A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
9 October 2022
9 October 2022
Exodus 19.3-7; 20.1-17
For many people, for many Christians, being ‘religious’ is understood
as being someone who follows a set of divinely given rules:
do this, don’t do that.
For some this is very attractive,
it’s why they embrace a life of religious devotion.
There is a certainty, a security, in being told how to live,
what to do, what not to do.
Many go to church to hear the Bible expounded
in ways that will guide their decision making,
with the pastor dictating everything
from what a person might do in their relationships,
to their financial decisions.
But for others, this kind of controlling religious conviction
is experienced as highly oppressive,
and many of us here I’m sure will have left churches
precisely because they were too focussed
around the imposition of rules on the congregation.
Even Ned Flanders, the fundamentalist Christian
from the cartoon The Simpsons, struggled with this,
crying out to God on one memorable occasion:
‘Lord, I’ve done everything the Bible says.
Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff.’
And whilst I can see the attraction
of regarding the Bible as a book of rules to follow,
with church as the place to go to be told how to live,
in the end I have to be honest and say that this doesn’t work for me.
Firstly, my biblical studies have shown me that the Bible is not a book of rules.
As Ned Flanders discovered, to try and make it such
creates internal tensions and contradictions
that cannot be resolved without a fundamental re-think of what Scripture is.
So these days I tend to think of the Bible not as a book of rules to follow,
but as a series of thought experiments about the nature of God,
I think of it as a record of God’s people wrestling with God,
trying to understand what it means to be the people of God
in the midst of a complex, violent, and sinful world.
But secondly, I reject the approach to the Bible as a book of rules
because my pastoral experience shows that to treat it as such
creates a context for control, coercion, and abuse.
We must be careful not to point out the speck in our neighbour’s eye
whilst ignoring the plank in our own,
and none of us are immune from the temptations of power,
but it does seem to me that if you have a highly controlling understanding
of both the role of scripture, and the nature of God,
this creates a context
where that control is more easily mirrored in church life.
For example, The Jesus Army were in the news again this week,
as their compensation scheme opened
for victims of sexual, physical and emotional abuse. [1]
This organisation, which began
in a normal Northamptonshire Baptist church in the 1970s,
embodied a culture of absolute power
entrusted to a small group of male leaders,
combined with a theology of female subjugation.
The 800 page report into the Jesus army, published in 2020,
said that their theology of gender
placed both women and children at greater risk of abuse.
and that all five leaders "must take responsibility for their inaction". [2]
It’s author also said there was a culture of "blaming victims"
and "reinstating disgraced leaders".
And to be clear, my point here is not so much to point to the Jesus Army
and say how awful they were,
as it is to make the point that if this could happen
in a rural Baptist church in Northamptonshire,
it can happen anywhere.
Whenever controlling theology
colludes with unaccountable power,
there is a very high risk of abuse being the outcome.
And this is why our theology matters,
alongside our careful attention to the practicalities
of safeguarding and accountability.
This is why I remain so deeply suspicious
of those theologies that regard the Bible as a book of rules,
given by God, imposed by the church,
and obeyed by the people.
All of which brings us to our reading for today,
the story of the institution of the Ten Commandments
in the book of Exodus.
This passage is one of those thought experiments I was talking about:
it’s a story that explores something of the nature of God,
and of how humans might live in the light of that revelation.
But in order to understand the ten commandments from the Hebrew Bible,
we need to understand a little of the context
in which they came into being.
This afternoon, a few of us from Bloomsbury
will be going to the community preview at the British Museum
of their new exhibition on Hieroglyphs.
Alongside star exhibits such as mummies and the Rosetta Stone,
we will also see more mundane objects,
such as records of taxation rules.
Several of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs were known as lawgivers,
and although no complete ancient Egyptian law codes
have been yet discovered,
we do have records of laws from Mesopotamia,
including the famous Hammurabi Law Code from ancient Babylon.
This is a collection of 282 laws
which were recorded on a large black rock, or Stele,
in the reign of the Babylonian king Hammurabi,
who lived nearly 1800 years before the time of Jesus.
This stele is now on display in the Louvre in Paris,
and whilst the Hammurabi code contains the earliest example
of an accused person being considered innocent until proven guilty,
it also contains horrific punishments,
such as the removal of the guilty party’s tongue,
hands, breasts, eye or ear.
And the significant thing for our understanding of the ten commandments
is that the Hammurabi stele is part of the context
for the story of the giving of the Israelite law code,
which gives us a Jewish version of a law code,
one which is based on those that had been around
for many centuries in neighbouring cultures.
