A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
Sunday 6 September 2026
Exodus 20.12–17; 1 Kings 21.1–15
Romans 13.8–10; 1 Corinthians 11.17–22
Back in the spring I looked at a guitar online.
I didn't buy the guitar.
But I clicked on it once,
the way you might pick something up in a shop,
turn it over,
and put it back on the shelf.
Except that the guitar came with me.
It was there the next morning in Facebook,
beside an article about the Middle East.
It appeared, with a certain reproachful patience,
next to a video of somebody restoring an old bicycle.
For six weeks it followed me around the internet
like a dog that has decided you're its owner now,
and every time it said the same thing:
you love me, you want me, I want to be yours.
And it was right.
I hadn't wanted it before I saw it.
But I wanted it now,
and more each week,
and the wanting had been manufactured,
and I could see the machinery,
and it worked anyway.
That's the tenth commandment.
Not the guitar.
The machinery.
On the fifteenth of July this year, seven weeks ago,
buy now pay later came under the regulation
of the Financial Conduct Authority.
Until then it wasn't regulated at all.
In 2017 that market was worth
about sixty million pounds a year.
By 2024, more than thirteen billion,
and around eleven million of us use it.
And from July, for the first time,
lenders have to run affordability checks before they lend –
including on purchases under fifty pounds.
Read that again slowly.
Until seven weeks ago,
nobody was legally required to ask whether you could afford it.
An entire industry grew up
in the gap between wanting a thing and being able to have it.
That gap is where most of us live,
and it used to have friction in it –
saving, waiting,
deciding you didn't need it after all.
But the genius of the last decade was to sand the friction
off.
Three clicks and the gap is gone,
and the cost arrives later, quietly, in instalments,
when the wanting has worn off.
Now I'm not here today to proclaim that debt is a sin.
Some of us here are managing debt we didn't choose and
couldn't avoid,
and I'm not adding a sermon to that load.
But I am saying that we've built an economy
whose central engineering problem is how to make people want things.
And the Decalogue, the ten commandments, written three
thousand years ago,
looked at the human heart
and put its final word exactly there.
A fortnight ago we looked at the first part of the list of
commandments,
those that face towards God.
Well, today we have the whole of the rest of the list in
front of us,
and I want to take it not as six separate rules,
but as one thing with a root.
The other commandments here are about what you do.
Honour your father and mother.
Don't kill.
Don't commit adultery.
Don't steal.
Don't perjure yourself.
These are things that can be witnessed.
They leave marks.
And then the last one comes,
and it goes inside.
You shall not covet.
Not don't take - don't want.
No court in the world can try you for this.
You could keep the other five perfectly for eighty years
and break this one continuously, silently,
in a pew, in a marriage, at a dinner party,
and nobody would ever know.
Which is why we read this one as the internal commandment,
the one that catches you out
just when you were feeling pleased with your record on murder.
But I want to suggest that's only half right,
and the smaller half.
Because the Hebrew word here isn't a feeling word.
Rather, it's desire that reaches.
It's wanting with your hands already moving.
When Exodus says you shall not covet your neighbour's house,
it isn't primarily worrying
about you feeling wistful outside a nicer property than yours.
It's worrying about what happens when wanting gets access to
power.
Which is why we heard about Naboth this morning.
Because that story is the whole second part of the list
falling over,
one commandment at a time,
and it starts with a man at a window.
Notice the detail that everybody skips.
Ahab makes a perfectly reasonable offer.
A better vineyard in exchange, or the full market price in cash.
This is not theft.
It's a fair commercial transaction,
of the kind that happens ten thousand times a day in this city.
But Naboth says no,
and his reason isn't that the price is too low.
His reason is theological.
It's the inheritance of his ancestors –
which is the fifth commandment,
honour your father and mother,
in its oldest and least sentimental sense.
Not be nice to your parents.
Under Torah that land isn't Naboth's to sell,
because it's what his grandchildren will eat from.
Honouring the generations means keeping the family's portion
intact
for the ones not yet born.
It's not a commodity;
it's the means of life, held in trust.
And Ahab goes home, lies on his bed,
turns his face to the wall and refuses to eat,
which is the behaviour of a toddler with an army.
And Jezebel says the sentence that gives it away:
do you now govern Israel?
Meaning – what's the point of being king
if you can't have the field?
