Nineteen Comes Before Twenty

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 16 August 2026

Exodus 19.1–6; 20.1–2 · Matthew 22.34–40

There is a test you have to pass
            in order to become British.
It's called the Life in the UK test,
            and it consists of twenty-four multiple choice questions
which you have to answer in forty-five minutes,
            having paid for the privilege,
and you need eighteen of them right.

The official handbook that people revise from
            ranges across the Bronze Age,
            the Reformation, the rules of cricket,
            and the height of a certain wheel on the South Bank.

I have met people who have taken it.
            Without exception, they knew more
            about this country's history by the end of it than I do,
and rather more than most of the people I know
            who were born here and have never had to sit anything at all.

I'm not going to stand here and mock it.
            There are worse ways of doing this,
            and the people who administer it are mostly kind.

But I want you to notice the shape of the thing,
            because the shape is the point.

First you demonstrate. Then you belong.
            First the evidence, the documents,
                        the fee, the biometric appointment,
                        the letter that comes or doesn't come.

Then, if all of it goes well,
            the ceremony in the town hall
            and the little flag and the photograph.

Prove, and then belong. That's the order.

That's how nearly everything in our common life is arranged,
            when you start looking for it.
Belonging is a thing you earn,
            and having earned it you can lose it again,
            and everyone knows it.

Which is why I want us to spend some time this morning
            with a mountain in the Sinai desert,
because what happens there happens the other way round,
            and once you've seen it
            you can't unsee it.

One: nobody asks

Here's the first thing about Sinai
            that I think we routinely get wrong: Nobody asks.

Three months out of Egypt, says Exodus 19:1,
            they come into the wilderness of Sinai
            and they camp in front of the mountain.

And there is no scene
            in which the people gather at the foot of the rock
            and say to Moses,
            go up and find out what he wants from us.

There's no negotiation. There's no request for terms.
            God simply speaks, and the very first thing God says
            is not a requirement at all.

It's a piece of history.
            "You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,
            and how I bore you on eagles' wings
            and brought you to myself."

That's a sentence about the past.
            It's entirely indicative.
            There isn't an imperative anywhere in it.

And look at where it says they were brought –
            not to Canaan, not to the land, not to safety,
            not even to freedom in the abstract.
To myself. The destination of the exodus,
            according to God's own account of it,
            is God. Everything else is scenery.

And then the whole thing happens again
            at the top of chapter 20.

Before the first commandment,
            before "you shall have no other gods before me",
there's a sentence: "I am the Lord your God,
            who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
            out of the house of slavery."
We tend to call that the prologue, and we skip it,
            the way you skip the terms and conditions.

Jewish tradition doesn't. In Jewish numbering
            that sentence isn't the preamble to the Ten Commandments.
            It is the first of them. The First Word.

Sit with that for a moment.
            In the oldest way of counting,
            the first of the Ten Commandments commands nothing whatsoever.
It just tells you who God is
            and what God has already done for you.
And only after that
            does anything get asked.

The American preacher David Lose
            puts it as memorably as anyone has:
            nineteen comes before twenty.

The relationship comes first.
            It's primary, literally – it's chapter nineteen.

The ethical demand comes second,
            literally, in chapter twenty.

And you cannot reverse the order
            without breaking the thing entirely,
because the commandments only make sense
            as the description of a life
            that has already been rescued.

Now I want to be honest with you,
            because there's a word in verse five
that a lazier sermon would step over,
            and I don't want to step over it.

"Now therefore, if you obey my voice
            and keep my covenant,
            you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples."

There's an if. There is a condition in there,
            and anyone who tells you
            the Bible only ever deals in unconditional grace
            hasn't read this chapter with their eyes open.

But look carefully at what the condition attaches to.
            The rescue isn't conditional.
The rescue has already happened;
            it's in verse four, past tense, done.
Nobody at Sinai is being asked
            to earn their way out of Egypt,
            because they're already out.

What's conditional is the vocation.
            What's on offer, if they will have it,
            is to be "a priestly kingdom and a holy nation"

Not better individuals.
            But a different kind of people altogether.
A whole nation functioning as priests,
            which is to say
a whole nation standing between God and the world
            on the world's behalf.

