Imagine the scene. The otherwise quiet mountain of the Lord is smoking. Peals of thunder and flashes of lightning going on at the top. A trumpet blast gets louder and louder. The people shake more violently than the mountain. "You talk to him, Moses, because if we did, we will die." It's a terrifying scene and then all of a sudden out of the thick smoke the Lord speaks. The trumpet blast stops momentarily; the mountain stops shaking and smoking. The thunder and flashes of lightning cease as the Lord speaks these words, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery."

And then just as soon as it stopped, all the scary stuff starts up again and He continues speaking, "You shall have no other gods before me."

Moses doesn't record this brief moment of silence, and it probably didn't happen, but it would have fit well if it had. The moment of silence would have marked the Lord preaching the salvation event of the Old Testament, the release from slavery in Egypt. This is the Gospel proclamation of the Old Testament the proclamation that finds its fulfillment in the cross of the New Testament. Just as we hear, Christ died for you, to pay your penalty, freedom from Egypt says basically the same thing to them. You are a free people, a new people. You are no longer bound to the old ways of life. By my simply saying it, makes it so. As a result, I am now going to describe what you will be like. You shall have no other gods. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God, and so on." Notice the word. It was "shall" not "should." I'll explain the difference.

There were once two men. One man's name was "Should," the other "Shall." "Should" liked to see things go the way they were supposed to be. He was a stickler for it. "It should go this way, not that way," he would say. "Should" saw a little more leeway than he wanted, though, because it didn't always go the way it was supposed to. "Shall" on the other hand, had no choice. There was no other option. "Shall's" life was fixed. It wasn't a matter of that it was SUPPOSED to go a certain way, it simply did. "Should" impacted the weather; "Shall," the sun. "Should" would like for it to rain when the crops got dry, but it didn't always happen. "Shall" simply said, "The sun shall rise tomorrow."

Are you getting a little feel for the difference? "Shall" describes. "Should" prescribes. "Should" says, "This is what is supposed to happen." That's a prescription. "Shall" says, "This is what will happen." That's a description.

Notice now, what word is used in the Commandments. You SHALL have no other gods. You SHALL not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. You SHALL not murder. You SHALL not covet. It's not "should," it's not a prescription; it's a description. This is simply what is going to happen. Those who are God's people will not do these things. They will not sin. This is what will happen. It's a description of reality. It's not that they shouldn't; they won't.

But I bet you notice a bit of a problem here--a huge inconsistency. Maybe it says God's people won't do this--but we do. We are God's people but we do what we can't do, what is apparently impossible for us to do--all the time. We sin all the time, because we don't do the very things that are expected of us. If we are truly God's people, we would just do them. They would just happen. But we don't. Here is where we see our need for God's mercy. Here is where we see it given to us in Christ. We say, "This description does not describe me. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner." And He says, "I have had mercy, and I will have mercy again. Receive the forgiveness won for you by my Son on the cross."

We are now set up to go into today's portion of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. We see a description of the life of the baptized. Those who are baptized, those who are God's children, will not hold anger against their brother. They simply will not. They will not call him a fool. They will not insult him. They will do all they can to be reconciled to their brother who has sinned against them.

They will forgive--and here it comes, are you ready?--forget. They will forgive and forget. That's what Christians do.

But Jesus knows what happens with sinners. They don't. They don't always forgive and forget. Sometimes they don't even forgive. And sometimes they are even on the offensive, attacking others, even those who are Christian.

Jesus talks about the scribes and Pharisees. Now, the thing about these guys, is that when they were on the offensive, they always made it look good. Or at least they usually pulled it off in the eyes of the people. Look at what they did with Jesus. They claimed they had to do what they did to preserve the truth. They claimed Jesus was a danger to the message of God. They acted like they had no choice but to refute Him.

They may have made it look like preservation of the truth, but Jesus knew their hearts. They hated Him. They hated Him and killed Him many times over in their hearts.

We do the same thing. We hold grudges. We say, "I'm only doing this for that person's good. They need to learn." We claim we are doing this everyone else's sake. We make it look good. We make it look pious, but we are as hypocritical as those scribes and Pharisees. That's bad.

