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[Choral singing] The Capstone Commandment, a message by Dr. Ruth W. Heumann. [Choral singing] [Choral singing]

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And God spoke all these words, saying, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself a graven image,

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or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them, or serve them. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

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Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. For the seventh day you shall not do any work.

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Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you. You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery.

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You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife,

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or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor. Now when all the people perceived the thunderings and the lightnings and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking,

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the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood afar off and said to Moses, "Speak to us and we will hear, but let not God speak to us, lest we die." And Moses said to the people, "Do not fear,

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for God has come to prove you, and that the fear of him may be before your eyes, that you may not sin." And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to the understanding of this inspiration.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Five years ago, a member of the freshman class of that time

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came to me and asked me to preach a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments. I said I would be happy to do that, but I would do only two each year, one each semester. There was a homiletic reason for doing it in that way, which I won't go into now.

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Suffice it to say that tonight I come to the end of a series. I had never preached on any of the Ten Commandments before, and so it has been a rich blessing of God to me to search out this portion of the scriptures.

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I determined as I began the series of studies not to take the commandments in order, but rather to approach them simply as I was led to approach them. I did note from the very outset, however,

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that the Tenth Commandment would have to be the one I would consider last. I knew from the first that it would be the conclusion of the series, because the Tenth Commandment is the capstone commandment. The capstone, of course, is that which crowns the column.

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And so the Tenth Commandment crowns all those that come before. The First Commandment has the special authority which goes with priority, but the Last Commandment has the special authority which goes with finality. The Tenth Commandment is the sum of the ten.

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Why does one commit adultery? Because one covets the body of another. Why does one feed or steal? Because one covets that which belongs to another. Covetousness is at the root of lying and the neglect of parents and the misuse of the Sabbath and the idolization or the worship of ignoble deities and powers.

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It's covetousness which leads us sometimes even to threaten the lives of other people. So the impact and the authority of the Tenth Commandment rests in this. It condemns that inner attitude or motive which prompts all of the evils of which the other commandments speak. What does it mean then to say, "Thou shalt not covet"?

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We often refer to sins by reference to different parts of the body. We do this for both functional and metaphorical reasons. When we talk about lying, we think of the tongue. When we talk about envy, we think of the eyes.

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When we think of lust, we think of the genitals. When we think of gluttony, we think of the throat. The Latin word for throat is gluttus. When we think of anger, we think of blood boiling.

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When we think of pride, we think of the puffed up chest. When we think of conceit, we think of the turned head. When we think of snobbery, we think of the uplifted nose. The part of the body which corresponds to covetousness, the arms or the hands.

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So the covetous spirit you see is a greedy or a grasping spirit. When Paul writes to Timothy and tells him to be careful with those who have too great a love for money, he says they crave it, and the word for crave which he uses from the Greek origomai means literally to reach out and clutch. When we talk about a person being tight-fisted, we are saying that they are covetous.

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Covetousness is the inordinate desire to possess someone or something. Now notice the word inordinate. It is not wrong to have simple desires. We are made to think and to choose and to will and to act on the basis of our choices and our willingness.

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Jesus teaches us in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 that we are to develop the skills which are ours. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 that we are to seek the highest gifts. Jesus again says to us in Matthew 5 that we are to desire those things which are of priority. There is built into all of us a desire to excel and to exceed and to gain,

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and our civilization has advanced because of our desire to do these things. When you are hungry, you desire to eat. There's nothing wrong with that. We all attempt to avoid pain. We seek to procreate in order to continue our species.

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Those are physiological needs or desires. We also have within us the need to belong and to be cared for. We want to be approved of. We want to know what happiness is. We yearn for some kind of security, and those are ego needs, and there's nothing wrong with those needs.

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When the Buddhist suggests to us that we ought to deny all of our needs, he is saying in so many words that we ought to deny our very created nature. When the Communist says that we are to ignore our individual desire to excel and exceed and to focus all of our efforts towards the benefit of the state,

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he is robbing us of our motivation, of our desire to move ahead. This is the reason that production and business and art and science are so moribund, so dead within the Soviet Union. Some scientific humanists are suggesting to us that we ought to take chemicals

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or use other devices to control our desires. One of the suggestions is to develop a tiny radio receiver which can be placed under the scalp, and when a person has a covetous thought, then this receiver will be stimulated and the thought will be cancelled out.

