Sermon – The Second Set of Commandments: You and Your Neighbor

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, PA on August 30, 2026 in response to Exodus 20:12-16. You can also listen to the audio at the following link.)

There is a fight going on right now in several states over whether the Ten Commandments should hang on the wall of every public school classroom. Lawsuits have been filed. Legislatures have voted. People on both sides have strong feelings, and you have probably already heard the arguments. Some say the Commandments are part of our shared moral heritage and belong in front of our children. Some say posting them in a government building crosses a line that should never be crossed, and that faith imposed by law stops being faith at all.

I’ve brought this up before, and I imagine some of you are wondering if I’m finally going to settle it this morning. I’m not. That was never my plan. But I want to tell you what troubles me about the whole “debate.” Both sides are arguing about the Commandments as if they are a tool. A tool to shape the culture. A tool to win an argument about who we are as a nation. And when you turn the Ten Commandments into a tool, you have already lost what they actually are.

The Ten Commandments were never handed down as a weapon to win a culture war. They were handed down as good news to people who had just walked out of hell.

That is where we have to start. Not with a courtroom. Not with a classroom wall. With a people who had spent generations in Egypt, enslaved, worked to exhaustion, treated as property to be used and discarded. God heard their cries. God brought them out. And before God gave them a single command, God reminded them who had set them free. Exodus 20 opens with these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Grace comes before law. Everything God says after that sentence is an answer to grace already given, not a condition for earning it.

Two weeks ago, we laid the foundation, the context of Exodus 19, the reminder that grace comes before law. Last week we looked at the first four commandments, the ones about our relationship with God, including the sabbath, God’s gift of rest. This week we turn to the second half of the list, the commandments about how we treat one another. Honor your father and mother. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Here is the thread that ties all of this together, and it is easy to miss if you don’t know the story. Every single one of these commandments is aimed straight at Egypt.

Egypt was not just a place. Egypt was a system. And that system ran on three convictions that empires have always run on, whether it was Pharaoh’s Egypt or Rome or any government since. Might makes right. The strong deserve to survive at the expense of the weak. The ends justify whatever means it takes to get there. 

Under that system, a slave’s family could be broken apart at the whim of an owner. A person’s body had no protection if someone more powerful wanted to use it. Labor and dignity could both be taken away simply because someone held the power to take them. And if you were an Israelite in Egypt, you had no standing in front of a judge, because the whole legal system existed to serve Pharaoh, not you.

God is not simply telling the Israelites to behave. God is dismantling the entire foundation they were raised on and replacing it with something the world had never tried before. Theologians sometimes call this shalom. Shalom does not just mean the absence of conflict. Shalom means right relationship. It means a community ordered so that every person, especially the person with the least power, is protected and honored. Egypt was built on using your neighbor. The kingdom of God is built on shalom.

Notice how different this is from how empires still operate. Every empire needs its people to believe that some lives simply count for less. That belief is what allows an empire to work people past exhaustion and bend the law toward whoever already holds the power. God looks at that whole arrangement in Egypt and says, not anymore, not among my people. The kingdom I am building runs on a different set of convictions entirely.

Now, here is something worth sitting with. If you simply released a people who had known nothing but slavery for hundreds of years and said, go, be free, do whatever you want, what do you think would happen? They would almost certainly rebuild the only system they had ever known. Because that system was normal to them. Cruelty and hierarchy and using people for what they can produce, that had become the water they swam in. Nobody in that wilderness had ever seen anything else.

But oppressive systems damage more than the people crushed beneath them. They damage the people standing on top too, in a different way. You cannot treat another human being with cruelty for very long without losing some of your own humanity in the process. And there is a fear that runs underneath almost every oppressive system, deep and mostly unspoken, that if the oppressed ever get free, they will turn around and do to their oppressors exactly what was done to them. That fear is often what keeps the whole system locked in place long after anyone remembers why it started. It convinces the people on top that they cannot afford to let go. 

God breaks that cycle at Sinai. The truth is that people who have suffered under an oppressive system rarely want to rebuild it and simply switch who holds the whip. They have felt what it does. What they want is for it to end.

