Our second reading comprises two readings, one from the Old Testament, the book of Job, and one, once again from Matthew’s gospel, the Sermon on the Mount.

  **  Job 1, verses 6-12 is the introduction to the book of Job. Job is a book about suffering. In the end, Job’s suffering is unexplained, though at the beginning of the book, we’re given an insight into what’s going on behind the scenes in heaven. Satan comes to God and the issue is seen there as testing. All that I really want to draw out of this particular passage is the fact that Job’s faith, in the end, was by no means superficial or empty. He believed. He believed deeply. He did not believe in God "in vain." (See Scripture Reading)

  **   In the New Testament, we turn to the Sermon on the Mount, to different portions of Jesus’ teaching that we’ve already heard in our first scripture reading. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ teaching which forces us to dig beneath the surface of our religion, into our hearts and to ask where has our faith in God lodged? Is it deeper than just on the outside? Is it rooted somewhere on the inside as well?  (See Scripture Reading)

In our sermons, we’ve just started a new series on the Ten Commandments. In our first sermon, we looked at the background of these commandments, commandments which we read as our call to worship this morning. And I said that these commandments were given to God’s ancient people Israel around thirteen hundred years or so ago as a gift. The people had come out of slavery, they had come out of bondage. Their ancestors had been in bondage for years. They didn’t know how to exercise their freedom, so these commandments were given to people, as a people, living as an independent community for the first time together, – given as a gift of God, not only for their individual morality but for their communal morality. The commandments described how they were to live together in such a way that they would not hurt themselves or each other, so that they would in fact be a blessing to one another.

We observed that the commandments are not just moral commandments. They are inescapably religious commandments, and the first three commandments in particular, and perhaps the fourth as well, but at least the first three obviously focus on our relationship with God.

Two weeks ago we looked at the first of those three, which says that "You shall have no other gods before me." It’s about choosing God as our first priority.

And then last week we looked at the second commandment, "You shall make no graven images," as the King James version says, or as we might say nowadays "do not make any idols." I pointed out that the commandment is not just about worshiping an image that you make specifically to bow down before and worship, as people did, let’s say, five or six centuries before the birth of Christ: at that time the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah inveighed against such idolatry. There may be some communities that still do that today but this commandment is not just about that specific kind of idolatry. It is rather about any kind of idolatry where we worship or trust in or depend upon any object or any idea about God that is in some sense of our own making. Any object, any idea about God that is in some sense not the living God.

In fact we focused on "ideas" about God that were idolatrous or false. Of course, all speech about God is metaphor. All speech about God is analogy. All speech about God is picture, and is therefore in some ways always inadequate. To put it another way: if we could encapsulate God in words, the God we encapsulate would not be God; we would! All we can do in naming or describing God is to touch the outskirts of God’s ways. And in this regard what the second commandment tells us to do, is to keep asking the question, "Is my image of God the image that God wants me to have? Or am I constantly making God in my own image or am I constantly moving toward an image of God that God wants me to have?"

It’s a question we must never get away from: do we make God as we want God to be? OR, does God make and remake us as God wants us to be? In this life we will always be caught in the middle, doing some of both! But it’s the question which is important: Do I keep asking, checking myself, . . . Will I allow God to fashion me or do I try to fashion God in some sense in my image. The commandment challenges us to question who our God is, and in particular to keep looking at God through the lens of Jesus. The early Christians, if you remember, said, but this still leaves us with a challenge, that Jesus was the image of the invisible God: the picture above all other pictures of who God is, the "Idea of God" on which we’re supposed to focus as we come before God in worship.

The first two commandments, then, "You shall have no other God before me," "You shall make no idols," and we come this morning to the third commandment: "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain." Or, in the New Revised Standard version, "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name." The commandment in Exodus Chapter 20 goes on to say, "The effect of such misuse of God’s name will not only be in your own life, but will affect one generation after another that follows you."

No wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God. In other words, when we speak about God, when we make commitments in God’s name, when we use words about God, we need to mean them. Because words are powerful.

Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher and mathematician from the seventeenth century said this about words.
    "Cold words freeze people. And hot words scorch them. And bitter words make them bitter and wrathful words make them wrathful. Kind words also produce their image on people’s souls. And a beautiful image it is, they smooth and quiet and comfort the hearer."

Words are powerful. But sometimes these days it is hard to take words seriously.

• This is a time in which commitments are made, it seems so often, through words which then are broken just as easily as they are spoken.

• This is a time in which words pour forth in our society, from one form of media or other: from radio or television, or in print, again and again and again, words, one after the other.

It can be hard at times to have them taken seriously. But the commandment says take them seriously, especially words for God, or about God.

There was a time when words, all words, were taken seriously and at times. In biblical times, words were taken very seriously. They were treated with great respect. In fact, people would visualize their words as never quite leaving their mouths, never quite departing from them, but always being a part of them, as if everything you spoke surrounded you like a growing cocoon, so that you had to be very careful with your mouth, with what you said with your words.

To share your name, for example, was to share part of yourself. To know someone’s name was to have power over someone. Somehow to encapsulate the person. Not just their name as if it were separate from them. Sometimes we go back and say, "Oh, my name means something." But back in days of old, all names meant something. They were given and they were shared with great care. To violate a name, to violate a word, was to violate a person.

You can see this in Scripture if you go back to one of the most chaotic eras revealed to us in the pages of scripture, the days of the Judges (maybe a hundred, two hundred years or so after the commandments were given, when it seems as if the ten words, the ten commandments were forgotten by God’s ancient people). At that time the people were in chaos, not sure what was right or wrong. In the book of Judges there’s a story, for example, about a man by the name of Jephtah, who makes a promise, who promises that if God gives victory to God’s ancient people, then he would sacrifice the first thing that meets his eyes. A rash promise, a wrong promise, and the first thing that meets his eyes is his daughter! It’s an awful predicament -- to choose between human sacrifice and the breaking of his promise. And even the daughter understands that he must not go back on his word – and thus meets her death. A terrible story, but it captures the point. Bizarre, but pointing to the fact that the word that was spoken was taken with utter, deadly seriousness.

Above any other word or promise, there was also, quite literally, one word that was so precious that it could hardly be spoken of at all. That word was the name of God.

We see the seriousness of this when we move to the first Christian century and to two of our gospels in our Bible: to the gospel of Matthew and the gospel according to Saint Luke. Both of them tell us that when Jesus preached, at the heart of his preaching was a "kingdom." One of the gospels says that it was the kingdom of God, and the other says it was the kingdom of heaven. Of course, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven are exactly the same! But Luke’s gospel, probably written by a person from the Greek-speaking world, is the one which says it’s the kingdom of God. Whereas Matthew’s gospel was probably written by a person from the world of Israel who could not utter the word "God" and so substituted the word "heaven" for God. We still do it — "for heaven’s sake" is the same as "for God’s sake." It’s a substitution. The word "heaven" was a circumlocution for God, because God’s name was too precious to utter. The kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, exactly the same.

In fact, God’s name and the people of Israel had a name for God, Yahweh, was the name which could never be spoken or written down. You don’t speak God’s name! You don’t write God’s name casually! . . . which makes Jesus’ appearance in ancient Palestine and his use of God’s name all the more fascinating, and all the more remarkable because Jesus frequently and habitually in such a way that his disciples remembered it, called on God as "daddy." Called on God whose name you only utter with great care as "daddy," in his native Aramaic, "Abba." Father, daddy. Something a child would say.

And he calls upon us to do the same. Does it in the Lord’s Prayer. The prayer he taught his disciples that we say together, "Our Father, our Abba, our Daddy, that we have in heaven." Intimate, close. And yet it’s in the very next line that Jesus himself says, "Don’t trivialize this privilege of coming close to God." The very next line of the prayer: "Hallowed be thy name." A positive version of the commandment: May your name not be trivialized but be honored. May we not slip into using your name in vain. May we not use it casually or thoughtlessly or wrongly or without honor.

