At worship at St Mark's, we've just finished a summer's worth of homilies/sermons/meditations on each of the Ten Commandments-- a necessary task, both daunting and exhilarating.
The skeptics of the Biblical studies academy, aided ironically enough by the knee-jerk conservatism of their opponents on the extreme wing of the religious right, has pretty well reduced the Commandments, for thinking people, to nothing more than demagogues' politics of convenience. It's hard to get seminarians to take them seriously-- that's the daunting part for me: "With your education, you should know better." But the exhilarating part is the Commandments' continuing relevance-- they're a lodestone of the deepest spiritual wisdom, which is why they're so necessary for contemporary Christians. Taken together, reasonably interpreted, they form a Rule of Life.
Adultery? Still very much with us-- just ignore the patriarchal color (You know-- wife as possession). Adultery always poisons every marriage it touches.
Murder? What about mean girls and bully boys who crush the spirits of the meekest kids on the playground? Or all those dreams so curtly dismissed on Dragons' Den?
Idols? There are lots of them to tempt us. Maybe not graven images here in North America-- but behold the Bible as "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."
Wrestling with the Ten Commandments this summer, as I realise here at the middle of September, has been-- curious to observe-- mentally, spiritually, even physically exhausting. Yet I can't help but feel I've just scratched the surface Sunday by Sunday. And I'm not done yet, because I'm reworking the homilies as essays and publishing them in book form for St Mark's congregation and its friends.
Will the book be as challenging--and valuable-- to read as it was to prepare?
The skeptics of the Biblical studies academy, aided ironically enough by the knee-jerk conservatism of their opponents on the extreme wing of the religious right, has pretty well reduced the Commandments, for thinking people, to nothing more than demagogues' politics of convenience. It's hard to get seminarians to take them seriously-- that's the daunting part for me: "With your education, you should know better." But the exhilarating part is the Commandments' continuing relevance-- they're a lodestone of the deepest spiritual wisdom, which is why they're so necessary for contemporary Christians. Taken together, reasonably interpreted, they form a Rule of Life.
Adultery? Still very much with us-- just ignore the patriarchal color (You know-- wife as possession). Adultery always poisons every marriage it touches.
Murder? What about mean girls and bully boys who crush the spirits of the meekest kids on the playground? Or all those dreams so curtly dismissed on Dragons' Den?
Idols? There are lots of them to tempt us. Maybe not graven images here in North America-- but behold the Bible as "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."
Wrestling with the Ten Commandments this summer, as I realise here at the middle of September, has been-- curious to observe-- mentally, spiritually, even physically exhausting. Yet I can't help but feel I've just scratched the surface Sunday by Sunday. And I'm not done yet, because I'm reworking the homilies as essays and publishing them in book form for St Mark's congregation and its friends.
Will the book be as challenging--and valuable-- to read as it was to prepare?
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