Many, many moons ago,

when I was still teaching high school English (or something like it), a student - Philip - and I somehow found ourselves talking about church. Perhaps I'd mentioned mine was Episcopal, and he wanted to know about it. At some point in this conversation, he asked me if we bowed to/in front of crosses. I responded that some people did but that I didn't, just as a sign of respect and reverence, etc. He - quite understandably Protestantly - responded with a question like, "Isn't that idolatry?" It was a question I understood and whose sentiment I probably shared when I first came to St. Mike's, but since I'd been there so long, I no longer thought of it that way. Nonetheless, I found myself floundering when I tried to explain why it wasn't idolatry. People who bow in front of the cross, after all, aren't worshiping it; that would be idolatry. (FYI: I haven't been through confirmation classes that would probably teach me such things, but I think the bowing we were discussing was a version of genuflexion, which can take different forms at various times during worship service.)

Because of my remarkable inability to answer Philip that day, our conversation has since hovered at the back of my mind, as it did yesterday, when I read the Exodus account of God giving the Ten Commandments (as well as a metric ton of other rules). As I read them, I couldn't help wondering what God meant when he issued such severe rules to His people. Not whether He meant them literally, or whether they are prescriptive or descriptive - just what they mean Why was He so specific for all those individual what-ifs?

I think I got my answer yesterday. My three year-old, who is usually a pretty well-behaved child (he is named after an angel, you know), became unacceptably aggressive toward his baby brother. After pushing him off a toy train and then biting him a short while later, I was furious, and Gabriel was in tears because he'd been punished. When I thought I'd calmed down enough to do so, I went back into his room where he sat in time-out, and I began trying to explain to him why it was wrong to be mean to his brother. I expected I would yell and shake my fist and point my finger and make myself all manner of cartoonish caricature of parent. Instead, I started crying, and once the floodgates opened, I entered into and out of a state of weepiness for the remainder of the day (thanks in no small part to last week's episode of "Glee").

And I thought about God laying out all these rules for His children. Sure, He'd given the Ten Commandments, and they were pretty self-explanatory. They should have stood alone - and as far as most Christians are concerned today, they did then and do now.

But God knew His kids. I can imagine that even as He spoke His rules for living that He could hear the "what ifs" and "but he started it" arguments forming in their minds. So before they had a chance to start backpeddling and finding ways not to obey the simple, brief laws He'd just given them, He gave His own extended version of "I don't want to hear it. I don't care who started it; I'm finishing it."

And as I read (past tense) and continue to read each of these laws, I get this picture of God-as-parent: All these laws were for the protection of all these children. He never wanted them to think their own desires were more important than the life of another person or his property, and every rule He set out for them seems designed to open their eyes to this truth.

It is not okay to bite your brother (or allow his property to be stolen, or steal it yourself, or allow his livestock to be killed because you didn't keep yours under control), quickly apologize, and expect for all to be forgotten. He deserves - and needs restitution, and you need to be the one to pay for it. And since my original rules did not seem to communicate this well enough, let me elaborate, applying those principles to the individual disagreements I know you will have among yourselves.

It seems to me that the spirit of all these rules is that the Hebrew people (and we as well) need to respect life - whether it's the life of an animal or the life of our fellow man. And the punishments for not respecting that life are severe. We can't just take - or covet in our hearts - what is not ours to have.