Costly Grace by Rob Schenck

Author:Rob Schenck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

16

Rev. Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western N.Y.

When I arrived in Washington in 1994, the tensions around questions of American morality that had begun in the 1970s had reached their zenith—or nadir, depending on your point of view. Shortly after I stepped away from the National Community Church, I was up on the Hill, talking to a senior congressional staff member about my concern over the deteriorating spiritual condition of our country. Our conversation became more and more frustrating. The more I talked about what I considered the most pressing problems, the more impassive his expression became, as if he could neither hear nor understand what I was saying. This was obviously not the first time I had spoken to someone who was secular, but it did make me realize just how entrenched this nonreligious worldview was in official Washington, D.C., and I wanted to do something about it. It also impressed on me how our divide was not just religious but, in a sense, linguistic: he spoke the language of secularism, and I spoke the idiom of deism, and from that difference all else followed—a cascade of misunderstanding and miscommunication—which I felt was deleterious to the moral fabric of our country.

I returned to my office to pray over and ponder what I had just experienced. Even though the congressional aide and I were roughly the same age, came from the same part of the country, and shared an intense interest in politics, the gap between us seemed virtually unbridgeable. Could there possibly be a common point of reference? Was there any place to begin a conversation?

Impatient for answers and looking for a sign, I pulled a magazine out from under a stack of papers, the Biblical Archaeological Review, a journal on modern-day discoveries of artifacts supporting the Bible story. As I scanned the pages, my eyes caught a small ad for imitation marble carvings of the Ten Commandments with a painfully amateurish photo. And yet, even as I flipped the pages forward, I kept going back. The ad was for Covenant Marble and Granite Works, located in Roaring River, North Carolina. Suddenly I felt the surge of adrenaline. I thought, Maybe this is where to start the conversation, at the very beginning, with the Ten Commandments.

The purpose of the Ten Commandments is to offer instruction on sin and righteousness, to lay out starkly the difference between right and wrong, to hold us accountable and force us to face ourselves in the mirror. The “Great Words of Sinai,” as I had called them in many a sermon, can also be a locus of tension between my evangelical community and the outside secular-dominated world. But I also thought most people probably had a memory of the Commandments from their younger days in either Sunday school or catechism—or they at least had a rudimentary knowledge of them passed down from parents or grandparents—and that familiarity would facilitate conversation. The Commandments also had a kind of universal status, recognized not just by Christians and Jews but by Muslims and many other religions.

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