Then watch them go down like dominoes.
Two paid liars, and that's false witness.
A man stoned outside the walls, and that's murder.
A king taking possession, and that's theft.
Four commandments in a single afternoon,
and not one was the first thing to break.
The first thing to break was a man looking out of a window
at something that wasn't his.
That's why coveting comes last on the list.
Not because it matters least,
but because it sits underneath the others.
It's where murder comes from,
and theft, and perjury,
and the breaking of marriages,
and the selling-off of what belonged to the grandchildren.
It's the root system.
Cut the tree down and the root will send up another one.
Paul saw it too.
Listen to how he does the same list, in Romans:
you shall not commit adultery,
you shall not murder,
you shall not steal,
you shall not covet –
and then he stops listing
and says that any other commandment is summed up in this word,
you shall love your neighbour as yourself.
Love does no wrong to a neighbour.
And notice what he says just before it,
which lands rather well on a Sunday
when we've been talking about instalment credit:
owe no one anything, except to love one another.
The second part of the list of commandments isn't six rules.
It's one debt,
and it's the only debt worth carrying.
Now I have to be honest with you about this text,
because it doesn't deserve to be smoothed over.
Look at the inventory in that last verse.
Your neighbour's house.
Your neighbour's wife.
His male and female slave.
His ox.
His donkey.
The neighbour's wife is in a list with the livestock.
And it simply assumes that a household contains enslaved
people
who belong to the man of the house
in the same sense that his donkey does.
We’re too careful here to pretend otherwise.
But what interests me is that Scripture is already
uncomfortable with itself here –
by the time the list is given again, in Deuteronomy,
somebody has quietly moved the wife out of the property column.
That's the trajectory.
And the gospel's work, still going on here, today,
is the work of moving people
off the list of things that can be owned
and into the position of neighbour.
Because here's what I find remarkable.
In Hebrew, the very last word of the Ten Commandments,
the final syllable of the whole covenant,
after all the thou shalt nots,
is: ‘your neighbour’.
‘you shall not covet … anything that belongs to your neighbour
The Decalogue ends on the neighbour.
And something strange happens
when you follow that final commandment into the New Testament.
Because when the early church talks about coveting –
about the itch for more,
more than you have,
more than the next person –
they don't file it under social ethics.
Colossians says greed is idolatry.
Straight out.
Which means the last commandment
has just turned into the first one.
The Decalogue isn't a list.
It's a circle.
You come all the way round the outside,
through God and name and sabbath and parents
and murder and adultery and theft and lies,
and you arrive at wanting your neighbour's things,
and find you're standing back at the beginning,
in front of another god.
The love of God and the love of the neighbour are one
movement,
and the thing that breaks both at once
is the conviction that what I have is not enough.
Which brings us, uncomfortably, to this table.
Because Paul has just told us
what happened when a church tried to eat this meal
while that conviction was still running.
When you come together, he says,
it is not for the better but for the worse.
There are divisions among you.
When you meet, it is not really the Lord's supper that you eat.
That is an extraordinary thing to say
to a church that thought it was having Communion.
Whatever it is you're doing,
it isn't this.
And the reason is almost banal.
They were eating a real meal,
and the wealthier members were arriving early, because they could –
they weren't tied to somebody else's working day –
and by the time the poorer members got there,
the working members, the enslaved members,
there was very little left.
One goes hungry, Paul says, and another gets drunk.
They hadn't stolen anything.
Everyone brought their own.
Nobody in Corinth had broken
one of the other commandments getting to that table.
They had simply brought the world's arithmetic into the room.
And I don't think they set out to humiliate anybody.
Roman society ran on rank.
Every dinner party in that city was a machine for displaying it –
better food at the top table,
cheaper wine further down,
everyone knowing where they came.
The Corinthians didn't invent that;
they had been formed by it since childhood,
and it walked through the door with them.
That is what the powers of this world do:
they get into our habits before we have chosen anything,
and then turn up at the Lord's table
dressed as ordinary good manners.
They had made the Lord's Supper into a ranking,
and a ranking always has someone above you and someone below you,
and the someone below you goes hungry.
If we can turn this table into a ranking,
we can turn anything into a ranking.
And no amount of success would fix it,
because a list always has someone above you.
Paul doesn't leave them there.