But there’s also the issue of the difference
between when the Hebrew Bible stories are set,
and when they were written.
The stories of the Exodus and the wilderness wanderings of Israel
are set at a time only a few hundred years
after the writing of the Hammurabi code,
but the book that tells us these stories, the book of Exodus,
was written and edited much later,
during and after the Israelite captivity in Babylon,
only some 500-700 years before the time of Jesus,
or a thousand years after the setting of the events they are describing.
This means that what we have in the story of the ten commandments
is a product of the Exile,
and it is the Jewish take on the Babylonian law codes,
which had been around, by that point, for over a thousand years,
and of which the Hammurabi Stele is one of our earliest known examples.
Just as we have already seen over the last few weeks,
with the stories of creation and the flood,
the Israelites in exile encountered the Babylonian worldview,
and the mythologies and concepts that upheld it,
and then created their own reshaping of those stories
to reflect their particular and unique understanding of the nature of God.
So, for example, the Babylonian story
of a creation born in violence and destined for violence,
became a Jewish story of a world created good, and destined for peace,
with human sin disrupting that ideal.
Similarly the Babylonian flood story
of a world at the whim and mercy of capricious gods,
became a Jewish story of God hanging his war-bow in the sky
and promising to never again threaten the world with destruction.
And so with the giving of the law,,
as the Babylonian law codes of overkill and scapegoating,
become the Jewish principles of proportionality
and respect for one’s neighbour.
But before we drill too deeply into the text of the ten commandments,
- and I do promise we’re getting there -
we need to spend a few moments with the first part of our reading.
It may sound obvious to say this,
but chapter 19 comes before chapter 20!
What I mean by this,
is that the covenant precedes the commandments.
Chapter 19’s promise from God to Israel
that they shall be a priestly kingdom and holy nation,
called by God as a treasured possession,
to be a blessing to the whole earth which is the Lord’s,
is the essential precursor
for the giving of the ten commandments.
What this means is that the law is not a condition to God’s faithfulness,
rather, it is a response to it.
God’s love for humans is not predicated
on their obedience to arbitrary laws,
rather, human right behaviour
comes into being as a response to God’s love.
This really matters,
because it strikes right at the heart of the question with which we began:
that of how, and in what way, religious belief
might affect, control, or regulate human behaviour.
The Babylonian laws were arbitrary,
they were violent, vengeful, and ruthless,
because they were the outworking of the Babylonian belief
in gods who were arbitrary, violent, vengeful, and ruthless.
However the Jewish conception of God
was of one who created humans for love,
who turned away from violence,
and who took action to release people from enslavement.
And so the laws which arose from their belief in such a God,
were substantively different from those of the Babylonians.
The Jewish laws were a response to God’s covenant,
they were the signs and symbols of God’s faithfulness.
The European Reformation caricature of the Jewish people as legalistic,
which lies behind so much of the horrific history of Antisemitism,
is in fact a profound misunderstanding
of the nature of the Jewish relationship with God.
Martin Luther’s equating of the legalism of the Catholic Church in his time,
with the legalism of Judaism,
and his similar equating of St Paul’s language of grace,
with his own rejection of Catholicism,
have done immeasurable damage
to the lives of Jewish people, from his time to the present day.
In 1543, he wrote a text called “On Jews and Their Lives”.
In that text, Luther said that their synagogues should be burned down,
that their religious books should be destroyed,
and even that “we are at fault in not slaying them.”
Luther believed that the Jewish God was a God of law;
and this belief, this misrepresentation
of Judaism’s relationship to its covenant with God
directly contributed to the context that, 400 years later
became the horrors of the Nazi holocaust.
But it doesn’t stop there, because that then in turn created the impetus for Zionism,
which brings us to our church trip to Palestine next month,
as we will be visiting in solidarity by those living under occupation.
I told you that theology matters!
All of this evil in the world can be traced
to a misrepresentation of Israel’s law code.
But the revelation of Exodus,
a text itself shaped in a time of exile and occupation,
is that God is a God of covenantal faithfulness, not of legalistic demands,
and that God’s people are then called to live in the light of that covenant.
Which brings us, at last,
to the ten commandments,
the Jewish take on the Hammurabi law code.
And one of the striking things about the ten commandments,
is the lack of proscribed punishments.
There are no injunctions here to cut off body parts,
or to lock people up.
