Exodus 20:1-17

Lent 3 - Year B

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

Proper 22 (27) - Year A

 

To have 10 words from G*D seems pretty straight-forward. When their interactions and common direction are considered, a double handful is plenty enough to keep us busy.
ReligiousTolerance.org indicates at least three different numbering systems for the 10 community guides:

- Ancient Judaism, Reform Protestants, & Eastern Orthodox
- Current Judaism
- Roman Catholics, some Lutherans

and makes this comment: “Lack of agreement among various divisions with Christianity and Judaism would make it very difficult to reach a consensus about how the Ten should be printed for display in public locations.” [You may want to spend a little time at the rest of ReligiousTolerance.org if you are not already acquainted with it.]

What was probably once very clear to folks has been broken into several different traditions and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t seem to put it back together again.

How are you playing back and forth between Law and Freedom and the varying number schemes?

 

- - - - - - -

 

a medium is a message
it lops off the ends
one size fits all
average is good enough

 

a medium whispers
stories behind stories
believable and not
what you see is not all

 

a medium well
is recommended
to burn out illness
and blood guilt

 

a medium nurtures
biologic experiments
testing theories
confirming evidence

 

a medium colors
pale lives
with pigments
life experienced

 

a medium law
keeps us from
in medias res
and attendant glory

 

a medium life
bounded by rules
binding with same
unconscious errors

 

As found in Wrestling Year A: Connecting Sunday Readings with Lived Experience

 

 

It is difficult in a multi-valanced community to come to agreement about the ground rules for that community to grow together and to flourish.

When one considers that one's community is a self-bounded entity in the midst of that identified as "other" there is a better chance of setting up rules that have a great deal of power in the community. It very much feels like a matter of survival.

The Hebrews between exodus and entry have that setting. The religious right in a world of diversity have that setting. Trying to figure out and implement the few fundamental rules is crucial for them.

For those of us who are not feeling so constrained the question comes about what is constituent for us. Are there still a handful of guiding principles that keep us on course and growing closer? How different are the "rules" when the issue is living in a larger community rather than remaining one group among many.

GOD and humans are co-partners in creating the future from here.

Trust is crucial for us to rest enough to be creative and not exhausted.

That which breaks personal relationships, breaks community.

Entitlement is a source of on-going sorrow.

What would you add? What would you throw out? What would you modify?

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/march2003.html

 

 

The spiritual growth commandment is #4 - participate in Sabbath. In resting or trusting in the image of creation we find both the awe of being a partner with YHWH and the humility of being in solidarity with our neighbors.

This is the spot where we learn more about ourselves in relationship to G*D and Neighbor. It is this opportunity to at once rub up against both the One Who Is and sisters and brothers that we find the spark of life being fanned into a flame.

Without Sabbath there is no partnership, just our task to name and take dominion. Without Sabbath there is no larger context within which to structure our social relationships for the well-being of all concerned.

This is even acknowledged within the Lenten timing. Our Sunday Sabbath is exempt from Lenten disciplines. It is here that we enter into the larger realm of meaning - partnership with G*D and solidarity with small and large communities.

Here is an image [MISSING URL] that might be helpful in further meditating on this so the nature and name of G*D is not Commander in Chief, but "Thy nature and thy name is Love".

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2006/march2006.html

 

 

Today's appended quote from Wordsmith triggered thoughts about fulfilling previous understandings by recasting them: "All men -- whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans -- have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies." -Norman Cousins, author, editor, journalist and professor (1915-1990).

If we expand the nationalities named to religious groupings - what are the obligations we have to one another that transcends our obligation to our own perspective, our own "decalogue"? Regardless of where we come out in that balance, simply raising this question honors the progressive nature of life.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

 

 

By what standards will you be known, will the community you are a part of be known? What are the criteria by which you would be willing to risk breaking a rule for which you are known?

Most of us are members of several communities that are not on the same page about the details of membership. This can be confusing. It can make chameleons out of us. It can also allow us to leverage one against another to help broaden the base from which we engage others.

