth from his word.
 
Which is another way of saying
          that when we come back to the same texts,
          we never come back
          to quite the same place.
 
So here's the truth this morning,
          and it's not a task.
          It's a gift.
 
We've been carried.
          Whatever house of bondage
          any of us has known,
          whether it was a regime,
          or an addiction,
 
or a debt we never chose,
          or a waiting room
          that seemed to have no end,
 
the God who bore Israel on eagles' wings
          has borne us too.
 
We've been brought,
          not just somewhere,
          but to God.
 
We're a priestly people,
          every one of us,
          with nobody standing over anybody else.
 
Our rest is not earned.
          It's given,
          and it's given to the stranger
          as much as to us.
 
And the commandments
          aren't the price of our freedom.
          They're what freedom looks like
          when it's shared.
 
The first line belongs to us.
          Nobody can cut it out.
 
"I am the Lord your God,
          who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
          out of the house of slavery."
 
That's where the law begins.
          And that's where we begin,
          too.

Rescue at the Sea

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 4 October 2026

Exodus 14.5–7, 10–14, 21–29

Matthew 2.13–15

There's a particular kind of fear

that belongs to shorelines.

It's the fear of running out of ground.

We've been moving,

we've been getting away,

and then the land simply stops.

In front of us there's water,

grey and deep and indifferent.

Behind us, getting louder,

is whatever we were running from.

That's where Israel finds itself this morning.

They've left Egypt,

and for a few days it must have felt like freedom.

Then they reach the sea,

turn round, and see dust on the horizon.

It's the chariots.

The story is careful to tell us what's coming.

Six hundred picked chariots,

and then all the other chariots of Egypt,

with officers over all of them (14.7).

This is the finest military technology of the ancient world,

the tanks and drones of its day,

and it's all been sent after a column of brickmakers

with their children and their bread dough.

It's worth asking why Pharaoh bothers.

The text gives us the answer,

and it isn't what we might expect.

It isn't wounded pride,

or at least not only that.

Pharaoh and his officials look at each other and say,

"What have we done,

letting Israel leave our service?" (14.5).

The whole weight of the empire turns round

because the workforce has walked out.

The pyramids won't build themselves,

and the store-cities need bricks.

An economy built on unpaid labour

can't cope when the labourers leave.

So the chariots are, in the end,

an economic policy.

That's usually how empire works.

It rarely presents itself as cruelty.

It presents itself as necessity,

as the natural order of things,

as the way the world has to be run.

And when people try to leave that order,

it sends the chariots.

Then comes one of the most painfully honest moments

in the whole of scripture.

Israel sees the army and cries out,

not in faith

but in terror.

And then they turn on Moses:

"Was it because there were no graves in Egypt

that you've taken us away to die in the wilderness?" (14.11).

There's a black joke hiding in that line.

Egypt was the land of graves.

It was famous for them,

the grandest tombs in the world.

"Couldn't you at least have let us die

somewhere with decent burial facilities?"

Then they say the thing that really breaks the heart:

"Didn't we tell you in Egypt to leave us alone

and let us serve the Egyptians?

It would have been better for us to serve Egypt

than to die in the wilderness" (14.12).

It would be easy to preach against Israel here,

to scold them for their lack of faith.

But I don't think that's what the story wants.

It's showing us something truer

and sadder.

Empire doesn't only take our labour.

It takes our imagination.

After four hundred years,

Israel literally can't picture a life

that isn't organised around Pharaoh.

Slavery at least was familiar,

and freedom is a wilderness with no map.

That's not a personal failing.

It's what systems of domination do to people.

They teach us that there's no alternative,

and they teach it so well

that when the door opens

we're frightened to walk through it.

Many of us know something of that,

in the jobs we can't leave,

in the debts that shape our choices,

and in the stories we've been told

about what's realistic.

So Moses answers the panic,

and what he says matters:

"Don't be afraid.

Stand firm,

and see the deliverance the Lord will accomplish for you today.

