Exodus 20:1-4, 7-10a, 12-20
October 4, 2026
The Good Place is the first
and only television series I’ve ever watched that included Moral Philosophy and
the study of ethics in in the foundation of the show. I don’t want to give too
much away, but I can give you a few main points. The premise of the show is
that when you die, you wind up in either the Good Place or the Bad Place. And we
reach either the Good Place or the Bad Place by a calculation of points. Every
day of our lives, we have the opportunity to earn or lose points. We earn
points by doing good things and being good people. We lose points by doing bad
things and being bad people. It’s that simple, or at least it should be. The
rest of the series is one twisty, turny, roller coaster ride as to why the
points system is not as simple as it seems. That’s where Moral Philosophy and
ethics comes in.
In the first episode, one of the
show’s main characters, Eleanor Shellstrop, wakes up in The Good Place. She
meets Michael, her guide to her part of The Good Place. One of Eleanor’s first
questions of Michael is who got it right. Which one of the religions got heaven
and hell correct? Michael tells her that all of the world’s religions got some
of the afterlife right. But he shows her a picture hanging on his wall of a
young man in the 1970’s. The young man is Doug Forcett. In the 1970’s, when he
was in an, let’s call it an altered state, he had a vision of the afterlife and
he described it with a 92 % accuracy. This made him an afterlife hero, which is
why his picture is hanging on the wall.
In a later episode, we meet Doug
Forcett in person. He is an older man living in Calgary, and his perception of
the afterlife when he was in his 20’s changed him – but not for the better. He
spent the rest of his life so scared of losing points that he gave
self-sacrifice a bad name. He would take care of any injured animal. Any
injured animal, domestic or wild, even if caring for that animal meant his own
life was put in danger. A kid who lived near him came and taunted him on a
daily basis, making mean requests of him because he knew that Doug would do
them. Doug was so terrified of not earning enough points to get into the good
place, he ended up living in relative isolation, unable to be in relationships,
and unable to experience any happiness or joy. He was controlled by fear, which
does not make for much of a life.
The points system in The Good Place
may be an invention, but it resonated with how I understood God for a long
time. When I was a kid, I was convinced that any mistake I made would bring
disaster down upon my head. When I was four, I was with my parents in the
grocery store. The store had inexpensive paperback novels for sale near the
checkout lane. I picked up one of the books and put it in a grocery bag. My mom
liked to read, so maybe she would like to read one of these books. When we got
home and my parents discovered it, they naturally questioned me. I was
terrified. I knew that I had done something wrong, and I knew that I would be
punished. But as scared as I was of being punished by my parents and the
prospect of going to jail, I was even more scared of being punished by God. If
I were in The Good Place, I would definitely have lost points.
You see God was confusing to me. In
Sunday school we learned that God in Jesus was our loving shepherd. He took
little children into his arms and blessed them. But we also learned that God
was always watching us, and if we ever made a mistake, if we ever put one toe
out of line, then God’s foot would come down from the clouds and stomp us like
a bug.
I want to stop for a moment and
defend my early religious teachers. I don’t remember any of them ever using the
image of a foot stomping on a bug to describe God. But that is the impression I
had. And whether I would have admitted it or not, I carried that impression
with me well into adulthood. What helped to reinforce that impression of God?
The Ten Commandments.
To be fair, it wasn’t just the Ten
Commandments themselves that gave me the idea that God was waiting to stomp me
out of existence. It was the story around the giving of the commandments that
scared me half to death too. If you look at the passages building up to our
verses from Exodus, you will read that it took three days of preparation for
the Israelites to be ready to hear these words given by God to Moses. On the
third morning, there was thunder and lightning. The mountain of God was covered
in thick smoke. From out of nowhere a trumpet blared so loudly that it made
every person waiting in the camp tremble and shake.
This would have terrified me as a
kid, and I’m not crazy about it as an adult either. But this colored my
association with the Ten Commandments. It is The Law, and it is designed to
keep us in line. Or else …
But was it?
I don’t want to tell you how old I
was and how long I had been in ministry when I began to wonder if God didn’t
create the Ten Commandments as a club to hammer the people into submission,
which is what I’d always thought. Maybe, just maybe, God gave the people the
Ten Commandments as a gift. A gift. God gave them as a gift to help the people,
who were being formed into a community, as a way to be in community, to be in
relationship with God and with each other.
When I teach the Ten Commandments to
confirmation classes, I encourage the young people to notice the structure of
them. They begin by first talking about how we are to be in relationship with
God. God has brought the people out of slavery in Egypt. Our God is a
liberating God, so don’t create idols because worshipping those idols will make
you captives all over again. What idols do we worship today that hold us
captive? Money, power, busyness?
And what about not making wrongful
use of God’s name? Is this about swear words or is it about using God’s name to
justify evil, to excuse harm, to support the oppression of others? How much of
the evil done in the world throughout history and today is done in the name of
the Lord? And before we point fingers at other religions, we need to turn those
same fingers toward ourselves. Every religion is guilty of this. Every religion
continues to be guilty of this.
Then there is the command to keep
the sabbath. Is the sabbath about restriction or is about rest? In the story of
creation, God rested on the seventh day. God rested. Shouldn’t we rest too? And
shouldn’t we allow the rest of others, other people, animals, creation itself? Instead
of rest, though, we have turned sabbath keeping into another list of rules and
regulations. Or we ignore sabbath altogether and believe that constant busyness
proves our worth as humans.
I’m not going to explicate every
commandment but looking at the rest of them, we see that they are about being
in relationship with others. Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t break
relationship, don’t be envious about what others have. Honor the people who
have loved you into who you are now. In the gospels Jesus summarized them with
this same structure. Love God. Love one another as you love yourselves. The
commandments are about relationship – with God and with one another – and I
think they are a gift.
Jesus also taught that his coming
was the fulfillment of the Law. He didn’t talk about overturning it or making
it obsolete. He talked about fulfilling it. Jesus, as the divine incarnate,
showed us what it meant to be human, what it meant to be in relationship with
God and with other people. Jesus showed us what it meant to love neighbor as
self. Jesus exemplified the gift that is the Law.
And it seems to me that when Jesus
had run-ins with the religious authorities, which is the context of our gospel
passage this morning, it was to try and show them that they took the Law God
gave them as a gift and turned it into a weapon to be used against those over
whom they held power and authority. It was not God who made the commandments
into a club to wield against the people. It was the people who did that. And we
still do it.
We still try to use the
commandments, the Law, not as a way to build relationship, but as a way to
force submission. We use it not as a gift but as a hammer. And when it is used
as a hammer, it builds walls between us instead of tearing them down. When we
use it as a hammer it pushes people away from God instead of drawing them near.
If Jesus tried to tell the religious professionals that they had lost the plot
when it came to the Law, then I suspect he would tell us the same thing. We get
the letter of the Law, but we never quite capture its Spirit. The Law was meant
to be a gift, to build relationship, to create community. And we need that gift
more than ever, because our world is one of broken relationships. And that
brokenness reveals itself in small ways and large. It reveals itself in harm
toward others, toward creation, toward ourselves and toward God.
I think it is fitting that we think
of God’s gift of The Law on this day. Because today is World Communion Sunday.
Today is a day when we emphasize our relationships, not just with one another
in this place and in this community, but with people all over the world. Today,
people in every context and culture, will gather at the table and take the
bread and drink from the cup and remember Jesus and what he lived for and what
he died for and who he died for. And we all will remember that in him death is
not the end but the beginning. We are a resurrection people. And resurrection
is not just something that happens in the sweet by and by but in the now. When
relationships are built and rebuilt, when we extend the grace that has been
given to us, when we forgive as we are forgiven, when we see the Law not as a
hammer but as a gift, we participate in resurrection.
We have been given a gift. We are
called to love God and to love one another and to love ourselves. It is a gift.
It is the good news. Thanks be to God.
Let all of God’s children say,
“Alleluia!”
Amen.
