12.11.06 Steve Remembrance Sunday Exodus 20: 7-11
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The Decalogue has been adopted as the basis of the laws of human conduct in our society;no longer exclusively Jewish, but the starting point for almost all who have agreed to live together in community. It is, concludes Joy Davidman , "..on the thunderstone of the tablets that Western civilisation has built its house."
"The world is passing through troubled times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they know everything and what passes for wisdom with us, is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress." Peter the Hermit 1274
No doubt we have to 'revision' how we read these - not as negatives/prohibitions, (Joy Davidman says - 'no wonder the decalogue makes us uncomfortable... we have turned it from a thrilling affirmation into a dull denial) - We should see this as a summary of how to live in 'right relations' - 'stem cells' of the whole nature of our faith tradition which is about relationship with God (who, indeed, is understood in terms of a trinitarian relationship), and relationship with each other. The division of the text for today is a bit wrong......
2-7 - Right relations with God
8-11- Right relations with work
12-17 - Right relations with Society
The second of these - Sabbath - given for liberation, not bondage. It is the recognition that work is the gift of God, and not a tyranny that rules us. It is a recognition, therefore, that all time belongs to God, and therefore he is Lord over both his creation and time. It's original meaning was to evoke a return to Eden - a feast, which was eventually hijacked by a highly organised and legalistic priesthood into a day of prohibition. We're familiar with the prohibition version in this part of the world because of its adoption by the more puritanical wings of the Reformation (I loved the story recently of the protests about CalMac's introduction of a Sunday ferry service to Lewis - when, because it was the Sabbath, the protesters couldn't actually turn up to protest and left their rather forlorn placards standing to greet the ferry).
Part of what we do today then - as we gather on a Sunday - is to ally ourselves with that recognition - that work doesn't rule us - and that we say even by our presence in church (as well as other ways) that God is Lord of creation and time. By being here for worship this morning, we've pinned our colours to the mast just by making the time and turning up - before anything else is said and done.
Surely none would argue with the benefits of stopping once a week to reflect on the nature of the world and our part in it. ... which provides a tenuous link to Remembrance - which is also about stopping (at least once a year) to reflect on the nature of the world and our part in it. There was the usual spat in the press this week about the call of some pacifists to wear white poppies - an argument, the nature of which I have never really understood. Quite helpfully, I think, the Bishop of Manchester (National Chaplain of the Royal British Legion) - denied that there was any contradiction between the Church's opposition to militarism and his official presence at Remembrance Services. "The sole purpose of remembrance is to honour those who have given their lives in war at the call of their nation....It is not encouraging militarism, and there is no sense of glorifying war..... indeed it is the church's job to contribute to the elimanation of the conditions that lead to warfare.... it was Earl Haig who told a bishop: 'Your job is to make sure my job is unneccessary."
Here's where there's a link between how we think of the patterns for living in the Decalogue and Remembrance Sunday -
- when we consider the decalogue's patterns for right relations with God, with work and with each other, merely omitting or refraining from doing something is not moral at all - otherwise a command could be fulfilled by sheer inactivity - thus if something is forbidden in one of the commands, its opposite good must be practised before one can be called obedient. There's no point in somehow keeping the sabbath unless we understand it as a liberating feast day that celebrates God's creation and celebrates that our time and our work are the gift of God.
When my children do something to really annoy me (however trivial) and then say 'sorry' - without what I consider to be the required conviction, I realise that 'sorry' ought to be sufficient, but what I really want is some kind of definite, preferably written agreemnet that they won't infact steal my computer speakers at any stage in the future..... or at least that if they do they'll bring 'em back. And as I set out the brass memorials, and looked over the names of the men & boys from this place who were killed in war, I wondered about the human cost to those families, and realised again that this is a cost that can never be measured or quantified. As we honour them, on this remembrance sabbath, realised again that I should be committing myself to doing whatever I can to remove the conditions for war. Our country has been at war now for the last 5 years, a war promulgated on a false premise - and many of us here raised our voices in protest at it's inception - and the ongoing terrible cost is all too clear. Not only a country at war, but also a country preparing for it - Tony Blair has put on the political agenda the prospect of spending some £40 billion more to keep nuclear weapons in Scotland until at least the year 2055. As we honour the dead let us pray for peace.