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And that undoubtedly would eliminate our desire to be covetous. But it would also eliminate our desire to think and to choose and to will and to act. It would make us into nothing less than scientific robots. See, there's nothing wrong with desire.

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Covetousness is inordinate desire. Notice what the commandment says. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thy neighbor's ox, thy neighbor's manservant or maidservant." If you want to have a roof over your head and share it with another, it is proper to desire that.

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If you want to work hard and develop a business and employ others in that business, it is proper to do this. If you wish to cooperate with nature to produce that which is good and which blesses the planet and the people of the planet, this is fine.

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But when you want that which is evil, or when you want that which belongs to someone else so that you are going to have to take it away from them, or when you so want something that the wanting does damage to your own soul, when you want what is wrong, when you want that that you're going to hurt another to get,

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and when you want that with such a passion that it eats away your own spirit, that is covetousness. Notice one other thing about the meaning of this commandment. It's the only one of the ten that deals with attitude or motive.

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Every one of the ten concerns an act. "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie." Those are specific acts. They are forbidden. But covetousness is an inner attitude.

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This commandment deals with how we think. Micah sums it forth very accurately. He says, "Woe to those that desire iniquity and think of ways of evil while they are lying in their beds. For when morning comes, they will do what they have thought about.

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They begin by coveting, and then they seize men, houses, and the heritage of the people." What we're dealing with then in this tenth commandment is that root attitude or motive, that covetous spirit, which leads to all of the things catalogued in the Decalogue.

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And when we think of covetousness in these terms, we must recognize that it is one of the truly besetting sins of our age. Usually when we think of a covetous person, we get a picture of a miser, someone sitting in his basement counting and stacking his quarters.

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Money is an object often thought of with regard to covetousness because in money there is power and there is also the delight of counting it. But that kind of retentive acquisitiveness, what Freud calls that kind of anal desire, that is not really what covetous demonstrates itself in today.

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In fact, when we think of misers today, we almost think of them as being some kind of eccentric. Now I think covetousness manifests itself in two far more dangerous ways today. First, it manifests itself in our conspicuous consumption. See, we don't accumulate things in order to hide them in a dark, locked room in the basement.

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The symbol of covetousness today is not the key for a door, it's a picture window. We don't want to hoard things. We want to show what we have. We want to burn things up. We want to go to parties and parties. We want to have big cars. We want to live in fancy houses.

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We want to have a telephone in every room and our homes overheated. We want to lose ourselves in a firestorm of spending and activity. That's our desire. We fail so often to realize that with this kind of ostentatious consumerism, we enslave ourselves. You see, things destroy freedom. We think we own things.

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But things actually own us. At first, when we get them, they are ours and we rejoice in the fact that we possess them. But rather soon, they're saying things to us like "Press me," or "Polish me," or "Pack me," or "Paint me," or "Prune me," or "Plaster me." We get demands from the things we have in order to take care of those things, and very soon we find that we are working for them.

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And eventually, it gets to the place where we are bored with this working, so we set these things aside and immediately begin to covet something else. And the cycle starts all over again. That's one of the ways in which covetousness shows itself today. The other principle way I would suggest to you is in the desire for power and control.

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In large measure, the miser has been replaced in our society by the manager. The difference between the miser and the manager is this. The miser, counting his gold, enjoys counting it. But the manager, who manipulates and controls the lives of other people, instead of delighting in that,

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eventually comes to despise those whom he manipulates and controls. He gains a contempt for them because they are so far beneath him. He doesn't even have the delight that the miser has in the glitter of his gold. Now, I'm not saying that all management and all direction and all administration and all organization and all mastery are wrong.

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I'm not holding up some utopian or Arcadian ideal. But I am saying that when people in authority fail to remember that the earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof, and when they fail to remember that they have no right to own or manipulate or coerce another, then they are acting in a covetous manner.

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We're very quick to condemn the miser. But we don't often condemn the company which manipulates or controls its employees, or the union which manipulates or controls its members. These unions and companies will boast about their economic power or their political muscle.