We have seen this pattern play out in our own history. When slavery ended in this country, freedom did not arrive with a manual. It took constitutional amendments and the hard work of entire generations just to begin building structures that protected people who had been told for centuries that they were property. And still, the habits of that old system did not disappear overnight. Some of them are still working themselves out of us today. A people does not walk out of an old system into a new way of living just because someone says they are free. They need a path. They need guidance for what the new normal actually looks like.

That is what the Ten Commandments are. Not a burden laid on people who were already suffering. A path laid out by God for people who had just been rescued, so they would not become the very thing they had escaped.

I want to tell you something about myself. I am colorblind. I cannot tell the difference between red and green most of the time. Blues and purples blur together. Grays and pinks, oranges and yellows, especially when the light is dim or too bright, all look the same to me. It is just how I have always seen the world. I have always known that other people see it differently than I do, colors sharper and more distinct than what reaches my eyes, even if I couldn’t picture exactly what that meant.

A few years ago, my family stopped at a rest area in Tennessee. The state has installed special colorblind viewfinders at some of its rest stops and overlooks, devices with a lens built for people like me. I put my eye up to it, more curious than hopeful, and looked out over the hills. And red exploded into view. I mean it hit me almost like a physical force. I had never in my life seen red the way everyone else sees it. After all those years, I was finally seeing a color the way it was actually meant to be seen.

That is what the good news of God feels like. God does not simply improve the picture we already have. God shows us something we did not know existed. A whole way of living we could not have imagined because we had never seen it, because the world around us had never offered it. And once you have seen it, you cannot go back to believing the muted version was the only one available.

But here is what that story alone cannot teach me. Standing at that viewfinder was a gift for me, alone, in my own eyes. The commandments are not for what happens in your eyes alone. They are for what happens between you and the person standing next to you.

So let me give you another picture, one about neighbors instead of colors. When apartheid ended in South Africa, an entire nation had to learn something it had never been taught, how black and white South Africans were supposed to actually live as neighbors after generations of a legal system built on separation and violence. Nobody had a manual for that either. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others leaned on an old African concept called ubuntu, the conviction that a person becomes a person only through other persons, that your own humanity is bound up with the humanity of the one across from you. A nation cannot simply legislate that belief into existence. Truth had to be spoken out loud in public hearings. Harm had to be named instead of buried. And slowly, imperfectly, a nation began practicing a new normal for what it meant to be neighbors, because the old normal had been built entirely on using one group of people for the benefit of another.

That is exactly what God is doing at Sinai. God is teaching a freed people what it means to be neighbors after Egypt.

So let’s walk through these five commandments and see Egypt standing behind every one of them.

Honor your father and your mother. In Egypt, loyalty belonged to the state and to Pharaoh. Families could be separated at any moment because the empire’s needs came first. This commandment plants loyalty back where it belongs, in the family, the smallest and most human unit of community, the place where love is supposed to be learned before it is ever asked to be practiced anywhere else.

You shall not murder. In Egypt, human life had a price tag attached to productivity. Work someone to death, and you simply found another body to replace them. People were disposable. This commandment declares that every life carries a worth that no empire, and no economy, gets to assign or take away.

You shall not commit adultery. In Egypt, the powerful could take the bodies of enslaved women and use them for their own purposes, answering to no one. This commandment protects the deepest bond two people can form from exactly that kind of violation, insisting that a person’s body belongs to no one else’s use.

You shall not steal. Egypt’s entire economy ran on stolen labor, stolen resources, stolen time, stolen lives. This commandment says plainly that what belongs to your neighbor is not yours to take, no matter how much power you hold.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. In Egypt, the Israelites had no standing in any court. The legal system existed to serve the empire, and nothing an enslaved person said carried any weight. This commandment insists that truth and testimony matter, and that a neighbor’s word deserves to be heard and honored rather than twisted or ignored.

Do you see it now? These are not five random rules pulled out of the sky. They are five specific wounds from Egypt, each one answered directly by God.