It's worse, when we consider, this doesn't happen among those who are God's people. I mean, that is how we are created. We are a new creation by our baptism, and this doesn't happen with those who are a new creation. When we see it happening, though, when we see ourselves doing these things, we get a sense of how far we are from what we were created to be.

We see that we really do have no righteousness of our own. Jesus says our righteousness has to exceed those who seem to be unbelievably righteous, and we see we aren't anywhere close to how they appear. And yet we have reason to hope. We have reason to not worry, even though Jesus says based on what we have, we have no reason to expect we will enter the kingdom of heaven. We have Jesus. His righteousness exceeds the false righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. Even what they appear to have, doesn't come anywhere close to what Jesus actually has, and He gives it to you. When He gives it to you, your righteousness truly exceeds their righteousness. It matches Jesus' righteousness, because it is His.

Still, even though we are given such a wonderful gift, we need to hear Him say that we shouldn't try to manufacture our own. That's what the religious leaders were trying to do and telling the people they should do. They were trying to help people think they were actually succeeding at obeying the commandments. They would say, "When the commandment says, 'You shall not murder,' that means literal murder. Murder with your hands; taking away another person's life. You don't do that, so therefore you are keeping that commandment." Then a person could stand up straight and tall, pat himself on the back and say, "I am a righteous person."

But Jesus shuts down any attempt to manufacture our own righteousness. He makes it clear--murder isn't just with our hands. It is with our heart and our mind, our mouth, even our eyes. If our eyes look down on another, or we give a scowl, if that look were a weapon, that person would be dead. With our mouths, we speak poorly of another or don't defend him. With our hearts and minds, we kill him when we wish something evil might happen to him.

Don't we do this? Even though it is not possible for us to do this as God's children, we do it anyway. All the more reason for us to rejoice that we are given the righteousness of Christ; we are given a righteousness that far exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.

As we continue describing the life of a Christian, our lives as Christians, we encounter the situation of someone giving offense to us. Now the world would say that person needs to apologize before they can be forgiven. And the sinner in us would agree. "Yes, I can't forgive that person, because that would only encourage him to walk all over me and others." But we can hear Jesus say, "It may be that way among the people of the world, but not so among you. You are not of the world. If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember your brother has something against you, leave your gift and be reconciled."

Sure we can bring our offering as a sign of our gratitude for being forgiven, but do we really grasp that forgiveness? We may say we want forgiveness, but if there is no forgiveness from us, do we really want forgiveness from Him?

For this reason, the Christian church has applied this to the Lord's Supper. We see it in the book most of us used as we went through instructions to be confirmed. The book asks the question "Who must not be given the sacrament?" Among answers of those who are of a different Christian confession, those who are openly unrepentant and those who aren't able to examine themselves, we have this answer to the question, "Who must not be given the sacrament? Those who are unforgiving, refusing to be reconciled. It goes on to explain, "They show thereby that they do not really believe that God forgives them either."

Can a person be a Christian if he doesn't believe God forgives him? I don't see how. Therefore, could a Christian say, "I can forgive, but I can't forget?" I don't see how. And yet we are not saved because we are good Christians, or even because we are Christians. We are saved because God has had mercy on us. Being Christian means we have been given the faith to believe He has had mercy on us.

But when we find ourselves doing exactly these things we know Christians don't do, we see our weakness, we see our need to keep looking to our Lord for mercy. We see why Jesus came; why He was treated so horribly by the scribes and Pharisees; why He was hung on a cross; why He was abandoned by His Father, and finally why He had to rise from the dead. This is why He gives us His Supper, to give us the assurance that He truly was abandoned, He truly did die, and He truly did rise again from the dead, all so He could give us forgiveness.

This is our hope, our confidence. The description Jesus gives in our reading doesn't always describe us. In fact, it never really does. But this description describes Jesus and by His grace and mercy, through our baptism, it is seen as describing us. This way, as you believe it, you will not only enter the kingdom of heaven, you have already been ushered in.

AMEN