A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,
Sunday 11 October 2026
Matthew 5.17
we're not imagining it.
on the Ten Commandments,
and now, barely two months later,
the lectionary has marched us straight back up Sinai.
somebody wasn't looking at the preaching plan.
because we were away
can at least take comfort:
after the sermon on the Sabbath,
that probably counts as obedience.
The commandments are given twice:
once here in Exodus,
and then again in Deuteronomy,
on the edge of the promised land
and goes through the whole lot again.
"Not with our ancestors did the LORD make this covenant,
but with us, who are all of us here alive today"
(Deuteronomy 5.3).
we complete and tick off.
They're meant to be heard again and again,
until we hear them as spoken to us,
now.
at home and away,
when lying down and when rising up
(Deuteronomy 6.7).
two months between sermons is a bit slack.
about that second telling.
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).
the memory of Egypt doesn't shrink;
it grows.
because not every repetition of the commandments
does that.
children are sitting underneath a poster.
and it says exactly what the poster must contain.
in the old King James wording,
and it begins like this:
"I AM the LORD thy God."
Full stop.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
In the Bible that first sentence doesn't stop there.
"I am the LORD thy God,
which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage."
that line was cut.
Somebody decided it wasn't needed.
tutting at America,
it's worth remembering
that we've done this too.
that the Ten Commandments be set up
at the east end of every parish church,
where the people could best see and read them.
gold lettering on black.
in a country where Baptists and other dissenters
could be fined or locked up
for meeting on their own terms.
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".
for his trouble.
Whenever the commandments get taken up
by the powers that be,
the first thing to go
is the story.
gets turned into a rule
for keeping people in their place.
every time,
is the one about Egypt.
let's put it back.
not with a command
but with a memory.
and they're camped at the foot of a mountain
in the middle of nowhere.
God tells Moses to remind them of something:
and how I bore you on eagles' wings
and brought you to myself"
(Exodus 19.4).
It doesn't say "I brought you to this mountain",
or even "I brought you to the promised land".
The destination of the exodus
isn't a place;
it's a relationship.
The rules come second,
and they come as the shape of a love
that's already been given.
"if you obey my voice and keep my covenant"
(Exodus 19.5),
that "if" isn't a price of admission.
The "if" is about how to stay free,
not how to get free.
the bird of empire.
and empires have liked eagles
ever since.
the eagle's wings belong to God,
and they're used for carrying people away from empire,
not marching them into it.
wants to describe God's people escaping the dragon,
it borrows this image straight from Exodus:
so that she could fly from the serpent
into the wilderness"
(Revelation 12.14).
the eagle carries people out into the wilderness,
which is where a people
learns how to be free.
before the commandments begin:
"you shall be for me a priestly kingdom
and a holy nation"
(Exodus 19.6).
one man stood between the people and the gods,
and that was Pharaoh.
Nobody gets to stand over anybody else.
for four hundred years.
already knew all about law.
Pharaoh had quotas.
Now make the same number of bricks
without the straw.
to go into the wilderness and worship,
Pharaoh's answer was:
"You are lazy, lazy"
(Exodus 5.17).
no limit,
and no end.
it's a counter-law.
commandment by commandment.
Pharaoh claimed to be a god.
is a political statement
as much as a religious one:
nobody who holds power over us
is God.
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.
by clearing away every false god,
because false gods always demand sacrifices,
and it's never the powerful
who end up on the altar.
One day in seven,
nobody works.
not your son or your daughter,
and then the list keeps going:
or the alien resident in your towns"
(Exodus 20.10).
that they may never do to others
what was done to them.
It's something everybody gets,
and it's shared all the way down,
to the servant, to the ox,
and to the stranger.
and it's more generous
than many of ours.
in the middle of the Ten Commandments,
and later Exodus makes it explicit:
for you were aliens in the land of Egypt"
(Exodus 22.21).
again.
without thinking about Britain this autumn.
anyone recognised as a refugee in this country
is given thirty months of protection
rather than five years,
their case is looked at again.
the government has proposed
that the road to settling here permanently
could stretch to twenty years.
is "core protection".
for a human being.
that wanted them dead.
they're believed,
they're officially recognised as a refugee.
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 plan.
They can't quite rest.
It's the house of bondage
rebuilt as a 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.
at people who are anxious about migration;
those anxieties are real,
and they're being exploited
by people who ought to know better.
that a politics which turns insecurity into policy
has forgotten the line about Egypt.
that it was ever the stranger,
it starts building the very thing
it once escaped.
worth lingering over,
and that's the last one.
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).
because it's the only commandment
about something that happens inside us.
and no court can prosecute it.
it's where the whole list has been heading.
Don't murder.
Don't commit adultery.
Don't steal.
And then the tenth
goes underneath all of them,
down to the root.
and cheat, and steal,
and lie about each other?
Often we want it
precisely because our neighbour has it.
We learn what to want
by watching each other,
becomes the rival
standing in our way.
It's as old as Cain and Abel.
Pharaoh's slaves were building store cities
(Exodus 1.11),
warehouses for surplus,
monuments to more,
will always need somebody
to make the bricks.
isn't a fussy little rule about envy.
that drives the whole house of bondage,
and switches it off.
sitting on another mountain.
to abolish the law or the prophets;
I have come not to abolish
but to fulfil"
(Matthew 5.17).
as Jesus dismantling a religion of law
and replacing it with a religion of grace.
That's not what he says.
teaching Jewish people,
and he tells them the law
isn't going anywhere.
the grace was there at Sinai
before the law was.
It was there on eagles' wings.
is to fill it full,
to give it its whole weight.
we can see how Jesus does it.
to those of ancient times,
'You shall not murder'...
that if you are angry with a brother or sister,
you will be liable to judgement."
down to the root,
to the anger and the wanting underneath.
what the tenth was already doing.
Jesus fulfils the law.
the religious authorities say:
and according to that law
he ought to die"
(John 19.7).
Law with the exodus line cut out.
and Roman power,
working together
to get rid of a troublemaker.
not a gift.
God overturns the verdict.
on every use of law
to crush the innocent.
God sides with the condemned.
is the one God raises to life.
In Jesus,
the missing line is restored.
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery"
"I am the Lord your God,
who brought you out of the grave."
is the God of the empty tomb.
to be read in that light:
as the shape of life
for people who've been carried out.
"We limit not the truth of God
to our poor reach of mind."
pastor to English Separatists
exiled in the Netherlands,
that the Lord had yet more light and truth
to break forth from his word.
that when we come back to the same texts,
we never come back
to quite the same place.
and it's not a task.
It's a gift.
Whatever house of bondage
any of us has known,
whether it was a regime,
or an addiction,
or a waiting room
that seemed to have no end,
has borne us too.
not just somewhere,
but to God.
every one of us,
with nobody standing over anybody else.
It's given,
and it's given to the stranger
as much as to us.
aren't the price of our freedom.
They're what freedom looks like
when it's shared.
Nobody can cut it out.
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery."
And that's where we begin,
too.
No comments:
Post a Comment