An informative exercise is to list the various communities you belong to from blood/adoptive family to formative high school/college years to employment to nation to religion to environmental niche to . . . . Then indicate what the standards of each group are and what enforcement mechanisms are employed.

This leads to the extension to verse 20 – our desire to have some force between ourselves and the various standards as a way of developing plausible deniability should we be caught not living to the letter of one of the rules and regulations.

What have you developed as a universal ethic that grows out of your various communities? Is this a lowest common denominator ethic that can see you through any of their variations? Is this something beyond them that brings a question or challenge to their way of making a business out of relationships? Another way to ask this question is whether you are part of the priestly function or the prophetic?

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

 

 

To have 10 words from GOD seems pretty straight-forward.

The Religious Tolerance website indicates at least three different numbering systems for:

- Ancient Judaism, Reform Protestants, & Eastern Orthodox
- Current Judaism
- Roman Catholics, some Lutherans

and makes this comment: "Lack of agreement among various divisions with Christianity and Judaism would make it very difficult to reach a consensus about how the Ten should be printed for display in public locations."

[You may want to spend a little time at the rest of The Religious Tolerance website if you are not already acquainted with it. Simply click on the "Home" button at the bottom of their page.]

What was probably once very clear to folks, has been broken into several different traditions. And all the king's horses and all the king's men can't seem to put it back together again.

So how do you play back and forth between Law and Freedom, between the varying number schemes and how much play do you allow others?

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/october2002.html

 

 

Walls and hedges of protection are valuable gifts. Within these we are able find a source of steadfastness for ourselves and a place of refuge for regrouping when life happens. These protective gifts can be personal as well as communal.

The downside is that we begin to rely on these levee-type boundaries as the end-all and be-all of living and they begin to constrain us or to over-comfort us.

Like a nautilus that doesn't grow a new chamber, our very protections from external dangers turn to become a restraint on internal growth and maturity. If we don't make room for more than what we learned in Sunday School as a youth, we will remain spiritually stuck at that point.

As consoling as a hedge can be when we need escape it can turn us into spiritual couch potatoes, never willing to risk the fear and trembling of salvation. We take our comfort and look for more and more of it. Without knowing the limit of enough comfort. It becomes ever so much easier to avoid using our little gray cells.

Thank goodness for communal boundaries of such as 10 out of 100s of "commands." Thank goodness for the comfort of steadfast love that hedges us round.

Woe for thinking any number of commands will suffice for adequately participating in the messiness of life. Woe for choosing more and more and comfort over enough and reality.

If you were to name your place of safety that allows your prophetic side to take the risks it needs, what would you name?

If you were to name your place of imposed boundary that keeps you from maturing, what would you name?

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/october2005.html

 

 

World Communion Sunday, by its very existence, recognizes that there are incompatible differences between those who sacramentalize a eucharist in Jesus' name. We emphasize different commandments and so are constantly balancing and rebalancing our boundaries.

Putting the Exodus and Isaiah passages together we find less emphasis upon the specifics of thundering commandments, than on what G*D expects to be their result -- justice (Isaiah 5:7).

Left on our own, we are afraid - who can keep every jot and tittle? But seen as precursors to a longer prophetic justice (thus the vineyard images in these pericopes) we are able to keep on.

In this light, the Psalmist is correct to see the commandments as clarifying - "Here is an example of justice: honor those who have gone before." In keeping that which builds justice we find a great reward, one worth pursuing with all our energy. It is also this that connects us with Prophet Jesus - identifying a great justice and what stands in our way of moving toward it.

- - - - - - -

listen to another parable
what is going to happen
to those in the tale
just so it will happen
to you and your family
as we project
so we are
change an expectation
and you change a course of history
facts are not immutable
or determinative
listen to a parable
live a parable

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

 

 

So how would you redact this version of 10 commanding words?

Are the many more words about idolatry and Sabbath than the other commands needed because these are necessarily more complex and subtle than the rest? Can we really simplify these or do they need more said about them because of the little ways they can be subverted?

