“Emergency Ten Commandments”

 (Ex 17:1-7; Mtt 21:23-32) 10:30 am, Sun, Sept 27, 2026; JGW, FBC Amherst

In many different Churches around the world today, the Ten Commandments are being read again, from scripture. When I saw this was for our Emergency Services Memorial Sunday, I thought to myself, what to say? Surely there must be ten commandments for Emergency Services. 

Sure enough, there are. Search online and you can find lists for firefighters, for emergency medicine, and so on. I will quote a few I found, adapt a few, and create a few, as I begin with each of the Bible’s Ten Commandments. The first we just heard is: I am the LORD your God; have no other gods before me. To begin my riff off these Ten, I will say one commandment for Emergency Service Personnel is Be a leader and be led. 

This was one of a few I read online. It is possible that every helping role, in a time of crisis, has an element of leadership in it. In training for various responses and roles, there is leadership to learn. Even if it is simply how to lead people having a crisis how best to act, as well as how to lead the onlookers to behave well and stay out of the way on a scene. 

Not every one of us is cut out to be a leader, not even ever first responder. Yet we must remember there are many styles of leadership. Thirty-four years ago I agreed – with God – that I should head into ‘the ministry,’ as we call it. Be trained to be a clergy person. At the time, at the age of twenty-one, I thought I was signing up to be a pastor of people – a spiritual care giver. I was signing up to be a preacher of sermons, and teacher of spiritual lessons. But I did not sign up to be a leader. Heaven forbid! Oops. Heaven was willing to make me a leader, but of a type that matched my personality and talents. It took a decade to figure that out. 

The other side of leadership is followship. We need to be followers of the leaders. The best of leaders knows how to follow.

OK, gotta move on to commandment number Two: Protect Lives and Property. Healthcare workers speak of the patient. Law enforcement speaks of safety and justice. The fire service serves the public and business and everyone also. So our second commandment today can be Protect Lives, and also property. The second Bible commandment teaches that nothing comes ahead of God as the worshipped authority, no idols; so in emergency work nothing comes ahead of serving the people in need. Idolize no one and nothing ahead of the people who are in trouble. 

Three: Always heed cries for help; always answer the call. My wife can tell a story from her childhood in Scotland. She was a kid, at an intersection in the little town. There was an accident. A pedestrian was hurt. There were people around. They all stopped, and probably gasped. But no one approached. No one rose to the occasion. No one responded. 

I think that was part of her formation as a first responder. That moment when all the adults on a streetcorner were not prepared to heed a cry for help. The simple cry of what they saw before them. 

Always heed the call for help. It goes without saying. Perhaps in emergency services it can be about recognizing every call for help. Or perhaps it is about realizing that you can respond, not matter what the call for help is. Once you gain skills and are in an emergency responding role, every emergency is a place to respond, even if it is simply to refer to others and call upon other experts. The third Bible Commandment says Don’t use the name of the LORD your God in vain. At the basic level, this is about communication, so that’s why I thought about how we receive cries for help. You understand crises.

Four. Stay fit, in body and inner self. In the original Ten Commandments we have this: “Remember to keep the Sabbath Holy,” which is about being free from work one day out of seven, including the work of buying and selling. It is about getting a rest and being healthy. To quote another bit of the Bible, remember your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. 

Our bodies are holy. So, for emergency service folks, we remember the value of staying healthy, keeping fit. For there is always physical work to be done, and readiness is important. I think there are some people who naturally eat really well and stay fit, but the vast majority of us need reminders, need encouragement, to develop disciplines, need friends to team up with and take good care of ourselves. And our fellowship with one another – especially those who do the same emergency work as us – can be vital to our inner health, our mental and spiritual well-being.

The Fifth Bible Commandment is honour your parents, so that things will go well, living where you will live. A fifth emergency commandment can be: learn from others and be teachable. As I say, this goes for every one of us, but for you in the Fire Service, Search and Recuse, and so forth, it is so valuable. All your training has been passed on to you from others. All the technical skills. All the work with new tools and technology. All shared with you by others, by experts, and by those who know the local story of the service. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. You can likely name some great leaders of the past in your departments. 

In my own line of work, I had many teachers and mentors. And they always mentioned the things their teachers taught them. So I always felt the influence of the previous generation of pastors and preacher who I never sat under, or barely met. But the wisdom of Jud Levy, and Earl Merrick, and Charlie Taylor were passed down to me, by their disciples. So I learned even from them. And you, like me, remember colleagues who are now gone, whose memory you honour, and the lessons of their life stay with you.

Now, we are getting into some Commandments for more extreme circumstances now. Number Six is no murder. So, I thought of this positively for today’s service: Do unto others as you would your own family. We know there are moments, those intense, crisis moments, when you need to shut off your automatic emotional responses, and keep them for later. You get focused upon your task, for the sake of those in need. Yet it is still motivated by these real people, people who are in danger, people who matter. They matter as much as the people who matter most to you. 

One of the great challenges for any one of us is to keep on caring deeply and helping someone whom we feel is their own worst enemy, someone who we might blame for the mess they got themselves into. A good friend of ours just retired this summer as a nurse, working for years in emerg. I remember chatting with her when she worked at the Digby Hospital, and she mentioned the ‘frequent fliers.’ You know, those whose same troubles brought them back, again and again, to the emergency room. It took patience (no pun intended) and being intentional to keep treating those patients well. They were still people, people who mattered, people in crisis. 

By now you are probably wondering what on earth can I find to correspond with the Commandment: thou shalt not commit adultery. I am simply going to say that Seven is: Learn from your mistakes. This is the other side of being teachable. We can be ready to learn, and able to study and practice skills, we can learn from others who instruct and inspire us, but until we learn from our own mistakes, we are incomplete. 

Commandment Eight: Thou shalt always work as a team. In the Bible, number Eight is no stealing. In emergency service work I suggest that working as a team is the opposite of stealing the show, becoming a lone ranger, stealing the limelight for yourself. At the best of times, there is today praise and deep gratitude from the public for police, firefighters, paramedics, search and rescuers, and so on. You know better than I the bad exceptions to this. But teamwork is essential, above and beyond the support and honour for each of you as a person. 

Time is marching on, so let me get to the Ninth. In Exodus twenty we read: don’t bear false witness. Don’t lie. Let me challenge us by giving an opposite, one I found in the emergency medicine list.  Trust no one; believe nothing. What’s meant by this is: be very careful with what people tell you, and even what is written down. Check things for yourself. Do your own research on the scene, with the patient, in whatever situation. Don’t assume what you heard is accurate. Be ready for the truth of what’s going on to surprise you.

And, finally… the last of the Ten Commandments is about respecting ownership: thou shalt not covet, in the old translations. Our Emergency tenth Commandment is going to be: Keep all equipment ready. Take care of all the stuff. In every discipline there are many tools that need to be kept clean, kept ready, kept in order and stored in the right way, and maintained. Eventually recharged, refuelled, replaced, and so on. In the fire service you have weekly pack checks, and all the stuff to do with each trucks. After a call there are the routines you follow, including washing the vehicles. 

We all respond to the needs of others by being ready. We keep our tools in order, not just ourselves. Whatever we find our role to be in life, we do well to be prepared and stay alert. The Ten Commandments of scripture are just the beginning of hundreds of guidelines in this Book. So too in our emergency work; our list of Ten is but a beginning.