Living in the Spirit
October 27, 2014

Scripture Reading: Joshua 3:7-17

. . .the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth is going to pass before you into the Jordan. So now select twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe. When the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan flowing from above shall be cut off; they shall stand in a single heap.’ — Joshua 3:11-13

The Ark of the Covenant was the protective covering for the second set of tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. Those tablets were considered sacred and the entrance into the Promised Land was accomplished with great effort to place God first in the Israelites’ life. As you may recall, the first set of tablets containing the Ten Commandments were broken by Moses himself because as he descended from the mountain he saw that the Israelites had turned their backs on God and were worshiping a golden calf.

This week a man drove his car onto the grounds of the state capitol in Oklahoma City and rammed it into a monument that featured the Ten Commandments. It broke into four pieces. The man said a voice had told him to do this. He apparently had previously been diagnosed with a mental illness and was hospitalized as a result of this incident. I think the whole state was rather stunned by this event. There has been much banter from all sides regarding the appropriateness of even having this monument on the capitol grounds. I don’t think anyone thought something like this would happen.

I think there is a message for all of us in this act of a person who we probably deem less than clear headed. He may have more insight than all of us, I don’t know. When I heard the news report about this, my mind immediately flashed to the scene of Moses tossing the tablets to the ground as he looked down on people reveling around that golden calf. Perhaps we should take this bit of destruction to heart and consider it to be a message telling us to stop worshipping our own golden calves. This year, we as a state prohibited cities and towns from raising the minimum wage higher than the state requirement while at the same time we refused to participate in the Medicaid expansion that was specifically designed to meet the medical needs of those working poor earning low incomes like the minimum wage. We cut the income taxes for the top bracket of incomes while most state employees have not had a pay raise in several years, our bridges are falling apart, our schools are failing, and our prisons are overcrowded without enough guards, much less restorative services. We seem to be a government committed to assuring that the rich get richer while everyone else does without or shoulders more than their fair share of the tax burden.

It honestly does not matter to me whether we have a monument located on our capitol grounds with the Ten Commandments written on it or not. They are just meaningless words if we don’t live them. What matters to me is that we people, who claim to follow those Ten Commandments, do our very best to obey them starting with the first one to have no other God’s before God. And, of course, Jesus listed another law as second to this one, love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Prayer: O Lord, strengthen us to rend our hearts and not our garments (Joel 2:13:) and turn away from the lesser gods that so beguile us. Restore to us the joy of our salvation (Psalm 51:12) so that we can live your way, your truth, and your life. (John 14:6). Amen.