Not long ago a controversy erupted in Connellsville, near Pittsburgh,
about a replica of the Ten Commandments that had been erected on public
property. They were banned by a court
and the people erupted with anger over this decision. The other day, a group of these citizens
began erecting signs showing the Commandments all over the place. One of the members of the group said that “if
people would simply obey these simple rules, all of the wars would cease and we
would live very happy lives.” That is
certainly true, and it is exactly what God had in mind when the Ten
Commandments were handed to Moses on Mt. Sinai after the freeing of the Hebrews
from Egyptian captivity.
Of course,
it didn’t work. Humanity has its own
idea of what the rules ought to be and the Ten Commandments aren’t a part of
it. The truth is, all of us have broken
every one of them. This is why God
repeatedly returned to us with new ways to help us to understand what the
thinking behind the Commandments involves.
The prophets were sent to point out our failures; and when that didn’t
work out very well, finally God sent Jesus to come among us to show us the
meaning of Love as the way for us to live, so that the Ten Commandments could
really be obeyed. “Love the Lord your
God with all of your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as a person
like yourself”, said our Lord when he gave us what we call the Summary of the
Law. We still recite this in our liturgy
as a reminder to us every week of what it is that we ought to be doing in our
lives. Of course, we don’t do it very
well. We still don’t obey the law in the
way that our God would like for us to do.
That is why
the confession of our sin is such an important part of our liturgy every
week. It is no accident that the
confession and absolution is given to us right before the Peace. So that a congregation of forgiven sinners
can embrace each other in newness before God right before we begin all over
again with the celebration of the Eucharist.
The intention of this is always to make us a new people; people who can
let the past be the past and get on to new relationships without the shadow of
the past. Forgiveness is the issue. When we can learn to forgive in the same way
that our God forgives us each week; then our relationships will blossom and our
lives will be filled with the wonder of God’s love.
I have
always loved the 137th Psalm.
It is the one that was supposedly composed after the captivity in
Babylon happened in 587 BC and the Hebrew people were taken far from their home
in Jerusalem in to the bondage that they suffered for so many years. They tried to sing, but the words just
wouldn’t come to them. The words of the Psalm tell the story very well:
By the waters of
Babylon we sat down and wept, *
when we remembered you, O Zion.
when we remembered you, O Zion.
As
for our harps, we hung them up *
on the trees in the midst of that land.
on the trees in the midst of that land.
For
those who led us away captive asked us for a song,
and our oppressors called for mirth: *
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
and our oppressors called for mirth: *
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
How
shall we sing the LORD'S song *
upon an alien soil?
upon an alien soil?
Indeed, how can we sing the Lord’s
song in a foreign land? That captive
people remembered the happy times in Jerusalem, when life was free and times
were good. After their captivity, that
all vanished and singing the songs of Zion seemed to them a mockery of what
their lives had become.
Amen.
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