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But when you come to them and ask them to do something for the good of the society, something of social, positive benefit, they will act as if they are non-entity. Now, I'm sophisticated enough to understand the difference between a primary and a secondary responsibility. I know that the primary responsibility of large corporations and unions and things of that kind is not social activism.

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But I also am sophisticated enough to know that any such organization which does not see itself in terms of its responsibility to the whole society will eventually become covetous with regard to its primary goals. You see, I'm one of those stubborn people who refuse to believe that insensitivity to mercy is inherent in the capitalistic system. I refuse to believe that profit is a morally acceptable excuse for covetousness.

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There are some companies, some corporations, some unions and organizations whose records in the service of society are nothing short of magnificent. They show what can be done, but they also reveal how occluded and perverse some other similar organizations are. We see this same kind of covetousness in government.

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There's more fascism abroad on the face of the earth today than ever in our history. The fascists believe that people are too stupid to rule themselves, so he must regulate them. He must control them. He must psychologically and physically terrorize them.

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He must discipline their thoughts. See, the fascist understands that most people are not courageous enough to stand up before cold, ruthless power. And so the fascist does not hesitate to use just that kind of power. What the fascist fails to remember, of course, is that if men are too stupid to rule themselves, those fascists are men also,

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and therefore that same stupidity exists in them. Stupidity and sinfulness, selfishness, misdirection are no respecter of persons. Any totalitarianism anywhere, be it in a nation, in a state, in a company or a union, in a church or a school, any totalitarianism anywhere is self-contradictory,

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because on the one hand it maintains that those it leads are too dumb to think for themselves, but it fails to remember that in condemning mankind in those terms, it condemns itself. They are forgetting the importance of checks and balances. Democracy is the finest form of government, not because all men are good,

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but because we all recognize if we're thinking that men are not good. And because they are not good, then every leadership must have upon it checks and balances. Every dictatorship of any kind, in any circumstance, is a covetousness which debases God, debases others, and debases self. This incidentally is the reason that when Jesus, the Son of God, came to us,

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he came to us as a waiter, as a servant, and as a washer of sinking feet. Now how does covetousness debase God? Well, it debases God because the covetous person thinks he must rely on what he can do with his own hands, rather than yielding to the hands of God.

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The covetous person does not forget God. If the covetous person is poor and wants to get some of the rich things that other people have, he prays to God. His religion becomes a kind of petition. It's directed toward the future. He uses God as a kind of prop to gain gold.

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If the covetous person is a rich or powerful person, who already has many things and many people in his manipulative way, then his religion becomes a thing of gratitude. It is directed toward the past.

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He wants a God that is a dead patron. You see, it's like this. The poor, seeking to gain the things they don't have, pray to God and try to make him into someone who extends their desires. He becomes a kind of celestial bellhop, a prop to their gaining their gold.

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The rich, on the other hand, having all these things already, only need one thing. They need something to justify the fact that they have them. So what do they do? They want a God who only justifies them and never discomforts them. They want a God whom they can thank.

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Which kind of implies, you see, I'm thanking God because God knew I was so good he gave me all of these things. That turns God into a dead patron. Either attitude, you see, debases God. Covetousness also debases others. When man was put into the garden in Genesis, he was told that he could rule over the garden.

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But he was not told that he could rule over other men. He could rule over the garden, but he was to live with other people. We don't own other people. This is one of the central truths of the doctrine of baptism, which is at the very center of the Christian faith.

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Paul teaches us, you see, that baptism is moving from slavery to freedom. Even the parents who bring a child into this world offer that child back to God. He is the only one who can direct and possess that life. And anyone who tries to possess other people, be that person a dictator

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or a clergyman, be that person a teacher or a corporation president or a union steward, any such person is dispossessed by the act of baptism. Augustine put it this way, "Any placement of one person over another has at the very best only relative justification."

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It's bad theology when we think ourselves so wise that we can control the lives of others. That's pompous and it's ugly. [Bell rings] Please turn your cassettes to the other side.

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And covetousness also debases the self. Because you see, when you try to turn another person into an object, you not only affect the other person, you also affect yourself. Gabriel Marcel, the great French existentialist, says that there are two orders.