That's the offer.
            That's what you can say yes or no to.

And I'll tell you where that phrase surfaces again,
            because it's my particular hobby-horse
            and you'll forgive me.

When John of Patmos wants to tell
            seven small, frightened, unimpressive churches
scattered around the coast of Asia Minor
            who they actually are,
he reaches straight back to Exodus 19
            and says that Christ
            "has made us a kingdom,
            priests to his God and Father."

He says it in chapter one,
            and he says it again in chapter five,
and both times he says it
            in the teeth of an empire
that had its own account of who ran the world
            and its own priesthood to prove it.

Sinai's covenant formula turns up in Revelation
            as an act of resistance.
This is who we are. Whatever Rome says.

One more thing before we leave the mountain,
            and it's uncomfortable, so let's not pretend otherwise.

Nine verses after our reading stops,
            Moses tells the people
            to prepare themselves for the third day,
and what he says is:
            "do not go near a woman."

Judith Plaskow built a whole book on that sentence,
            and the title says it:
Standing Again at Sinai.

At the founding moment of the covenant,
            the community is addressed
            as though it were entirely male,
and half of Israel is standing there listening to instructions
            that assume they're not in the room.

That's in the text.
            It's in our text.
And I mention it
            because a priestly kingdom
that hasn't noticed who it habitually addresses
            and who it habitually overlooks
is not yet the thing God is describing,
            and that is as true of us in 2026
            as it was of them in the wilderness.

Two: somebody asks, and not in good faith

So that's Sinai, where nobody asks.

Now come forward a very long way,
            to a courtyard in Jerusalem
            in the last week of somebody's life.

Matthew has been running a sequence of traps.

The chief priests and elders
            have tried Jesus on the question of authority.

The Pharisees and Herodians
            have tried him on the tax,
which was a beautiful trap
            and he walked straight through the middle of it.

The Sadducees have tried him on the resurrection
            with that ludicrous story
            about the woman and the seven brothers,
            and he's silenced them.

And now the Pharisees regroup,
            and they send in a lawyer –
a nomikos, a specialist in the law –
            and he asks the question
            we've been circling all morning.

Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?

Matthew tells us he asked it to test him.
            It isn't a seeker's question. It's an examination,
in the week when the examinations were getting serious,
            and everybody in that courtyard
            knew where this was heading.

And Jesus answers a hostile question
            by reciting the Shema. Deuteronomy six,
the words a faithful Jew says
            on waking and on lying down,
            the words written on the doorpost.

Love the Lord your God
            with all your heart
            and all your soul
            and all your mind.

And then he does something the lawyer didn't ask for.

He volunteers a second one, from Leviticus nineteen,
            and he says it's like the first.
You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

And then the line that only Matthew gives us:
            on these two commandments
            hang all the law and the prophets.

Hang. It's an ordinary enough verb
            and I don't want to build a cathedral on it.
But it is the word you use
            for something suspended,
something whose whole weight is carried
            by the point where it's fixed.

And the man saying it
            is about four days away
from hanging, on a Roman cross,
            outside the city wall,
which is what empires do to people
            who answer their questions like this.

I say that because the two great commandments
            have had a soft life among us.
Love God, love your neighbour –
            it's the sort of thing that gets printed on a banner,
            and it sounds like a recommendation to be nice.

It isn't. In Matthew it's said under interrogation
            by a man on his way to an execution,
and everything hangs on it,
            and he means everything.

The law and the prophets.
            The whole edifice.
If it doesn't come down
            to love of God and love of neighbour
then whatever else you're carrying,
            you're carrying it for nothing.

And notice, please,
            that Jesus does exactly what Sinai does.
He doesn't answer the question "what is required?" with a list.
            He answers it with a relationship, twice over.
Vertical and horizontal. God and neighbour.

And Matthew's Jesus refuses
            to let you have one without the other,
which is why the second is "like" the first –
            the Greek word here means of the same kind,
            cut from the same cloth.

You cannot love God
            in a way that leaves your neighbour untouched,
and you cannot love your neighbour
            in a way that has nothing to do with God,
and every attempt any of us has ever made
            to run one of those without the other
            has ended in something ugly.

Piety without justice curdles.
            Activism without contemplation burns out.
They are two sides of one coin
            and Jesus will not let us spend them separately.

Three: we ask, constantly

Which brings us here.

The question we ask, in church,
            in one form or another, week after week,
            is: what do I have to do?

What's required? Am I doing enough?

And underneath that question, almost always,
            is the older and more frightened one,
which is: do I belong here,
            and on what terms,
            and what would I have to do to lose it?

I want to say to you
            as plainly as I know how
that the Bible answers that question
            in the wrong order on purpose.

You are not being assessed.

The rescue is in the past tense.
            Nineteen comes before twenty,
and there is no version of this
            in which you demonstrate first and belong afterwards,
because God has already gone and done the belonging
            without waiting to see how you got on.

And then – then – having settled that, the commandments arrive,
            and they turn out not to be about you at all.

Read them again with Egypt in mind,
            because Egypt is what the prologue puts in mind.

Out of the house of slavery.

Every single commandment describes a society that is not Egypt.
            Don't murder, because in Egypt they threw babies in the river.
Don't steal, don't covet your neighbour's house
            or field or anything of his,
because coveting is precisely
            what an extractive economy runs on
            and the brick quota was where it ended up.

Keep the sabbath, and make sure your son
            and your daughter and your workers
            and the migrant in your town
            and even your animals get it too –
because Pharaoh gave nobody a day off,
            and when they complained
            he told them to make bricks without straw.

Walter Brueggemann calls the sabbath commandment
            an act of resistance and he's right.

The Decalogue isn't a purity code for individual souls.

It's the constitution of an alternative society,
            drafted by people who had recently escaped from the other kind
and knew exactly what they never wanted to build again.

And that's why Jesus reaches for Leviticus 19
            for the second commandment,
and I'd love you to go home
            and read the whole chapter,
because sixteen verses after
            "love your neighbour as yourself"
the same chapter says this:
            the alien who resides with you
            shall be to you as the citizen among you;
you shall love the alien as yourself –
            for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

Same logic. Identical.
Your memory of having been a stranger
            is the engine of how you treat the stranger.
Not charity.
            Not generosity from a position of security. Memory.

So when we are told,
            as we are told constantly
            and from several directions at once,
that belonging in this country
            is something to be earned
            and evidenced and paid for and periodically re-proved,
and that some people's belonging is provisional
            in a way that other people's is not –
when we're told that,
            we are not being told something politically controversial
            that the church should stay out of.

We are being told something
            that runs directly against the First Word.

And there are people in this building this morning
            for whom that is not a debating point
            but a letter on the doormat,
and the church that reads Exodus 19 aloud on a Sunday
            and has nothing to say to them on the Monday
            has not understood what it read.

And I want to say this here,
            because it belongs in the sermon
            and not in the notices.

This isn't something we've only talked about.

Some of you were part of the community sponsorship
            that brought sisters here from Syria,
            and supported a couple from Afghanistan,
and you know what that actually involved –
            the paperwork and the housing
            and the endless phone calls,
the dentist and the doctor and the bus routes,
            and the ordinary, undramatic business
of standing alongside people
            while they built a life again.

It was hard. It took a long time.
And it is one of the truest things
            this church has ever done.

We want to do it again.

We're looking to build a new team,
            a bigger and stronger one this time,
            working alongside our partner churches.
So if something in you moved just then,
            or if you've been quietly waiting to be asked –
            come and talk to me.
I would be very glad of the conversation.

Because this is us, this is who we are called to be :
            A priestly kingdom. A holy nation.

Standing between God and the world,
            on the world's behalf.

That's the offer at Sinai
            and it's still the offer,
            and it's the only thing worth being.

So hear it in the right order,
            and hear it as the first and greatest word,
            the one that commands nothing:

I am the Lord your God,
            who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
            out of the house of slavery.

You were carried here.
            You didn't pass a test.
            You are not on probation.

The love came first,
            it has always come first,
and everything else we do together
            is simply what it looks like
            to have been loved like that in public.

Nineteen comes before twenty.

Thanks be to God.