In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

 Last Sunday I spoke to you about the principle, the idea of community. how the very essence of Christianity is based on the radical belief that we live and worship as a community that is responsible to one another and to creation itself. I would like to continue to expand on this principle, this idea this morning and explore the issue of ethics within community.

Ethics are the very stuff of life. Ethics are the rules which we create to live together in some kind of harmony. They rise out of the common consent of the people and have the purpose of protecting people from each other as a community is built together.

For in any community as people interact with one another, ethical guidelines develop so that the community can maintain a harmonious state. As the community grows more complex and relationships become less intimate the guidelines are codified and evolve into a body of law. Which brings us to our reading from Exodus 20-the Ten commandments.

The best known part of the book of Exodus is the story of God’s people crossing the Red (Reed) Sea but following closely is the story of the Ten Commandments. Many of us in Sunday School were expected to commit them to memory. And to many adults they seem extremely important as a moral standard even though these adults are not certain of their specific content. This is the case especially in the United States where the ten commandments find a prominent place in court houses and state legislatures.

Bishop John Shelby Spong tells the story of an experience he had concerning the ten commandments when he was serving as parish priest in a socially prominent conservative Anglican congregation in Virginia. Spong writes;
“In that parish there was a general criticism of our church school program because it was said we did not teach the Bible.

At a lively social evening, Spong was approached by a woman from the congregation holding a drink that was obviously not her first of the evening.
This was the moment she chose to lecture Spong on the church’s failings concerning moral guidance.

Her strongest point was that the children no longer had to learn the ten commandments. Spong replied, “Do you know the ten commandments?” “Of course” the woman said angry that Spong would even ask.  Spong pressed on, “name them”. The woman gave a cough and then an angry look, and finally she remembered perhaps ironically considering the situation, “Thou shall not kill.”

Now the ten commandments carry a residual effect even in this post Christian time but what do they mean for us today? Are these ancient words still relevant for our society for our time?

We live in a society that considers a world like law to be a dirty word. Our favourite words are freedom, autonomy, self expression, tolerance and we consider all laws and rules to be an intrusion into our personal rights, another word we hear a great deal about today. We live in a society in which God is remotely absent for many people, meaning that God exists but is not experienced by people in their daily lives.
Certainly under these conditions the Ten commandments do not seem to make any sense in our society as a whole- you can’t have the rules without the God who gives the rules and forgives us when we fail to keep them. And you can’t have God without the rules that give our worship of God its ethical shape.

For in considering the ten commandments it is important not to lose the historical context. God has just delivered his people from slavery in Egypt. They have been liberated, set free to go to a new land which God has promised them. Israel is now out in the desert-this is where we come in, ready to worship. But it has been so long since anyone has worshipped the true and living they’ve forgotten how.

So Moses travels up the mountain in order to get an order of service. There is lightning, smoke and God says, “pay attention, first, I am the Lord...who brought you out of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. And on it goes until the list is complete-notice there are no tablets of stone. That doesn’t happen until Exodus 30 and 34.

But it is there in the presence of God that Moses realizes that he, all the people have been bought. God has bought them, God owns them. They are God’s people freed from slavery in Egypt in order to become slaves to God alone.
Adherence to the ten commandments then is the people’s response to God’s amazing grace in setting them free. Their ethical behavior as a community is a response to God’s grace. They are to be a light to all peoples.
You can’t have the rules without the God who gives the rules.

And so it is for us as well. These commandments only make sense to us when we are in a community of faith. And by studying them and striving to fulfill them we are responding to the work of God’s grace in our own lives through Christ. Unless we have experience of God and his grace in our lives these commandments make no sense. There has to be some sense of the sacred.

And certainly we have enough evidence in our world to know that this is the truth. For in our striving for self liberation without any notion of God we have enslaved ourselves to other masters: alienation, confusion, the heresy of the sovereign individual, narcissism. People take the lives of innocent civilians and have the temerity to call it justice. Marriage vows are made and broken, with ease, without concern for the collateral damage upon children.

Conventional accounting practices are considered to be rules for uncreative dummies, schmucks who do not know how to get ahead. Can anyone say David Dingwall or sponsorship scandal?

And yet in this time of moral and ethical confusion, God loves enough to give  the rules, to show the way. And Israel loved its children enough to teach them the way of morality, decency and abundant life. God loves us enough to give us the rules.

Here in these ten commandments, we find the steps that lead us a community of faith along the way to life, to life abundantly.
THANKS BE TO GOD, AMEN.