Sermon for September 22nd, 2013
Matthew 22:34-40
34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Deuteronomy 5:15-18
15Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. 16 Honour your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. 17 You shall not murder. 18 Neither shall you commit adultery.
You Shall Not Commit Adultery
Well, here it is, the sermon everyone's been waiting for since we started our series on the Ten Commandments: You shall not commit adultery. The seventh commandment. Some of you have already told me you were curious to hear what I was going to say about this one. To be honest, I was curious to hear what I was going to say about this one. First Presbyterian Church in Midland, Texas did a sermon series on the Ten Commandments awhile back--they have four pastors who take turns preaching, and I understand they actually drew straws to see who got stuck with this commandment.
Why is this one so hard? Adultery has to do with sex, and in our culture, we're pretty uncomfortable talking about sex--although we certainly have no problem "communicating" sex in our culture, through our movies and TV shows, magazines, fashions, music. But I'm not going to go on a long rant against all those things in our culture. Actually, I hope to make the point that the seventh commandment has far less to do with sex than we tend to assume. But to do that, we are going to talk about sex--what it is and what it was to the people who first received this commandment, how our view of it has evolved through the years, and what that means for us today.
But first...to break the tension in the room: There was an old Roman Catholic Priest, who got so tired in confession of hearing his members confess to adultery, that he said from the pulpit one Sunday: If I hear one more person confess to adultery, I'll quit! Well, his congregation genuinely liked him, and they didn't want to see him go. But they didn't want to give up their adulterous ways, either. So they came up with a code word: Someone who had committed adultery would say in confession that he or she had "fallen." This worked well for many years, until the priest died and a new priest came to town. After the new priest had been there for a month, he came to see the Mayor, and he was very concerned. "Mayor, you have to do something about the sidewalks in this town--people tell me they are falling down everywhere!" The mayor laughed, realizing that no one had told the new priest about the code word. Before he had a chance to explain, the priest interrupted him: "I don't know what you're laughing about; your wife fell three times this morning already!"
