Why do you suppose the Lord God Almighty has told us not to steal?  What difference does it make to God if you leave your wallet sitting in the Parish House and I rifle through it and take a five dollar bill?  How does that impact upon God who has everything, and if He looses something can make another in the blink of an eye?  How does what we do affect Him?  . . . Well, as our Parish Confirmation Class discovered this last Friday evening, . . . the effect of murder or theft or adultery or deception is that it breaks community!  Failure to keep one of God’s Commandments is not simply an individual lack of respect for God, . . . but it expresses a lack of respect for the community; . . . a lack of respect for another person.  . . . And you see, if you cannot treat one person with respect, . . . then how can I depend upon you to treat me with respect?  . . . To break a Commandment is to break Community.

    And the difference it makes to God, when you break Community, is that a major definition of what it is to be a human person; . . . a major definition of what it is to be created in the Image of God . . . is that we are a Community.  The Lord God Almighty tells us this at the very beginning of the Bible.  In the First Chapter of the Book of Genesis we read:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . .”  So God created man in his own image, male and female he created them.

The Lord God Almighty speaks of Himself in the plural, suggesting that part of what it is to be God is to be a Community.  . . . And then the Lord God Almighty creates Man in His Image . . . and it is not a single person that God creates; . . . it is two persons:  male and female; . . . so, part of what it means for us to be created in God’s Image is to be a Community.  . . . Which means that when you break Community . . . you become something other than what God created you to be; … when you break Community, you not only become estranged from one another; … you become estranged from God.

    This is what so disturbed the children of Israel when Ezra read the Book of the Law to them.  You see, some six hundred years before Jesus was born the army of the Babylonian Empire invaded the kingdom of Judea, destroyed its royal city Jerusalem, deported all the Jewish people into the North, and confined them to a ghetto in the imperial city of Babylon where they lived in exile for some fifty years or so.  Where they lived until the Persian Empire kicked the Babylonian Empire into oblivion and king Cyrus of Persia sent the Jewish people back to their own country.  . . . And among the things that happened in those exciting and chaotic days of returning home and rebuilding what had been destroyed . . . was that the Book of the Sacred Law was found under the rubble of the Temple at Jerusalem; . . . the Book of the Sacred Law was found and the precepts of that sacred Law were reintroduced into Jewish life.

    Nehemiah says that this was done with a public reading of the Law at the eastern entrance to Jerusalem:  in “the square before the Water Gate”.  And along with this public reading came a careful explanation of the Law’s meaning to everyone.  It was a dramatic moment; . . . it was a dramatic moment because

all the people wept [Nehemiah tells us], . . . all the people wept when they heard the words of the law.

All the people wept when they plainly heard what God expected of them; . . . all the people wept because they suddenly realized that for fifty years or so they hadn’t kept God’s Law.  . . . The Jewish people who had come back to the land of Judah wept because they realized that they were a broken Community; . . . that their lives had become deformed and inhuman; . . . that they had become estranged from God.  But Ezra and Nehemiah, and the Levites who assisted them, tell the people not to grieve.  Holy Scripture tells us that Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites who assisted them

said to the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.”  . . . “[But] Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

And the reason Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites who assisted them told the people that the day was holy is because they understood that it had been the Hand of God that had caused the Book of the Law to be found; . . . that the Lord God had caused the Book of the Law to be read to His people.  The Lord God Almighty had caused the Book of the Law to be found and read not to condemn His people, but to show Himself to them!  The sacred Law of God -- all the Commandments -- are not rules by which God controls us; . . . they are how God manifests Himself to us!  The Law is how God makes Himself present to us; how God is in communion with us.  . . . And in the reading of the Law at the Water Gate . . . the promise of God through His prophet Isaiah had been fulfilled:  in the reading of the Law at the Water Gate the Lord God Himself, in the person of His Sacred Law, preached good news to the poor and rebuilt a Community of Faith.  The Lord God Himself proclaimed release to the captives; healed the blindness of His people and set them at liberty in the Land of His Promise.  The Sacred Law is the Life of God . . . breathed into the hearts of His People.  . . . The Sacred Law beckons to God’s people; . . . It beckons them to come out of themselves and into the joy of God.

    The Law of God is profoundly misunderstood.  So many, many people fantasize the Commandments to be the evidence by which to indict sinners and justification for their incineration as punishment for their despicable lives.  . . . But the Law is no such thing.  The Sacred Law of God beckons us to come out of ourselves and into the joy of God.  . . . And so, we read in the Gospel of Saint Luke that following His baptism; . . . following His experience of God’s sacred Spirit uniting Him to the Community of Heaven, saying “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased”; . . . aflame with God’s familial Spirit, . . . Jesus comes to outcast Nazareth in Galilee.  . . . Jesus comes to Nazareth “in the power of the Spirit,” Luke says, . . . Jesus comes to Nazareth, and, in the synagogue on the Sabbath, at the invitation of His friends, Jesus reads from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

. . . And then Jesus closes the book, and gives it back to the attendant, and sits down, with the eyes of everyone in the synagogue fixed on him.  And Jesus begins to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”   Not only was Isaiah’s prophesy intended to encourage the children of Israel during their exile in Babylon, . . . but by hearing Jesus . . . God Himself even stands among the people of Nazareth in Galilee(!); . . . God Himself stands among them to preach good news to the poor and proclaim release to captives held in the bondage of sin; … God Himself stands among the people of Nazareth to tell them that they are not outcast but standing at the threshold of the Community of Heaven; . . . God Himself stands among the people of Nazareth in order to heal their blindness and set them at liberty in the Land of His Promise; . . . God Himself stands among the people of Nazareth in person . . . and breathes His sacred Life into their souls.

    I mention all this because the marvelous graces of which we read in Holy Scripture don’t simply apply to foreign people living in the distant past.  Our gathering here as a sacred Family -- as a sacred Community; . . . our gathering here today brings us into the breathtaking Presence of the living Lord Himself; we are in the breathtaking Presence of Jesus, risen and ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty, . . . so that whenever someone breaks bread in remembrance of Him, . . . He is present to them; . . . whenever someone drinks from the Cup in remembrance of Jesus, . . . He is present to them.  . . . Jesus is present here in this place; God Himself stands among us; . . . God Himself stands among us to speak comfort to our anxious hearts.  God Himself stands among us to offer hope and to give us His ineffably subtle and quiet but effective help in the poverty of our need.  God Himself stands among us in order to heal our bodies, in order to heal our hearts; in order to heal our disordered affections; . . . God Himself stands among us in order to heal Community and end estrangement and make us free.  All that is necessary is that we come out of ourselves, eat the fat and drink sweet wine, and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared; . . . all that is necessary is for us to allow the joy of the Lord to make us strong.