Anxiety dreams.
Do you ever have those?
One of those dreams when you suddenly realize you are walking down the street naked as the day you were born?
Or you are back in school and you can’t find your locker, or you realize that you forgot to show up for a class for the whole semester?
Clergy have their own brand of anxiety dreams. We stand up in the pulpit to preach and suddenly realize that we didn’t prepare a sermon.
Another one is being asked to name the Ten Commandments and not being able to.
I wake up at night and I quiz myself on the commandments, and I usually only come up with nine. I always forget one or another of them.
Of coarse there are actual events when potential bishops or rectors are being interviewed and they are asked, usually by the youth delegate, to name the Ten Commandments, it usually doesn’t go so well.
One potential candidate once tried to deflect the question by saying that he preferred Jesus’ Two Commandments that summarize the whole of the law and the prophets, to love God and neighbor. Of course he didn’t get away with it.
Its not just clergy, several conservative pundits who have viciously advocated the presence of the Ten Commandments in public institutions have been caught up short by the same question.
The Commandments always seem to wake us up and we realize we are naked and standing in the middle of the road in broad daylight.
I’ve lead week long youth camps organized around the Ten Commandments, done five week preaching series on them, and I still almost always only come up with nine most of the time.
So if you ever want to catch me up short, you know what to do.
We have five babies to be baptized here on All Saints Sunday.
I’m in the middle of a six week class for the parents of those five babies and part of the Catechism we went over last week was the portion on the Ten Commandments.
It is a lively class, and the discussion on how our Catechism interprets the Ten Commandments was reverent and funny and eye opening and refreshing for all of us.
In fact let’s all refresh ourselves, turn in your Prayer Books to page 847.
The Catechism unpacks some of the potential meaning of each Commandment. We are so used to hearing them that we often don’t think about all that they point to, so much so that it can be a challenge to connect the catechism version to the strictly literal version that we hear today from the book of Exodus. Go back sometime today and see if you can match each Commandment to what the Catechism says.
There is a common misunderstanding that the Law is about earning God’s love, a sort of stair steps to perfection.
It has never been about that.
The Law is a gift of love from the God who loves us, they reveal God’s nature and character as much as they direct us to what life can and should be about.
It is about accepting the gift and living with it rather than earning God’s love. In many ways they are like the sacraments a gift we inwardly digest and let it change how we live.
The heart of the Commandments is about worship, worshiping the Holy One who created us, who loves and cherishes us, who chooses to be known by us, who graces us with Ten Words, the Decalogue.
It is out of reverence for God, and the image of God created in each of us that we know how to live.
Our failure to fully adore God leads to violation of the first four commandments.
It is our failure to fully venerate the image of God in one another that leads to the violation of the other six.
In this exodus out of slavery into freedom the Commandments point us toward a life of reverence, of worship and of veneration of the God who is gloriously present and revealed to us.
The Word of God is revealed in these ten words from God.
That Word has become flesh,
God stands before us, naked, in broad daylight waking us up from a bad dream.