Lent 3B
(Girl Scout Sunday)
Exodus 20: 1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1: 18-25
John 2:13-22
We welcome the Scouts who have (will) join(ed) us today for
our celebration of Scout Sunday.
We are grateful that you have
chosen to be with us, not only today, but through the year, so we may
know and support your lives. When we get to the end of the service,
we will ask you to recite the main rules of Scouting – The Girl Scout
Promise and the Girl Scout Law and the Cub Scout Promisei, Law of
the Pack and Cub Scout Motto.ii Right now, we are going to talk
about what most Jews and Christians would recognize as the Law of
God, the Ten Commandments. We recited them at the beginning of
the service.
One day, my sister and I were talking about the Ten
Commandments—well, about one of them in particular. She asked
which number commandment it was. It was before the days when
you could google anything, so I didn’t have an answer. When we got
to thinking about it, neither of us could list all ten, not even out of
order. So, I went and got a little card at the Bible Bookstore, which I
carry in my purse. It lists the Ten Commandments, and The Lord’s
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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Prayer, and the Books of the Bible, and the 23rd Psalm, the quote
about the full armor of God, and the Beatitudes and the “Roman
Road”, a series of seven quotations from Romans. Now you can
imagine the size print these things are in…With my bifocals, in good
light, I could read them back then. But, I dug it out this week, just in
case someone asks me again what the Ten Commandments are…
Let me tell you of the story of these Commandments as it is
found in the Old Testament scripture. The LORD has called our hero,
Moses, to lead his people out of slavery e in Egypt. Moses gathered
them up and they negotiated and finally left slavery in Egypt. This
ragtag band of former slaves has come across the Red Sea, just
ahead of the pursuing army, and formed a caravan wandering around
the wilderness. God has given them their freedom and now wants to
tell them the terms of their agreement, as they begin to live into that
freedom and form a new community. These Ten Commandments
were given to the people to guide them in the use of their new
freedoms, to help them become the holy people of God. In the story
of Exodus, this event takes place three months after the people leave
Egypt. . God brought the people out of Egypt to become his
holy people.
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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At the LORD’s direction, the people have prepared by fasting
for three days. On the third day, there are thunder and lightning, fire
and smoke. God calls only Moses to the top of Mount Sinai and there
the LORD gives Moses two stone tablets with the Law inscribed up
them by the LORD himself. As the story goes, Moses goes down to
the valley and finds the people and his brother Aaron partying around
a false God, a Golden Calf that they have made in his absence.
Moses breaks the tablets in a fit of fury that sounds a lot like Jesus in
the Gospel lesson. After venting his anger, our eternally forgiving
LORD gives Moses the law on another set of tablets.
The law
becomes the foundation of the relationship between God and the
Hebrew people, later known as the Jewish people.
The Ten Commandments are sometimes called to as “The
Decalogue”, or the “Ten Words”.
However, it is not always clear
exactly what the Ten Words are. The version of the commandments
that we read earlier today is not the only way the text has been
translated and interpreted by God’s people. There are two slightly
different versions of the Ten Commandments in scripture, the one
from Exodus in your leaflet and one in the Book of Deuteronomy as
the story is retold. In Jewish tradition, the commands are clearly
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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divided between five positive and five negative commands. What we
consider the prologue to the Commandments, “I am the Lord your
God”, they consider the first rule. The Decalogue may be read alone,
but the commandments are considered much more closely tied to the
larger body of law that follows in the next few chapters.
Christians generally divide the Commandments into a different
list. As with many things, we differ among ourselves how to divide
the list.iii
“The Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions
generally consider that three commandments relate to one’s
relationship with God…and seven to one’s neighbor. The Reformed
tradition (Presbyterians and others) divide the commandment into a
group of four and a group of six, separating what we read as
Commandment One into two. As we often say, wherever two or more
are gathered, there will be multiple opinions….
Setting aside the exact wording of the text and the division of
the Commandments, it is useful to think about what we believe
the role of the Ten Commandments for Christians. There are
even more opinions on where Christians stand in relationship to
the Law of the Old Testament than there are divisions about
how that Law is structured.
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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The issue began with Jesus. Jesus was a Jew, heir to the
covenant between the Lord and that group of escaped slaves in the
wilderness. Over the centuries, the Law given by God to Moses had
expanded into a strict religious way of life.
The reason for the
community enforcement of the law is easy to understand. The people
of Israel had a covenant, a formal agreement with God—a covenant
in which God made certain promises and God laid out certain rules.
The people of Israel had agreed that the Lord would be their God and
they would be His holy people. Failure to fulfill the covenant, whether
by an individual or the society, would violate their sacred covenant
with the LORD. Time and again, the people of Israel fell away from
God’s requirements and their prophets called out for repentance.
