Summary 

The Ten Commandments often trigger resistance because we don't like being told what to do, yet the first commandment reveals something profound about worship and relationship. Everyone worships something, and what you worship gives you your laws for living - directing your paths, controlling your time, and shaping your decisions. A god is anything we love, serve, devote energy to, listen to for direction, and allow to control us.

While we may not have shrines to ancient deities, we still worship modern versions of the same forces they represented. Aphrodite's domain of love and pleasure, Juno's realm of family and status, and Mars' territory of power and conflict still dictate our lives today. We serve the gods of money, sex, work, sports, and even family when they become ultimate concerns.

Transcript

 Lord, would we find that the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul, the statutes of the Lord are pure, reviving the simple. And Lord, we find that in this season it is a joy to look at your commandments, to hear that you shall have no other gods before me before you, and that we would eagerly cast aside all the other things that call for our love and our service and our devotion and put you first.
God, would you move in us in this time. Would our devotion and our love for you increase? Would our approach to your word and your commandments be one of delight and joy? God teach us now we say with Samuel long ago, your people are listening. In Jesus name.
Amen. All right, everybody worships. And what I want to suggest to you is that what you worship gives you your laws for living.
What you worship directs your paths, directs your life. So last week we began this series, this Eastertide on the Ten Commandments. And I said, and I know that as soon as I say that we're going to be looking at the Ten Commandments, there's sort of a reticence when we say, let's look at law together, there's going to be this sort of visceral reaction that is generally opposed to that idea against it. And part of this is simply because we don't like being told what to do.
Some of this is because of rebellious hearts. I suggest it to you. Some of it is because churches often lead with law and what you can and cannot do and do and don't and all that instead of love and grace. That is true. And some of this is because of the ubiquitous, widespread hypocrisy that was not just true of the religious folk of Jesus Day.
Right? That's wasn't just true of the hypocrites that Jesus called out, but it's still true. It has been true of so many Christians throughout time. Which is to say there are understandable reasons for the reaction that we have.
Another reason that I want to suggest to you is because we often pit law and love against one another. Kind of think of them as like this, polar, polar opposites.
We might prefer to hear Jesus call or summary of the law as loving the Lord your God with all your heart and mind, soul and strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself. And this also is understandable. But while it may be understandable, Jesus is always upholding the law, this is not one jot and tittle, not the small little marks are going to be taken away from it. He's always setting the law before us. As something that is good and right.
And actually one of the fundamental truths of Christian faith is that Jesus lives it perfectly on our behalf. He is the great law Abider.
So last week I suggested to you that the only answer to this sort of conundrum that we find within ourselves, right, this call, well, this reticence to sort of say, ah, law yuck. And at the same time, the call to love it, to find it sweet and more desirable than gold and tastier than honey, so we're told, is to look upon the one who has done the law keeping on our behalf, who has finished the work of salvation for us. And so that's why the whole beginning of the Ten Commandments is I am the Lord your God, who brought brought you out of the land of slavery. Look at what I have done for you. It is my action, first and foremost.
The Ten Commandments themselves were given in this context of being brought out from slavery. And it's this new life, not a life of slavery. So the Ten Commandments aren't given to enslave, but to instruct in right living, reflecting the God who has done our salvation.
So our meditation on the law now happens in the context of Good Friday having happened, of Christ's finished work on the cross being complete, of the empty tomb being empty, of God saying new life, of the perfect law keeping, Lord conquering, the effects of rebellion against God, Satan, sin and death. For us, the resurrection, what I also suggested to you, the resurrection changes us. Resurrection changes us. God's salvific work in the Old Testament changed the people of God. That was what the law was to say.
Here is how you now live. How do we live in light of God's salvation For us, who God is and what God has done determines who we are and what we are to do, what we are to be about. And so it makes sense that the very first commandment has to do with who's your God, who's your God?
