Sermon Transcript: October 11, 2026
Exodus 19:3–7; 20:1–17
Then Moses went up to God; the Lord called to him from the mountain, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the Israelites: ‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.” So Moses went, summoned the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him.
Then God spoke all these words,
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
“You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.
“Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
“You shall not murder.
“You shall not commit adultery.
“You shall not steal.
“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.
***
Well, I grew up in the time before there was such a thing as truth in advertising. I remember getting a pair of sneakers and being disappointed that I couldn’t run as fast as Carl Lewis or jump as high as Michael Jordan. For those of you who are younger, Carl Lewis is like Usain Bolt, and Michael Jordan is like LeBron James, okay? Or that eating spinach didn’t immediately give me huge biceps like Popeye.
But perhaps the most disappointing of them all were these dinosaur capsules. Does anybody remember those? They’re these little capsules that, when you put them in water, would suddenly grow into, like, a brontosaurus or a Tyrannosaurus rex. And I distinctly remember the commercial for these. It showed a boy with a garden hose waiting around the corner, ready to surprise his friends. And so he puts the little capsules there, and then, when they come, he comes around the corner and sprays them with the hose, and they grow into these real, life-size dinosaurs that are roaring and everything. I was sold immediately. I began imagining playing this prank on my buddies in the neighborhood. It was going to be legendary.
But, of course, when I actually got the capsules and tried them in the sink, the results were underwhelming, to say the least. Sure enough, the capsules dissolved, but what grew out of them was nothing like those lifelike dinosaurs in the commercial. Instead, it was this tiny little dinosaur-shaped sponge that could fit in my hand.
Now, what if I told you that those who argue that we should hang the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom or every courtroom are guilty of the same thing as those ads from my childhood: false advertising? They reduce them to a list of rules to be obeyed or else. They take all of the life out of them, and they oversimplify them to the point of squeezing all of the meaning out of them. They dehydrate them, if you will. They flatten them.
Bobby Williamson and Amy Robertson write, “We insist that these commandments cannot be flattened onto a piece of paper, but must be understood with the smoke and fire erupting from Sinai and the liberating power of God in Egypt.”
To bring them back to life, what we need to do is not douse them with a hose, but recomplicate them. We have to put them back in their context and read them not as individual rules to curb bad behavior, but as life-giving guidelines for people to live together in community and freedom. We must understand them as a gift, not a burden.
Tom Long writes—and this is on your bulletin cover—“We think of the Ten Commandments as ten things we’d really like to do, but God doesn’t want us to, so to please God, let’s don’t.” But we miss the way that the commandments begin, he says. “I am the Lord your God” is the first thing that God says to the people. “I brought you out of slavery into the land of freedom.”
And this, God says to them, is the shape of freedom. You are so free that you don’t have to have any other gods. And you certainly don’t have to serve them. You’ve been given so much, you’re free not to covet what is your neighbor’s. You are free to have the Sabbath day and to keep it holy. “It’s not a list of rules,” Tom Long writes. “It’s the shape of freedom.”
Let me give you a few examples of recomplicating the commandments. Let’s take that word in the last commandment, “covet.” It’s not an everyday word, right? It’s a churchy word: covet. And we think we know what it means. “Don’t be jealous” is basically what we usually interpret that as, right? Don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff. Don’t be jealous of what your neighbor has. It’s like an ancient version of, you know, “The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.” That’s the simple version, the dehydrated version of the command.
But when we take that commandment and we put it back in context, remembering that this is being spoken to people who, not that long ago, were completely under Pharaoh’s control, where they had few, if any, possessions, and what they did have could be taken away from them at any moment by those in power over them, we can ask: What does it mean for those people, in those circumstances, to be told not to covet? What depth does that add?
Well, Bobby Williamson points out that the only other place in Scripture where this word is used, “covet,” is in Micah. And there it is to describe, in a very negative way, the way that the wealthy people in the city were devising ways to scheme and take the land away from rural farmers for their own profit. And God was angry at them for coveting what their neighbors had—for using their power to not just be jealous of it, but to forcibly take it from them.
So it’s not really when your neighbor gets a new car, and they pull into the driveway, and you say, “Oh man, that’s—I wanted that car.” No, no. It’s about not using our power and privilege to get our way at the expense of others. Which, you know, thank goodness that never happens anymore, right? Yeah, right.
So we can see that, by putting this commandment back into context, it recomplicates it. It makes it not so simple, but it also makes it much more relevant. We can apply that to our daily living and lives in community with one another. Don’t take advantage of others just because you can. An important part of living in community is respecting each other’s autonomy and not using our power over others to our advantage and their disadvantage.
That’s how we all live together in freedom and harmony, is what God is saying. Not just, “Don’t look over at what your neighbor has and wish you had it,” but live in such a way that you are glad for them, that you are with them, that they can live in peace and harmony, and so can you.
The other example I can easily point to is the commandment about the Sabbath. We still play around with this one. We like to, you know, say, “Well, Sunday’s my Sabbath. I went to church, and then I went home and had brunch, and then I went and watched the football game and fell asleep.” Probably what I’m going to do this afternoon, to be completely honest.
But is that what God meant by observing the Sabbath? Is that all God wants us to do? Again, that’s a flattened—it’s not that it’s wrong, necessarily. It’s just flattened. It’s dehydrated. It’s a simple version of the commandment. But if we put it back into context, we can see that there’s so much more. There’s so much more depth and richness there.
“Sabbath, in the first instance,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “is not about worship. It’s about work stoppage. It’s about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.” Again, thank goodness that never happens in our culture anymore.
He also writes, “The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgement that God and God’s people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production.” So it’s not just about your work stoppage. It’s about your neighbors as well, and those that may be in your employ. Let them rest once in a while. Let them be, so that they know that they’re valued not just for what they do or what they produce or what they own, but for who they are and who God created them to be.
Can you sense the difference when we recomplicate these commandments? Can you sense how much more is going on in each of these? Freedom, of course, is a gift, but without limits or a sense of responsibility to our fellow human beings, it’s just competitive chaos. It’s enslavement all over again, just in a much more subtle form. It’s every person for themselves rather than the reminder that we are each other’s keeper, that your well-being and my well-being are part of the same whole.
Hanging the commandments on the wall, putting them on display, makes them seem like a museum piece, an interesting historical artifact, but has very little relevance. But when we take them down, when we put them in context, when we ask questions, when we actually try to live them—not just the letter of the law, but the generous spirit of it—suddenly they come to life for us. They become worthy of our time, worthy of our examination.
They remind us that we are not what we own or produce. We are God’s beloved. And that’s not just true of us, but our neighbors as well. And if we truly believe that our neighbor is a child of God, just as we are, all of these things just become no-brainers. Of course we will not cause them harm or treat them unjustly. That’s not the way we want to be treated. And so we will be sure to treat them the way that we want to be treated.
Because, friends, faith is not about forcing others to live the way we think they should live. It’s about trusting in the grace and mercy of God and trying our best to live the way that God intends for us to live: in community, in shalom, in wholeness, in forgiveness.
We do not honor God or the Ten Commandments by hanging them on a wall in a school or a courthouse, but by taking them seriously, understanding them in the larger context of our faith, and allowing them to become a part of our being, a part of who we are.
Pointing to some words on the wall isn’t all that impressive, is it? But showing somebody, through our living and the way that we treat them and the way that we treat others—and especially the way that we treat the most vulnerable—what it means to belong to God and what it means to trust in God’s love above all else: that, my friends, is the kind of advertising that we Christians need a whole lot more of. Don’t you agree? Truth in advertising.
Because the true test of faith is not making others follow our values and principles. It’s how well we follow them ourselves. Amen.
