Sermon – What the Ten Commandments are Really About

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg on Sunday, August 16, 2026. You can listen to the audio by going to this link. The sermon was in response to Exodus 19 and 20:1-2)

Every nation writes something down to explain itself to itself. The Declaration of Independence begins by saying who we are and why we exist as a people. The preamble to the Constitution does the same thing. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. Before either document gets to a single law, it tells you a story first. It tells you who did the forming, and what that forming was for.

I bring that up because this morning we are reading a founding document. Exodus 19 is Israel’s version of that same kind of writing. It tells the story of a people before it tells them a single rule to live by. And once you notice that pattern, you start to notice something else. Every law says something about who wrote it and who they think you are. A law written by the powerful to protect what they already have will read differently than a law written to free people who have nothing. Exodus 19 is the second kind. It is the founding document of a people who used to be property, and it opens with the person who freed them, not with the people themselves.

That matters right now, because the Ten Commandments have become a prop in a fight in this country. States have argued over whether to post them in classrooms. People have argued over which version even counts, since Jews, Catholics, and Protestants number them differently. I am not going to settle that argument for you this morning. Here is why. I do not think that fight is really about the commandments at all. It rises up, gets used for a while, and then gets dropped the moment a new argument comes along to take its place. We never actually resolve it, because resolving it was never really the goal. Fights like this keep our eyes locked on each other instead of on who benefits while we stay busy and distracted. So this morning, let’s set that argument down. Let’s look at what is actually written on the page. It has more to say than either side of that fight has given it credit for.

We are starting a four week series on the Ten Commandments. Today is not about the commandments themselves. Today is about what comes before them, because what comes before them is the whole reason they exist. A preacher named David Lose has a phrase for this that I love. Nineteen comes before twenty. Exodus 19 comes before Exodus 20. The relationship comes before the law. God shows up and claims a people before God ever tells them what to do. That order is not an accident. It is the whole sermon.

So let’s walk through it.

The people have left Egypt. They have crossed the sea. They have wandered through the wilderness with no food and no water and no map, and God has fed them and kept them alive the whole way. Now they arrive at a mountain, and God tells Moses to go up and get a message for the people. 

Listen to how God introduces this whole thing. “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” Not, here is a list of things I expect from you. Not, here is what you need to do to earn my attention. I bore you. I brought you to myself. Before there is a single command, there is a rescue and an embrace.

I think about that when I think about all the clinics in this building. This building is a sanctuary, and for us that word is not only a theological one. It is a practical one. A sanctuary is a place of safety. We have always said that trust is our currency here. People walk through these doors because they know they can trust us. We do not collect information on people that could somehow be taken from us and used against the very people we are trying to care for. Because people are more than the information written down about them. They are names. They are faces. They are bodies, and stories, and relationships. They are hurts and wounds, and they are healing. When somebody walks through our doors, sick and scared and maybe without insurance, maybe without papers, maybe without anywhere else that would see them, we do not hand them a form first. We greet them.  We learn their name.  We get them a chair. We get them water. We look them in the eye. Care comes first. The relationship comes first.

It is the same thing on a Sunday morning. When somebody visits this congregation for the first time, the first thing we say to them is not a question about membership, or whether they can do something. The first thing is an introduction. A welcome. We tell them that we are glad they are here, just as they are.  And we mean it.  We see them as a person before we see them as anything else. That is part of why we let the sharing of the peace run long here on Sunday mornings, sometimes ten minutes or more, people crossing the whole room to embrace people. It comes right before we walk to the table together, making sure we have first seen each other. It might look disorganized if you are only counting the minutes. But it is exactly right. People embracing people, before we ever share a single bite of bread.

That is what is happening on this mountain. God is not handing Israel a form to fill out before they are allowed to belong. God has already carried them here. The commandments, when we get to them next week, are going to be about how a people who are already loved learn to live like it.

Now, this chapter also has some strange instructions in it. God tells the people to wash their clothes. God tells them to stay off the mountain, to keep some distance, to prepare themselves for three days before they get near this holy thing. There are consequences if they cross a line they have been warned not to cross. We are going to see this pattern again later in scripture, when the temple gets built, with its rules about who can go where and how a person gets ready to stand in a holy place. It can sound harsh to our ears. But underneath it is something simple. God’s holiness is enormous, more enormous than we are built to hold. The rules are not there to keep the people away from God out of spite. They are there because an uncontained, unprepared meeting with that much holiness is more than a body can survive. The boundaries are not punishment. They are protection. God is not trying to destroy the people. God is trying to keep them alive long enough to be loved on purpose.

