Service Date: 5 October, 2008

I wonder what sort of games you played when you were a child, or what sort of games you play now. Some people go for bridge, I know that; some for golf; some for snakes and ladders; some for chess, some for tennis. All very different sorts of games, but one thing they all have in common: they all have rules about how you play them. What's the rules for snakes and ladders?
• you take turns
• you find out with a dice how many squares you can go
• if you meet a ladder you go up
• if you meet a snake you go down
• whoever gets to the top of the board first has won.
I learned the rules for snakes and ladders quite young. Other games have more rules, and some of those I've not got the hang of yet - one of these days, if you're really brave, you can have a go at explaining the rules of bridge to me. But it doesn't matter how simple or difficult the rules are, they're still important. Why?
• because then it's fair to everyone
• because some of the fun is following the rules and still winning
• because then other people will look up to you for playing right
• because it's not the game if you haven't got the rules
But it's not just games that have rules. It's life too. When we live together, we have to agree how we'll do it, or we can't live together properly. And the reading Judith's read out for us shows us that from a long, long time ago, thousands of years ago, God gave us rules for the game called life that we all need to follow in order to live properly.
Moses and the people of Israel started playing by those rules, which we call the Ten Commandments, when they escaped from Egypt. Sometimes they broke the rules, and then life went wrong for them. But because they knew the rules, they knew how they should be living, and how to get back to living right when they'd gone wrong.
A lot of the Ten Commandments make sense to lots of other people, whether they know about God or not. It's a good idea to look after your parents; after all they've looked after you. Killing people, breaking the promise you've made to love someone, taking other people's things, lying and envying what other people have are obviously bad ways to live, because we wouldn't like it if someone did that to us.
But the first four commandments only make sense for people who love God: to put God first in our lives and not to let anything or anyone else be more important; to take God seriously and to put aside time every week to rest with God. When we break these rules, it may not be so obvious to start with. But they're there to help us play the game of loving God and being loved by God. And that's the best game in the world. Even better than snakes and ladders or bridge. So they're rules worth keeping, because the game's worth playing.

Hymns

R&S 496: Fight the good fight
R&S 674: God's perfect law
The Law of God is life to choose
R&S 447: I come with joy
R&S 373: Lord Jesus Christ

Sermon

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Philippians 3:4b-14
On the whole, I reckon we're a fairly law-abiding congregation at St Andrew's;
I could see a few heads nodding with approval during the theme introduction. Of course we need rules and regulations, to do things decently and in order - that's the Presbyterian way, isn't it? Yet ironically this very habit of keeping to the rules can also cause us problems.
When I was preparing this service, I came across a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough called the Last Decalogue, which some of you may already know:

Thou shalt have one God only;-who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When 'tis so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

That illustrated for me one of the dangers we run in placing too much emphasis on life as a game with rules: for the better we know the rules, the more tempting it can be for us to bend them somewhat, in an direction advantageous to ourselves. Yet even when we follow the rules to the letter, we can be tempted to look down on those wicked or ill-bred or ignorant people who don't. And that's a temptation that endangered the Pharisees in Jesus' time. As lay people they had made the decision to live their whole lives by God's laws - not just the Ten Commandments, but the whole 613 principles of law and ethics in the first 5 books of the Bible, that normally only the priests would be expected to follow.
Very impressive. But the snag was that they tended to look down on Jews who didn't put so much effort into keeping all God's laws, not to mention Gentiles like us, who didn't follow most of them at all. (Shocking!) And when Jesus came, not washing his hands before meals in the prescribed way, healing people on the Sabbath - well, they couldn't see God working in him; all they could see was the bylaws he had broken.
Paul himself came from the Pharisee school of thought. He'd ticked all the right boxes. Circumcised on the eighth day after birth, as the law demands; a member of the tribe of Benjamin and a full Jew; he'd studied under Gamaliel, one of the most famous rabbis of his day; Paul could have been forgiven for resting on his laurels, if a crown of laurels when you'd won a race hadn't been such a Roman custom. His Jewish CV was immaculate.
But according to his letter to Philippi, Paul was now playing a different game, where everything had changed. He'd jettisoned his old friends, his old certainties, his old habits - but as far as he was concerned, all the things he had once prided himself on were just rubbish, blocking him from his new goal: that of knowing Christ, and of letting him direct the whole of Paul's life from then on. The stakes were so high that he was willing to sweep away all that had gone before, and even to take on whatever suffering resulted, if he could only go on hearing God's call to him, speaking in Jesus' voice.
There's someone motivated by love, not by the smug satisfaction that comes from keeping the rules, or the trembling fear that comes from expecting to be punished if you break them, or even the desire to fit in by playing the same game everyone else has chosen to play. There's an enthusiast - and that word means someone with God in them; someone who will make any sacrifice to play the game he's chosen - or rather, the game that's chosen him. And I wonder, how does such a picture of Paul match up with our own motivations for coming to this service of Holy Communion? Granted, unlike Paul, a lot of us here today have been playing the Christian game all our lives; but once we stopped coming because our parents made us, why do we still choose to be here?
Communion in the Presbyterian tradition is a very ceremonial affair. We have maintained this attitude in the way the Elders process in with the bread and wine at the beginning of the service. We also maintain traces of another Presbyterian tradition: Communion cards, handed out by the Elders in pre-Communion visits to the members who are their particular care, and collected at the door when people enter church. These days, if someone from outside our congregation is visiting us on a Communion Sunday they will still be invited to share in the bread and wine. But in former years, no one without a Communion card would have been admitted to the service. And only those who had lived openly holy lives would have been given a card by their Elder.
In Geneva Calvin would have liked his churches to have celebrated Communion weekly, but they refused. Under pressure from Calvin's strict rules of behaviour, many came to God's table reluctantly, fearing they hadn't kept the rules well enough and might be barred. And that's our toxic legacy. For, as we have already established in the theme introduction, while without God's laws we can't play the game of living with each other, the reason we have these laws is to help us to love God, and to know in our hearts God's love for us, which never stops, even if we break the rules. And when we've experienced that love, and know that forgiveness, we can look forward with joy to connecting with Jesus' life in the bread and wine of Communion.
I know some of us here understand that well. Every now and then Stuart who sits at the front will ask me, ‘Is it bread and wine this week?' I'm always sorry to disappoint him when it's months away. But I have a question for the rest of us. As we put effort into our traditional way of preparing and serving Communion according to the rules; or even as we negotiate our committee structures, there to serve our church's life; I wonder, do we sometimes lose sight of the joy that Paul enthusiastically describes, joy in knowing Christ and the power of his new life? If so, we need not fear more condemnation, for we can all stumble on our race towards God. But together, let's follow Paul and press on to that very goal of loving God and neighbour which our rules were made to help.