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You’ve probably seen the stories in the news this year: state legislatures around the country passing laws requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted on classroom walls. My first thoughts: yes, it’s political. And it seems more superstitious than theological — as if hanging a laminated poster in the front of a room could act like some kind of talisman. As if proximity to the words could fix behavior, the way you’d hang garlic to ward off vampires. That maybe if they look at the list long enough, and… children won’t commit adultery. .

I don’t think that’s how these words work, not how they ever worked.

In case you didn’t know, or you don’t remember, these are words being given to a mass of people at the base of a mountain. They weren’t comfortable, they weren’t settled, they weren’t getting a legal update mailed to their door. They were six weeks removed from slavery — four hundred years under Pharaoh’s quota system, where every single rule of their lives came from the crack of a whip, never once from a relationship. They don’t know what it means to decide, together, how to treat one another. They never had to, nobody has ever asked them to; and now they need to go from being a mass of former slaves to a people.

There’s a documentary that aired on British television back in 2009 called Boys and Girls Alone. Producers put ten eleven- and twelve-year-old boys in a house together, no adults, for several days — food, beds, toys, no rules beyond “take care of yourselves–total freedom. But what happened wasn’t really freedom. It quickly became total chaos. Alliances were made and split into factions overnight. Boys turned on each other, spread rumors about who’d done what, kept each other awake out of spite. The very thing that was supposed to be liberating turned the house into something smaller and meaner than Egypt — a house with no Pharaoh, but plenty of tyranny, just distributed among pre-teens instead of concentrated in one crown.

A poster on a wall assumes the problem is that people don’t know the rules. But Sinai isn’t dealing with a knowledge problem. Sinai is dealing with a people who have never once lived outside of domination, being asked, for the very first time, to build freedom, on that isn’t domination. And left to their own devices, without a different kind of structure, freedom doesn’t stay freedom for long. It slides right back toward the house it just left.

I think those of us who grew up in the church were taught and learned, we inherited from a long line we good, well intentioned Sunday School teachers these commandments as an individual moral report card. Did I lie today? Um… Did I lie about another in a court of law? No. Did I take something that wasn’t mine? No, I’m doing fine. So, done. It’s easy when we quietly check the list ono our own. Instead of asking  the harder question of what kind of community these words were actually trying to build in the first place.

Let’s stop verse 12 for a moment — honor your father and your mother. For some of you, that’s warm, easy ground. For others of you in this room, it is not. I know some of you left family systems that hurt you, and you’ve had “honor your parents” used against you like a leash or a whip — as though honoring could only mean staying, meant silence, meant tolerating harm because “honoring” demanded it of you. I don’t believe that’s what this word is doing. But I understand exactly why it’s landed that way, because we’ve treated commandments as demands for compliance instead of descriptions of trustworthy relationship that builds community

And that same misreading runs straight through to verse 16 — you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. We can, like I did, make it closer to what the text says and probably meant, or we can think about it in relationship, because Tell me? isn’t exactly where we’re living. Rumor as currency. Suspicion as the default setting. A culture where it’s easier to believe the worst about the person next door than to pick up the phone and ask them a question, get to know them.

Now, I could tell you that the girl’s house in the Boys and Girls Alone functioned incredibly well, but then you might think that there is something about boys that make them just bad at this freedom, and that isn’t the point.

In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga took a small boat out and got caught in a storm that wrecked them on a deserted island called ‘Ata. No adults. No rules handed down. They were stranded there for fifteen months before anyone found them. And here’s the thing — they didn’t turn on each other. They built a covenant instead. They kept a fire burning continuously, day and night, for over a year, so a passing ship might see the smoke. They split the labor. When two of them got into a fight, they had an agreed-upon system: separate, cool off, come back together and make it right, no exceptions. When one boy fell and broke his leg, the others set the bone, did his part of the labor, and cared for him until he could walk again. When rescuers finally found them, all six were alive, and by most accounts, in better shape — physically and toward each other — than when they’d started.

Two houses. Two versions of freedom without adults. One dissolved into faction and cruelty. The other built something that held for over a year on a rock in the middle of the Pacific. The difference wasn’t the absence of rules — both groups had none imposed on them. The difference was whether the freedom got built into a covenant centered on relationship or left as a vacuum.

That’s what is happening at Sinai. These five commandments aren’t a fence built to keep freedom penned in. They’re scaffolding — the structure that lets a liberated people become something other than the house that eats itself. You cannot have a free community without some floor of trust to stand on together.

And look again at that word honor in verse 12 — kavod, in Hebrew. It doesn’t mean obedience. It means weight, gravity, glory — the same word used for God’s own presence filling the tabernacle — it was the weight of the glory of God. To honor your parents was never about handing over unconditional authority. It’s about treating the relationship as something with real weight — holding it sacred, being present, caring while they age. And it is a weight that sometimes includes grief, or distance, or the hard, faithful work of a boundary.

And notice where this sits in the whole of the Ten Commandments. Everything before verse 12 is about our relationship to God. Everything from verse 12 forward is about our relationship to each other. This is the hinge. This is where reverence stops being an esoteric statement about God and starts asking a much harder question: how, exactly, are you going to treat the person next to you?

In the ancient world, laws like these existed because the vulnerable needed them — because without them, whoever had more would simply take from whoever had less and call it the natural order.

So what if we read “you shall not steal” and “you shall not bear false witness” not primarily as leashes on individual bad behavior, but as structural protections for the people with the least power to protect themselves?

That’s the same thread I named last week talking about Sabbath — this web of being God is weaving among a people who have never gotten to live inside a web like that before. Sabbath was rest woven into the fabric of a free community. These commandments are trust woven into that same fabric. Different threads, same web, same six-weeks-out-of-Egypt people learning, together, how to hold each other up.

So here’s my invitation this week, and it’s not about putting up a post hoping the rules will filter off the wall and fix everything. Posters are the ten boys’ house — rules with no relationship behind them, hung up and hoped for. What I want us to build instead is closer to the fire on ‘Ata Island — something we tend together, on purpose, because we chose it.

Before you leave today, or sometime this week, I want you to write down one or two commandments of your own. Not the ten — yours. One or two promises you’re willing to make and keep, to hold up the floor of trust for the people around you this week. Maybe it’s refusing to pass along a rumor. Maybe it’s telling the truth about something you’d rather smooth over. Maybe it’s honoring a relationship by finally being honest inside it, instead of just being present in it.

We are a people not so far removed from Egypt, every one of us, still learning how to be free together, freedom of covenant rooted in relationship. We are learning to tend the fire.

Reflection Questions

Where in your life has “honor” been confused with silence or obedience — and what would it look like to give someone real weight instead?

What’s one fire you could help tend this week — one small, ongoing commitment that holds up the floor of trust for someone near you?

This Week’s Invitation

Before you leave today, write one or two commandments of your own — not the ten, yours. One or two promises you’re willing to make and keep this week to hold up the floor of trust for the people around you.

My commandment(s) this week: