The Missing Line

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,

Sunday 11 October 2026

 

Exodus 19.3–7; 20.1–17
Matthew 5.17
 
If some of us have a nagging sense of déjà vu this morning,
          we're not imagining it.
 
Back in August we spent our summer series
          on the Ten Commandments,
          and now, barely two months later,
          the lectionary has marched us straight back up Sinai.
 
It's tempting to think
          somebody wasn't looking at the preaching plan.
 
Those of us who missed a week or two in August
          because we were away
          can at least take comfort:
          after the sermon on the Sabbath,
          that probably counts as obedience.
 
But the Bible got there first.
          The commandments are given twice:
          once here in Exodus,
          and then again in Deuteronomy,
 
when Moses stands before the next generation
          on the edge of the promised land
          and goes through the whole lot again.
 
And as he does, he says something remarkable:
          "Not with our ancestors did the LORD make this covenant,
          but with us, who are all of us here alive today"
          (Deuteronomy 5.3).
 
The commandments aren't a syllabus
          we complete and tick off.
          They're meant to be heard again and again,
          until we hear them as spoken to us,
          now.
 
Israel was told to talk about them
          at home and away,
          when lying down and when rising up
          (Deuteronomy 6.7).
 
By that standard,
          two months between sermons is a bit slack.
 
And there's something interesting
          about that second telling.
 
In Exodus,
          the reason given for the Sabbath is creation.
          In Deuteronomy, Moses gives a different reason:
          "Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt"
          (Deuteronomy 5.15).
 
When the commandments are repeated,
          the memory of Egypt doesn't shrink;
          it grows.
 
That's worth holding on to,
          because not every repetition of the commandments
          does that.
 
 
In classrooms across Louisiana and Texas this term,
          children are sitting underneath a poster.
 
The law says it has to be a decent size,
          and it says exactly what the poster must contain.
 
It's the Ten Commandments,
          in the old King James wording,
          and it begins like this:
          "I AM the LORD thy God."
          Full stop.
 
Then straight on to
          "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
 
Something's gone.
          In the Bible that first sentence doesn't stop there.
 
It carries on:
          "I am the LORD thy God,
          which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt,
          out of the house of bondage."
 
Somewhere between Sinai and the state legislature,
          that line was cut.
          Somebody decided it wasn't needed.
 
Now, before we get too comfortable
          tutting at America,
          it's worth remembering
          that we've done this too.
 
In 1604 the Church of England ordered
          that the Ten Commandments be set up
          at the east end of every parish church,
          where the people could best see and read them.
 
Plenty of those boards are still there,
          gold lettering on black.
 
They went up in a church established by law,
          in a country where Baptists and other dissenters
          could be fined or locked up
          for meeting on their own terms.
 
Within a few years Thomas Helwys,
          one of the very first English Baptists,
          had written to King James to remind him
          that "the king is a mortal man, and not God,
          therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects".
 
He died in Newgate prison
          for his trouble.
 
There's a pattern here.
          Whenever the commandments get taken up
          by the powers that be,
          the first thing to go
          is the story.
 
The law that set slaves free
          gets turned into a rule
          for keeping people in their place.
 
And the line that goes missing,
          every time,
          is the one about Egypt.
 
So this morning
          let's put it back.
 
 
The story starts, in Exodus 19,
          not with a command
          but with a memory.
 
The people have been out of Egypt for three months,
          and they're camped at the foot of a mountain
          in the middle of nowhere.
 
Before a single word of law is spoken,
          God tells Moses to remind them of something:
 
"You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,
          and how I bore you on eagles' wings
          and brought you to myself"
          (Exodus 19.4).
 
Notice what it doesn't say.
          It doesn't say "I brought you to this mountain",
          or even "I brought you to the promised land".
 
It says "I brought you to myself".
          The destination of the exodus
          isn't a place;
          it's a relationship.
 
Grace comes first.
          The rules come second,
          and they come as the shape of a love
          that's already been given.
 
So when the next verse says
          "if you obey my voice and keep my covenant"
          (Exodus 19.5),
          that "if" isn't a price of admission.
 
They're already out.
          The "if" is about how to stay free,
          not how to get free.
 
And then there's the eagle,
          the bird of empire.
 
Rome's legions marched behind it,
          and empires have liked eagles
          ever since.
 