In a few minutes we'll hear what he said next –
the words he handed on to them, and they to us,
and which we say over this table every time we come.
We sang earlier about safely gathering the grain in
before the winter storms begin.
Jesus told a story about a man who did exactly that,
and pulled down his barns to build bigger ones.
And God said to him, you fool –
not because he stored grain,
but because he'd found a way to stop needing anybody.
And then look at what's here.
A piece of bread.
A sip from a cup.
That's it.
In a moment you will receive
precisely the same as the person next to you,
and neither of you will have earned it,
and there will be enough.
That is the answer to Corinth,
and to the whole second table.
You cannot covet here,
because the portions are identical
and they are not payment.
There is nothing to want
that you haven't already been given.
And at the centre of it is Jesus,
who Paul says elsewhere did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped –
something to be seized, clutched, held onto.
The one person in the story with an actual claim to
everything
is the one with no grasping in him at all.
He opens his hands and gives himself away,
and the empire reads that as weakness
and nails it to a piece of wood.
And on the third day God raises him.
Which is the verdict.
Not just on death,
but on the whole grasping business.
God looks at the acquisitive life –
Ahab at the window,
the rich man building barns,
the Corinthians eating early,
and God looks at the open-handed life that got itself killed,
and raises the open-handed one.
The ungrasping life is the one with a future in it.
So come to the table.
Come with your wanting, all of it:
the thing you saw last week that you can't stop thinking about,
and the thing about someone else's life
you'd quietly like instead of your own.
Bring it.
Nobody here is going to check.
In a moment we'll sing that the love of God comes close.
It does.
It comes as close as a piece of bread in your hand.
There's bread.
There's a cup.
There's enough.
And when we go back out,
the machinery will start up again
before we've reached the end of Shaftesbury Avenue.
It will tell us what it always tells us –
that we haven't got enough,
and that we aren't enough.
But we'll have eaten by then.
And the person who was handed exactly what we were handed
will be walking out of here beside us.
That's what we have against it.
Not willpower.
Not a technique for wanting less.
Just a meal, each other,
and the one debt we'll never finish paying and never want to.
And that is enough.
Romans 13.8–10; 1 Corinthians 11.17–22
I didn't buy the guitar.
the way you might pick something up in a shop,
turn it over,
and put it back on the shelf.
beside an article about the Middle East.
It appeared, with a certain reproachful patience,
next to a video of somebody restoring an old bicycle.
like a dog that has decided you're its owner now,
and every time it said the same thing:
you love me, you want me, I want to be yours.
I hadn't wanted it before I saw it.
and more each week,
and the wanting had been manufactured,
and I could see the machinery,
and it worked anyway.
Not the guitar.
The machinery.
buy now pay later came under the regulation
of the Financial Conduct Authority.
Until then it wasn't regulated at all.
about sixty million pounds a year.
By 2024, more than thirteen billion,
and around eleven million of us use it.
lenders have to run affordability checks before they lend –
including on purchases under fifty pounds.
Until seven weeks ago,
nobody was legally required to ask whether you could afford it.
in the gap between wanting a thing and being able to have it.
and it used to have friction in it –
saving, waiting,
deciding you didn't need it after all.
Three clicks and the gap is gone,
and the cost arrives later, quietly, in instalments,
when the wanting has worn off.
and I'm not adding a sermon to that load.
whose central engineering problem is how to make people want things.
looked at the human heart
and put its final word exactly there.
those that face towards God.
and I want to take it not as six separate rules,
but as one thing with a root.
Honour your father and mother.
Don't kill.
Don't commit adultery.
Don't steal.
Don't perjure yourself.
They leave marks.
and it goes inside.
You shall not covet.
Not don't take - don't want.
and break this one continuously, silently,
in a pew, in a marriage, at a dinner party,
and nobody would ever know.
the one that catches you out
just when you were feeling pleased with your record on murder.
and the smaller half.
Rather, it's desire that reaches.
It's wanting with your hands already moving.
it isn't primarily worrying
about you feeling wistful outside a nicer property than yours.
one commandment at a time,
and it starts with a man at a window.
Ahab makes a perfectly reasonable offer.
A better vineyard in exchange, or the full market price in cash.
It's a fair commercial transaction,
of the kind that happens ten thousand times a day in this city.
and his reason isn't that the price is too low.