Sometimes reform occurred and sometimes the people were
punished by the LORD. By the time Jesus was born, the people of
Israel had a community life centered in the temple in Jerusalem and
governed by leaders who required strict observance of the law and
great penalties for failure to conform to the law.
Jesus himself rebelled against many of the rules—the ones
about the Sabbath come to mind. Jesus reminded his listeners that
the rule to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy was intended to
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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help the people stay holy, to do what God wanted. He often insisted
that the principles of compassion and mercy should override a strict
observance of community Sabbath rules. The stories in the New
Testament imply that Jesus and his followers were quite familiar with
the Ten Commandments.
However, the Ten Commandments
themselves are never listed in the teaching of Jesus. Jesus does
answer the question about the greatest law—“You shall love the
LORD your God with all your heart and mind and strength AND
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”(Matthew 22:34)
The Apostle Paul followed Jesus in resisting the application of
all the Jewish laws to the new followers of the Christ. However, Paul
saw the law as a useful tool to help us understand where we have
fallen short of the will of God. The debate and dispute continued
throughout the history of the church. There are Christians who claim
we can ignore the Ten Commandments because Jesus’ saving action
set them aside. Other Christians think we should have them posted
on every wall. Both arguments have merit.
A theologian in the National Catholic Reporter wrote that rules
are not central to our way of following Jesus: ““We're Christians, and
Christians are not called to follow rules, but rather to follow Christ. If
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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we are to do that, we must remain engaged with Christ, so as to allow
Christ to guide us. We're not called to give rules to the world; we're
called to be Christ for the world.”iv
According to a more moderate view: “Reformed and Anglicans
have taught the abiding validity of the commandments, and call it a
summation of the "moral law", binding on all people. However, they
emphasize the union of the believer with Christ - so that the will and
power to perform the commandments does not arise from the
commandment itself, but from the gift of the Holy Spirit. Apart from
this grace, the commandment is only productive of condemnation,
according to this family of doctrine.”v
I would be interested to engage any of you in conversation
about what your think about Christians and the Ten Commandments.
For each of us, our relationship with God rests on what we
fundamentally believe about what God has promised and what God
requires of us. We know, and in Lent we take special measures to
remember and to reinforce, that we are human. As humans, part of
the family tree from Adam and Eve, we all sin. We have all fallen
short of what God expects of us. All of us have failed to be God’s
holy people. We have all failed to meet the standards of holiness
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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revealed to us through the Ten Commandments and other scripture.
Because we failed, God loved us enough to send his only Son to live
and die among us, to be resurrected and conquer death and sin.
Jesus’ actions did not set aside God’s desire that we be a holy
people. We are called to return God’s generous love shown in the
creation of the world and in his repeated rescue and reconciliation
with our fallen forbearers. God wants us to be a holy people. The
commandments were given to us because if we follow them, in their
enumerated detail or in Jesus’ summary, we will be closer to God. As
we prayed earlier, “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves”,
but, with the Holy Spirit living and breathing through us, we can come
closer to the living, triune God. This Lent, reflect on where you have
fallen short of what God expects for your time here on earth. Repent,
restore and reconcile. Love God with all your heart, your mind and
your soul and love your neighbor as yourself.
i
The Girl Scout Promise
On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.
The Girl Scout Law
I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.
ii
Cub Scout Promise
I, (say your name), promise
to DO MY BEST
To do my DUTY to GOD
And my Country
To HELP other people, and
To OBEY the LAW of the Pack
Law of the Pack
The Cub Scout follows Akela.
The Cub Scout helps the pack go.
The pack helps the Cub Scout grow.
The Cub Scout gives goodwill.
Cub Scout Motto
DO YOUR BEST
iii
Religious groups have divided the commandments in different ways. For instance, Catholics
and Lutherans see the first six verses as part of the same command prohibiting the worship of
pagan gods, while Protestants (except Lutherans) separate all six verses into two different
commands (one being "no other gods" and the other being "no graven images"). The initial
reference to Egyptian bondage is important enough to Jews that it forms a separate
commandment. Catholics and Lutherans separate the two kinds of coveting (namely, of goods
and of the flesh), while Protestants (but not Lutherans) and Jews group them together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments
iv
Jesuit Fr. Dirk Dunfee is minister to the Jesuit community at Rockhurst University in Kansas
City, Mo. COPYRIGHT 2000 National Catholic Reporter
v
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments
The Rev. Martha McKee
Church of the Holy Spirit – Tuckerton
March 8, 2015
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