“The Ten Commandments: Love Your Neighbor” Exodus 20:12-16

 It is no secret that one of the pastors who I greatly admired was Fred Rogers. Yes, Mister Rogers from Mister Rogers Neighborhood who was an ordained Presbyterian minister. I have a colleague who shares my admiration for Mister Rogers - and when asked why, it is because of his emphasis on neighbors. Loving your neighbor. I recently told this colleague that I found a new novelty item for the neighborhood that says this “you are not acting like the person Mister Rogers knew you could be.”

Which has been true well before Mister Rogers was called or he was even born. Throughout time, people have not been acting in ways that they could be. Ways that they were created to be. Which is why we needed (and still need) the second half of the Ten Commandments. 

The Ten Commandments were so sacred to the people of Israel that they were placed in the ark of the covenant. Now there were lots of different understandings around the purpose of the ark of the covenant. It symbolized the presence of God. It went before the Israelites into battle. It was present at times of worship. But the ark and the items continued within were a reminder to the people that their lives, their whole, everyday lives, were lived before a holy God. 

Yet, we are not God, so we need life to have structure in order to help us to have a container in order to live in a way that is pleasing to God. There is a woman in our parish who always reminds me of the Scripture of Psalm 16:6 that states that God has made our boundary lines fall in pleasant places. While we often try to rebel against boundaries, they are truly a gift from God. And in that gift there is both abundance and blessing.

The problem is what we have never been very good at boundaries or being obedient to the One who gives them to us. Think back to Genesis 3, in the garden, where Adam and Eve were told that they could eat from any tree in the garden except the tree that was in the middle of the garden - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There was a clear boundary. But the serpent confused the boundary line and its meaning, by telling Eve that the consequence would not be death if she ate from it, but instead she would be given the gift of open eyes. A decision was made. Consequences even worse than death came as Adam and Eve were dismissed from the garden. And a path of human disobedience and personal willfulness began to dominate our story. 

But God still did not give up on us. As he is forming this new community in this new promised land he gave ten commandments to act as boundary lines around how we are to relate to God and to one another. The problem is that we have made the ten commandments into the ten suggestions or the ten moral principles instead of actually viewing them as the boundary lines that they are intended to be.

Lest we think that the Ten Commandments just guide our Jewish brothers and sisters, I remind you of what Jesus said when asked what the most important commandment was. He couldn’t give just one. Instead he said, “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” In this statement, Jesus ties together the two tablets of the commandments and tells us to write them on our hearts and live them out in our lives. 

Which we still need today. Because we are not always good at common life together. In fact, we can be downright sinful. The Ten Commandants are not meant to be a gold star that we wear as a badge of righteousness, proclaiming that of course we can keep them. No, they expose our sin and then try to restrain it as well. Boundaries. Boundaries that offer life. 

What happens when we don’t view the second half of those commandments properly? Well first, we forget that the whole loving our neighbor thing flows out of the love we have for God. Kids get this a lot better than adults, I’m afraid. I’m big on using images or items that you can hold in order to communicate Gospel truths. So I have told kids in the past that the cross tells us about God’s love in the vertical portion - God sent his own son to give his life for us as an act of live. But the hortizonal part of the cross, that reminds us that we are to share that love with the world in how we interact with our neighbors. Because God loved us, we love others. 

But instead, we get caught up in judging people. Or arguing. I’m in the middle of VBS at my new church. We meet with kiddos once a week over a month timeframe in order to proclaim the Good News. At the first planning meeting I attended, when things were already well under way, the organizer said something that stayed with me. Do we really wonder why kids treat each other so poorly today when the adults they have modeling behavior for them, on TV and in person, aren’t showing them a different way?

And I’m sorry to say friend, that statement can be just as true of Christ followers as anyone else. We don’t always get the loving your neighbor thing right. 

So we have this covenant that yes, binds us, but it also sets us free to live as the people of God in a away that is so different than the world. In a way that makes us different. That allow us to love differently, not out of our own strength, but out of God’s. Not to point to our own goodness and moral fortitude, but to point to the salvation that has changed us. Not to build ourselves up, but to build up the community by speaking the truth in love. 

A few weeks ago, a fellow pastor and sister in Christ posted something on Facebook that resonated with my soul. Now Facebook and the internet at large, can be a place that destroys community. It can quickly become a place where we do not love our neighbor well. This sister posted a statement about how we should be guided by what is Christ-like. In how we approach life and in how we live life. And I found myself thinking “that! That’s it!” I want to live a life that is Christ-like in how I love my neighbor. And that is what I appreciated so much about Mister Rogers. Even through a TV screen he was able to make strangers into neighbors because of his care and how he loved with the love of Christ. 

At the end, the commandments that were uttered from the very mouth of God about what it meant to be community and love your neighbor well, are just as needed today. Not as a suggestion. Or for kindness’s sake. But because without them, we don’t put our neighbor first. We do not love with the love of God. We are prone to go our own way. 

So are we going to live as people within our boundaries given by God and see them as pleasant and creating a place of abundance or are we going to rebel against them? Are we going to live differently because of the love of Christ or are we just going to look like the rest of the world in how we communicate with and treat other people? Are we going to have a Christ-like heart that guides all we do and say or are we going to let our own words and thoughts take over?

Maybe, just maybe, the statement that we need is not “you are not acting like the person Mister Rogers knew you could be” but “you are not acting like the person Christ died for you to be.” Let us be different church. For the sake of the Kingdom. Amen.