Worshipping False Gods

          During the season of Lent Christians often begin worship with the recitation of the Decalogue, more commonly known as the Ten Commandments. For thousands of years, those laws have laid out for people of faith how we are to live with God and one another.

            Saying them during Lent, the most penitential season of the Church year, gives us an opportunity to reflect on where we as individuals, a community, and a nation fall short of how God would have us live, and to repent and take steps to correct our failings and sins.

            This Lent, the first two commandments speak loudly to me of how we as a nation need to repent.

            “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me,” proclaims the first commandment, followed by the second law, “You shall not make for yourself any idol.”

            Since the mass killings in Newtown, Connecticut just before Christmas, it has become crystal clear to me that we, as a nation, have made an idol of our guns.

            Guns, what they represent, and the violent culture they breed, seem at times more important to us than human lives, even the lives of our children.

            Too many of our lawmakers at every level of government bow down and worship at the altar of the National Rifle Association, fearful lest they incite its political wrath if they put people above weaponry.

            Too many of our lawmakers and citizens buy into the deadly fallacy propagated by the leaders of the gun culture, that weapons designed for death can bring us life.

            As our state legislators convene in downtown Atlanta they will be considering bills that would bring guns into our churches, universities, and schools, allowing the desecration of places that should be havens of safety and peace.

            Last week the Rt. Rev. Robert Wright, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta,  prayed before the General Assembly and urged our lawmakers to turn away from the gun culture that has gripped us for so long.

            “As America and Georgia aspire to continued greatness, greater safety for her citizens – greater safety for her children – must be a priority, which means we must enact meaningful changes to our gun laws as a nation and as a state,” he said.

            “It is hollow to respond to parents who have lost children to gun violence that their dead child is somehow just the price of keeping the Second Amendment intact.       “On what reasonable grounds can we argue against background checks before the purchase of a weapon? To issue a weapon to someone without a modicum of scrutiny is not an exercise in liberty; it is an exercise in folly.”

            The bishop’s remarks were immediately protested by some lawmakers, who called them impolite, inappropriate, and too political.

            The truth is that the Gospel is political. Jesus never hesitated to speak truth to power, to speak for life. All people of faith and conscience must do the same.

            Our national idolatry of guns and violence must end. This is not how God intends a great nation to live.

In this season of Lent we must answer the call to repentance and stop our worship of guns.