There are Christians who kiss the crucifix, yet I have yet to see pious lips laid on the Ten Commandments. There are no telltale lipstick markings left on Moses’ two tablets of stone. Instead of kissing them, many want nothing to do with them.

Case in point: under the cover of darkness, a two-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments was removed from the Oklahoma Capitol grounds earlier this month.

Some people hate the Ten Commandments. Others mock them. Most ignore or endure them. We certainly don’t kiss them in adoration and love. Why not? Because the Law condemns, that’s why.

In the beginning. Nothing. No light. No darkness. No time. No space. Nothing … except God.

And God said, “Let there be light!” And suddenly there was time and space and light and darkness!

Last week I was talking to my confirmation class about discipline with the Fourth Commandment. I asked them what would be the proper discipline for different age children if they did something naughty. For a 1-year-old they offered these disciplinary gems:

We don’t know her name. We only know her as the Israeli servant girl to Naaman’s wife. This little girl had been ripped out of her parent’s hands by bands of raiders from Aram. Her parents knew her and loved her, but she remains anonymous to us. That does not mean that she was unimportant or powerless, though.

Maybe you have seen the videos on YouTube or through your Facebook feed. They are videos of deaf people who hear sounds for the first time. Doctors put cochlear implants into people’s ears. When the implants are activated, the deaf person can immediately hear their first-ever sounds. The videos record the reactions of these people hearing voices for the first time in their lives.

In his Civil War book, Glory Road, author Bruce Catton shows us how dirty a human being can get. He recounts an episode in which a soldier leaves a prisoner-of-war camp to rejoin his old unit. His time as a POW had left him filthy beyond description. He asks his comrades to help him get clean. They take him into a river, strip off his clothes and begin to wash and scrub. Only after this continues for a time do the man and his friends realize that he is still wearing an undershirt. The man’s body had become so encrusted that it had been impossible at first to tell the difference between a soiled piece of clothing and his own skin.

Today we come to the conclusion of Jesus’ teaching in His Bread of Life sermon in John chapter 6. We began in the wilderness with Jesus feeding the 5,000. Then we moved with Jesus across the Sea of Galilee into the village of Capernaum. Now Jesus ends His teaching in the Capernaum synagogue.

I live 4 miles from the church. Driving those 4 miles I pass 15 fast food restaurants. I also pass thirteen regular restaurants. Probably the most tempting is constantly driving by O&H Bakery. That’s a lot of food. We relish all the salt and butter in restaurant food. We enjoy the time saved by going through the drive through and having our meal served to us in paper bags. We savor not having to clean up or doing the dishes when we eat out.

One of the darkest secrets of Christianity in America is that we are losing our kids. We hide it with paintball trips and Christian outings to baseball games, but it’s true. And it’s nothing new. It has been happening for more than fifty years. It is still happening right at this very moment.

Worse than that, it’s not just happening to our kids. It’s happening to our college students and senior citizens. It’s happening to newly married couples and those in mid-life crisis.

Christians are losing faith. Christians are falling away. Christians who were once on fire for the Lord are burning out.

If someone would ask me to name the two most challenging places for a preacher to preach, I think I would say that preaching at the Seminary chapel in front of my classmates and professors was tough. And then preaching in front of my home congregation was equally tough. A key challenge in both places is that those listening might not see me first as a preacher.

At the Seminary, those listening could be tempted to see only a student or a classmate (whose foibles and failings they know quite well). In my home congregation, they could see only the little boy they watched gumming Cheerios in the pews.