Rev. Andrea DeGroot-Nesdahl
When I taught the Commandments to Confirmands as their pastor there were always lots of questions like ‘What if you miss Church if you are sick? Is that breaking the Commandment?” “What if your mom/dad is mean to you, and you run away….is that breaking the Commandment?” “What if you hunt deer, or pheasants, or (fill in the blank, including ants) and kill them…..is that breaking the Commandment?” Not a stone was left unturned as the students wrestled with the Commandments, and struggled to see whether God would in fact still love them if they DIDN’T keep them.
I told them it would be impossible to write a list of enough Commandments to meet all the scenarios they were asking about, but somehow God had narrowed it down to just 10. What does that tell us about God? Just 10 Commandments, when they had quickly run up a much longer list of possible rules for living as God’s children with all the questions and what-ifs they thought of.
It made for a great segue to talk about Baptism, and what it means to be both Saint and Sinner in our Lutheran theology. Just one Baptism makes us members of the Body of Christ. Just one Jesus gives us forgiveness over and over in our lives, and time to amend our ways as well. Just one life to live trusting in the One God who loves us enough to not only prioritize how we should live it in 10 simple commandments, but also One God who gives us God’s only Son, our Lord, to help us and hear us and love us when we manage to keep the commandments, but especially when we fail at that, or at any of the hundreds of other scenarios we encounter in our daily lives.
What I want you to hear today, as you read the Exodus text noted above, is that the 10 Commandments are built on God’s love for us, and God’s desire for us to live together in harmony. The underlying premise of these rules of life together is the relationship God established with God’s people over all of history, which carries on to eternity: a relationship built on love, on forgiveness, and on living out our lives based on that Divine Love. We know it best in Jesus, who died that we would have forgiveness and new life. We experience it best in living out our Baptisms in Jesus name. Only 10 commandments, but a lifetime, and eternity, of the love of One God.
Let’s pray: O God, when we are tempted to count our value by the number of commandments we keep, remind us of your eternal love for us, and lift our eyes to the cross of your Son, Jesus Christ, who won forgiveness for us all, and remains with us as we seek to live lives in response to all you have given us, in His name. Amen.
