Rules of Belonging

Exodus 20:1-20; Philippians 3:4b-14

How many of you have heard of “the Ten Commandments”?

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that phrase?

 

(Every commentator I read this week mentioned Charlton Heston and courthouse walls)

 

The “Ten Commandments” – known in some traditions as the Ten Words, or Ten Utterances – have a place in our culture, a claim on our collective mind.

Sometimes, that place in our minds is a shape – an image of two arched tablets, with a numbered list of short, strong, Dos and Don’ts

 

But…when we look in the Bible, at the twentieth chapter of Exodus (which we read this morning, and where these words, these commandments, are first introduced) or at the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy (where these commanding words are reiterated), it doesn’t look all that much like a tablet-friendly list. 

 

In fact, there’s rather a fluid texture to many of these words, as God tells Moses on the mountain, and the ancient people of Israel, and us now, both who God is, and what we are to do about it. And there are at least three mainstream traditions about how to divide this fluidity into ten points.

 

In the original text, God’s direction for our actions is embedded in a lot of context about God’s nature, history, and personality, and God’s relationship to the people who first heard these words from a mountain of awe in the middle of a wilderness. 

 

Our ten commandments – God’s ten words – do not start out as a list of dos and don’ts meant for general guidance in good living.

These are – at their root – a way of being that is laid out for a particular people, in a particular time, to build a community unlike any other.

 

These ten words [310 words in the New Revised Standard English translation which we read today; these ten “utterances”] are spoken to a motley mob of refugees, uprooted from the life and places they know, coming out of a situation of trauma.
A collection of not-quite-lost folks who are wandering in a wilderness of uncertainty, not sure what’s just happened to them, or what’s going to happen next. Who are facing a whole new bunch of challenges they probably have no idea how to even start managing.

 

That might sound a little familiar to many of us – either from individual experience, or from shared experiences in the last few years.

Then – and now, too – God is speaking to a group of people who need to become a people, a community with a shared identity, a shared sense of who we are, and how we are. 

 

So God starts with belonging.

I am the Eternal, your God, who brought you out of Egypt.

In some accounts, that right there is a commandment, the first one. I am your God. We belong to each other.

You will have no other gods besides me.

When Episcopalians count, that’s where we draw the “first” command – a mutual, primary, and exclusive belonging. We root our identity, and our obedience, in belonging, first and foremost, to God. 

 

The next several sentences (and two or three commandments) are more detail about how that belonging works – about staying focused on the particularity of this relationship, being careful with the power (the Name of God) in the relationship – and then on a way we mark ourselves as belonging to God, by being like God in the observance of Sabbath. By preserving pause, and rest, for others, as well as in our own work.

 

Starting there – in the way we relate to one another in Sabbath, as well as to God – the focus of the rest of these words is on our relationship with one another, the shape of our community, all rooted in this particular relationship with God. 

 

We do not take life, or property, or relationships, or truth away from one another. We respect one another, with particular attention to some relationships. We belong to a community that does not harm one another – and doesn’t even dream of harming one another. 

Because we belong together. 

We belong to one another, because we belong to God.

And God to us.

 

And that’s something we really need to know – when we’re coming out of pain and trauma, when we’re wandering in uncertainty, when we’re facing new challenges – exploring new opportunities – we’re not even sure how to start to manage.  

When some or all of those things are true for us, as individuals, it really matters to be part of, to belong to, a community, to a unity of people who know who we are, and what we do, together.  

When some or all of that trauma, uncertainty, and challenge are true for us as a community, too, we need to know – not just know in our heads, but in our hearts, souls, and bodies – know that we belong – to one another, and to God, and God to us.

 

That’s the context God is speaking to, in these commandments, these words of belonging. That’s maybe why God is staking this claim on us, and on how we live together.

 

Sometimes, we may not know we need or want this community, this belonging to God. That’s why – at the mountain in the wilderness, and in our lives – God usually moves first to establish that belonging. We heard Paul tell his friends in Philippi this morning that he owes his desire to belong to Jesus to the fact that Jesus has already laid claim to him; he wants to belong because he knows he already belongs to Jesus.

 

God lays that claim on us, too. On you and me.

What Moses tells his mob of motley refugees, recorded in tradition and scripture, is a story of belonging through an escape from slavery and genocide, through God’s work in creation and invitation to us to be like God, through the promise of home. Belonging initiated by God, belonging that causes our desire to belong to God, causes our care with God’s image and power, causes our care to live peaceably, honestly, and generously with one another. 

 

In our own context, millennia later, we tell a similar story in the Eucharistic Prayer, as we bless the bread and wine to be our shared meal of Christ’s Body and Blood. A story of belonging through inheriting that freedom and promise and teaching, through God becoming like us, through the promise of abundant life in the home of God. 

Belonging initiated by God, God placing a claim on us that makes it possible for us to long to belong to God, to the community that shares Christ’s Body and Blood and follows his teachings, to love one another as God loves us and we love God. 

 

Belonging that carries us from our losses, pain, or trauma, individually or together. Belonging that carries us through the uncertainties we wander in, carries us to new challenges, and belonging that is where we begin to find the answers to those challenges, begin to find joys in new opportunities. 

And always, the answer to who we are.

And most of all, whose we are.

 

Not by the dos and don’ts we follow, but by the claim God puts on us: that we belong to God, that God belongs with us, and we with one another.

 

That’s more than ten words.

But it’s the word we need.

That we belong.