And here is the thing I want you to sit with. This whole chapter reads like a birth story. Think about a family waiting in a hospital room for a child to arrive. There is preparation. There is waiting. There is fear mixed in with hope. And then the child arrives, and the parents look at that child and they name them, and that name means something, because it comes from people who share their very blood and breath with that child. That is what is happening on this mountain. This is Israel’s birth. A people who were property in Egypt, who had no name of their own, who belonged to Pharaoh the way a tool belongs to whoever is holding it, are being born into a new identity. God looks at them, the way a parent looks at a newborn, and says, you are mine now. You are not what Pharaoh called you. You are my treasured possession. You are a priestly kingdom. You are a holy nation.

A priestly kingdom is a strange phrase, and it is worth sitting with. A priest is somebody who stands between people and God. A priest carries the people’s prayers up, and carries God’s word back down. That is exactly the role Moses is filling on this mountain, going up to hear from God and coming back down to speak to the people. But God is not just naming Moses a priest here. God is naming an entire people that way. This whole nation is being given a job of standing in that space between, representing God to a world that has only known gods that were silent statues, gods carved out of stone who never said a word and never listened to one either. Israel’s God speaks. Israel’s God listens. That is not a small thing. That is the whole difference between the gods of Egypt and the God who just carried a people out on eagles’ wings.

I want to bring one more piece of scripture into this, because I cannot read the birth of Israel without thinking about Genesis 3. In the garden, Adam and Eve are given a kind of freedom already, but a serpent convinces them there is a better freedom available, one where they can be like God, knowing good and evil for themselves, answering to no one. So they take it. Their eyes open. And what they find is not freedom at all. What they find is fear. They hide from God. They turn on each other. The freedom the serpent promised was a lie, and lies do not free anybody. They just leave you exposed.

Here in the wilderness, God does something different. God does not just cut the chains and walk away and leave this people to sort out their own freedom on their own terms. God claims them, and in that claiming, God gives them a way to live together. That is not a smaller freedom than what the serpent offered. It is the real thing. Because it turns out that freedom without any shape to it is not freedom. It is just chaos with better marketing.

This is where I think about something Martin Luther wrote about the purpose of God’s law. Luther talked about the law doing more than one job. Sometimes the law simply holds a society together, keeping the peace between neighbors who might otherwise tear each other apart. Sometimes the law works like a mirror, showing us exactly where we fall short of loving God and each other the way we were made to. And for those who already trust in Christ, the law becomes something else again. It becomes a guide, showing us in very practical terms what a life shaped by love actually looks like day to day. All three of those things are happening at once in this story. The law is holding a fragile new nation together in the wilderness. The law is showing them, and showing us, how far short we fall. And the law is teaching a freed people what freedom is actually for.

Luther wrote something else that belongs right alongside this. In a short work on the freedom of a Christian, he put it in two lines that sound like they contradict each other until you sit with them for a minute. A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. That is not a contradiction. That is the whole shape of what happens on this mountain. God frees the people first, completely, subject to no one else on earth. And that very same freedom turns around and makes them servants of one another. Freedom was never the finish line. Freedom was the starting line for love.

I have talked before about two paths I believe we are always walking at the same time, both of them, not one or the other. One path I call empire. You know it when you see it. It runs on the belief that might makes right, that only the strong survive, that the ends justify whatever means got you there. It shows up in cruelty and control and the hoarding of what could be shared. The other path I call shalom, which is a word that means something bigger than peace. It means wholeness. Enoughness. It is the path Jesus was pointing to every time he talked about the kingdom of God, a way of living built on love and mercy and the willingness to see God’s image looking back at you in your neighbor’s face. Empire is always hungry, because empire is built on the lie that there is not enough to go around, so you had better grab yours before somebody else does. Shalom is not hungry in that way, because shalom starts from the truth that God has already provided enough.

