Delivered on Sunday 03 February 2008 in St George's Chapel

Exodus 34:29-end

I have to say this was a hard sermon to put together. They are all difficult in their own way but this one posed very special problems. I felt like I was stuck somewhere between a rock and a hard place. First I looked at the few verses from Paul but concluded that I simply didn't have the energy. It's dense stuff - isn't it? - and I knew I just didn't have it in me. Then I looked at the story from Exodus and my heart sank - glowing faces, veils, fasting and commandments. But worst of all reading this little passage is like being told the punch line of a joke but never hearing what went before. So which was it to be the rock or the hard place? The hard place, the passage from Exodus. But if we are going to make sense of it at all, we will have to retrace the story; we will have to call to mind the story as it is recorded in the second half of Exodus.

At the beginning of Chapter 19, the people of Israel arrive at Mount Sinai. They have seen all the plagues, they have crossed the wilderness and here at the foot of Mount Sinai they are about to engage in a covenant with God. To some extent this was a new covenant but more accurately it was a development of the old covenants made with Noah and with Abraham. With this covenant, however, there was to be a distinct difference. This time round the covenant would definitely cut both ways: God would look after his people; but his people would have to follow his commandments. So it is that Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the two tablets of stone on which were written God's 10 words, words that would become foundational for the ethical life of God's people. He was up there, mind you, for a long time - forty days and forty nights.

While he was away the people hanging around at the bottom of the mountain were becoming increasingly frustrated. We know how bad it is to have a train delay of hour or so, but even in the ancient world a delay of forty days was worthy of a line to the relevant watchdog. Out of sheer frustration an approach was made to Aaron - Moses brother: let's gather all our gold jewellery together and make for ourselves a golden calf. If Moses isn't coming back, lets create a god for ourselves. But Moses was coming back. Actually he was on his way down right there and then, and when he saw what the people had done he was so angry he threw down the tablets of stone and they smashed into smithereens. Not only had the people waited forty days for God's commands, now those same commandments lay at their feet irredeemably shattered.

Well they patched things up, one way or another, and Moses headed off once again up Mount Sinai. At this point he was probably contemplating the arduous challenge of getting another set of stone tablets down the mountain - no doubt he will have made a mental note that an anger management class ought to be arranged back at base. Anyway he lumbered upwards. And sure enough he received a further two stone tablets. And after a further forty days and forty nights he made his way back down to the camp. And that's where we join the story. We hear of Moses returning and how he told the gathered assembly about the commandments, and that while he spoke to the people his face shone - there could be no doubt but these really were words coming directly from God.

Now I have greatly simplified the story. I have especially ignored the fact that as the story has it the commandments on the second set of stones were nothing like those on the first. The second lot sound a good deal more churchy: they have to do with feast days, pilgrim feasts and sacrifices. They also include a commandment that I can safely guess few of us will have been tempted to break: 'Do not boil a kid in its mother's milk'. There are all kinds of reasons why the story gets told in this way, but what is important and genuinely obvious from the Old Testament as a whole, is that the Ten Commandments, more or less as we know them, are what were really at stake. For example, the book of Deuteronomy is, in effect, a detailed commentary and practical legal framework developed out of these ten seemingly simple instructions.

I say 'seemingly simple' because I think in reality they are far from simple. That was the case then, and it is still the case now. They pose a serious challenge to our liberal democratic society and in particular to a Church that over several generations has preferred etiquette to ethics. They were not simple from the start. Originally these were not understood so much as simple commandments as a set of values from which to construct a world view. Let me take just one commandment as an example. 'Thou shalt do no murder.' Clearly that is not a simple instruction. What does it mean? Thou shalt not kill an innocent? Thou shalt never kill? Thou shalt not kill even in war? There is a good deal in Deuteronomy that attempts to work out an answer to these questions, but what we can legitimately claim is that the instruction 'thou shalt not kill' is, at its root, an expression of the view that all human beings are made in the image of God. It is here that so-called human rights become enshrined in the core values of Judaism and as a consequence in Christianity. What seems a simple instruction is actually the creation of a value. So too with each of the commandments. What's happening here is this: moral space is being furnished with carefully chosen values.

And so to the Church. The Anglican Church has a reluctance to lay down moral instructions; typically the Church prefers to give information and leave the actual decision to individual conscience. It is easy to understand why. In a liberal society primacy is given to the individual, so it's important to allow people their rightful choice. When we furnish our houses we do so to our own taste. By analogy, when we furnish our moral space we should also be allowed our own individual choice. That's why there is this appeal to conscience. But conscience is a strange thing. Unless you believe that there is actually a part of you that is something called a conscience, then what you really mean by conscience is the manner in which you react to certain patterns of behaviour. Over time you have learnt values. When you feel those values threatened you will say that your conscience has been pricked. And that is all well and good. But when the Church is making an appeal to individual conscience it is also making the assumption that there are values that clearly flow in the very blood of Anglicanism. But are there? And what are they?

What I am appealing for is a radical look at the Church's ethical guidance. To mutter a few facts and claim that it is up to the individual's conscience is not helpful in the context of a liberal democracy. No-one knows where the Church stands or indeed if it has the solidity to stand anywhere. I'm not looking for a whole list of instructions. But I am looking for what the Israelites received - guidance in the form of moral values. I am looking for values with which to furnish our moral dwelling. For this is an enterprise we share; we live it out together as part of the people of God. It is a communal venture of desire - the desire to know and enact the will of God in the living of life.