How?

     Remember my former parishioner in Knoxville, Ellen, the one who read through the Bible in a year?   We were conversing one day and she offered me some unsolicited feedback. It was a critique I didn’t know I needed to hear. She said, You know Pastor, you’re always telling us that we should love our neighbor or the stranger or even our enemy, but you never teach us how to do that. As difficult as it was to hear Ellen’s assessment, she was absolutely correct about me specifically and about contemporary Lutheran Christianity in general. I, we, don’t do a very good job at teaching one how to, actually, love one’s neighbor.

     Following our conversation Ellen elected to sojourn in Buddhism for a while. There she learned practices that helped her in her Christian call to love her neighbor. Meanwhile I sought after resources within Christianity itself, practices to help a disciple learn how to love her neighbor. After much digging, I found a  source deeply rooted in Christianity. It had been there the whole time, hidden in plain sight.

     What is this ancient Christian practice for how to love our neighbor? None other than, the ten commandments. The reason that wasn’t so obvious to me was because, for so long, we’ve been taught that one purpose of the commandments is to show us our inability to keep the commandments thus convicting  us of our sinfulness and our need for Christ to save us. Additionally, many Christians have come to believe that the commandments function as a litmus test one must pass and maintain to gain membership and good standing within the faithful. Yet, I think such an approach to the commandments misses their true purpose and value entirely.

     I’m sure you remember the ten commandments were given by God through Moses to God’s chosen people, Israel. Look closely at what I just wrote…”given to God’s chosen people.” They were not given as a test for entry into that people or as a way to earn chosen status. No, they were given by God to God’s already-chosen people as a gift. The gift of the commandments served to teach the people how to be in community and how to maintain healthy relationships. Or, in other words, how to love one’s neighbor.

     The same is true for us Christians. The ten commandments are not “do these 10 and you will be saved — or else,” but are gifts to all of us who are on this path of becoming fully-alive human beings. Thus, the ten commandments (call them practices) form us in an ethic for serving our neighbor and, as we will see tomorrow, also serve as guides for how to love our neighbor.

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Does it change your perception of the ten comandments to think of them as gifts or practices rather than commands? If so, how?

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Photo of mural created by artist Tim Mossholder.