Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 – The Ten Commandments
John 15:12-17 – Jesus gives his followers one commandment
I was a philosophy major in college. I think it still sneaks through at times. I’ve always liked big ideas. To be honest I didn’t major in philosophy just because it gave me the opportunity to think deeply. It was because the philosophy department only required six courses for a major and everything else was elective.
As I read the lessons for today, I recalled one particular philosophical truth that I’ve used as the title of my message today: Less is More. The phrase crept into the English language 150 years ago in a Robert Browning poem, but it’s been around from the beginning of time. It’s at the heart of the teachings of Buddha and Thoreau and many other philosophies. But it really doesn’t fit with western consumerism.
Over the last 50 years houses have doubled in size while families have gotten smaller. Our culture has bought the idea – or more correctly – sold out to the idea – that more is always, always better. Ironically, when I typed the phrase into Google the third hit said “Less is more – shopping results”! More money, more stuff, more fame, more apps, more military spending, more of anything is better… unless you’re tweeting… then less is more. Or, should I say fewer is more?
As our lives are more drawn to possession and power and privilege, we have to deal with the dark side: more depression, more divorce, more laws, more violence, more surveillance, more police, more prisons… Maybe “less is more” is wise and good, but we rarely walk the talk. Our teacher did.
On this world communion Sunday, we gather with hundreds of millions of Christians around the globe to recognize that God has called us and shown us a way that’s not rooted in the values of the world or the claims of any culture, but in the simple, eternally-true wisdom that poured from Jesus’ life and teachings.
Today’s readings give us two fundamental lessons, the first from Exodus 20, a version of the Ten Commandments. You may have memorized them as a child and you may subscribe to them today. Some people believe they should be displayed in every classroom and courtroom; that this would infuse the moral code back into our daily lives.
True, there was a time that the Ten Commandments still shaped public life. Many of us remember when very few stores would open on Sunday, and even the corner convenience store with its necessities had to lock their beer cooler out of some adherence to age-old Puritan Blue Laws based on the Ten Commandments.
A major problem with the Ten Commandments is that the minute God gave them, the children of Israel began looking for loopholes and found that ten principles can’t cover everything. As people wrestled with their meaning the Pharisees were guaranteed life-time employment with benefits, developing 613 laws that eventually interpreted the Ten Commandments themselves.
For devout Jews today keeping the commandments is getting harder all the time.
You may have heard of kosher food, kosher salt, and kosher hotdogs, but what about kosher appliances? Both Torah and Jewish oral tradition forbid igniting or extinguishing a fire on the Sabbath. Modern day rabbinic authorities explain that electricity is included in this prohibition. Therefore any appliance that’s activated by a person’s direct action is categorically forbidden on the Sabbath…
http://www.allaboutappliances.com/kosher-appliances-sabbath-mode/
(You can see this coming): an entire industry has grown around “Sabbath-compliant” appliances so a devout Jew can, for example, open the refrigerator door without causing the light or compressor to turn on, thereby avoiding the prohibition of working in any manner on the Sabbath.
I truly respect this devotion to the covenant law and the desire to follow God’s will. But we know the vast majority in modern cultures roll their eyes and say “why bother?” Why worry about Sabbath-keeping or anything else from those ancient, irrelevant stories? Increasingly, our culture asks us the same question.
How do we live according to God’s holy will in times that are constantly changing, and why does it matter?
Now Jesus said many things about the Law. He said he didn’t come to abandon it but to fulfill it. He knew that laws have loopholes and people will find them. He wasn’t much interested in playing word games, or winking and nodding as his listeners quoted the commandments and then went on to violate the spirit if not the letter. He emphasized God’s spirit that lives through the commandments, but not only there.
In Matthew 5:27-28 we read: “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” President Jimmy Carter shocked polite society thirty-five years ago when he owned up to this very common sin in an interview in Playboy Magazine. I certainly didn’t see the actual magazine… just heard about it from my brother!
Jesus believed that the realm of God was unfolding here and now in the lives of the beloved community. He was bold – revolutionary really – when he told his disciples that less is more; that all Ten Commandments and 613 laws were captured in one single commandment: “…love one another as I have loved you.”
He didn’t imagine the Romans were going to lay down their weapons, join hands and sing Kum Ba Ya. But he did teach those closest to him that less is more – that everything holy comes down to this one commandment and, if need be, be prepared to do what he did – lay down your life for your friends.
And with that he changed the world, and continues to. This love is not emotion but action that embodies the will and spirit of God.
People act in many amazing and inspiring ways. But the readiness of a person to sacrifice herself or himself for the well-being of others is one of the most profound: the mother who puts herself in harm’s way for her child; the soldier who instinctively walks into the line of fire to protect his comrades; the 9/11 First Responders who ran toward the catastrophe rather than running away from it and who were then caught in the towers’ collapse. We read of such things and draw a deep breath of awe and wonder.
Few of us will face such a moment in a literal sense. But every one of us has many moments when we choose whether to act solely for ourselves or for others. Jesus’ commandment was less, but so much more: love one another as I have loved you. And when you do that, you put into the universe your small gift of hope and joy – returning some of that which God has given to you. And when we do that together we can build and build on each other.
Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara famously said: “If I dream alone, it is only a dream. If we dream together, it is the beginning of reality.”
And so it is on this world communion Sunday. When we reach out to receive the bread of life and the cup of blessing, our hands will be empty. But many of us will find our hearts, maybe our tears, will be overflowing. And we receive a gift that is so utterly simple yet so profoundly important in reminding us of how God works.
We may have so much – maybe even too much – but we know in God’s economy less is more, and there’s always enough.