July 31, 2022
Exodus 20: 17

I have friends and former colleagues who teach marketing and advertising at the college in Sudbury and I really hope that they aren’t listening or reading this online this morning.

When I worked as a journalist, the newsroom folks always considered advertising a necessary evil … after all it paid the bills, but you always had this nagging sense that advertising was a little on the shady side.

One of the basic goals of marketing and advertising … is to turn a person’s want into a person’s need… to move them from I want a 75-inch television to I need a 75-inch television. 

In essence, advertisers try to enflame a person’s desires so that they feel they cannot live without whatever the item they’re selling.

In a sense, they foster dissatisfaction with one’s life.

They want a person to buy with their hearts rather than with their heads … because when you think about it … spending three grand on a television might not be the smartest moves. But the heart wants what the heart wants.

Today is the final day that we’ll spend with the Ten Commandments this summer.

When we started this series, it had already been three months since the freed people had left bondage in Egypt.

They had journeyed across the wilderness … nourished by God along the way. Now, they stand in the desert at the base of Mount Sinai. God’s holiness and power terrify the people and cause them to tremble just as the mountain trembles from the thunder and trumpets.

On the summit, God tells Moses to remind the people of all that God had accomplished for them and to tell the people that God will make a covenant with them … an agreement that, if they keep up their end of it, would make them God’s treasured people forever. 

God gives Moses ten commandments … 10 moral guidelines … for the behaviours that will mark the priestly kingdom … the holy community that God intends for them to become. These commandments are to guide how the people are to live … how they are to relate to each other and to God. 

The commandments are to give shape to a person’s life.

We’ve heard the commandments not to place other gods or idols before God … not to kill … to honour your parents … and so on. 

The commandments are the means for the people to carry out their roles of furthering the cause of justice and good order in the world and over creation … responsibilities that we too assume as God’s treasured people of faith.

The people are to follow the commandments because that is the expected response to being in relationship.

Still, it’s probably a fair question to ask:

What do a treasured people actually treasure?

It’s a question that lies behind the final two commandments … the two we’re looking at this morning.

In our tradition, coveting is so important that it is the only commandment that bears repeating. The final two commandments are … do not covet your neighbour’s home and do not covet your neighbour’s wife.

In the context of these commandments, home means more than just a building … it means everything within the property … the entire household … possessions … slaves and even the relationships between the people who live there.

Coveting your neighbour’s wife can disrupt lives throughout a community.

Since the commandments are guides for right relationships with God and neighbour, then it’s clear that coveting is a major threat to such relationships.

Coveting fills a person’s heart with desire … desires that can ruin relationships and that place focus on the accumulation of possessions, so much so that there isn’t room for anything else.

Clearly, problems begin when we want what belongs to others or what someone else has. A heart’s desire carries incredible power.

It can preoccupy our days … become the motivation for our actions and pull us away from our call to love God and love our neighbour. It can pull us away from a peace-filled heart.

Coveting means we are unsatisfied and far from enjoying the contentment that marks life in the holy community that God calls the people into.

So perhaps we can consider what we desire most … are there things that clutter our own hearts … what do we covet? Is there something that keeps our hearts from fully loving God and our neighbour? And what does this coveting nature cost us?

Has jealously over a neighbour’s possession caused you to work longer hours at the expense of spending time with your family? Rather than be happy for someone else who’s made a big purchase, are we jealous of them?

It’s easy to see how the desire to have the largest, fanciest house or the most fully loaded car … keeping up with Jones is one way to view it … how this can lead to sleepless nights, chronic unhappiness and anxiety over meeting obligations and paying bills.

A heart that doesn’t covet is a heart that is content. 

It’s hard to love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind … when all that other stuff is clogging your heart and the arteries of your life.

Coveting may be good fuel source for the economy of the world, but it has no place in the holy community that is formed through God’s promise to with people … a promise … that Jesus extended to others outside the confines of temple life and Jewish society.

Jesus took all of the people’s sins … all their covetous nature … upon himself on the cross and cleared the way for hearts to be filled with grace… with God’s love for all.

On the mountain, God was pretty clear … God says “DO NOT COVET!” … AT ALL … and he says it to a people who have the clothes on their backs … maybe a tent to protect them from the chill of the night or the searing desert sun … and small amounts of food to sustain them during the journey.

Do not covet … God tells Moses to instruct the people. In other words, you have all you need. Can we say the same? Can our hearts be content?

The final two commandments call us into some soul-searching … more than any of the others do. That’s what happens with matters of the heart … and that is what the ninth and tenth commandment deals with … our hearts. We are called to know our hearts.

We are called to continually search our hearts to find the things that keep us from being content with what we have and eliminating our desires for what others possess or the blessings they enjoy.

The final two commandments direct us toward loving the right things in the right ways … the people around us and the God who has given us the gift of grace through Jesus.

And that is all that should fill our hearts.

AMEN