Tuned into God

 A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 23 August 2026

 

Exodus 20.3–11 · Matthew 22.34–40

I was playing that guitar a few minutes ago,
            and before I played it,
            I tuned it.

You can tune a guitar entirely from the inside.
            Finger on the fifth fret of the bottom string,
            tune the next one to match,
                        then the next,
            working your way across.

By the end you have a perfectly coherent instrument,
            every string in a proper relationship with every other string,
            internally consistent and beautifully in tune.

And it's fine.
            It's fine right up until the piano joins in.

Because relative tuning tells you how the strings sit against each other;
            it can't tell you where any of them ought to be.

Concert pitch has to come from outside
            – a fork, a pipe, an app –
sounding or hearing a note
            the guitar could never have generated for itself.

For those of you who don’t know this building inside out,
            my office is just up there, in that top corner,
            on the other side of the wall where the organ pipes are.

Usually this is one of the great perks of the job:
            somebody comes in to practise
            and I get an hour of Bach for nothing,
            through a wall, while I answer emails.

But once a month, before the recital,
            the organ is tuned.
Thousands of pipes, one at a time.

And it is not beautiful.
            It's hours of a single note held and bent and held again,
that horrible wavering beat
            as two pitches slide towards each other
            and don't quite arrive.

There are mornings when I have to get my coat
            and go and find somewhere else to be.

Two things I've learned from the wrong side of that wall.

The first is that tuning is not a pleasant experience.
            We talk about being in tune with God as though it described a mood;
                        from where I sit it sounds like an ordeal,
            and the person nearest it wants to leave the building.

The second is stranger.
            Nobody decides to go out of tune.
The organ doesn't choose it.
            It drifts – temperature, humidity,
            the heating coming on in October.

That instrument goes out of tune
            by standing perfectly still in a room where the weather changes.

Which is, as far as I can tell,
            exactly how it happens to us.

Nobody here woke up one morning
            and resolved to start worshipping something else.
We just sat still in a warm room
            while the weather changed.

So: the first four commandments.
            Not a moral audit.
            Not a purity test.
A tuning note.

The list you can't get God onto

Last week we spent our time on the fact that nineteen comes before twenty
            – God rescues first and legislates afterwards.

Everything this morning stands on that.
            These are not the terms of entry.
They're the shape of a life that's already free.

So: "You shall have no other gods before me."

I've heard that preached,
            and I've preached it,
            as a question about priorities.

What's number one in your life?
            Is God at the top of the list?

There's something in that,
            but it misses what the Hebrew is doing.
The phrase is al-panay
            – literally "before my face,"
            "in my presence,"
            "over against me."

It isn't a ranking.
            It's a spatial image.

Which means the first commandment
            isn't asking to be at the top of your list.
It's declining to be on the list at all.

A tuning note isn't competing with the organ for attention;
            it's a different kind of thing altogether.

And the moment you treat it as one item among others
            – God, family, work, health,
            let's see if I can get God up to third this year –
you've misunderstood what sort of note it is.

Luther put it about as well as it has ever been put:
            whatever you set your heart upon and put your trust in,
            that is properly your god.
Which means the question was never whether you worship.
            It's what you've tuned to.

And the alternatives on offer here aren't private spiritual preferences.

These people have just walked out of Egypt,
            where the god they served had a name
            and a face and a building programme,
and his name was Pharaoh.

What genuinely competes for our undivided attention
            is rarely an alternative religion.
It's a system.
            It's what our diaries have already decided
            before we've prayed about anything.

The image that's already been made

Then: "You shall not make for yourself an idol."
No pesel – no carved thing –
            of anything in heaven above,
            or on the earth beneath,
            or in the water under the earth.

And what's going on here
            is far more interesting than a suspicion of art.

In the ancient Near East a divine image did a particular job.

The statue in the temple was where the god was locatable
            – fed, housed, consulted,
            tied to a place and a throne.

And the living image of the god,
            in Egypt and Assyria and Babylon alike, was the king.
The king is where you look
            to see what the god is like.

Now hold that next to Genesis 1.
            Let us make humanity in our image,
            according to our likeness.

Male and female, both of them,
            the whole species,
            not one royal man.

Israel takes the most exclusive claim in the ancient world
            and hands it to everybody.
To the slave.
            To the woman.
            To the stranger passing through.

Which means the second commandment
            isn't God being precious about representation.
It's God refusing to be owned, localised,
            carried at the front of somebody's parade
– because the image has already been made,
            and it's your neighbour.

Where do you look for the likeness of God?
            Not up there.
            Or across the aisle.
            Or two doors down, sleeping in a doorway
                        on Shaftesbury Avenue on a Tuesday night.

Every idolatry I can think of narrows that.
            It says the image is here and not there,
                        in us and not them,
                        in this nation and not that one.

Idolatry is always, in the end,
            a shrinking of who gets to count as the likeness of God.

Which is exactly why the two tablets of the law
            – the commandments about God, the commandments about the neighbour –
can't be pulled apart,
            as Jesus is about to tell us.

The name you carry

Third: "You shall not make wrongful use
            of the name of the Lord your God."

Most of us were taught this was about swearing.
            It isn't, or not mainly.

The Hebrew verb is nasa'
            – to lift, to carry, to bear.

You shall not carry the name of the Lord your God lashav,
            emptily, to no purpose.

It's the language of picking something up
            and taking it somewhere.

So the question isn't whether you say the word.
            It's what you carry it onto.
Whose banner. Whose policy. Whose war.

There's a long and grubby history
            of God's name being carried at the head of armies,
            and it isn't finished,
and I could stand here and name the obvious offenders
            and we could all agree comfortably about people who aren't in the room.

