I expect most of you have heard the story of Judge Roy Moore, even if you do not recognize the name. Judge Roy Moore once served as the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Roy Moore is the guy who fought to keep a monument of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. He lost the fight. He was removed from his seat on the court, and his monument of the Ten Commandments was likewise removed from the courthouse. Roy Moore has taken on a new project: he now hauls the Ten Commandments monument around in the back of his flatbed truck. He and the monument make public appearances – sometimes by invitation, sometimes not – all around the south.

What I recently learned is that this monument of his weighs 5,280 pounds. As someone recently pointed out¹ , that’s over 500 pounds per commandment.

Apparently, when Roy Moore and the monument return to Alabama a 57-foot, 5-ton, yellow I-beam crane is hired to remove the monument from the flatbed truck. The crane visibly buckles under the weight of this monument.

The trouble with Roy Moore and his monument is that he has made of the Ten Commandments something that is heavy, unwieldy and burdensome. For him, they are so cumbersome and heavy-laden, they require a special truck and a 5-ton crane to maneuver through this life.

What a travesty this former judge has made of something that was meant to be a light and beautiful gift from God.

When Moses carried the Ten Commandments down from Mt. Sinai, he carried them lightly. When he presented them to the people of Israel, it was as if God was proposing to Israel, wooing her, offering to marry her. You see, the rabbis tell us that the best way to understand the Ten Commandments is to understand them as wedding vows – the oath of commitment and fidelity and love – spoken by God to Israel and by Israel to God.

I invite you in your imagination to travel back in time 3000 years, to the Sinai Peninsula. God has delivered the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The wandering ex-slaves have entered the Sinai desert. They set up camp at the foot of Mt. Sinai. God, who led them as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, is settled on top of Sinai, shrouded in the mountain mists that often occur in the Sinai Peninsula.

God, on bended knee, proposing to Israel says, “Remember how I brought you out of Egypt, how I bore you on eagle’s wings. I brought you to myself, to make you my people.” God uses the language of a lover proposing to his beloved. “I brought you to myself. I love you. And if you marry me, if you take my covenant and accept it, then you will be a holy nation, my treasured possession.”

The people, as it happens, are in turn in love with God. They have fallen madly in love with this God who has freed them from slavery and escorted them safely to the desert. They don’t act coy. They don’t play hard to get. Flattered and in love, they accept God’s proposal.

Moses, who is God’s best friend, becomes God’s best man. He arranges everything. He instructs the children of Israel to bathe and wash their clothes. He tells them to make all the preparations you make for a wedding.

Three days later, when they are ready, Moses gathers the children of Israel. He arranges them neatly together at the foot of Mt. Sinai. They are squeaky-clean and all turned out in their finest clothing.

The rabbis tell us that the mists upon Mt. Sinai were the chupah, the sacred wedding canopy. To this day, it is beneath the wedding canopy that Jewish couples speak the ancient vows that unite them as partners.

Moses stands between the partners: between the trembling children of Israel and Yahweh. All is silence. Moses clears his throat. Then he reads the tablets or the Ten Commandments. The rabbis tell us that this is the brit, the wedding contract, the vows.

The vows begin with God using the language of relationship. “I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

“You shall have no other Gods before me.” In other words: “Let’s be honest. There are a lot of other suitors out there: a lot of other gods trying to woo you; other gods offering all kinds of wonderful things. If you are looking for a good time, there is Bacchus. If you are looking for security, there is wealth. If you are looking for a lot of love, there is Eros. There are other gods. Oodles of them.” We live in a world of options and choices. It does no good to pretend there are no other suitors.

But, none of the other suitors has ever wrought an Exodus ... none but our Yahweh has ever loved and liberated slaves. The children of Israel – under the spell of a God who loves them unconditionally – vow, then and there, to love God back in turn.

The season of Lent is a season in which Christians are invited to renew their vows of fidelity and love for God. At Old South, we are doing so not only in worship, but also in our educational series, the Church in the World. Today we are focusing on the journey of the Pilgrims and the Puritans … and the way they devised to follow God, and to be faithful to God.

The Pilgrims and the Puritans have been laughed at and criticized … sometimes with good reason. They sought religious freedom for themselves, but then failed to extend that same courtesy to others. They viewed the American Indians as a project, rather than as human beings in their own right. Some Puritans executed witches. They viewed the world – and, indeed, the world of their individual souls – as a battleground in which the forces of good and evil wage perpetual battle.

But for all their faults, it is also true of these passionate men and women, that they were in love. They were in love with God. They renounced a great many things in order to live in monogamous relationship with God.

As they imagined the people of Israel sojourning through the wilderness in faithfulness to God, so too, they embarked upon their own journey, guided only by the Bible, their prayers and their spiritual scruples.

This month we mark the anniversary of John Winthrop’s A City Upon A Hill. Written aboard the Arbella in 1630, just before his fleet of ships reached these shores, it is nothing so much as a love letter to God, an oath of fidelity, a promise of faithfulness.

For all their faults, our Puritan forebears understood something about the Ten Commandments that Roy Moore of Alabama may never understand: that these laws are not meant to be a ball and chain around our ankles, or a yoke around our necks, or a ring in our noses. Rather, they are as wings to set us free, to give us flight.

The ancient Israelites experienced these laws as a way of life where there was neither stealing nor coveting, neither lying nor the taking of life, where elders were honored, and promises once made were kept, and God’s name was uttered with reverence and awe.

The ancient Israelites, and our Puritan forebears, fell head-over-heels in love with this amazing God who loves and liberates slaves; who loves us even when we are at our most unlovely, who promises to welcome us home no matter how many times we run away, who calls us into a large human family even when we are at our most selfish and self-centered, who has imagined a realm whose characteristics are justice and respect and kindness and reverence for life.

The Ten Commandments are an invitation into a relationship and a way of life marked by liberation, justice and love. So, please, please, when you think of the Ten Commandments, do whatever you can to erase the image of Roy Moore and his cumbersome monument from your mind’s eye. When you think of the Ten Commandments, imagine instead our God on bended knee, proposing.

And then, when you are ready to live in this realm marked by liberation, justice and love, don’t act coy, don’t play hard to get, throw caution to the wind, and say, “I do.”

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1. From “Dancing the Decalogue,” a reflection on the Ten Commandments by Thomas Long published in The Christian Century, March 7, 2006