Have you heard about the judge who wants to put the Ten Commandments on the wall of his courtroom? The judge felt that if everyone just followed the Ten Commandments he would have a much easier time of it. If everyone just followed those ten simple rules, he would be able to retire early and go fishing.

The judge is not alone. The Ten Commandments are very popular these days. Or at least it is popular to quote them. There are a lot of people now who think that the problem--the country's problem, the world's problem, the problem with kids, the problem with marriage, THE problem--is that we have lost our ability to follow rules. Rules in general, and the Ten Commandments in particular.

In this view, the most important thing about the Ten Commandments is that they are rules. Very special rules--given by God through Moses to Israel and thus to us, Israel's spiritual descendants. Rules about what seem to be very basic human behaviors: killing, stealing, lying, things like that. But rules. Some people, those who like living by rules, or think others should, like this notion. Other people, who think that rules are oppressive and should be bent, or even broken, don't like it so much.

I want to tell you a love story. Once upon a time there were some people. They were slaves. They lived in a foreign land not their own. God liked these people. One of the reasons was that God had promised their ancestors that God would watch over them. At the moment, the people needed some watching over for sure.

God sent a man to free these slave people. He did, through persuasion and through some miraculous events and through trickery. The people got away, crossing a sea and ending up in a bleak desert. They wandered around for a long, long, long time. They got tired and hungry. And they wondered what they were doing in this stupid desert when they could be back at home, slaves but comfortable in a way.

The people had forgotten who they were. They forgot that they were people of God. Over the years of slavery they had forgotten who loved them. They forgot they were people of God, and that God--whose name was Yahweh--loved them.

They didn't know what to do. They didn't. They were wandering--in the desert and, more importantly, in their minds and their souls. They were lost. They didn't know what to do. I think this made God sad, for, as I said, God loved them.

So God stepped in and called to Moses--he was the man who had freed the slaves.. And God gave Moses some words. That's what is says in the Bible: words, not commandments. The words told the people who they were. It defined them, in a way.

In Colorado, in some places in the Northeast, and I'm sure in the Mid-west, they place tall poles with markers on them. During winter storms, there is no way to tell where the road is. Without those markers, all looks the same. You might wander forever. But with the markers, the road way is clear and the path known. In the same way, the words God said marked the path ahead. The Ten Commandments were not fences, but guides.

The Ten Commandments gave the people the assurance that God cared for them and that God cared what they did. And it gave them a method, a procedure, for living a life that God hoped for them to live. They were like a manual for living: for best results, do this and not this.

And they all lived, … Well not really happily ever after. But from that point on they lived with each other, Yahweh and Israel. The words were a gift to Israel.

We cannot understand the Ten Commandments without understanding that they are part of a story of liberation. They are central to the escape story of a slave people who hope to find a place of their own. The prolog to the commandments is this: “I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Yahweh is a liberator.

The Ten Commandments seem to be grouped in two parts, or two tablets. The first deals with the relationship God's people have with God. And the second deals with the relationship God's people have with people. But of course, you cannot separate one from the other so easily. Can we love God and hate people? Can we be good to people without leaning on God's strength?

The Ten Commandments are in many ways a political manifesto. Though embraced recently by people we call conservative, the Ten Commandments are radical. They come out of a radical liberation story, and they are radical now.

They are radical because they paint of picture of a certain way of life. They are radical because that picture they paint is at odds with the world in which Israel lived and in which we live today.

They are radical because the two tablets contain two strong and tough-minded ideas. The first is that God is in everything we do and that everything we do must include God. The second is that people are not instruments: that is, people must not be treated as things.

The world of Moses and the Israelites, was a fragmented world. There were lots of gods, and each had its own particular realm or field of work. They had the market divided up, so to speak.

In our world, it is not so much different, except we don't talk about it all in terms of gods. People live in realms: the business realm, the family realm, the religious realm, the realm of the courtroom, the realm of the streets, the realm of the schools. The realm you go to when you want some fun and the realm you go to when you are sick and dying.

Our world has a tendency to remove God as somehow inappropriate in much of people's lives. We like to make God either too big for the little stuff, or too divine for the earthy stuff, or too perfect for the worldly stuff. The world has a stake at putting God in a little corner of the world, safe and unsurprising.

In the world of the first tablet of the Ten Commandments, though, there is only one realm: God's realm. If the words of the first tablet are our markers, our user manual, then for us God has a place in all we do. There is no one who can say, keep that God-talk out of here. No one who can say “that's not God's issue.” If we see the world through the eyes of the first tablet, then everything is God's issue.

I'm not much of a fan of business jargon. It is almost as bad as church jargon. I'm especially not a fan of the term “human resources,” which used to be called personnel. It is not that human resource people don't do valuable work. They do: they set up benefits packages and go to bat when there are workplace conflicts, among other things. It is the notion that, from the point of view of the business, people are resources. Other business resources are capital (money), buildings, patents and such. These are instruments of production. Human resources are people who are seen as instruments.

It is easy for us to see people as instruments. We speak of people as resources, they are a market, they are consumers. But it is not only business that talks that way. People are votes, people are constituents, taxpayers. People are criminals, or immigrants. People are prospects for evangelism. In the extreme case people become nations or races. Or causalities. Collateral damage. People become like things.

But if the words of the second tablet are our markers, our user manual, then for us people are never things. Each of these commandments is personal. The “you” in each of them is singular. And the content of each is the relationship each person has with each other person. How each of us treats each single other person.

The judge in the courthouse thinks, I guess, that following the Ten Commandments should be easy. But he's a judge; he should know it is not. He sees evidence of it every day.

It is not easy because the Ten Commandments are not just rules, even difficult ones. It is not easy because the Ten Commandments don't fit well with our world. In our world, God is tiny and humans are resources.

The Ten Commandments, along with the laws in the Torah that follow them, define a new world. They describe, as one person wrote, a vision of social possibility, an ideal creation. A world in which God permeates all of life and in which no person is more important than any other.

Sometimes it seems, doesn't it, that we in these times are wandering in the desert. That we are lost. That we are ready to trade freedom for comfort. And sometimes I think that we, like the people of Israel, have forgotten who we are. Like Israel, we don't know what to do.

So maybe we should post those radical words. Not because they are the right rules to follow to stay out of jail. But because they remind us of who we are, and of the world that might still be.