The Lord will fight for you,

and you have only to keep still" (14.13–14).

Notice what isn't asked of Israel.

They aren't told to arm themselves

or to form ranks.

Nobody suggests they meet chariots with chariots.

The logic of empire says

that power can only be answered with power

and force with a bigger force.

The God of the exodus

simply refuses to play that game.

Israel's rescue won't come

from learning to be a smaller Egypt.

That's the thread that runs all the way to Jesus,

who tells Peter to put away his sword in Gethsemane.

The way out of Pharaoh's world

isn't to become Pharaoh.

And "keep still" doesn't mean do nothing.

In the verses just after our reading, God says,

"Tell the people to go forward" (14.15).

So the stillness is the stillness of trust,

and it turns out to be the only thing

that can hold our feet steady enough

to walk into the sea.

Then the wind comes.

A strong east wind

that blows all night (14.21).

The pillar of cloud moves behind Israel

and stands between the two camps,

darkness on one side

and light on the other.

The sea is driven back,

and the people go through on dry ground,

with the waters a wall on their right hand

and on their left.

If we listen,

we'll hear an echo of the beginning of the Bible.

In Genesis, the wind of God moves over the face of the waters,

and God separates the waters

and says, "Let dry land appear."

The exodus is creation all over again.

God is making a people

the way God made a world,

by pushing back the chaos

and giving it a shore.

And for those of us who are Baptists,

it's hard not to hear something else as well.

Paul says our ancestors were "baptised into Moses

in the cloud and in the sea" (1 Corinthians 10.2).

Every time someone goes down into the water in this sanctuary,

they're walking the bed of the Red Sea.

They go down into what feels like death,

the place where the ground runs out,

and they come up on the other side

as part of a people who've been brought through.

We don't go through deep water because we're brave.

We go through because someone has gone before us

and held the waters back.

But we can't leave the story on the far shore quite so quickly,

because there's a part of it that should trouble us.

The Egyptians follow Israel into the sea.

The wheels of their chariots clog in the mud,

the waters return,

and "not one of them remained" (14.28).

Our instinct, perhaps, is to cheer.

And the next chapter does sing.

Miriam takes up her tambourine,

and we should never begrudge the song

of people who've just escaped slavery.

But there's an old Jewish tradition,

found in the rabbinic writings,

that tells a further story.

When the Egyptians were drowning,

the angels in heaven wanted to join the song.

And God stopped them.

"The work of my hands is drowning in the sea,"

God said,

"and you want to sing?"

I love that story,

because it's truer to the God we meet in Jesus

than any cheering would be.

The soldiers in those chariots

weren't the architects of empire.

Most of them were sent.

They were ordered into the sea

by a king who'd already shown

he'd sacrifice anyone to keep his system running.

In the end,

Pharaoh drowns his own people.

That's what the machinery of domination always does.

It devours the enemy,

and then it devours its own.

God is with the victim,

and here that means both the slaves who reach the shore

and the conscripts who don't.

The sea isn't God's revenge.

It's the place where empire's violence

collapses in on itself,

and even there God grieves.

Now we turn to our second reading,

and something extraordinary happens.

The road runs the other way.

Joseph has a dream.

An angel tells him to get up,

take the child and his mother,

and flee to Egypt,

because Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him (Matthew 2.13).

So in the night they go,

as refugees,

carrying what they can.

Matthew is doing something deliberate here.

Herod is playing Pharaoh.

Just after our reading

he'll order the killing of the little boys of Bethlehem,

just as Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew boys thrown into the Nile.

The empire has changed its name

but not its methods.

Kings who are afraid of losing power

still reach for the children.

And the land of slavery

has become the land of refuge.

Egypt, the house of bondage,

is where the holy family finds safety.

There's no parting of the waters this time

and no pillar of cloud.

There's only a dream,

a night journey along an ordinary road,

and a border that lets them in.

That matters.

