Tuned into God

 A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 23 August 2026

 

Exodus 20.3–11 · Luke 13.10–17

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,
            tune the next string to match,
                        then the next,
            until every string is in a proper relationship with every other string
            and the whole thing is 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 –
            a note the guitar could never have made 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 a perk of the job:
            somebody practises
and I get an hour of Bach for nothing
            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 worried at 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 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;
            but from where I sit it sounds like an ordeal.

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

Which is 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.
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.
These aren't 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 preached it myself,
            as a question about priorities.
What's number one in your life?
            Is God top of the list?

But the phrase translated "before me"
            means something closer to in front of 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.
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 it is.

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

And the alternatives 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 competes for our undivided attention
            is rarely another 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 carved thing,
            of anything in heaven above
            or on the earth beneath.
Which 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.

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.

So 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.
But across the aisle.
            Or two doors down.
            Sleeping in a doorway on Shaftesbury Avenue on a Tuesday night.

Every idolatry 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 a shrinking
            of who counts as the likeness of God.

Which is why what we do in this room
            and what we do outside it
cannot be pulled apart
            – and I'd rather show you that than argue it,
because Luke shows it to us,
            in a synagogue,
            on a sabbath.

The name you carry

But first, the third: "You shall not make wrongful use
            of the name of the Lord your God."

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

The verb underneath it
            means to lift, to carry, to bear
– you shall not carry the name of the Lord your God
            emptily, to no purpose.

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

And I could name the obvious offenders,
            and we could all agree comfortably about people who aren't in the room.
I'd rather not.
            Because we're the ones who carry the name.

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

And no institution 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 we've most thoroughly reduced to 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 migrant,
            the one without papers 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.

It's a labour law before it's a spiritual discipline,
            and 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" addressed is a male householder,
            and his wife appears nowhere.
Hold onto that,
            because Luke is about to hand us
            a woman nobody had counted.

Which is live rather than historical,
            because the person with power over somebody else's time,
on any given day,
            is nearly all of us.

It's the email I send at half past ten at night,
            knowing perfectly well what that does to whoever reads it.

It's the thing I ordered on a Sunday
            because I wanted it Monday,
which is somebody's shift in a warehouse
            and somebody's van on my 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.

The woman who could not look up

So to Luke 13,
            a synagogue on a sabbath morning,
and a woman bent double for eighteen years
            who cannot stand up straight.

Start with what she is doing there.
Eighteen years bent towards the floor,
            eighteen years of feet and paving
            and the hems of other people's clothes,
and she is in the synagogue,
            on the sabbath,
            keeping the fourth commandment.

Nobody in this story has been more faithful to it.
            Nobody has got less out of it.

And Jesus sees her
            – which is worth pausing on,
because to be seen by someone who cannot lift her head,
            you have to come to her
            and get low enough to be seen.

He calls her over.
            He tells her she is set free.
He puts his hands on her,
            and she straightens up,
and the first thing she does with a body that works
            is praise God.

Which is what worship looks like
            when the tuning has done its work.
Not a mood.
            A posture.

Then the leader of the synagogue objects,
            and on impeccable grounds.

There are six days for work.
            Come on one of those.
He isn't a monster,
            and he isn't a stand-in for somebody else's religion
– he's a religious professional
            protecting good order in a building he's responsible for,
and if you want to know who he most resembles in this room,
            it's the man in front of you.

His mistake isn't that he loves the commandment too much.
It's that he's taken it for a fence
            when it was always a rescue.

And notice he doesn't say it to Jesus.
            He says it to the congregation.
Which is a very churchy sort of cowardice,
            and I've done it myself.

And so Jesus answers with an argument about knots.
            Every one of you unties your ox or your donkey on the sabbath
                        and leads it out to water
            – and in Luke's Greek
                        the word for untying that animal
                        is the same word used for what has just happened to this woman.
Loosed. Untied.

You do it for livestock without thinking twice.
            She has been tied for eighteen years.
Ought she not to be untied,
            on the sabbath day of all days?

And then he calls her a daughter of Abraham.

Nobody else in scripture is called that.
There are sons of Abraham all over the place,
            but she is the only daughter,
and he says it out loud
            in a building where the commandment she has kept so faithfully
            was written in words that didn't quite have room for her.

The image had already been made.
            It just took somebody willing to look down to see it.

So the sabbath is not a fence around God's day.
            It's the day the knots come off.

And that argument in the synagogue
            isn't religion against freedom;
it's an argument inside the tradition
            about what the tradition is for,
which is the only argument worth having,
            and the one we are having here this morning.

Because here is the thing that ought to keep us awake.
It's entirely possible to keep all four of this morning's commandments
            – no other gods, no idols,
            the name honoured, the sabbath guarded –
and still be the man in that story.

Beautiful worship.
            And a woman still bent double.
Piety that leaves the world exactly as it found it.

And it's just as possible the other way round:
            to love your neighbour on willpower alone,
            running on your own supply until there isn't any.
That's 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 you thinking
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 for a while.

That isn't failure.
It's most of the Psalms,
            and it's the sentence from the cross.
And it was, for eighteen years,
            the experience of the most faithful person in this morning's Gospel.

So notice what the women do at the end of Luke's story.
            They watch him die.
They see where the body is laid.

They go home and prepare spices and ointments
            – and then, chapter 23, 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 being here again next week
            – bent double, if that's what it takes,
but here.

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 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 part of the instrument, one at a time,
turned towards a note it could never have made for itself.

That note has been sounded.
It was sounded early on a Sunday morning
            at the mouth of a tomb,
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 it do its slow and unlovely work,
            one pipe at a time,
until we can stand up straight.

Amen.