Sunday, October 8, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (readings start around 23:18; children’s sermon starts around 27:11; sermon starts around 39:53)
Readings: Deuteronomy 5:1-21; 6:4-9, Mark 12:28-31
For the children’s sermon, I brought in a bag of different kinds of “apples” – there were Honeycrisp, Red Delicious, and Granny Smith apples, but then also a banana and a tomato, haha. I tried to convince the kids that all of them were different kinds of apples. When they disagreed, I asked them to explain to me how they know what is and isn’t an apple – What are the rules? Who decides? We talked about how interesting and weird it is the way that rules can define something’s identity. What are some rules that define our identity – in our families? In our church? Rules aren’t just something that grownups impose on us because they can or because they want to be mean; rules are often about how we live together in community – they’re how we know we belong. In our reading for this morning, we hear our pal Moses reminding the people about the ten commandments God gave them – it’s not just a list of rules; it’s a set of guidelines for what it means to be one of God’s people – a list of characteristics for being God’s apples, lol. And as much as it does make God happy when we try to live by these commandments, the truth is that they’re actually more for our benefit – God gives us the commandments as instructions for how to live well.
One of the defining questions humans have been asking for as long as we’ve been human-ing is: What does it mean to belong? It’s a question that has especially concerned religious people and religious groups throughout our history. How do we know who we are? How do we know who is one of us and who isn’t? What does it mean for us to belong?
Back in the days of Moses, for his people, the Israelites, the answer(s) to this question were pretty straightforward and clear. To belong to their people meant being a descendant of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob/Israel. It meant having not only this shared familial connection, but also this shared history. And it also meant living in a certain way, according to a certain set of practices.
All this is what Moses is basically laying out throughout the entire book of Deuteronomy. He has led his people safely through the sea and out of Egypt; they’ve taken the (very) scenic route through the wilderness; and now they are on the verge of finally entering the promised land. And Moses takes this opportunity to remind his people of who they are, by telling them the story of where they have been – by telling them the story of all that God has done for them.
Moses lays out – in great detail – the expectations laid on them as a result of the covenant they have made with God. There are rules governing all sorts of things from what they eat to what they wear to when to circumcise their children to the proper way to worship. In fact, within the Torah – what we know as the first five books of the bible – Jewish folks traditionally consider there to be 613 commandments. That’s a lot! But these are the practices that will set Moses and his people apart – the things that will signal that they belong to a particular group.
And Moses reminds the people here that the most important commandments – the ones literally etched in stone – are these ten: the Ten Commandments. These particular commandments deal with how they are to act toward God and how they are to treat their neighbor.
Taken together, all these commandments – including the ten commandments – add up to something much greater than just some stodgy set of rules designed to hem people in. They are a set of instructions for how to live well – and especially they are instructions for how to live well in community. They are rules for God’s people that teach them how to live out the kind of love that reflects God’s love for all creation. And as generation follows generation among the Hebrew people and they spread out into this new territory, these commandments will come to form a really core part of their identity. It’s by adhering to these laws that they answer the question: What does it mean to belong?
Fast forward hundreds of years to the first centuries after Christ and you’ll find the early church wrestling all over again with this question of belonging. Jesus’ life, teachings, and ministry lead the people of this first century Jewish movement to start questioning how they understand themselves and their community. They see the arguments he has with religious authorities over questions of law, and his willingness to minister to people outside the fold of Israel – and it makes them start to wonder what it truly means to be God’s people.
But it’s the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that truly blows the whole thing wide open. Jesus’ first disciples knew he had left them with this enormous charge to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth,” but now it becomes abundantly apparent just how serious he was about this. These Hebrew disciples, who now suddenly speak a whole mess of not-Hebrew languages, they are tasked with going out and opening up the boundaries of their tight-knit movement wildly beyond anything they would have ever imagined.
So now what does it mean to belong? The early church becomes this mixed bag of Jews and Greeks and people from all over the place. No longer are they all descended from the same ancestors, nor do they share the same background, the same story. They don’t all practice circumcision or observe every single one of those 613 commandments. They don’t all bear the traditional marks of belonging to this community. And all throughout the New Testament, especially in Paul’s letters, you can read about the church’s struggles to define for themselves where the boundaries are now.
But Jesus has already given them the key to figuring out how to define themselves as a community. And I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear that that key is… circumcision! Circumcision is the key to belonging. Just kidding – you know it’s love. It always, always comes back to love.
Jesus is asked what the most important commandment is, and he responds with a pair of interrelated commandments: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. In the verses we read today, he says that “there is no other commandment greater than these.” Elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus takes this even further, saying that, “on these two commandments hang all the law and all the prophets.”
And if you’ve been paying attention in confirmation, you already know that Jesus isn’t speaking abstractly here. The core commandments of law for the people of Israel – the Ten Commandments – can broadly be divided into commandments about how we love God and commandments about how we love our neighbor.
The core of the law is already rooted in love, and Jesus is pointing his followers straight to the heart of the matter. Belonging in this new community of believers is no longer about keeping all the details of these different practices down to the letter of the law. It’s about loving God and loving your neighbor. It’s a shift that transforms the law from being a kind of fence – built to keep some people in and some people out – to being like an anchor or a guiding star. Instead of keeping people out, it draws them in; it teaches them how to live a good life as a member of a community of love.
This understanding of the law and of what it means to belong frees us from having to worry over meticulously keeping every single detail of the law. But at the same time, Luther points out in the Small Catechism – in his explanations to the Ten Commandments – truly living out this law of love actually demands more from us: not just to refrain from doing harm to our neighbor, but to actively go out of our way to show them love, just as God shows love for us.
To this day, the Ten Commandments remain central as an anchor and a guide for the church. Despite sounding like a heaping helping of law – when we Lutherans are all about that grace – the Ten Commandments actually serve to point us straight toward a bedrock foundation of love.
In many ways, the church as it is today is wrestling once again with a lot of the same questions as the first century church – including this question about what it means to belong. In this age, we have communication technology that allows us to easily connect with people all over the place – with people who might never actually walk through our door. The whole notion of “membership” is shifting, as the culture moves away from religious and civic organizations; and likewise, the definition of what’s considered “regular” participation in church has changed, since it’s no longer a weekly thing for most people. And in this increasingly divided and pluralistic world, we also have to wrestle with the reality that the people who share our values and the people who profess our same beliefs are not always the same people. In a modern world with so much complexity, how can we know what it means to belong?
It always comes back to love. The central, defining feature of who we are as God’s people, as the body of Christ, is always love. Letting love be our anchor helps us navigate a changing church – and a changing world – with grace. It helps us to reflect the love of God in the ways we deal with our neighbors and with all creation. It points us beyond ourselves toward the love with which God first loved us. It’s love that teaches us what it truly means to belong.
This is the Day 