A Return To Civility: 2 Creat No Idols Series

A couple of weeks ago we began our series “A Return to Civility” and I mentioned how earlier this year I had speculated on what I saw as a loss of civility in our society. We’ve come to a place where we can no longer agree to disagree, and we’ve stopped treating one another with respect, at least with those we disagree with.

It seems that society as a whole has come to a place where we demand others need to be tolerant of our views, but we aren’t all that interested in being tolerant of their views.

And I wondered if we lost some of that civility when we lost a common morality. That there was a time, that the majority of Canadians, participated in corporate worship of some kind. It might not have been Christian, and it might not have happened on Sunday, but most Canadians were in a worship service on either Friday, Saturday or Sunday. They may not have had a relationship with the god they were worshipping, but they came together to worship their god, and we shared a common morality.

And the thing that we had in common was a sense of morality, a sense of what was right and what was wrong, and the one thing that we all seemed to agree on were a short list of laws, called the Ten Commandments.

This summer we are taking a journey through the Ten Commandments, which will take us ten messages. Funny how that works isn’t it?

Last week was fairly straightforward, not a lot of room for discussion, not much controversy. Most of us would consider ourselves monotheistic, that is we believe in one God, so the first commandment isn’t really tough, it says in Exodus 20:3 Do not worship any god except me. How can you argue with that?

If you were here at Gatehouse last week, Pastor Deborah challenged you about what you worship in your life, and you may have brought that up on the index card she provided for you and left it on the communion table, leaving it with God.

I spoke at Windgate, and I challenged people to be careful about putting anything else in the number one spot in their lives for a couple of reasons. The first is that if we put anything else in that spot, we will eventually be disappointed.

The second reason is that we worship that which is above us, and so whenever we promote something to that level in our life, our career, addictions, sex, family, or anything we are saying that it is superior to us.

Did you catch that, we worship what is superior to us. We don’t worship what is beneath us, only what is above us. That’s what worship is.

The Bible tells us that there is God, then there is man and that everything else is below us. And so, if nothing is above us but God then there is nothing to worship but God.

But that was last week when we spoke on the first commandment.

The second one may be a little tougher. Through the years there’s even been a major disagreement whether this commandment should stand on its own or be included with the first commandment.

If you have a Catholic or Lutheran background, you might have been wondering why I was spending two weeks on the first commandment and only a week on each of the other nine.

That is, because Catholics and Lutherans, number the commandments differently than most protestant churches.

Both the Catholic and Lutheran Churches, combine the first two commandments as one, worship no other Gods and don’t make idols. Then they split number 10 in two. So number 9 is don’t covet your neighbour’s property and number 10 is don’t covet your neighbour’s wife.

That’s the way the Catholics and Lutherans number the Commandments whereas we number them the right way, only kidding.

In trying to determine why the two groups differ, it didn’t take long to realize that it is much too complex to get into in this service.

Some Protestants, fairly or unfairly, and I’m not making any judgment calls here at all, some protestants feel that the Catholic church renumbered the commandments so they could continue the widespread use of religious imagery, statues and relics in their worship. Fairly or unfairly it’s your call. I don’t know how they explain the Lutheran thing.

But the second commandment does say some things about images and objects and relics and whether they should be used in worship.

What does it say? The second commandment reads this way. Exodus 20:4–5 “You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children; the entire family is affected—even children in the third and fourth generations of those who reject me.