Wherever you come out on that matter, the harder questions are those at the end. Are you comforted by Moses' response urging us to have no fear because this is only a test to see how fearful (awe-full) we can get? I suspect that their rejoinder to Moses may well have been, "O, right!, there's no reason for us to be afraid, its only a test we can't pass. How could we have been so foolish – Not! We're still afraid!"

This response seems to be implicit because of the way the story proceeds to The Lord going on to give law upon law. And, I suspect, that the Israelites would have been corroborated in their fear - "Who, now, can do anything without going down in flames? Ten we could deal with, but hundreds?!"

During these days of Rosh Hashanah it might be good to remember the principle of a Selichot Prayer and its revelation of mercy before, after, and during a test.

In light of steadfast love and mercy, failure can be borne.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html

 

 

You shall not make a marketplace of your life, this community, this creation, this religious perspective, this glorious commonwealth.

Those wonderful markers strewn around the country in 1956 to commemorate 10 arenas of life where things can go awry in were to help market a movie. Now they become traditions that must be held onto at all costs. Law has become law has become law, dividing the very communities once held together by what stood behind such law.

Somehow the glory of life keeps getting pared down enough to pass a legislature. The meaning of day and night cannot be put into words, and yet we latch onto one set of temporal propositions or another. Through proliferating law is glory's silence broken and we finally settle for the law and not the glory.

We even market our religion as though it were the only possible revelation of an expansive love that pushes past every one of our sacred moments - even that of resurrection. No matter how broad even we progressive religionists envision life, we are too pale for the colorful dance that will raise all enemies to friends.

Indeed, zeal for someone else's vision consumes us. Evidence America's preemptive entry into Iraq. For whatever good may have once been possible, we have devolved. Zeal, all by itself, becomes marketed as righteousness. Even action against marketing, becomes marketing. What a dizzying, disorienting flurry.

- - - - - - -

a medium is a message
it lops off the ends
one size fits all
average is good enough

a medium whispers
stories behind stories
believable and not
what you see is not all

a medium well
is recommended
to burn out illness
and blood guilt

a medium nurtures
biologic experiments
testing theories
confirming evidence

a medium colors
pale lives
with pigments
life experienced

a medium law
keeps us from
in medias res
and attendant glory

a medium life
bounded by rules
binding with same
unconscious errors

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html

 

 

G*D is at a distance. The people are explicitly warned not to come up the mountain to G*D. G*D’s “son”, Moses, goes to the people with commands.

How’d he do? Folks listen? Implement? Or ignore (a polite throwing out)? Could they hear future religious leaders coming after them?

How long does control by fear last? One generation? Two? Eventually there is a springtime of the soul and controlling “sin” by fear and awe doesn’t have a good track-record. Inquisitions eventually ebb.

Now with context out of the way. These are specifics in the long tradition of loving G*D and Neighbor. There might well be other specifics (and there are many more in the following chapters). What specifics might we use today? In recent days might we want to make some amendments:

“Honor your fathers and mothers, fathers and fathers, mothers and mothers”
“No murder: individual, legal, military”
“No adultery: physical, emotional, mental”
“No stealing: personal or corporate”
“No lies: by word, silence, or tweet”
“No coveting: enough”.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/09/exodus-201-4-7-9-12-20.html

 

 

“I am the G*D who brought you out of the land of Markets.”

From this new beginning we hear about the danger of idols, markets in any form. Their main difficulty is the same as portrayed by this strange G*D - they mix up and confuse jealousy/rejection with steadfast love.

The passage goes on to give other particulars that reveal this same dichotomy in relationship to creation, family, and community.

How easy it is for any little thing to become something for which we are jealous and enter into a zero-sum game to get it or leads us to reject someone or whole groups of someones to protect our own.

How difficult it is to see the larger picture of an expansive and expanding love behind each little thing that pricks our comfort.

Re-imagine each of these insights, sometimes called commandments, in light of your favorite Market. What challenge do they make to your background idol?

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/03/exodus-201-17.html