Between 1526 and 1528, Martin Luther embarked on a visitation tour of congregations in Saxony. The purpose was to learn what the people knew, the competency of their pastors, and the congregations’ financial health.
What he found was shocking. Most laity knew little about the Christian faith and most pastors were poorly educated. But especially disturbing was the contempt for Christian teaching itself. In his introduction to the Large Catechism, Luther wrote:
Many regard the catechism as a simple, trifling teaching, which they can absorb and master at one reading and then toss the book into a corner as if they are ashamed to read it again….But this I say for myself: I am also a doctor and a preacher, just as learned and experienced as all of them who are so high and mighty. Nevertheless, each morning, and whenever else I have time, I do as a child who is being taught the catechism and I read and recite word for word the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Psalms, etc. I must still read and study the catechism daily, and yet I cannot master it as I wish, but must remain a child and pupil of the catechism—and I also do so gladly.[1]
We, too, are called not to be masters and judges, but students. There’s a degree hanging in my office with the phrase “Master of Divinity”. That’s a stupid name for a degree because I haven’t mastered anything. If Luther didn’t consider himself a master, none of us can. Jesus even says as such to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel: “Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.”
Instead, we return to the catechism—the basics of Christian teaching—because we need constant reminding of not only who we are (people formed in the image of Christ in baptism), but also whose we are (people who belong to God). That is why we are beginning this series on the Commandments. It’s titled Rules for a Shalom Life because these are the laws God gives for a people to live well with God and neighbor.
But the first thing we learn from today’s readings is that before God gives his people any laws at all, a relationship is established and a new identity is forged. This relationship and identity go back to the end of Genesis chapter 11, when out of all Noah’s descendants, God chooses one family to be the means for the salvation of the world: Abraham’s family. Everything that happens in that family, including every failure, including four hundred years of servitude, leads up to this moment on Sinai. And there, God doesn’t style himself as an alternate master after Pharaoh. He doesn’t have building projects for them to do up there. No heavy labor is required. Rather, God calls them his “kingdom of priests and…holy nation”, having carried them on eagle’s wings to himself. They belong to God—only to God—and not to any rival pharaoh, deity, or power.
Of course, the people have a hard time with that. That’s perhaps the main theme of the Old Testament. The people have difficulty trusting in a God they can’t manipulate or control. Even at Sinai, the people grow anxious and impatient that Moses remains so long with God on top of the mountain. They demand that Moses’s brother Aaron make them a golden calf so that they could have the divine presence directly with them. And we don’t do any better. We have trouble trusting in God when God doesn’t do what we want him to do. While most of us aren’t making literal golden statues, we do have our own idols. It might be family or political allegiance. It might be our work or our kids. It might even be the phone in your pocket or purse. Whatever it is, we have our idols as a means of accessing the divine on our own terms.
And this is where God calls us back to remember who and whose we are. While Exodus 19 was for the ancient Hebrews first, the first letter of Peter reminds us that in Jesus Christ, we too are made part of that royal priesthood. We, too, by virtue of our baptism, are sons, daughters, children of the living God and siblings of Jesus. We are part of a holy nation, not defined by race, color, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, Christian denomination, or congregational size, but because our citizenship is in heaven, as Paul states in Philippians. It is all rooted in our baptism, which seems embarrassingly ordinary, but is our adoption and reception into the family of God, which stretches backward to the creation of our first parents and stretches forward into eternity.
And like any family, we need rules for living. We need clear expectations and well-defined standards. These are the enemies of Pharaoh and all other tyrants, which thrive on ill-defined rules and random punishments. But we also need to realize that the rules aren’t for their own sake. They are for the sake of love—genuine love of God and neighbor.
That’s what Jesus says in response to his Pharisee tester. Jesus calls upon Deuteronomy and (yes!) Leviticus to phrase this. We are commanded to love God with everything we are and everything we have and our neighbors as ourselves. We are commanded to do this because God loved us first. God loved our ancestors in faith so much, he did not abandon them to Pharaoh’s whims, but brought them out of slavery. God loved our ancestors in faith so much that when they fell into idolatry, he sent them judges and prophets to bring them back on the right path. God loved our ancestors so much that even after the disaster that destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, God built up the remnant of the nation in exile. God loves us so much that when we were lost in sin and prey for the many would-be lords and masters of this world, he came to us as the man Jesus, suffered, died, and rose again for us. God loves us so much that he did not let the message of the cross die when under attack by empire or regime, but raised up faithful and courageous Christians. And God loves us so much that even in this current age of decline in the institutional church, God still gives us the Word—his Son Jesus Christ—in both the proclamation of the Word and the celebration of the sacraments.
All of these laws point to love of God and neighbor and they are given to us, not as a burden, but as a privilege of our baptism. God open our hearts and minds to receive them these next couple months so that our faith may be refreshed. Amen.
© 2026, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes.
[1] Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert, and Charles P. Arand, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 380.
