A sermon for Lent

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent

First Reading: Exodus 20:1-17  

How many commandments are there? That you say ten betrays the fact that you/we are a bunch of Christians. If we were a bunch of Jews, if we were in synagogue, if I were, say, a rabbi asking how many commandments there were, your answer would be different. It would be 613. In Judaism it is traditionally said that there are 613 commandments, drawn from Torah, from the first five books of the Bible. In that sense, we might say that the role of the ten commandments is somewhat marginalised in Judaism; they take their place alongside 603 other commandments. Or we can put it this way. ‘Ten commandments’ is not a biblical phrase. Tradition speaks of the Ten Words. It’s not that they don’t contain commandments. They do. It’s that they are not the only commandments which count.

Ten commandments/ten words. Now, another question: What is, oh, say, the ninth commandment? It’s not an easy question to answer actually. This is because the verses – dividing the text into verses – came centuries after the text was written down. In fact, there has never been just one way to divide the text up into ten. Unfortunately – or maybe fortunately – there are Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican (and I dare say so on) ways of dividing the material into ten. So there is no one way of saying which commandment is the ninth. We don’t often admit this, which is a shame.

Surely, though, it is easy to say what the first commandment is, the first word? If you were brought up on the Book of Common Prayer the answer would be clear: ‘I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me’. Sound familiar? Is that the place to start? Well, it is not the place to start according to the Jewish tradition. If you go to a synagogue, you may well see the Ten Words presented as a text on display. There may well be a pictorial representation of the two tablets. It’s unlikely to have all the words, but will have the first few words of each of the ten. The first commandment, the first word in Judaism is ‘I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves, you shall have no other gods before me.’ This is not a mistake. This is not an accident.

What this means is that, in Judaism just as in Christianity, we begin with gospel. We begin with good news. It begins with grace. Before we do the hard work of thinking about how to live, and what commandments, positive and negative, we need to be truly free, before all of that, we receive the good things which God has already done for us. God has taken us out of slavery. God has brought us out. God has liberated us. God is liberator, and liberates, and to hear God’s commandments, first of all, you know yourself to be free, liberated. ‘I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves’.

I am wondering if this is a surprise to you at all. It may be. After all we are used to thinking of Judaism as being about rules and commandments. We are certainly used to thinking of Moses as being about rules and commandments. We are used to thinking of the ten commandments (ten words) as being hard work, stern words, austerely expressed. They are the ‘thou shalt nots’ of our tradition. It can be hard, then, to realise that the rules and commandments come in this context. First of all, the Jewish people know themselves to be slaves-made-free, by the grace of God.

Brothers and sisters, if this is a surprise, I want to suggest that Lent can be full of such surprises. Let’s think back to Ash Wednesday and the words we heard then. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin, and be faithful to Christ’. It can seem that these words are stern and austere. But I think if you dig a little deeper, they are not. ‘Remember that you are dust’ means: ‘Be aware, no, really, feel in your bones, that you are mortal. You will die. You cannot live for ever. Indeed, this very day you are living, you will never live again.’ In other words, your life is precious, and you are precious. You are unrepeatable and your life is unique. So it is a good question to ask, at any point, and especially in Lent: So then, are you making the most of your life? To be ‘dust’ is to be precious. Lent is a celebration of your preciousness.

And then, ‘Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’. Well, yes, we have the ‘s-word’. Sin! Here we are, being the Church, doing what the Church does… talking of sin. Do we do that too easily and too often? Actually, I think that’s an extremely hard question to answer. It is very hard to get it right about sin. It’s too big a question to go into here. Instead, I want to think about the statement as a whole. It is an imperative. It is the call to turn.

I think there is something fundamental about the call, the invitation to turn. It is a reminder that we do need to do something to enjoy a fully godly life. God doesn’t magic us into holiness, against our will. We need to participate. We need to turn. But all we need to do is turn. We don’t need to become different kinds of people, spiritual beings or whatever. We don’t need to prove to God that we are changed people, desperately sorry, self-flagellating. For that matter, we don’t need to prove to God that we are full of some mysterious warming presence called ‘faith’. We can turn to Christ as frail and doubting people.

We don’t need any of that to get God’s attention. We already have God’s attention, and all we have to do in response is to turn.  And the other side of this imperative, this invitation, is that it is full of confidence that we can turn. We have all we need to turn. We can turn away from sin, and turn to Christ. Human beings can change. Human beings can change even in deep-down, serious, life-changing ways. You can change. You can change this Lent.

You are precious and you can change. I do think that’s the heart of the Lenten claim. And how do we change? Well, slowly and painfully perhaps. But the direction of the change on offer is clear. It is a journey from slavery to freedom. You are to become more and more free, to be less and less a slave of whatever it is that is enslaving you now, that is bowing you down, holding you in. It’s all about the journey to Easter. Why? Because of that First Word: ‘I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves’.

That Book of Common Prayer that I mentioned edited the word of God, by the way. It cut out the words of liberation. It pretended that God had said simply: ‘I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods’. But that was a crucial edit. Now, I am hugely loyal to the Church of England, and Anglicanism. I am so loyal I can even cope with talk of ‘covenants’ and so on. There is great wisdom in Anglicanism. But in this, we got it wrong. Rather, God said (God says): I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves.’ It starts with the gospel. It starts with the good news. Lent too is good news. It is about God’s gentle care, to help us – us, with all our preciousness and potential - to freedom. May you continue to have a holy, blessed, rich, and truthful Lent.

Amen.