Sometimes rescue looks like the sea standing up in walls.

And sometimes rescue looks like a neighbouring country

letting frightened strangers in.

Then Matthew quotes the prophet Hosea:

"Out of Egypt I have called my son"

(Matthew 2.15; Hosea 11.1).

When Hosea wrote those words,

he was talking about Israel,

about the exodus,

about God's tender love for a people brought out of slavery.

Matthew takes that verse and says it's about Jesus.

He isn't twisting it.

He's saying that Jesus carries Israel's whole story

in his own small body.

He goes down into Egypt,

and he'll come up out of it.

He'll pass through water at his baptism in the Jordan.

He'll go through the wilderness.

And at last he'll go down into the deepest water of all,

into death itself,

and God will call him out.

Before Jesus was a preacher,

before he was a healer,

he was a refugee.

That's not a footnote to the gospel.

It's part of the gospel.

William Brock, our first minister here,

told this church to hold the Bible in one hand

and the newspaper in the other.

So let's do that.

A little over twenty miles from the white cliffs,

there's a shoreline where people stand

with the sea in front of them

and something terrible behind them.

Since 2018,

more than two hundred thousand people

have crossed the Channel in small boats.

Of those whose asylum claims have been decided so far,

the majority have been granted protection,

and that's before anyone counts the appeals.

These are people fleeing their own Herods,

their own Pharaohs,

their own massacres of the innocents.

The numbers this year are the lowest since 2021,

and that's being presented as a success.

Some of that is because more boats are being stopped,

now and then even in the water itself.

Whatever we think about how borders should be managed,

and there are serious questions there,

the exodus story asks us something uncomfortable.

When we look at that shoreline,

whose side of the story are we being invited to stand on?

Are we with the people at the water's edge,

or are we the chariots?

In this story God's action at the sea

is rescue,

not deterrence.

The pillar of cloud stands

between the refugees and the army.

When lifeboat crews have been accused

of running a "taxi service"

for going out to people in trouble at sea,

they've been doing something very close to what God does in Exodus 14.

They've been getting between the drowning

and the deep.

This isn't a call to feel guilty.

It's an invitation to see clearly.

The powers want us to see a threat.

Scripture wants us to see Mary and Joseph,

travelling at night with a baby,

hoping a border will open.

There's one more thing to say about that night at the sea,

and it's this.

Before the waters part,

there's a long darkness.

The wind blows all night.

Israel has to wait on the shore,

with the cloud between them and the army,

not yet through,

not yet safe.

Many of us live in that night.

We know what it is

when the way ahead seems blocked.

It might be a diagnosis,

a debt,

or a grief.

It might be a relationship that's ended,

or a fear for the world that we can't shake.

We stand on the shore

and the water doesn't move.

The Christian story knows about that kind of waiting.

It's Holy Saturday,

the day between the cross and the resurrection,

when Jesus lies in the tomb

and nothing seems to be happening.

But the wind is blowing all night.

God is at work in the dark

long before the morning shows it.

And on the third day

the waters of death are driven back,

and Christ comes up out of the deep

onto the far shore.

The resurrection is the exodus completed.

It's the sea parted for good.

So we come to the table.

The first Passover was eaten in haste,

by people with their sandals on

and their bags packed,

waiting for the night of their deliverance.

When Jesus sat with his friends in the upper room,

it was that meal he was sharing.

The bread and the cup belong to a people on the move,

a people who've been brought through.

We don't come to this table

because we've got it all worked out,

or because our faith never wavers at the shoreline.

Israel complained all the way to the water's edge,

and God brought them through anyway.

We come as we are,

with our fears and our doubts.

We come as people

whose rescue has already begun.

The sea has parted.

The one who was called out of Egypt

has gone before us through the deepest water of all,

and he has come up on the other side.

The chariots don't get the last word,

and neither do the graves of Egypt.

We're a people brought through deep waters.

The way has been made where there was no way.

And the table is set

on the farther shore.