You shall have no other gods before me. Who do you look to love and serve? If the answer to our conundrum with the law is what God has done, the answer to sort of our question of worship has to do with relationship, okay? And I want to suggest to you, I want to consider this first commandment, which is you shall have no other gods before me. By suggesting that there's actually two relationships that are on offer here, okay?
There's the relationship of other gods and then there's the you and me, other gods and you and me. So first thing I want to Consider is just the idea of other gods. And I think, as I, as I say that, and as maybe as you hear this first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. You think of other gods. My.
Well, I think it's important that I acknowledge that probably very few of you, my guess is none of you have shrines in your basement to baal, to, I don't know, Allah, to Vishnu or Shiva.
No. Okay, I didn't think so. When you think of other gods, it wouldn't surprise me at all if what first comes to your mind are some of the ancient gods. Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Juno, Mars. I think that's such an antiquated way of engaging with the world.
Maybe what comes to your mind is other religions. And so other gods brings to your mind, yes, Allah maybe, or the Shinto Kami, something so far off from your experience.
Of course, when you think of it like this, this commandment in some ways becomes a non issue. Right. So no other gods before you're like. Well, I mean, what? Okay, all right.
You're rarely thinking of those other gods that I mentioned. Don't give them the time of day.
You aren't going to the temples of Aphrodite or Juno or Mars and offering sacrifices, are you? No, you're not. You aren't probably lighting incense to Brahma. Not likely.
Probably. My guess is none of you in this room frequent the Buddhist center up on Wiconisco in Uptown. How many of you knew it was there? Yeah, okay, a couple of you.
It's not likely that these things cross your mind. And yet I began this sermon with this idea that everybody worships each one of you. But think of this, okay, Aphrodite was the God of love and lust and beauty and pleasure and procreation. Juno was the God of marriage, of childbirth, of women and statecraft.
Juno is the God, sorry, Mars is the guardian God over fields, livestock, crops, that which sustains you. He's also the God of war.
It's not too hard to make the connection, is it? It's not too hard to make the connection. It's not just that the ancient world had many gods, and that is so silly in our minds, but that the ancient gods that they had are the very gods that we still have. The very things that we still hold up as that which gives us purpose and orients our time and our lives. What is a God after all?
What is a God other than that which would. Which we love, which we serve, which we devote our energy and attention to, which we listen to, to direct us, which we allow to control us. I mean, yes, a God is what we worship. There are certain acts of worship for different kinds of gods.
But what you worship is what you love is what controls us. It dictates our lives, our time and our energy. Again, one of the things I want to try to stress this morning is that a God is that which we allow to give us the laws by which we live by.
Who gives you your law? How do you orient your life?
Of course, today in our world, the lawgiver is most often ourselves, right? We're our own gods. Self actualization is our goal. Self determination is our goal. It is the age old sin ever from since the garden of placing ourselves in the role of God.
We determine how we spend our time, our money, how we engage with our bodies, how we engage with others. Don't tell us what to do, we think. And of course today in our world, of course, another one that dictates our lives, that gives us our law, is others. Just the others about us. We are in a world that is so fraught with anxiety and there's all kinds of reasons for this and many of them are very, very understandable.
But you probably have heard, hopefully you've heard by now that anxiety went crazy high after what was introduced in 2009. The like button. Facebook's like button. You can chart. Anxiety goes right up.
Which is to say that we are so desirous of the approval of others, We're paralyzed with worry, which is what anxiety often is. A paralyzing worry over the approval of our friends, maybe of our family, our perfectionistic father, our hypercritical mother.
These things dictate how we live. Often they dictate the clothes we wear, the shows we attend, the food that we eat, all of it. They give us our law for living. So it's not hard to make a connection between the ancient gods and the gods of our own day. What I'm suggesting to you is in fact most time they're the same.
It's the same thing for us. There's still the great gods of sex and shekels, money, stomach. There's still the great gods of pleasure and possessions and position and power. There are still the same gods of football, sports.
Y' all didn't hear that? Of the firm, right? Our work. And of course the great God of family.