If you want those kinds of laws, you have to read on,
into places like Leviticus and Deuteronomy,
where the ancient Jewish authors added to the ten commandments
a whole raft of legal minutiae,
to try and cover every imaginable eventuality.
Actually, as an aside, do you know my favourite random law in the Hebrew Bible?
It’s from Deuteronomy 25.11-12
If men get into a fight with one another,
and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband
from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals,
you shall cut off her hand; show no pity.
I’ve always wondered why this was included…?
Was it happening so often that they needed a law about it?
Or possibly, did it only happen once,
in which case why did they make a law about it?
My personal theory is that this happened, once,
but the man grabbed was a legal scribe,
and once he’d recovered and returned to work,
he thought to himself…
‘Right, if that ever happens again, I’m having her hand!’
But anyway…
Deuteronomy 25 is not the ten commandments,
which have a very different feel to them,
compared to the other, later, legal material in the Hebrew Bible.
The ten commandments are foundational
for the Jewish understanding of how they should live
in response to God’s calling of them to be a holy nation, a royal priesthood,
set aside from the world, for the benefit of the world.
If they are to be God’s people
then their way of being human must reflect the revealed nature of God.
And so the ten commandments provide a framework
for living within the covenant of God.
So they begin:
Commandments 1-2
Keep God at the centre of your lives and community,
and don’t worship other gods,
no matter attractive they may be.
The consequences of displacing God are severe,
because the worshipping of idols is merely a cypher for the worship of self,
and selfishness is destructive of community and family life
in ways that can take generations to heal.
People sometimes thing that the statement about children being punished
for their parents’ sinfulness to the third and fourth generation
is a statement about the harshness of God,
but anyone who has spent time studying family systems therapy,
or possibly just observing the patterns of dysfunction or abuse in their own family,
will know that this is simply a statement of fact.
They much you up, your mum and dad…
as Philip Larkin nearly put it.
Commandments 3-4:
Don’t take God for granted,
and keep a day of rest because you need it, and so does the earth.
I firmly believe we need to recover the intent behind the principle of Sabbath,
if we are to learn how to live well upon the earth,
and to live peacefully with ourselves.
If you’ve not read it, I commend Nicola Slee’s wonderful book on
Sabbath: the hidden heartbeat of our lives
to your reading list.
Commandment 5:
Honour your parents,
because family matters.
Perhaps it mattered even more in the ancient world
than it does in our time,
with survival dependent on familial structures,
and care for the elderly the responsibility of the community.
Commandments 6-9:
Now we get to the specific ‘thou shalt not’ commands,
which are often caricatured as the epitome of legalised religion.
I’ve often heard people dismiss Christianity and its parent religion of Judaism,
as being just one long list of ‘thou shalt nots’
But these thou shalt nots are commands I want to get on board with.
Murder, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness…
the world would be a much better place if people didn’t do these things.
The tragedy is that religious types have added so many more ‘thou shalt nots’…
a project that has been ongoing from the highly contextualised law codes
of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,
to the current evangelical grandstanding
on the issue of human sexuality.
We are always very keen to add more commands,
turning what should be a guide to lives lived in response to God’s covenant,
and an invitation to relate to others in love and faithfulness,
back into a law code with punishments and imposition.
The ten commandments are not laws to cover every eventuality,
they are an invitation for people to reflect on the nature of God,
to recover their own identity in God as God’s people
and to then start living in ways that embody that identity.
And so our relationship with God is renewed,
as God reaches out to us in faithfulness and love,
and our relationship with one another is renewed
as we learn to live in peace and harmony.
Commandment 10:
So we get to the final command,
the one about not coveting your neighbour’s house, wife, and possessions.
If God is faithful, so then our relationships with one another
should also be marked by good faith.
If God is the God who provides,
then we do not need to desire what we don’t have.
And as Rene Girard has shown us,
desire of what is not ours to own
lies at the heart of all the systems of scapegoating
that dominate our societal and communal relationships.
And so to close, a reading from Mark’s gospel:
Mark 12:28-34
One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another,
and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him,
"Which commandment is the first of all?"
29 Jesus answered,
"The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one;
30 you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.'
31 The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.'
There is no other commandment greater than these."
32 Then the scribe said to him,
"You are right, Teacher; you have truly said
that 'he is one, and besides him there is no other';
33 and 'to love him with all the heart,
and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,'
and 'to love one's neighbour as oneself,'
-- this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices."
34 When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him,
"You are not far from the kingdom of God."
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-63059575
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-53450901
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