Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Exodus 20:12-16

So, on this Father’s Day weekend, I was thinking about an analogy for the second table of Ten Commandments that might relate (stereotypically) to the males in the room: Let’s talk about working on cars. But first, to review, as Lutherans we seek to follow the ten commandments not as rules to follow “or else” we’ll be eternally condemned, but as guidelines given to us by God so that we might live in healthy relationships with God and with one another. These are rules for our benefit. On this Father’s Day, we might lovingly think of the times our own dads have told us, “This is for your own good.” And maybe later, we looked back as parents ourselves and grudgingly admitted they were right. These five commandments we heard from Exodus: Honor your father and mother, do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, and do not bear false witness against your neighbor, have to do with our relationships with each other and how we love our neighbors as ourselves, as Jesus commands us to do in Matthew. The last two regarding coveting also have to do with our relationship with others, but since they both touch on the idea of “coveting,” a word we don’t use commonly anymore, we’re going to focus on the last two commandments next week.
“What do these commandments have to do about cars?” you might ask. Well, the dad in our house, Pastor Rich, has a few phrases he likes to use and one of those phrases is “firing on all cylinders.” Getting ready to go on a camping trip, when we’re all ready to go, we’re “firing on all cylinders.” If things are going pretty smoothly at church and we’re on the same page as pastors with each other, they’re “firing on all cylinders.” When he gets a new computer program set-up and it’s working well, it’s “firing on all cylinders.” Now, I could care less about cars as long as they get me from point A to point B, so I don’t think I really understood what he was talking about when we were first married, this “firing on all cylinders,” until my own car at the time, a 1996 2-door Saturn, started acting strangely one day. We lived seven miles from town on a gravel road and I managed to limp it to our mechanic, going about 35 miles an hour down highway 81. The mechanic opened up the hood and showed me how only two of four cylinders were operational – the other two were stuck. He said it was the equivalent of trying to do 60 mph with a riding lawn mower. He got those cylinders moving again, but it wasn’t long until we basically had to sell the car for parts. It wasn’t until then that I had even really looked much under my car hood to understand how an engine worked, or what it meant that the car was a four-cylinder or six-cylinder or 8-cylinder, but then everything started to make sense! Ahh, so that’s what it means to be firing on all cylinders.
As the church, the body of Christ, God wants us to be as healthy as we can be, as individuals, and as an organization. To be healthy is to be firing on all cylinders. In this case, the cylinders are those Ten Commandments that have to do about us and our relationship with others. If we say, “yeah, I get that not killing people’s important to God, but it’s OK if I spread rumors about my neighbor,” thereby breaking the eighth commandment, then we are not firing on all cylinders as the body of Christ. We’re limping along like a riding lawn mower when we COULD be going at top-speed. These commandments are not just for us as individuals, but for a healthy community, a healthy society. God wants us to work well together!
Another way to look at these commandments comes from my Old Testament professor in seminary, Dr. Ralph Klein. He asked us to imagine that the Ten Commandments are the fence for the playground that God gives us to play in, a playground for life! I think what Dr. Klein meant by this image is that there’s a lot of freedom in having just ten rules to live by, and not the 613 that you can find in the Hebrew Scriptures. We have a lot of freedom in our relationship with God and with each other. When we step outside of that fence or beyond the bounds that the commandments give us, that’s when we know we’re not as healthy as we could be. We’re not as healthy as God wants us to be. We’re hurting ourselves, we’re hurting each other, we’re hurting our spiritual relationship with God. Certainly you could think of instances where someone has hurt you by breaking one of these commandments, or how you have been restored in learning to follow a commandment more faithfully, like honoring the Sabbath day or your mother and father, for example. You can start to see how God’s intention for us is not to set up rules that we will break so that God can punish us, but rather to help us live life fully and healthily with some basic ground rules.
Friends in Christ, we know that our culture is not “firing on all cylinders.” Just last week we heard the sad news of two high profile celebrities who committed suicide, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. It was a reminder that suicide knows no race, class, or creed, and that you can appear to have it all and have it all together and still be suffering silently and alone. Suicide rates have increased by 25% in the United States in the last two decades, and suicides occur not only with people who have diagnosed mental illness. We Christians are not immune to suicide because of our faith, and I encourage you to encourage loved ones to talk to somebody and get help if anyone has thoughts of harming themselves or others. Our faith does have something to offer a hurting world, however, that is struggling to find ultimate meaning and purpose in life. Why I bring this topic of suicide up is to emphasize that our incarnational God in Jesus Christ suffers when we suffer, when we are not firing on all cylinders as a society or as individuals. God desires for all of us to know we are fully and completely loved, and that our lives have meaning and purpose. We hear clearly from the gospel reading in Matthew Jesus asking us to love God, love one another AND love ourselves. In striving to follow the commandments, we can know more fully God’s grace, love and mercy for us, and we turn toward our neighbor in love to share God’s love with a hurting world in need.
This time in worship here at Bethel we pray is a “tune-up” for your soul, to reconnect to God and one another so you can get out there in the world and be firing on all cylinders. These commandments are the fence around God’s playground to help us better love ourselves, each other, and God. Tune into God, turn to your neighbor, and rest in God’s love. Amen.

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, June 10, 2018
Exodus 20:3-11

Last week Pastor Rich reminded us that before we look at what God tells us to do with those famous ten commandments, we remember that God starts the relationship with us. God says, “I am God, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of a life of slavery.” That is the same God we worship today, a God who desires us to be free, and to live in the freedom that our faith in Jesus Christ gives. So today, we heard the first three commandments, which we sometimes refer to as the “first table,” or those commandments that focus specifically on our relationship with God: Have no other gods, do not take the Lord’s name in vain, and remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
It is appropriate that God starts this list of commandments with three about our relationship with God. As a church, these are of primary importance. If we only focused on our relationship with others and how well we treat one another, we could easily just be another social service agency, social club, or secular institution. But we’re the church, and the church exists to help grow people’s relationship with God and with one another. In our relationships with one another, we ask how we see God at work in those relationships. This is why we hear Jesus summarize the ten commandments with those two commandments in Matthew: love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t separate them: we love God and one another and ourselves because it’s who we are as God’s people, as people who call ourselves Christian.
Particularly as we prepare for a relaunch here at Bethel in September, I find it helpful to hear this central reminder from God about the right relationship God wants from us in the ten commandments. It’s important for us to remember that one of the only things all healthy, growing congregations have in common is that people are growing spiritually. The congregation has created opportunities at home and at church for people to grow in their relationship with God. They’re laser-focused on those first three commandments. This is why we’re excited about trying “discipleship groups” at Bethel as a part of our relaunch, to help us all get back to the basics of connecting to God through prayer, conversation, and Bible study.
I wish it weren’t true, but it is. I’ve been in this role for almost four years now, and over and over again, people in our Nebraska Synod congregations want to ask me about bulk mailings, using social media effectively, what material to put on the church website, and what program they can purchase to get people to come to church. It’s easier in some ways, I suppose, to concentrate on what color the carpet is, putting together a praise band, and putting a coffee bar in the fellowship hall or narthex as the silver bullet that will “fix” our church. What’s sad about this to me is that we quickly end up breaking the first commandment and make idols out of this stuff instead of pointing people back to God as the church. We think that we can’t possibly worship God without or with an organ, and people even leave the church over what color they chose to paint the fellowship hall. What started as a well-intentioned evangelism effort becomes an idol. We kept ourselves busy doing stuff and forgot that what is of primary importance is our relationship with God. These may be creative ideas that come out of a sense of wanting to serve God and the community better! But we have to be careful when we start by thinking that changing our churches for the better requires a lot of money to buy stuff. What we hope could be a silver bullet to fix our problems could end up being a golden calf instead. Rather, a life of faith, and sharing our faith, starts with God.
The good news is that evangelism is much simpler and cheaper than you might think: you don’t have to spend any money and you don’t have to change anything about your worship service or your building. What we know “works,” so to speak, is very simple: talking and listening to God through prayer as a congregation AND as individuals. Going back to the basics so that everything you do is aligned with ministry priorities. Building relationships with people outside your walls who do not have a church home and being willing to do so even if they never walk inside these walls. Evangelism, and a thriving, vital church, starts with God! You can’t share your faith if you have no faith to share, after all! Loving God and putting God above all else, using God’s name well, and honoring the Sabbath day by worshipping God in community whether it’s here in this church building, in a small group at home, outside, online, be creative! These first three commandments are really God’s starting point to evangelism! When you love God above all else and put God first, by creating intentional Sabbath time for God, and speaking about God well to your friends and neighbors and really anyone you meet, you’re on the right track to strengthening your relationship with God and thereby being able to share your faith with others.
I want to take a minute to unpack the meaning of the second commandment in particular. Most of us, if we learned the ten commandments growing up or taught them to our kids, probably learned that the gist of this commandment is not to swear or take God’s name in vain. However, in the secular society we live in, and admittedly as shy Lutherans, we sometimes take this commandment too far in the other direction, and fail to talk about God at all outside of worship on Sunday morning. Using God’s name well means daring to talk about God with your coworkers, neighbors, and friends. Luther’s explanation in the small catechism is this: “We are to fear and love God, so that we do not curse, swear, practice magic, lie, or deceive using God’s name, but instead use that very name in every time of need to call on, pray to, praise, and give thanks to God.” In honoring the second commandment we strive to use God’s name in every time of need! And that includes sharing our faith with others.
Let’s remember what evangelism means, after all. It means “good news.” It’s the same word as “gospel” in the Greek. All evangelism means is simply sharing the good news about God in Jesus Christ with other people you love. Because Jesus has made such a powerful difference in my life, I can’t help but want to share about that experience with other people, too. My relationship with God honestly started with God, not with me. Out of the blue. I was baptized as a Lutheran and grew up in this church. I had my days and years of doubts like pretty much anyone my age. I experimented with other churches and no church. I was going to be a teacher – since I was in kindergarten I knew I was going to be a teacher. But then the adult youth sponsors at my church asked me if I had thought about being a pastor. And my pastors asked me if I had thought about being a leader in the church. My religion professor asked me if I had thought about seminary. And my grandma, one of the most important mentors in my life of faith, told me she saw gifts in me for ministry. And through this wild ride of being a pastor, my faith has grown and God has taken me places and had me meet people that I could have never imagined.
My spouse, my kids, my job, my friends, my free time would all look differently without my relationship with Jesus! What story do you have to share about how Jesus has made a difference in your life, too? Think about what keeps you from sharing that with others. How might God help you get over those barriers to try talking about God this week? How does knowing that it really all starts with God anyway, help? What I mean is, God will use whatever I have to give: my time, my openness to listen, my one small story about something awesome God did in my life. God will grow our faith. God will grow the church, even if it looks different than it used to and even “smaller” by human standards of measurement. A lot of the stuff we come up to do is just icing on the cake that God’s already got baking. And you better believe that this God who delivered the Israelites from slavery into freedom and delivered us all from sin, death and the devil by sending his only Son Jesus to die and be raised for us, this God has a pretty good cake in store for us. We can be thankful, that the Lord God who led people out of slavery in Egypt into the freedom of the promised land, is the same God we worship today. God offers us the same freedom to worship, to love God and each other, to serve and share our faith with all. Amen.