His reason is theological.
which is the fifth commandment,
honour your father and mother,
in its oldest and least sentimental sense.
because it's what his grandchildren will eat from.
for the ones not yet born.
it's the means of life, held in trust.
turns his face to the wall and refuses to eat,
which is the behaviour of a toddler with an army.
do you now govern Israel?
Meaning – what's the point of being king
if you can't have the field?
Two paid liars, and that's false witness.
A man stoned outside the walls, and that's murder.
A king taking possession, and that's theft.
and not one was the first thing to break.
at something that wasn't his.
Not because it matters least,
but because it sits underneath the others.
and theft, and perjury,
and the breaking of marriages,
and the selling-off of what belonged to the grandchildren.
Cut the tree down and the root will send up another one.
you shall not commit adultery,
you shall not murder,
you shall not steal,
you shall not covet –
and then he stops listing
and says that any other commandment is summed up in this word,
you shall love your neighbour as yourself.
which lands rather well on a Sunday
when we've been talking about instalment credit:
owe no one anything, except to love one another.
It's one debt,
and it's the only debt worth carrying.
because it doesn't deserve to be smoothed over.
Your neighbour's house.
Your neighbour's wife.
His male and female slave.
His ox.
His donkey.
who belong to the man of the house
in the same sense that his donkey does.
by the time the list is given again, in Deuteronomy,
somebody has quietly moved the wife out of the property column.
is the work of moving people
off the list of things that can be owned
and into the position of neighbour.
In Hebrew, the very last word of the Ten Commandments,
the final syllable of the whole covenant,
after all the thou shalt nots,
is: ‘your neighbour’.
when you follow that final commandment into the New Testament.
about the itch for more,
more than you have,
more than the next person –
they don't file it under social ethics.
Straight out.
has just turned into the first one.
It's a circle.
through God and name and sabbath and parents
and murder and adultery and theft and lies,
and you arrive at wanting your neighbour's things,
and find you're standing back at the beginning,
in front of another god.
and the thing that breaks both at once
is the conviction that what I have is not enough.
what happened when a church tried to eat this meal
while that conviction was still running.
it is not for the better but for the worse.
When you meet, it is not really the Lord's supper that you eat.
to a church that thought it was having Communion.
it isn't this.
and the wealthier members were arriving early, because they could –
they weren't tied to somebody else's working day –
and by the time the poorer members got there,
the working members, the enslaved members,
there was very little left.
Everyone brought their own.
one of the other commandments getting to that table.
Every dinner party in that city was a machine for displaying it –
better food at the top table,
cheaper wine further down,
everyone knowing where they came.
they had been formed by it since childhood,
and it walked through the door with them.
they get into our habits before we have chosen anything,
and then turn up at the Lord's table
dressed as ordinary good manners.
and a ranking always has someone above you and someone below you,
and the someone below you goes hungry.
we can turn anything into a ranking.
because a list always has someone above you.
the words he handed on to them, and they to us,
and which we say over this table every time we come.
before the winter storms begin.
and pulled down his barns to build bigger ones.
not because he stored grain,
but because he'd found a way to stop needing anybody.
A piece of bread.
A sip from a cup.
That's it.
precisely the same as the person next to you,
and neither of you will have earned it,
and there will be enough.
and to the whole second table.
because the portions are identical
and they are not payment.
that you haven't already been given.
who Paul says elsewhere did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped –
something to be seized, clutched, held onto.
is the one with no grasping in him at all.
and the empire reads that as weakness
and nails it to a piece of wood.
Not just on death,
but on the whole grasping business.
Ahab at the window,
the rich man building barns,
the Corinthians eating early,
and God looks at the open-handed life that got itself killed,
and raises the open-handed one.
the thing you saw last week that you can't stop thinking about,
and the thing about someone else's life
you'd quietly like instead of your own.
Nobody here is going to check.
It does.
It comes as close as a piece of bread in your hand.
There's a cup.
There's enough.
the machinery will start up again
before we've reached the end of Shaftesbury Avenue.
that we haven't got enough,
and that we aren't enough.
And the person who was handed exactly what we were handed
will be walking out of here beside us.
Not willpower.
Not a technique for wanting less.
Just a meal, each other,
and the one debt we'll never finish paying and never want to.
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