false

12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

13 You shall not murder.

14 You shall not commit adultery.

15 You shall not steal.

16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

17 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

No one likes to be told, "No".  As a matter of fact, we do everything possible to avoid hearing that word in our lives.  No seems to carry more weight than it's counter-part, more positive sounding, "Yes".  When I am standing at the door on Sunday morning, twelve people could say, "Yes" to the sermon and one could say, "No" and for some strange reason, my mind will dwell with the "No".  We want to try to turn "no" into "yes".  

I don't know why the last five commandments were written in the negative.  While our theology struggles against a God who would say "No", what I often hear in these words is God shining a light on human actions that causes brokenness and injustice.  These last six commandments are fairly straight forward.  Yet, they are also among the hardest for us to live.  

We all have rolled our eyes at our parents, we have all looked at our neighbor's new car/boat/big screen t.v. with envy, we have all gossiped about a co-worker, we have all looked the other way when the clerk forgets to charge us for some item.  We struggle with issues of violence and death as a nation and a world.  We know people who have cheated on a partner, whose relationships go south.

Part of what these last commandments do is remind us that life is messy.  And I don't think we always want religion to remind us of that.  We want a religion to make us feel good to face the messy, give us a pep talk and send us out to play the game of life.  But perhaps religion is less about some sacred space set apart from life and MORE about living life.

In order to live, we will bump/brush up against other people.  And when we do, there are going to be desires/emotions/thoughts that are awoken within us.  Some of those can lead to brokenness, some can lead to pain/hurt that will leave a lasting scar, some of those desires/emotions/thoughts will cause injustice.  So, God say, "No".  

That is good.  I don't want to worship a God who is warm and fuzzy, just spewing positive sayings all the time.  I need to hear "No", to know where the boundaries are.  Like that robot from Lost in Space who would say, "Danger, Will Robinson", I need to know when I am getting close to actions and words that will do damage and hurt others.  

The reality is that we can cross over into the danger zone quite easily.  We can ignore the "No".  And we do...lots of time.  In fact, most of the daily news we consume has at least some connection to stepping over this line God drew in the sand.  

And our human nature is that we want to know exactly where that line in the sand is and we want to look for any loop hole we can.  The book of Leviticus contains 600 laws that pretty much try to address the loop holes the People of God were trying to find with the 10 Commandments.  600 laws!  And friends, rabbis today are still discussing, re-defining, what it means to live these Commandments in our time.

While the child in me does not always like hearing the word "no", the spiritually thirsty and questioning faith part of me feels like I have a cool, refreshing stream.  

I invite you to re-read these six commandments this week...one for each day.  Listen to the news for connections and more importantly, look around your life too.

May the traces of God's grace guide you in hearing the wisdom of these words.