What laws guide your living? What are the commandments, the rules, that create the structure for how you walk in the world? There are those we can articulate and those that are simply so ingrained in us that they become the ‘second nature’ of what we do, how we live.
I’ve been thinking about this because our church community has been studying parts of the Book of Exodus with specific attention to Moses. We are doing this because this Sunday we will open an art show and dedicate a new sculpture based on the Ten Commandments. Many of us have been reading, re-reading, re-wording, discussing, perhaps even arguing about what these laws really mean and what they meant to those who first heard them. It seems that those who travel this spiritual path with me most often approach the study of scripture in the aforementioned way. It can make for some lively Bible study!
The laws laid out in the first ten commandments seem pretty straight forward. They were laws meant to build a group of people into a community of people. They were meant to keep people honest, faithful, respectful, safe. They were meant to help the people remember who they were and whose they were…..children of the Holy One. The laws that follow these initial laws can be less easy to follow, less easy to understand in our time. I encourage you to read through them sometime.
Reflecting on these ancient words, I thought about laws I observe at work in my daily comings and goings. I see people carrying out the law of kindness, offering help to those less fortunate, those living on the margins. I see people living out the law of goodness, opening their hearts and their minds to those much different than they are. I see people living out the law of justice, breaking down barriers of privilege and education, lifting people up from places of shame and oppression. I see people living out the law of love, offering their love and their prayer to friends and to strangers.
You may say, "Of course, she sees this. She works in a church." But I would bet that if you really gave attention to what you see every day, you might see the same, or even greater things. My mother used to say quite often that a parent’s job is to catch their children behaving well and to affirm it. Her theory was that if you do that, you have to do a lot less disciplining for bad behavior. I agree.
What are the laws that guide your life? Today might be a good day to affirm them and to practice.
"So shine the Lord’s commandments to make the simple wise; More sweet than honey to the taste, more rich than any prize. A law of love within our hearts, A light before our eyes." Timothy Dudley-Smith