But in the Bible
          the eagle's wings belong to God,
          and they're used for carrying people away from empire,
          not marching them into it.
 
When the Book of Revelation
          wants to describe God's people escaping the dragon,
          it borrows this image straight from Exodus:
 
"the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle,
          so that she could fly from the serpent
          into the wilderness"
          (Revelation 12.14).
 
Both times,
          the eagle carries people out into the wilderness,
          which is where a people
          learns how to be free.
 
And then God says one more thing
          before the commandments begin:
          "you shall be for me a priestly kingdom
          and a holy nation"
          (Exodus 19.6).
 
In Egypt,
          one man stood between the people and the gods,
          and that was Pharaoh.
 
Here the whole people is priestly.
          Nobody gets to stand over anybody else.
 
Baptists have been saying something like that
          for four hundred years.
 
 
The Israelites at Sinai
          already knew all about law.
 
Pharaoh had law.
          Pharaoh had quotas.
 
Make this many bricks.
          Now make the same number of bricks
          without the straw.
 
And when they asked for a few days
          to go into the wilderness and worship,
          Pharaoh's answer was:
          "You are lazy, lazy"
          (Exodus 5.17).
 
Pharaoh's law had no rest in it,
          no limit,
          and no end.
 
So when God gives law at Sinai,
          it's a counter-law.
 
And we can hear Pharaoh being answered,
          commandment by commandment.
 
"You shall have no other gods before me."
          Pharaoh claimed to be a god.
 
So the very first commandment
          is a political statement
          as much as a religious one:
          nobody who holds power over us
          is God.
 
The ban on idols goes further:
          idolatry is what happens
          whenever we take something we've built,
          an economy, an institution, a flag,
          and serve it as though it were ultimate.
 
The commandments begin
          by clearing away every false god,
          because false gods always demand sacrifices,
          and it's never the powerful
          who end up on the altar.
 
Then there's the Sabbath.
          One day in seven,
          nobody works.
 
Not you,
          not your son or your daughter,
          and then the list keeps going:
 
"your male or female slave, your livestock,
          or the alien resident in your towns"
          (Exodus 20.10).
 
A nation of former slaves is being told
          that they may never do to others
          what was done to them.
 
Rest isn't earned.
          It's something everybody gets,
          and it's shared all the way down,
          to the servant, to the ox,
          and to the stranger.
 
It's the first labour law in the Bible,
          and it's more generous
          than many of ours.
 
So the stranger is right there
          in the middle of the Ten Commandments,
          and later Exodus makes it explicit:
 
"You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien,
          for you were aliens in the land of Egypt"
          (Exodus 22.21).
 
The missing line
          again.
 
 
It's hard to read that
          without thinking about Britain this autumn.
 
Since March,
          anyone recognised as a refugee in this country
          is given thirty months of protection
          rather than five years,
 
and at the end of each thirty months
          their case is looked at again.
 
On top of that,
          the government has proposed
          that the road to settling here permanently
          could stretch to twenty years.
 
The name for this new arrangement
          is "core protection".
 
Think about what that means
          for a human being.
 
Someone flees a regime
          that wanted them dead.
 
They're examined,
          they're believed,
          they're officially recognised as a refugee.
 
And then they're told
          that for the next two decades,
          every two and a half years,
          they'll have to prove it all over again.
 
They can't quite set down roots.
          They can't quite plan.
          They can't quite rest.
 
It's a life without a Sabbath.
          It's the house of bondage
          rebuilt as a waiting room.
 
Some of us here know that waiting room
          from the inside,
          and some of us have sat alongside friends
          who've been waiting for the next letter
          from the Home Office.
 
We're not here to point fingers
          at people who are anxious about migration;
          those anxieties are real,
          and they're being exploited
          by people who ought to know better.
 
But we are here to say
          that a politics which turns insecurity into policy
          has forgotten the line about Egypt.
 
When a nation forgets
          that it was ever the stranger,
          it starts building the very thing
          it once escaped.
 
 
There's one more commandment
          worth lingering over,
          and that's the last one.
 
"You shall not covet your neighbour's house;
          you shall not covet your neighbour's wife,
          or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey,
          or anything that belongs to your neighbour"
          (Exodus 20.17).
 
It's a strange one,
          because it's the only commandment
          about something that happens inside us.
 
You can't see coveting,
          and no court can prosecute it.
 