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There is the authentic order of being, and there is the inauthentic order of having. The essence of life, he says, is to be open to God and to others. And when you start to control, to direct, to possess, to covet with your hands and your desires the lives of other people,

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you are ruining the essence of their lives and so impoverishing not only them, but yourself as well. And the result of all of this, he says, is a kind of present and continuing hell. I had a man come into my office on one occasion who wanted me to call his sister into my office,

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and he wanted me to rebuke his sister because of the way she was acting in an inheritance case which that family was involved with. And when I refused to do that, this man became enraged, and as he stalked out, he slammed the door saying, "I'll see my sister in hell."

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Now, I don't know whether he'll see his sister in hell or not, but I know that at that very moment he was in hell. He was trying to debate God by the misuse of one of God's servants. He was trying to control the life of his sister,

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and he was so full of inner rage and ugliness that he was tearing himself apart. Covetousness, you see, so prevalent in our time, dishonors God, dishonors others, and dishonors ourselves. That's the reason it's so awful.

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So we must ask in closing this question, how do we correct a covetous heart? Well, externally, of course, we want to stand for democracy. We want to root out anything which undermines the processes of democracy. We want to tear out of the body politics any bribery or corruption.

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We want to lift high any legal curb which will cause anything to defame or disrupt what the democratic process is to be. Edmund Burke, 200 years ago, put it like this, "Men are qualified for civil liberties in exact proportion to their disposition

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to put chains upon their own appetite. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate mind cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

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And that's the reason I urge all Christians everywhere to stand for strong democratic government. It's important for us to remember that many minorities in this country have not had civil rights.

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Many people in this country have been monopolized by an ethically and morally irresponsible business attitude. Many people in this country have suffered a grinding poverty. Many people in this country have been deprived of proper public education.

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Many women in this country have never been allowed to assume their proper place in society. And all of these things have happened because of the covetousness of others. Now we see gains on all of these fronts.

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More minorities getting civil rights, monopolies being broken up, strong unions being inhibited, poverty being eradicated, public education being expanded, women being moved into the position in society that they deserve.

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And all of these things have been done by democratic government. They have not been done by churches, and they have not been done by private education. And therefore, we are called upon as Christians to stand,

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to rebut those who attack our form of government, to defend our democracy and a strong democracy in every way that we can. These are only external checks.

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We also need internal checks. And the internal check is, of course, conversion. The only thing that will eliminate greed in a heart is redemption. The only thing that in the end will change the covetous spirit is agape love.

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Now you know that word "agape," how it appears in the Bible and means "love." It takes a whole chapter in 1 Corinthians to even begin to explain it. That kind of love does not envy. That kind of love does not vaunt itself.

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That kind of love does not seek its own way. The man who wrote those words in 1 Corinthians, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, was the apostle Paul. And Paul had a lot of trouble with covetousness.

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In Romans chapter 7, he describes covetousness as the sin which most entangled him. He pictures it like some huge, dead, coiled snake that's wrapped all around his heart.

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And then he confronted this 10th commandment, "Thou shalt not covet." And when he confronted the law of God, he says, "The first thing that happened was the law of God defined his sin." That's what the law of God always does.

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You know, when you don't have any laws, then nothing's illegal. At first, when there were no traffic laws, you could drive anywhere you wanted to and it didn't make any difference. Nothing was legal, nothing was illegal. But as soon as you put in a rule that said you had to go a certain way

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on a certain side of the street, then when you were not going that way on that side of the street, then you were breaking the law. The first thing that the law does, you see, is define that which is over against it.

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The first thing that happened to Paul when he confronted this rule about "Thou shalt not covet" was he suddenly had defined within him the covetousness which was coiled in his own heart.

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But then he goes on to say that the law does something else. The law provoked his sin. That is, this serpent suddenly came to life when confronted with the law. It began to rise and to twist.

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You see, whenever you are confronted with something wrong, each and every one of us has a tendency to begin to think about what it would be like to do that wrong thing. The grass is always greener on the other side of the law, you see.

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Whenever we are confronted with "Thou shalt not," something inside of us says, "That's exactly what I want to do." And that's what happened to Paul. And he was so overwhelmed with this that it awed him.

