Today, I'm featuring a guest post by Pam Heatley, who founded Vision with me eight years ago and is our Director of Ministry. She preached this sermon on Sunday.
I was driving in my car a family friend who comes here
to church. She told me (sort of in
a half joking way) that since we’ve been doing the 10 Commandments she realizes
that so far she broken the first 5 we’ve talked about. But the consolation for her she
said, “was that we’re getting to
Thou Shalt Not Kill soon right? “At
that’s good – because I know I don’t do that one.”
Some of you may be feeling the same way. How many of you have been arrested for
murder lately? No one. Whew! Ok then, finish your coffee and we can all go home!
Oh how I wish I could tell you that. I wish I could say this is the easy
commandment. The one you can
emotionally skip over and tell yourself you don’t have to worry about because
there “ain’t no way I’m killing somebody”. Well, don’t relax so fast. The problem for us is that this
commandment is about much more than we think it is. Even if we stick with the literal meaning of this
commandment you’ll find endless debates over what constitutes murder and what
is justifiable killing. For many
of us even those things seem far away and removed to many of us. So I’m not even going to go there
today.
I want to talk about the part of this commandment that
effects everyone of us, the part of this commandment that’s going to leave
everyone of us saying, “Uh oh, I do that one too” because we all do.
Behind every murder is a thought. A thought that can sometimes lead to the literal murder of someone but more often lead to just plain hurting each other. You know it’s possible to kill a person in little tiny ways by chipping away at their self-esteem, trust, joy, sense of worth, security and sense of self.
Maybe you’re saying “When have I ever done
that?” We all have times in
our lives when we let our anger rule us or when we let those things that emerge
from our anger like resentment, jealousy, competition or even our self-centered
drive to survive entice us to treat each other without dignity. When we do
that, we compromise the chance that the person we hurt can have the abundant
life that God wants for them. In
other words, we take a life and we commit murder.
Yes, I am saying that a hand gesture at a car that is
annoying you is just as bad as murder, because it comes from the same place,
anger. That does not diminish the
act of murder in any way, but it does increase our understanding that
everything we do has the potential to chip a way at someone’s soul. I believe there is a real death
that occurs in people whenever we speak unkindly about them, throw thoughtless
insults at them. Or make little
digs in our conversations with them, often disguised as humor.