They're not far. These still dictate how we spend our time, what we look at, who we honor, what we do with our bodies and others bodies, how we spend our money, how we Use our words, how and what we desire. If you're wondering, all I did just then was translate the Ten Commandments into a different. Into different words. They still give us the Ten Commandments because what you worship invites you into a way of living.
What you worship orients your life, gives you a law for what you do.
There are all kinds of other gods. Let's not look down our noses at the ancient world thinking how passe, how immature. When we follow in their footsteps, everybody worships. And of course this is why David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, which I have quoted over the last 11 years probably three or four times I'm going to quote again, gave this at Kenyon College back in 2005. Here's what he says.
Here's something else that is true. In the day to day trenches of adult life, there's actually no such thing as atheism. There's no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship and an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual type thing to worship, be it JC by which he means Jesus Christ, be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money or things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we know all this stuff already.
It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables, the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. He says, worship power. You will feel weak and afraid and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship intellect, being seen as smart.
You will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out, and so on.
Everybody worships. It's true. Everybody worships. So his suggestion, it seems, is probably to lean into worshiping some of the big gods, the personal ones, he says that which is outside of you. And so he suggests, you know, JC or Allah or Yahweh or the wicked Mother Goddess.
Of course, this brings me to sort of the second point, the second relationships that is in this commandment shall have no other gods. Other gods. You shall have no other gods before me.
Which is to say that the commandment is inviting us into a personal relationship with the Creator, the you and me again. I suggested last week that there's a widespread idea that Christians should be led not by law, but by love. What I'm suggesting in a way to you today is that what you love ultimately dictates how you live the laws that you follow in your life.
I'm suggesting to you that what or who you worship always dictates your life. It always orients your life. And so you shall have no other gods before me is the foundation commandment from which the others kind of flow out of, which is also to say law and love are not so antithetical to one another.
What we're called to in the first commandment is a call to a personal relationship with the one true God.
So you and the me that is the foundation for all other living. So remember how the commandments began. We heard these again this morning. They began this way by saying, I am the Lord your God. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
Which is to say, I have a personal relationship with you. The Lord there is actually the covenant name for God, Yahweh, the way he reveals himself to his people. He says, I am in committed relationships with you. I'm in a covenant with you. He binds himself to his people.
There's love in this relationship. There is honor, there's service, there's caring for each other. He's saying, you and me, we're in this together. You can't have other gods. We are in this mutual relationship, the relationship that makes.
The relationships that make up our lives can think about this. We can break them in a couple. We can kind of categorize relationships, right? We can categorize them into the personal relationships and the impersonal relationships. It's kind of simple.
You know, your personal relationships are your friends and your family. You know, the I and you's and the impersonal relationships are the its, right? So you can think of these kinds of relationships like the relationship you have with your car or your microwave or your shoes or your clothes or, you know, all this kind of impersonal stuff, which is what we use for our convenience. We primarily use these things.
They help us express ourselves, you know, creatively, sometimes wonderfully, sometimes. They help us get from point A to point B.
They help us execute our plans in life, right? But they are fundamentally Things that we use.
And I'm suggesting to you this morning that is how gods work. The other gods that we place before the one true God.
You offer sacrifices to Aphrodite so that your sex life can be good. So using relationship, she takes from you, just as David Foster Wallace said, she takes from you. You worship Mars so that you can win the war with your wife or whatever.
And he takes uses you, you use him, he uses you. You pray to Juno so you can be married and have children. It's an instrumental thing. It's for a certain end. It's a using, it's an impersonal dynamic.
These gods are yous and they use you. This is of course what he was saying with regards to beauty and sexual allure and money and power and all the rest.
You use them and they take from you. Which is to say that false gods always dehumanize. They always do.
We know what this is like to handle other people for our convenience. And we know that it is wrong to do so with another person is to treat them as a thing, as an item. And yet the other gods, all other gods, call you into this way of being in the world. They do. It is intrinsic to who they are and what they are about.