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There may be those in this room tonight who, as I've held up what covetousness is and have tried to reveal it in all of its ugliness and shame, at first they've recognized its existence within themselves

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and now they're angry. They're not angry at the sin, they're angry at me. There's a kind of a quiet rage going on because something is fanning the flame,

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something is revealing the reality, divining it and provoking it. That's what the law of God does when it's truly applied. And when Paul saw that happening in himself, he described himself as hopeless, he described himself as dead.

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No way to help himself. But then he said, "What the law couldn't do and what he couldn't do, Christ did do." What saved Paul was not the law from Sinai, but the love on Calvary.

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Because Paul recognized by the flooding power of the Holy Spirit that God forgives those uglinesses within ourselves that we cannot master. And Paul says, "When you recognize this overwhelming love of God, then you can say," as he does at the beginning of Romans 8,

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"There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." You see, the love of God comes down into us, forgiving us, and as it begins to loosen us, we find those covetous fists of ours beginning to relax.

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It's a slow, it's a hard, and it's a painful process. But it begins. It's not that we desire less, it's that we desire more, more of the love of God.

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We suddenly recognize that those people whom we've been coveting are made in the image of God like we are. We suddenly come to understand that the Christ who died for us also died for them. And as we recognize this, the mind of Christ is formed within us,

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and the mind of Christ is most illustrated by the fact that Christ loves all. Now you know how it is. You don't covet the things that people you love have. What loving father covets the success of his son?

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Why, he'd rather have his son succeed than he would himself succeed. What loving brother, if he's more than a brother just in name, covets the success that his brother has had? If he's a true brother, why, he'd rather see his brother's success than his own.

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When you love somebody, you're not jealous or greedy for the things that they have. And when the mind of Christ moves into you, you see, the horizons of your love are so expanded that there is room for covetousness no more.

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See, the world says the thing to do is get, get, and get. But God says it's more blessed to give than to receive. The world says be competitive, push the other guy down so you can make it to the top. But God says we are members one of the other.

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The world says work is pain, so get high enough on the tree that you can force the people under you to do your work for you. But God says let him who is the greatest amongst you be the servant of all. The world says watch out for them.

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Watch out for the governors. Watch out for the bureaucrats. Watch out for those who are seeking to manipulate your life. God says I have put those people into place of authority. This world is mine and my will will be done.

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And when God is listened to by that open heart, when the love from Calvary comes flowing down, when the open heart of God bleeds into the open heart of a person, well then, fists unclenched and spirits sore.

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I close with this. Lloyd Douglas, the author of The Robe, had a friend who was a violin teacher. And he used to go and visit him periodically. He was not an important violin teacher in terms of prestige.

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He had a one-room studio and a building full of one-room studios. He went in one day to this violinist's studio and he said, "Well, what's the good news for today?" The violinist put down his violin.

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And he went over to where a tuning fork was suspended by a silken thread from the ceiling. And he took a little mallet and he tapped the tuning fork. "This is the good news for today," he said. "That is an A. It was an A yesterday.

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It is an A today, and it will be an A a thousand years from now." The soprano upstairs can't sing on tune. The tenor across the hall flats every one of his high notes. The piano in the room next door to me has never been in key.

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All about me is noise, noise, noise. But the good news is, this is A. I can always depend upon it. It's a very steadying thing to the soul to recognize that God's law and God's love are like that A. They are permanent. They never change.

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His law convicts us of sin. His love converts us away from it. When we open our hands to God, he opens his heart to us. And in his grace, we become generous. And to be generous is the mark of a child of God.

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It is the sure and certain sign of the children of the king. Let us pray. Our father, four thousand years ago, you descended in a magnificent theophany to the top of a mountain

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where you met a trembling old Jew who was terrified and caught up in a magnificent awe. Into his hands you put your law. We've tried to improve upon it. We've passed laws and laws and laws,

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thirty-five million laws in the world today. Yet all of these laws are as nothing when compared with the infinite, the perfect purity of the Ten Commandments. We thank you for the truth that you've given to us. We thank you for your law, which leads us to see our sins.

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And we thank you most of all for your grace, which forgives us and empowers us to live as you would have us live. We pray our prayer of thanksgiving and gratitude and dedication in the name of that one who alone, of all that have ever lived, utterly and completely fulfilled the law. Jesus Christ, our Lord, our Savior, and our friend.

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The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves.

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His peace. [BLANK_AUDIO]