And this is where freedom gets misunderstood, both then and now. We often think freedom means doing whatever we want, whenever we want, with no one able to tell us otherwise. But that is not the freedom God gives at Sinai. Martin Luther wrote about this same paradox centuries later in his reflection on Christian freedom. A Christian, Luther said, is free, answerable to no one, and yet bound to serve every neighbor out of love. Freedom and service are not opposites. Real freedom always has room in it for someone else. License has no room for anyone but yourself.

Jesus understood this completely. When someone asked him which commandment mattered most, he did not choose one line out of the ten. He reached back into the law and pulled out its heartbeat. Love the Lord your God with everything you have. And love your neighbor as yourself. Everything in the law and the prophets, Jesus said, hangs on those two commands. The first table of the Ten Commandments teaches us how to love God. The second table we read today teaches us how to love our neighbor. Jesus is simply naming what was true all along.

Look at what Jesus actually does with his life, and you will see this same logic acted out again and again. His parables keep circling back to the same question, who is my neighbor, and what does love actually cost when I meet them. When he heals someone, he rarely stops at the healing itself. He restores that person to their family, back to a seat at the table. He is not simply repairing a body. He is putting a person back into community, because he sees the image of God still alive in someone the world had already written off. Loving that neighbor is how Jesus loves God. 

By the time we reach Matthew 25, he says it as plainly as language allows. Whatever you did for the hungry, or the sick, or foreigner, or the prisoner, you did for me. And when Jesus talks about money, he sounds the same warning, that hoarding and greed pull our eyes away from the neighbor in front of us and fix them on what we can keep for ourselves. None of this is a separate teaching. It is the same freedom we have been talking about all morning, worked out in a human life.

The point of the commandments was never to make you into a better project, working harder at your own moral improvement so God will approve of you. The point was always your neighbor. Honor your parents, and your family is loved. Do not murder, and your neighbor’s life is protected. Do not commit adultery, and your neighbor’s marriage is honored. Do not steal, and your neighbor’s labor and belongings stay safe in their hands. Do not bear false witness, and your neighbor’s name and testimony are treated with the truth they deserve. The law was given because God loves your neighbor, and God loves you enough to hand you the exact same gift.

That is the good news underneath these five commandments. God has already done what needed doing. God has already claimed you. God has already set you free from Egypt, from whatever system of using and being used you were caught in before you ever knew there was another way to live. And God has shown you, in Jesus, what shalom actually looks like lived out among real people, in real bodies, at a real table.

You do not have to build the kingdom of God by yourself. You do not have to earn your way into being loved by your neighbor or by God. That work is already finished. What is left for you is what was left for Israel in the wilderness, to keep learning what this new normal looks like, one neighbor at a time, until using each other stops feeling like the only way the world can work.

I think about this every time I walk through our doors here, whether it is a Sunday morning in worship or a Tuesday afternoon in one of our clinics. We talk about Christ Lutheran as a wheel, with healing sitting at the center axle and everything else turning around it. In the clinics, that healing is physical and mental, care for people who have been treated as disposable by an employer or a system that only valued what their bodies could produce. In the community groups that use this building throughout the week, that healing looks like social justice work and the slow mending of a neighborhood. And in the congregation itself, gathered for worship, that healing is spiritual and emotional, a community learning together how to carry one another. 

Nearly every dollar that keeps our clinics open comes from someone outside these walls who decided a stranger’s health was worth their gift. That is shalom, showing up in ordinary places all through the week. Nobody here is earning their way into being cared for. These are glimpses of the same kingdom of God that started at Sinai with the Ten Commandments. It grew and deepened across the ministry of Jesus, and it continues right now, in this room, through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our midst.

I still remember looking through that viewfinder in Tennessee and seeing red for the first time in my life. I imagine that is something like what it will feel like, on the day we finally see our neighbor the way God has always seen them all along. Not property. Not a means to an end. Just a neighbor, fully human, worth protecting, worth loving, standing right there in front of us.

May God give us the eyes to see it, and the grace to live it.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.