But how do we do that? How do we make sure that we hallow God’s name, that we do not take God’s name in vain or make wrongful use of the name of the Lord our God? Well, what I want to suggest this morning is that the starting place, but it’s only the starting place, is how we speak God’s name. When we say, "Oh God," or "Oh Christ" or "Jesus" in a perfunctory fashion, of course, we dishonor God’s name. But the commandment goes way beyond what we say with our lips in that way.

What particularly, I’d like to suggest is this: That we use God’s name in vain . . .

When sentimentality about God is swapped for substance.
When ritual replaces reality.
And when the circumference of our faith substitutes for the center. When what should be on the outside of our faith comes into the center, and what should be at the center moves to the periphery.

When the circumference substitutes for the center, when ritual replaces reality and when sentimentality about God is swapped for substance. At such times as these, God’s name is taken in vain.

Sentimentality or Substance? Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon teach at the Divinity School at Duke University and in the Christian Century magazine a few years ago, they wrote these words. They said,

Most professing Christians, from liberals to fundamentalists, remain practical atheists. They think the church is sustained by the services it provides or the amount of fellowship and good feeling in the congregation. (DR: I hope there is fellowship, I hope there is good feeling. But, they say) This form of sentimentality has become the most detrimental corruption of the church and the ministry. Without God, without the one whose death on the cross challenges all of our good feelings, we stand beyond and over against our human anxiety, all we have left is sentiment. A saccharine residue of faith in a personal God in demise. Sentimentality is the way our unbelief is worked out.

Take the cross out of our faith and that’s all you have.

No sentimentality, if you remember, in Job’s faith. Even if there was some before his suffering, there wasn’t after! That’s partly what the trial was about. What is it you’re in this for, taunts the devil? Just for comfort? Of course, we need the comfort of God. God is a comforting God, but God is also the God of fire and power and earthquakes. The God who is the creator of the ends of the earth. The God who created not only the earth, but Mars that we have seen in new ways in recent days.

The Sermon on the Mount also digs deep. Jesus, aware of the move toward superficiality and sentimentality, shakes us up as he does in all his teaching. He digs beneath the surface:

"Blessed are you when you are persecuted for your faith. When you hang in with me, when things are going badly. When you mourn. When you’re poor, when you’re poor in spirit. Is your faith alive then? When you carry a cross! Not everyone who calls me Lord Lord will inherit the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do my will. Dig deep says Jesus!

Sentimental? Yes, God loves us as a daddy. But not trivial, no. The faith must never be that. Substance? God is real and alive. Don’t take my name in vain, says God. Remember me as I am: great, powerful, intimate, all of these, together. Don’t substitute sentiment for substance.

Ritual or Reality? The same kind of thing happens when we allow ritual to replace reality. William Barclay, who for many years was professor of New Testament at the University of Glasgow, used to point out three moments in the life of the church where pledges were made and beliefs were affirmed: he speaks of marriage, he speaks of baptism, he speaks of communion (a silent reaffirmation of our faith). And I would add to those moments those times when we become members of a congregation and affirm or reaffirm our faith publicly, and times when we become officers in the congregation, when we affirm our commitment to fulfill our office in obedience to Jesus Christ. These are rituals that within the church where we says something with our lips, in which it could be very easy just to go through the motions and not mean it. So the call of the third commandment is to make sure that we mean it.

This is particularly important in my own life — I may have shared with you before about an incident that took place at my own confirmation. I was 18. In fact, I was at university at the time and went through confirmation class with the chaplain of the university. When the service of confirmation arrived, there were ten to fifteen of us lining up in the university chapel, built in 1450. Right outside the door, some people in the days of the Reformation had been put to death. Burned at the stake. There were markers of that, right outside the door. No sentimentality in their faith! And so we’re standing there, affirming our faith, and immediately after we say the vows one person turns to the next person and says, "I didn’t really believe that, did you?"

