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.