But I'd rather not.
            Because we're the ones who carry the name.

That's what the word Christian means
            – it's a nametag,
            his name, borrowed and worn in public.

And no institution on earth is better placed
            to hollow it out than a church,
because we say it so often and so fluently
            that it costs us nothing.

To say "Lord, Lord" beautifully at eleven on a Sunday
            and mean nothing by it on Monday
is precisely what the third commandment is worried about.
            Not blasphemy. Fluency.

The commandment with the guest list

And then the sabbath,
            which gets more words than any of the others
– more than murder, more than theft –
            and which is the one we've most thoroughly reduced
            to a matter of personal wellbeing.

Read the guest list.

You shall not do any work
            – you, your son or your daughter,
            your male and female slave, your livestock,
            and the alien resident in your towns.

The ger: the migrant,
            the one without papers or land or protection.

This commandment isn't addressed to the exhausted.
            It's addressed to whoever has power to make other people work,
and it tells them their rest is worthless
            if bought with somebody else's labour.

Brueggemann called it sabbath as resistance,
            and he was right:
            this is a labour law before it's a spiritual discipline.

Deuteronomy says so out loud
            – remember you were a slave in Egypt,
            therefore keep this day.

Notice, too, who isn't on the list.

The "you" being addressed is a male householder,
            and his wife appears nowhere,
presumably folded silently into the "you"
            that owns everything else on it.

The people who wrote down the commandment
            against narrowing the image of God
couldn't quite see all of it themselves.
            Neither, I promise you, can we.

And here's why this is live rather than historical.

One of the things trailed for the Employment Rights Act
            was a right to switch off
– a right not to be penalised
            for ignoring work messages outside your hours.

France has had a version since 2016.
            But in the end it wasn't in our Act at all,
and as of this summer
            no consultation on it has even begun.

Notice which of the ten
            we find hardest to get onto a statute book.
Not murder. Not theft. Rest.

And notice who the commandment is talking to.

It's addressed to the person with power over somebody else's time,
            and on any given day that's nearly all of us.

It's the email we send at half past ten at night,
            knowing perfectly well what a message arriving at half past ten
            does to whoever reads it.

It's the thing we ordered on a Sunday
            because we wanted it Monday,
which is somebody's shift in a warehouse off the M1
            and somebody's van on our street.

The economy that never stops
            isn't run by a Pharaoh in a palace.
It's run by all of us,
            one entirely reasonable decision at a time.

Egypt, it turns out,
            is a collective effort.

And what God offers against that
            isn't a wellbeing initiative
            or an app that counts your breathing.

It's a law, with a guest list that runs all the way down
            to the animals and the foreigner,
and it says: every seventh day,
            all of them, no exceptions,
because they are not machines
            and neither are you.

Two commandments, one hinge

Which brings us to the temple courts,
            and a lawyer with a trick question,
and the answer that holds the whole thing together.

Jesus gives him two texts.
Deuteronomy 6:5 – love the Lord your God
            with all your heart and soul and mind,
            the Shema, the prayer every Jewish child learned first.
And Leviticus 19:18 – love your neighbour as yourself.

And he says something remarkable about the second:
            it is like it.
                        Of the same kind.
            Not a lesser appendix to the real business of loving God,
                        but the same substance.

Then verse 40:
            on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

It's the word for hanging a door on its hinges.
            Take one hinge off a door
                        and you don't get a door that works half as well.
            You get a door on the floor.

The problem in that passage is that "table" is carrying the entire argument while never being defined – and it's doing so at exactly the moment the sermon is trying to land its central claim. Here's a version that glosses itself in passing:

So the first tablet without the second
            – loving God, and leaving the neighbour alone –
is piety that leaves the world exactly as it found it:
            beautiful worship, undisturbed injustice.

And the second without the first
            – the neighbour loved, and no God to love –
is what most of us are attempting
            – decency by willpower,
            love as an act of stamina,
            running on our own supply until there isn't any.

Tuning the guitar to itself.
            Fine, right up until somebody else joins in.

When you can't hear the note

Let me finish honestly,
            because I don't want to leave the impression
            that being tuned into God is a feeling of being in tune.

Some of you came in this morning
            and could not hear the note.
You've done the tuning
            – the prayer, the turning up, the trying –
            and there's been nothing on the other end of it for a while.

That isn't failure.
            It's most of the Psalms,
and if you want it in one sentence
            it's the sentence from the cross.

So notice what the women do in Luke 23.
            They watch him die.
            They see where the body is laid.
They go home and prepare spices and ointments
            – and then, verse 56,
            on the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

On the day when God had,
            as far as they could tell,
            gone silent for good,
they kept the fourth commandment.

Not because they felt anything.
            But because it was the day,
            and it was the commandment,
            and it was what you did.

That's Holy Saturday,
            and it may be the most honest thing the New Testament says about faith.

Sometimes tuning isn't an experience.
Sometimes it's just turning
            towards where the note is supposed to come from,
            and waiting, and being here again next week.
The practice holds you
            when the feeling doesn't.

And then it's the first day of the week,
            and they go to the tomb,
and everything is different
            – and it's worth saying
            that they only found out
            because they'd kept the sabbath first.

We're about to sing
"Take my life, and let it be."

Havergal wrote it as a list
            – hands, feet, voice, silver, gold, will, heart –
and it can sound like an inventory of things surrendered.

I'd rather you sang it as a tuning:
            every string, one at a time,
bending towards a note it could never have generated for itself.

That note has been sounded.

It was sounded early on a Sunday morning
            at the mouth of a tomb,
and it hasn't stopped since,
            and it isn't ours and never was.

All that's asked of us
            is that we turn towards it,
and let ourselves be bent into tune,
            one pipe at a time.

Amen.