Ritual. Just something to be done. Confirmation in church year after year. Baptism, marriage, you name it. How real is it? Do we not take God’s name in vain when we allow the ritual to be stronger than the reality?

Circumference or center? We take God’s name in vain in the third place and finally, when we substitute the circumference of faith for the center. When we substitute the circumference of faith for the center. Let me share a story which conveys what I mean by that.

The story is told of a wealthy person who buys a portrait by a famous artist. Brings it home to his mansion, knows exactly what room he wants to put this painting in. Asks the butler to take the painting up to the room. The butler wants to please the master, the wealthy man, by finding the right place for the picture. So before the master comes up to the room, the butler goes all over the room and holds the portrait up, in different places. Tries to find the right place in the room for the portrait. Sadly, the portrait doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. This particular painting simply does not seem to belong in this room with all of its furnishings.

When the master comes, the wealthy man, comes up to the room, the butler steps forward and says, "Excuse me, sir, but this picture is in the wrong room, the wrong place. It doesn’t fit with all the furnishings." To which the master replies. "I knew that to be the case. Take all the furnishings out and let’s refurnish the room. The painting stays."

It’s the center, it’s the masterpiece. Everything else needs to be seen as the periphery. The picture isn’t the periphery. It may end up hanging on the wall, seemingly on the periphery, but the truth is that it is the center, the heart of the room, and everything else must revolve around about it.

How easy it is, to have a faith in which God is hanging on the wall. Doesn’t disturb any of the other things on the wall of our lives. God is there, God is real. But on the circumference. Nothing else changes much. A fixture, an appointment. Nice to have around. Beautifies life. But we take God’s name in vain when that happens.

Robert Coles, one of my favorite authors, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, has done a lot of work with the faith of children. He wrote a book in 1999 called The Secular Mind, in which he tells the following story, a true story told first by one of his friends, Carlos Williams. The story takes place in Patterson, New Jersey, and is about a woman that Carlos Williams had met, a grandmother, a young one, who had been born in Italy and came to the United States when she was fifteen. She was married, and had brought up a family, and now was helping her daughter bring up another family. She told me a few weeks ago that it’s become different going to church here than it was when she was in Italy, when she first came here. She said she used to sit there and talk to God and try to figure out what God wanted. And tried to please God. Now she says she mostly thinks about what is going on in her life and her kids’ lives and she asks God to make it better. She said to me, "It used to be that I prayed to God that I would learn what God wanted from me and how God wanted me to behave. I wanted God’s help to be that kind of person, the kind God wanted. But now I pray to God that God help us with this problem or that. It used to be when I prayed to God, I was talking to God. And now it seems as if it’s me talking to myself and I’m only asking God to help out with things.

Do you see the difference? Do you see what’s happened? The transfer that’s taken place? Of course, God wants to help make our lives better. God is vitally interested in that. But what’s the center? And what’s the periphery? Are we the center? Or is God the center?

We take God’s name in vain, I believe, when the circumference replaces the center, when ritual replaces reality, when sentiment replaces substance, whether or not we swear with God’s name, or allow an "Oh God," or "Christ" or a "Jesus" out. I hope we don’t do that, because that too is taking God’s name in vain. Trivializing the great God who is our creator and redeemer; but there’s more to it than that.

The circumference replacing the center.
Ritual replacing reality.
Sentiment replacing substance.
Dig deep. Do not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God. Words we say about God, to God.

Of course when we break the commandment it won’t diminish God! God remains God. But it may well diminish us, and as the scripture says, what we do with God and for God, will certainly affect others, perhaps even from generation to generation.

Let’s bow before God in prayer.

Lord most high. Your word is hard, it digs deep into our souls. And without your help, without your intervention, we can not keep it. But may we live our lives as those who are always challenged by your word to grow. So may we never be stagnant but find ourselves depending upon you now and always. Bless us for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.