And you know how wrong it is. You've probably been treated this way by other people, used for certain ends, used by your boss, used in a relationship, used by your parents for their own self sense of self worth. You know how wrong this is. And yet this is the call of any other God before the one true God who says, you and me, I am the Lord your God, this you and me, relationship with God, this I and you, relationship with God, this Yahweh, covenant making, relational building, God. This reality is what commends the first commandment and commends Christianity as opposed to any other way of living, any other God to orient how you live into the world.
What you worship gives you your laws for living. And any other God will invite you into a depersonalized, impersonal way of engaging in the world.
Every other God other than the one true God will invite you to live in a way that takes and takes and uses and uses. But the truth about Christianity is that the God of the Bible is the personal God, the you and me, the I am your God, the Lord your God who brought you out from slavery. And what does he do there at Sinai? He doesn't just give the ten Commandments, but he says, we're going to build a house here, I'm going to move into the neighborhood, you and me together, it's a relationship. There's no other God who claims both to be the creator of all things and to become part of his creation.
There's no other God who creates all things and then says, I'm going to take on flesh and move into the neighborhood. There is no other God. There's no other God that sees the brokenness of the world and says, I'm going to be broken for it because I desire not to use you, but you life with you.
There's no other God who creates all things and becomes one of us. There's no other God who loves the world so much that he gives his Son, that whoever believes in him shall have everlasting life with him. You see, the whole thing is God saying, I want to be with you. I'm the Lord, the covenant making God. It's not impersonal, but a personal relationship and a God that is committed to being with us.
There is no other God who is not just using us and we are not just using now. There is no other God who invites us into this kind of relationship, not so we can use them, but so that we can know them and love them and live with them. Easter, the Cross and the Resurrection this is part of what I'm suggesting in this series. The salvation story behind the Ten Commandments is I'm the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, right? There's this salvation and there's this relationship that is established.
And therefore there's this way of being in the world. That is what Easter is also doing. The Cross and the Resurrection are the backstory of life with God and therefore of how we live. If we've been raised with Christ, if we have been seek the things that are above where Christ is put on this relationship and the relationship, the you and me between us and God, the love that God has for us perfectly in Christ is what invites us into this life with this God and therefore means putting away all other gods which orient our time and our energy and our money and our emotions and all the rest.
It's true that we have a reticence to the commandments. And I think it's true that this reticence is answered by not not seeing that we have to do or don't do, or do or don't do. But we look upon the work of Christ and say, it is done, it is finished. I think it's also true though, that the answer to who or what we should worship can only be answered by saying who actually wants relationship with us, who doesn't just want to take from us? And who do we not just want to take from?
And the only answer I know of is this God, the one true God, the Creator, the covenant maker, the covenant keeper, who takes on flesh for us, who becomes one of us, walks among us, invites us to to call upon the Father as our Father.
Greater love has no one than this that he lay down his life for his friends. And this is the way that God interacts with you.
Not demanding you sacrifice all to him, but him hanging upon the cross being sacrificed for you. Greater love has no one than that he laid down his life for us. And therefore, brothers and sisters, let's have no other gods before Him. Amen. Amen.
Lord, when we are honest with ourselves, we can think of how much of our time and our energy and our honoring of some and not of others and the ways that we use others and covet from others and spend and all the rest is a reflection that we are. That our hearts are idol factories.
And we need this commandment to not have any other gods before you because we are so often placing other gods before you, other gods that give us our laws for living our ways of being in the world, our calls to action.
God, would we in this series, would we today see the beauty in these relational words? You and me, I and you. I'm the Lord, Yahweh, your God.
Jesus took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood, gives my life willingly for my friends.
God, I pray that we would see the beauty of a God who is relational, who dignifies persons.
It doesn't treat us as the it, and we don't treat as the it. We have a life together. God, I pray that this communion, this fellowship that we have with you would enliven our hearts and change our lives and therefore brighten the world.
God, I pray that we'd be a people that are putting other gods to death, find it our joy to live into this commandment. You shall have no other gods before me. And do all that we can to live into that reality, this commandment, this law that can produce great love. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

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