And yet
          it's where the whole list has been heading.
 
The commandments climb.
          Don't murder.
          Don't commit adultery.
          Don't steal.
 
Don't bear false witness.
          And then the tenth
          goes underneath all of them,
          down to the root.
 
Why do we kill,
          and cheat, and steal,
          and lie about each other?
 
Because we want what our neighbour has.
          Often we want it
          precisely because our neighbour has it.
 
Our desires are borrowed.
          We learn what to want
          by watching each other,
 
and before long the neighbour who taught us to want
          becomes the rival
          standing in our way.
 
That's where violence comes from.
          It's as old as Cain and Abel.
 
Empires are just coveting at scale.
          Pharaoh's slaves were building store cities
          (Exodus 1.11),
          warehouses for surplus,
          monuments to more,
 
and an economy that runs on endless wanting
          will always need somebody
          to make the bricks.
 
So the tenth commandment
          isn't a fussy little rule about envy.
 
It names the engine
          that drives the whole house of bondage,
          and switches it off.
 
 
Which brings us to Jesus,
          sitting on another mountain.
 
"Do not think that I have come
          to abolish the law or the prophets;
          I have come not to abolish
          but to fulfil"
          (Matthew 5.17).
 
Christians have too often read this
          as Jesus dismantling a religion of law
          and replacing it with a religion of grace.
          That's not what he says.
 
He's a Jewish teacher,
          teaching Jewish people,
          and he tells them the law
          isn't going anywhere.
 
Besides,
          the grace was there at Sinai
          before the law was.
          It was there on eagles' wings.
 
To fulfil something
          is to fill it full,
          to give it its whole weight.
 
And if we read on in Matthew 5,
          we can see how Jesus does it.
 
"You have heard that it was said
          to those of ancient times,
          'You shall not murder'...
 
but I say to you
          that if you are angry with a brother or sister,
          you will be liable to judgement."
 
He follows each commandment
          down to the root,
          to the anger and the wanting underneath.
 
He does with every commandment
          what the tenth was already doing.
 
But there's another way
          Jesus fulfils the law.
 
When Jesus stands before Pilate,
          the religious authorities say:
 
"We have a law,
          and according to that law
          he ought to die"
          (John 19.7).
 
There it is again.
          Law with the exodus line cut out.
 
Law in the hands of temple power
          and Roman power,
          working together
          to get rid of a troublemaker.
 
Law used as a weapon,
          not a gift.
 
And on Easter morning
          God overturns the verdict.
 
The resurrection is God's judgement
          on every use of law
          to crush the innocent.
 
God doesn't side with the court;
          God sides with the condemned.
 
The one the law put to death
          is the one God raises to life.
 
That's the fulfilment.
          In Jesus,
          the missing line is restored.
 
"I am the Lord your God,
          who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
          out of the house of slavery"
 
becomes, on Easter Day,
          "I am the Lord your God,
          who brought you out of the grave."
 
The God of the exodus
          is the God of the empty tomb.
 
The commandments were always meant
          to be read in that light:
          as the shape of life
          for people who've been carried out.
 
 
In a moment we'll sing
          "We limit not the truth of God
          to our poor reach of mind."
 
It's built on the words of John Robinson,
          pastor to English Separatists
          exiled in the Netherlands,
 
who told his people in 1620
          that the Lord had yet more light and truth
          to break forth from his word.
 
Which is another way of saying
          that when we come back to the same texts,
          we never come back
          to quite the same place.
 
So here's the truth this morning,
          and it's not a task.
          It's a gift.
 
We've been carried.
          Whatever house of bondage
          any of us has known,
          whether it was a regime,
          or an addiction,
 
or a debt we never chose,
          or a waiting room
          that seemed to have no end,
 
the God who bore Israel on eagles' wings
          has borne us too.
 
We've been brought,
          not just somewhere,
          but to God.
 
We're a priestly people,
          every one of us,
          with nobody standing over anybody else.
 
Our rest is not earned.
          It's given,
          and it's given to the stranger
          as much as to us.
 
And the commandments
          aren't the price of our freedom.
          They're what freedom looks like
          when it's shared.
 
The first line belongs to us.
          Nobody can cut it out.
 
"I am the Lord your God,
          who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
          out of the house of slavery."
 
That's where the law begins.
          And that's where we begin,
          too.