Exodus 19 is a shalom story from beginning to end. Nothing here is earned. God acts first. God provides the escape, the food in the wilderness, the water from the rock, the safety at the mountain. And when God sets limits, like the boundary around the base of that mountain in verse 23, those limits are not the opposite of shalom. They are what makes shalom possible. Because freedom with no boundaries at all is not really freedom. It becomes whatever the loudest or strongest voice in the room says it is in that moment, and that can change again the next moment when a louder or stronger voice shows up. 

That is not freedom. That is just tyranny wearing a different coat, or its twin, anarchy, where nobody is really listening to anybody and the rules shift with whoever is shouting loudest. God gives Israel something in between those two. Not a tyrant handing down whatever he feels like that day. Not a shouting match where nobody agrees on anything. A covenant. Something they hold in common, something that does not change based on who is currently strongest, something built to hold a whole community together instead of tearing it apart.

So here is where all of this lands, and here is the piece I most want you to carry out of worship today. The commentator I have been reading this week put it about as clearly as I have ever heard it put. The law is not about you becoming a better version of yourself. It is not a self-improvement program handed down from heaven. When God says do not steal, do not lie, do not covet, God is not primarily thinking about your soul’s personal growth. God is thinking about your neighbor. God is thinking about the person standing next to you at the grocery store, the person in the next chair over at the clinic, the person whose yard backs up to yours. God loves that neighbor so much that God tells you not to hurt them. And here is the part that should make you smile. God loves you exactly that much too, which is why God turns around and tells your neighbor the very same thing about you. The commandments are not a ladder for you to climb toward heaven on your own effort. They are a rope God ties between neighbors so that nobody has to survive alone.

That is why we are spending this whole week on the setup before we ever get to the commandments themselves. Because if you walk into next week’s commandment without this chapter behind you, you will hear rules. You will hear a list of things you are not allowed to do, and it will feel like a burden, or worse, it will feel like a weapon somebody hands you to swing at somebody else. But if you walk in with Exodus 19 behind you, you hear something else entirely. You hear a people who were nothing, who were property, who were bought and sold and worked half to death, being told by the God who carried them out on eagles’ wings, you are mine now, and here is what love looks like lived out loud in a whole community.

That, and not any argument over a courthouse wall or a classroom bulletin board, is the good news this morning.

The good news is not whether somebody manages to get a version of these ten sentences posted in a government building or classroom somewhere. Rules on a wall have never changed a single heart, and they never will. A commandment carved in stone, or printed and framed and hung up somewhere, cannot reach inside a person and change what is happening in there. Something else has to do that.

That something is exactly what Exodus 19 is pointing toward, even before we ever get to Sinai. God bears the people. God carries them. God claims them before they lift a finger to earn it. And centuries later, we meet a man on the hillsides of Galilee doing the very same thing all over again, this time in flesh and blood. Jesus does not walk up to hurting people and ask what they have done to deserve his attention first. He touches the sick before they clean themselves up. He eats with tax collectors before they change their line of work. He tells a woman caught in the worst moment of her life that he does not condemn her, and only after that does he tell her to go and leave that life behind. Grace first, every time. Jesus is Exodus 19, walking around on two feet.

He is also the priestly kingdom made complete. Remember what we said earlier, that a priest stands in the space between people and God, carrying prayer up and carrying word back down. Israel was called into that job and could never fully carry it. We have not carried it well either. So God did not leave it there. God sent a priest of God’s own, one who did not just pass messages back and forth between us and God but who closed the whole distance himself, human enough to know exactly what our lives cost us, holy enough to bring us all the way home. That is who meets us at this table in a few minutes. Not a landlord checking whether we have paid up. A priest who has loves us so much that he was willing to go to death and beyond on our behalf. 

So here is where I want to leave you today. Not with an assignment. Not with a task list of who to love better this week. You did not carry yourself out of Egypt, and you cannot save yourself now. God did that. God is still doing that. Every morning, before you have done a single good or bad thing, you are already the one God bore on eagles’ wings. Every morning, Christ has already gone ahead of you into the space between you and God, and has already made peace there on your behalf. That is finished. That is done. You do not have to go earn it today, and nothing you do today can take it away from you either.

Nineteen comes before twenty. Grace comes before law. God’s love comes before God’s commandments, and Christ holds all of it together for us. That has always been true, and it is true again this morning, whether or not this has been a week when you loved your neighbor well. You are still the one carried. You are still the one claimed.

Thanks be to God. Amen.