September 6, 2026

Indianola Presbyterian Church

“Is My Life My Own?”
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch

September 6, 2026                                                                                                                Based on Exodus 20:12-16

 There's a man in San Diego named Alec Patton. 

A few years ago he realized he didn't know the people who lived around him, and he said it was kind of horrifying to admit. So he printed fifty fliers and walked them out to people’s mailboxes on the streets near his house, inviting his neighbors into a group text. Fifty people joined.

 And then one ordinary morning, Alec had half an hour to get his kids to school and discovered he had no car seat. He had loaned one out and his wife had driven off with the other. So he sent a message on the group chat. A neighbor answered and showed up to his door with a car seat in five minutes.

 I love that story.

It's easy to hear it as a nice little story about community, but something bigger is going on. Alec got help that morning because months earlier he walked around with a stack of fliers. He built a community before he needed it.

 On some other morning, somebody on that chat is going to need him. And he'll be the one answering in five minutes.

 That's not charity running one direction. That is how community is supposed to work. That’s a webbed network of mutual support, a safety net to fall into, that’s a grass roots system for folks to lean on one another. A system.

Hold onto that word, because it’s helpful.

 We’re in week three of our series on the commandments now.

Week one we remembered that Exodus chapter nineteen comes before chapter twenty. God’s grace and liberation comes before the law. Before God gives a  single command, God shows up, God liberates, and God makes a people out of a crowd of runaway slaves.

 The next week in the series, we talked about the first set of commandments.
 The structuring of our relationship with God… How we are to orient our lives and our time (our days and hours) to spend time on our relationship with God…

 This morning, the second set of laws… God’s commandments start to turn us outward. We move from the upward relationship between us and God, to the outward relationship between us and others… us and our neighbors…

Honor your father and your mother.
Do not kill.
Do not commit adultery.
Do not steal.
Do not testify falsely against your neighbor.
Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s house or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.

Six commandments, and not one of them is about us as individuals… Every single one is about your relationship to others. But all of these seem pretty standard right? Why have these laws at all?
Isn’t it just basic ethics to know killing is not okay, and things don’t go well in a society when people steal freely? 

 It may help to remember who first heard them. These were a people who had spent four hundred years enslaved, that’s something, 13 generations. That means you are used to a society that is structured like this:
You belong to Pharaoh, your parents belonged to pharaoh, your grandparents belonged to Pharaoh… your great grandparents… and so on.

 What does it mean to be a slave?
It means your life is not your own… Your relationships are not your own… Your possessions are not your own.

In Egypt, under the system of slavery, they were living in trauma.  Pharaoh could take any life he wanted. He tried to drown their sons in the river after all. Ask any of those parents whether their child's life belonged to them when Pharaoh could easily put together a policy that would systematically take their life away.

 But here on the other side of slavery, God gives them a new structure to live by, a new way of life, a new system… God says, do not kill. Your life is your own now. And so is your neighbor’s. When you kill, you return to Pharaoh’s system of oppression. You are taking what does not belong to you.

 Do you hear what God is doing here?

God is not handing out a personal growth plan with these commandments. God is taking every single thing Pharaoh took and is giving it back to God’s people.

Your life is now yours. Your body is now yours. Your things. Your name. Your people are now yours. 

 Of course The Israelites need these commandments… they’ve had 400 years for Pharoah’s system of oppression to sink into their bones… How long does it take to unlearn a system that devalues human life to the level they had been living in?

 I think it’s also important to realize that every commandment God gives you about your neighbor, God is giving your neighbor about you. You are somebody's neighbor. The same law that binds your hands from harming others in your community is the law that protects you. The same law that tells you to leave their things alone is the reason your things are safe. Somebody in your life has been told by God, this week, to protect your name.

That's the system. Everybody is covered, because everybody is covering somebody. It only works if we're all in it.

 The commandments tell us that as God’s people are free for the first time, they are freed to build a community where nobody has to be afraid of the person next door. Which, if you'd just spent four hundred years in Egypt, might be the most extraordinary thing you'd ever heard.

 Now,  I have to say the hard part. That's the systemic society God designed but that is not where we live.

 An hour and a half west of here, in Springfield, there are somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand neighbors in a city with a total population of sixty thousand. These are folks contributing to the fabric of their community. But as I’m sure you well know most of them lost their legal status at the end of July when Temporary Protected Status for Haiti ended.

 On August twentieth, ICE agents surrounded a car at a Sunoco station on South Limestone Street and detained a Haitian pastor named Gilbert Adrien. He is forty-one. He has a wife and two children, fifteen and seven. He is the one who earns for that household. As of this week he is being held at the Butler County Jail. Advocates say he has no criminal history and no reason to run.

 Five days later they detained a second Haitian pastor. By the next afternoon he'd been moved to a facility out of state. His congregation has not been told his name publicly, for his safety. Advocates in Springfield say people there are now afraid to go to church.

And then the heart-breaking story of Pierre Damas Bel, a young man with so much potential, starting college after graduating with honors, and yet forced to wear an ankle monitor, leaving him so humiliated and ashamed, he couldn’t live with it anymore.

 I want to name what this grief is in the context of our scripture.

Is my life my own? Is my body my own? Is my name my own? Can I go to the gas station? Can I go to worship?

Those are not new questions. Those are Egypt's questions. And they are still being asked being asked here in Ohio in the year 2026.

 And there's something else happening that I think we have to see clearly.

