The Family of Faith
St. John’s United Church of Christ
October 8, 2017
Exodus 20: 1-20
You may not know that in early Christian liturgies, the 10 commandments were recited as part of the baptism rite. They reminded the early Christians of what it means to be part of a loving community that makes a choice to live according to God’s will. A community that boldly choses to live according to God’s social vision, against all the other options that the world might present.
In the family of faith that lives by God’s social vision, as we observed last Sunday on World Communion Sunday, boundaries of race, gender, status, and age are transcended, and barriers of nationality and history are overcome. We all become one.
Because membership in God’s family of faith is freely available to all of God’s children; we cannot earn it. Membership in Christ’s family is not based on what we can and cannot do, our strengths, or our weaknesses. Since, all of us, regardless of our station in life, can receive God’s grace and mercy, all of us can be part of the family of faith.
And God knows that we cannot go it alone, that it is hard to be faithful people in a world that can be so harsh and unforgiving, full of temptation and strife. In order to strengthen our faith, we must be part of a supportive community like the one you have here at St. John’s. In response to God’s love, we are moved to care for each other in times of sickness, loneliness, trouble, and grief. God does not want us to fight our demons alone.
God, through the 10 commandments, and later through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, instructs us on how to order our life together and relate to others in a whole new way, as a family focused solely on loving God and our neighbor as ourselves.
Rather than viewing the 10 Commandments as punitive laws and absolute policy statements, we are called, as the people of God, to use them as guidelines when making ethical decisions about how we relate to one another in our everyday lives. They help us determine what to teach our children and they anchor our vision of the world.
Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggeman, writes about the 10 commandments’ relevance for today’s world. He talks about how they offer a counter-cultural vision and create a community that devotes itself to following God’s will. A community that is often at odds with larger society in which it finds itself. This because God’s family of faith does not share the values of a me-first, grab-my-share society that believes the ends justify the means and places individual acquisition, greed, over the common good.
The people of God, according to Brueggeman, who heed the ten commandments, value everyone as children of God: so it follows that no one, no child of God, should ever be subject to abuse or exploitation.
The first commandment establishes who God is and our relationship to God. God is beyond our imagination; we cannot box God in to conformour own image, to reflect our own needs and wants, as many “Prosperity Gospel preachers do. As Brueggeman says, “God is an active, decisive presence in our common public life, who in holiness, is beyond all our most pious efforts to control and manipulate.”
We also are reminded in the first set of commandments that “God is God, and we are not.” We are not God,all of us must be reminded of that from time to time; but neither are all those things we encounter in life that have the potential to enslave us, those things that we are tempted to put first in our lives. If we organize our lives around the pursuit of money, security, recognition, or anything else, they become our false gods.
Therefore, because we are children of God, we remember the Sabbath and take periodic breaks from our workaholism. We take time for re-creation, to periodically be just a human being rather than a human doing. God knows that everyone needs to disengage periodically from those systems of productivity that can enslave and exhaust us. We remember the Sabbath.
While the first set of commandments is focused on our relationship with God, the second set of commandments, focuses on our relationships with each other. For instance, because we are a family of faith, we break down the barriers between generations, we care for and protect the elderly in our community when they no longer can work or care for themselves. That might even mean that we make sure that the governmental safety nets that protect them like Medicare and Social Security remain intact. When we love and protect the elderly in our community, we honor our collective parents.
Because a family of faith values human life, we rail against those people and systems in our world, who have been in the news too much lately. We condemn all groups orindividualswho make war, promote violence, or take human life as we saw tragically in Las Vegas this week. As people who follow God’s commandments, we do not murder and, therefore, we do not make it easy for evil, deranged people to get the weaponry they need to commit mass murder.
In our family of faith, we want our most intimate relationships, to be mutually life-giving, nurturing, enhancing, respectful, and built on trust. Therefore, we do not commit adultery.
In our family of faith, we share what we have, do not hoard our blessings, but, see to it that all God’s children have the food, water, and shelter necessary to live an abundant life. We support groups that provide for those in need. We do not steal.
And we do not spin the truth or skew it to fit our own self-interest. We
believe alternative facts are lies, plain and simple. In a family of faith, we are honest with each other, we do not bear false witness.
Through Baptism, God calls us into this family of faith where we are guided by God’s social vision as given to us through the 10 commandments and later through the exemplary words and deeds of Jesus Christ.
And because we are a family of faith, because we put God first and know God’s grace, we live honestly and lovingly with each other. Weguide and care for each other, throughout all our joys and sorrows, our triumphs and tragedies, until that day when all of us are again united in God’s heavenly kingdom. This is the hope and promise you received the day on the day of your Baptism, the day you were embraced as part of the family of faith.
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