The commandments of God

Sermon preached at 11am Mattins at St Mary the Virgin, Lapworth
Sunday 11th July 2010 – Trinity 6, Proper 10 Year C
Other versions of this sermon were preached at St Mary’s at 8.30am Eucharist and at St Michael’s Baddesley Clinton at 3pm Evensong.

Readings: Deuteronomy 30: 9-14 Luke 10: 25-37


Recently my wife bought a new mobile phone. She had been without a phone for a couple of days, so when it arrived she was very excited to see it. It arrived at a very busy moment, but Elaine was very keen to get it going, so we rushed rather to assemble it. In the rush we gave only the scantiest attention to the manufacturing instructions, and misunderstood the one thing that we did read. This meant that we put the SIM card in upside down, and in so doing managed to damage it. The result was a further two days with no phone, while we got hold of a new SIM card from the service provider.
The incident reminded me that it is important to use equipment in line with the way it has been designed. Seeking to use it in other ways results in poor performance and could even result in accident or injury. I was reminded of one of my friend at school who was trying to lever the top of a can of paint, using not a screwdriver, but a chisel! The result was quite a nasty injury.
And of course we human beings have been made and designed for a particular purpose, a particular destiny. And it is a very high purpose and destiny, higher than we can possibly imagine. We are made in the image of God, to share in the eternal life that God himself lives out in within the Trinity. This is a great and wonderful thing. I am not sure whether we will ever comprehend how wonderful it is.
But to realise this purpose, this destiny, we have to live our lives in accordance with the maker’s instructions. We have to live according to the purposes for which we were designed. And this is all about following the commandments of God; walking in God’s ways; living according to God’s word; following God’s will for our lives. The importance of this can hardly be overstated, but it was really powerfully stressed in our Old Testament lesson today. Moses was speaking to the Israelites as they come to the end of their forty years in the wilderness and as they are about to enter the Promised Land; the land flowing with milk and honey. Actually Moses makes a great long speech; we only caught a very small part of it in our Old Testament lesson, but the deal is this, the covenant is this. God says to the Israelites, “Be my people, obey my laws, keep my commandments and I will make you prosper in the Promised Land. But you have a clear choice. If you don’t obey my laws and follow in my ways you will not last long in the Promised Land.” So it is obey God and prosper, or ignore God and perish.
And the importance of obeying God and keeping his commandments comes up time and time again in scripture. Jesus says, “If you love me you will keep my commandments.” (John 14: 15) and he says, “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments” (Matt 19: 17) and he says, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” (Matt 7: 21).
And what are the commandments of God? Well we heard the summary of all the commandments in New Testament lesson today; “Love God and love your neighbour” and then, in the story of the good Samaritan, we heard a beautiful illustration of what it means to love our neighbour; how it means helping them in practical ways, and looking out for their good.
So to realise God’s great plan for us, to fulfil all the good things that God wants for us, we need to follow God’s will for our lives, we need to live by the commandments of God and by the teaching of Jesus. And these commandments and teachings are all about love. The commandments are about educating us in what love means or requires of us in different situations.
And I want to put in an aside about “obedience”. In our contemporary western society the word “obedience” is often presented with rather negative connotations, as though it is about allowing ourselves to be dominated by other people, or about being fitted as a round peg into a square hole, or about failing to be true to our innermost instincts and desires. Well we need to re-educate ourselves to remember that obedience to God is always a thoroughly good thing; it is the good thing. It is precisely the way that we walk the walk towards heaven. It is the way we realise God’s creation in us. It’s the way that we allow God to form us and develop us so that we become what he has created us to be. So obedience to God is always a good thing, and obedience to God often (not always, but often!) requires obedience to other human being or human institutions; to a spouse, to a boss, to the law of the land, to a bishop or priest even. It is often through these people that we understand what God wants from us. And let’s remember that obedience to God is always about love, not wishing washing feelings, but the profound and mysterious love of God, which always seeks the good of the other.
I want to finish by re-reading the Collect for today, the sixth Sunday after Trinity because it does seem to summarise so much of this, so beautifully:

O God, who hast prepared for them that love thee
such good things as pass man’s understanding:
Pour into our hearts such love toward thee
that we, loving thee above all things,
may obtain thy promises,
which exceed all that we can desire;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (Book of Common Prayer)