Go back to the very beginning of Exodus, before any of the plagues, before Moses. Chapter one. The first thing Pharaoh does is give a speech. He tells his people that these Hebrews are getting to be too many, and too strong, and if there's ever a war they'll side with our enemies. That's the beginning of the whole thing. Fear mongering.
Before the whips, before the bricks, before the river. A speech full of misinformation about the Hebrew neighbors in Egypt’s midst and attempt to try to label them as dangerous. Pharaoh's system runs on that. It cannot run without it. To make people into property, you first have to make them into a threat.

 So when you hear someone telling you to be afraid of the family down the block, or the people at that church, or whoever moved in last year, I want you to recognize what you're hearing. This xenophobic bigotry is nothing new. And it always leads us in the same direction… to oppression so pervasive it’s almost impossible to unlearn.

 But God sees things differently.

 God's system and Pharaoh's system are both available to us. They always have been. And the way you tell which one you're building is simple. Does it make neighbors feel safer together, or more afraid?

The good news is though modern pharaohs still try to oppress and throw shackles on our neighbors… God is still at work.. and somethings happening about ninety minutes down I-70.

 A coalition of Springfield churches called G92 has been organizing since this started. Pastors from Akron and Columbus and all over this state have gone down there to pack food boxes for Haitian families. They're writing to Ohio's congressional delegation. They're standing outside with signs and chants with a phrase they've settled on,  "Unshackle Springfield,” referring to the shackles of the ankle monitors our government has forced our Haitian neighbors to wear.  They're showing up in solidarity at Haitian churches so those congregations don't have to sit there alone.

 That's what God’s system looks like in practice… Neighbors looking out for one another.
That’s what happens when community shows up to unshackle each other.
Giving Somebody back their life, their name, their household.
A system built by people looking out for one another rather than holding on to fear.

 Here's where I want to leave you.

None of this stays without maintenance. A community where nobody has to be afraid of the person next door is not a thing you arrive at and then forget about. It takes work… It's a thing people keep building, on purpose, in ordinary weeks, mostly out of boring decisions nobody notices.

And it can come apart faster than it goes together without intention, without structure, without purpose. But that is why God gives us these commands… to build a life where God’s people aren’t living in fear but are focused on lifting up one another.

 It's a lot to hold. Ten commandments to build a society on… and those commands would evolve to six hundred and thirteen more in all of the Hebrew bible…

So a few centuries later, a man walks up to Jesus and asks him to clarify. Out of all of them, which one is the greatest? Which one is the most important.

Next Sunday, we'll hear what How Jesus clarifies that…

Amen.

WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE

PRELUDE                                                                          “Prelude for Piano”                                                        Kevin G. Pace

INTROIT

WELCOME                                                                    Rev. Trip Porch

One: This is the day that the Lord has made

All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

*CALL TO WORSHIP By Nancy C. Townley

One: All heaven and earth proclaim the majesty of God’s creative power!

All: Praise God for the amazing and awesome beauty.

One: God has given to us codes by which to live together in harmony and peace.

All: In these commandments,

       God has summed up the ways we must respect one another.

One: Rejoice in the goodness of God.

All: Let us raise God for God’s complete and steadfast love for us!

*HYMN 66                                                                               “Every Time I Feel the Spirit”                                                    PENTECOST

*PRAYER OF CONFESSION                                                                                           Jeremy Carroll

God of the exodus,

you set us free, to live in community …and yet we keep wandering back to the ways of exploitation. We measure people by what they produce. We look away as our neighbors are taken. We have believed the story about our neighbor before we ever learned their name. We have wanted what is not ours, and called it fairness. We have let the ones who came before us become weightless, and we have been careless with the ones who come after.

Forgive us. Turn us back toward the people you have placed beside us.

Make us a community where no one has to be afraid of the person next door.

Silence is kept for individual confession…

Amen.

*ASSURANCE OF PARDON

*RESPONSE OF PRAISE 582“Glory to God, Whose Goodness Shines on Me”   GLORY TO GOD

*PASSING OF THE PEACE 

     One:   The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all,

     All:      And also with you.

WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD

ANTHEM                           “When In Our Music God Is Glorified”              Charles V. Stanford

                                                                                                                                                                                  arr. Harriet Ziegenhals

CHILDREN’S MESSAGE                                                        Mary Rebekah Fortman 

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

SCRIPTURE Exodus 20:1-2, 12-20    CEB

Then God spoke all these words:
I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery...
Honor your father and your mother so that your life will be long on the fertile land that the Lord your God is giving you.
Do not kill.
Do not commit adultery.
Do not steal.
Do not testify falsely against your neighbor.
Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s house. Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s wife, male or female servant, ox, donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.
When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the horn, and the mountain smoking, the people shook with fear and stood at a distance. They said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we’ll listen. But don’t let God speak to us, or we’ll die.” Moses said to the people, “Don’t be afraid, because God has come only to test you and to make sure you are always in awe of God so that you don’t sin.”

SERMON                                                                                              Rev Trip Porch

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD

*HYMN INSERT                              “O God, You Give Us Neighbors”                                                     AURELIA

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE followed by the Lord’s Prayer

TIME OF OFFERING  online giving is available at  www.indianolapres.org/give

OFFERTORY                                    “Flute Melody”                                                        Ellen Jane Lorenz

*OFFERTORY RESPONSE 709“God, We Honor You”                                   ABUNDANT BLESSINGS

PRAYER OF DEDICATION

God, May these gifts care for our neighbors. Take what we bring and put it to work near us and far from us.
Let it protect somebody. Let it feed somebody. Let it say to someone that they are not alone. Amen.

*HYMN 203                                         Jesu,Jesu”                                                                       CHEREPONI

TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING

CHARGE & BENEDICTION

POSTLUDE                         “Every Time I Feel the Spirit”                arr. Raluca Bojor

Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452