EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

I hope this won’t come as a surprise to you, but I love church. I love coming to church, being with other people who come to church, gathering together to worship, to listen, to sing, to pray, to give thanks, and to be fed and strengthened by God and for God and for one another.

I also love things like canon law and the church constitution and vestry meetings, but I understand those may be an acquired taste.

I love church, and I especially love the Episcopal Church. I’m not actually a cradle Episcopalian: I was confirmed and received as an adult. What got me here was one Sunday I walked into an Episcopal church and I fell in love with the service. I fell in love with the liturgy.

The word “liturgy” comes from the Greek word leitourgia which means, literally, the work of the people. So it’s not something the priest does or something the musicians do or something the people in the pews do but something we all do, together. And, of course, there’s good liturgy and bad liturgy. There’s liturgy that’s dry as dust and some that’s so wild and crazy it completely loses track of what it’s doing. But good liturgy, in all its many variations, is a container. Good liturgy holds us together and gives shape and focus to our worship of God. It’s a structure in which we enact, and proclaim, and participate in the mighty acts of God.

Of course, we don’t live our whole lives in church. We’re not meant to. The very last thing that happens in our liturgy is that we’re sent forth, out into the world to love and serve the Lord. Which is exactly what we’ve been doing here, but it’s a little more free-form out there in the big world. Here we have the Prayer Book to guide our liturgy. But what about out there? What shapes and focuses our lives before God once we go back outside?

One possible answer would be what we just heard in Exodus, the Ten Commandments. That’s what shapes our lives once we leave church. Voilá, question answered, problem solved. We can all go home now and come back next week.

But it’s not that simple. And part of the problem, actually, is that we may a little too familiar with the Ten Commandments. I’ve driven past lots of front yards with a small sign in the shape of two stone tablets stuck in the grass. And I know even without stopping to check that the lines on the tablets are the Ten Commandments. It’s a sign that the person who lives there wants to be right with God, the sign of someone who aims to keep God’s Law.

And the problem isn’t what’s on the sign. The problem is actually what’s missing from the sign. If you stop the car long enough to check it out you’ll see that the first line reads, “I am the Lord your God.” The second line is, “You shall have no other gods before me.”

What’s missing is something essential. God doesn’t say, “I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me.” God says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” What’s missing from the yard signs is the story of God’s saving act.

And that is a gaping hole. Skipping God’s salvation means taking God’s commandments entirely out of context. Because the Ten Commandments aren’t an abstract moral code or random guidance for how to be a good person. They’re the gift of a loving, liberating God to the people He set free. God gives His commandments to His Chosen People to teach them how they’re to live together as a community with God in their midst.

The psalmist lists praise after praise for God’s commands. “The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul . . . The statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear and gives light to the eyes.”

It’s hard to catch the full meaning in English, but in Hebrew to say that the law of the Lord is perfect means the law of the Lord has integrity-it has wholeness-and that’s what revives the soul. Because that’s what the Commandments are intended to do: they’re intended to help a community live into God’s wholeness-to live, in other words, in holiness, in sweet harmony and nearness to God.  That’s why the psalmist says they are “[m]ore to be desired than gold . . . sweeter than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.”

The commandments describe who Israel and we really are as the people of God. We’re a people who worship God, resisting the temptation to worship other gods or to make idols to worship instead of God. We’re a people who don’t trivialize the name of God, forgetting it’s holy. We’re a people who don’t make gods of ourselves by thinking that the world depends on our work and not God’s, or by forgetting what we owe to those who brought us into this world. We’re to respect the boundaries of life, and marriage, and honesty, and property because we can’t be holy on our own, but only together as the children of God living in God’s good Creation. We are called to live together in peace.

The Ten Commandments aren’t prescriptions so much as they are descriptions. They aren’t demands so much as they’re accounts of who God freed us to be. By God’s grace we aren’t meant to be merely moral, but holy-the holy people of God.

Which brings me back to church. This all sounds like a pretty tall order, doesn’t it, living as God’s holy people? It sounds like a daunting responsibility. But that’s why God has given us one another and that’s why we come back here week after week, Sunday after Sunday.

The highlight of the Christian year is the Easter Vigil, the night when we pass over from death into life, from Good Friday into Easter. And at the beginning of the vigil, the deacon sings the Exsultet, the song that recounts the story of our salvation, beginning with the exodus and continuing right up through Christ’s resurrection.

It starts on page 286 of the Book of Common Prayer in case you want to check it out later.

This is what’s right in the middle of the Exsultet:

“This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land. This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.”

This is the night, we sing at the Vigil, when we live again the story of God’s saving grace. And that’s what we’re doing now, too. That’s what we’re doing every time we gather to make Eucharist. We gather to hear God’s Word, to confess our sins and be absolved of them, to offer our lives and our selves to God, and to be comforted and strengthened by Christ’s Body and Blood.

And we do this together-there’s no such thing as a Eucharist for one. God doesn’t call us to be holy persons but a holy people. And by God’s grace, that’s who we are when we gather in His name.

It’s not a one shot deal. It’s something we live into our whole lives. In Christ, God has given us everything we need to be His holy people and in each other He’s given us a community in which we learn what that means.

Like I said, I love church. Amen.