THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
"A Fragile Bulwark Against Chaos"
Commandments III & VII
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached November 1, 1998, at The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
This is the second in a series on the Ten Commandments. In the first installment I insisted that the Ten Commandments comes to us not as an assortment of moral absolutes. Rather it is a part of a whole package having to do with the Covenant between God and a community of people. As I am dealing with them in this series, the Ten Commandments are not primarily a law code. They are, rather, part of that larger Covenant as to what kind of community Israel kept trying to choose to be. We shall not be speaking here about individualistic ethical rules of the "Don't do this and do that," variety. The context is always, instead, "What kind of community do you want to live in?"Whether or not you still insist upon understanding the Ten Commandments as moral abstract absolutes, that's not the setting in which they occurred. That's not the understanding that was happening with the people in whom they became a part of our tradition.
Immanuel Kant's basic moral principal was that you were to behave as if whatever you did could be made a moral abstraction for everybody else. That's the kind of abstract thinking that our whole notion of moral law has produced in our minds. It is a way of thinking, I submit, that produces an infinitude of situations in which the application of the principal would be stupid, immoral and destructive. That is to say, one would stand an excellent chance of behaving unimpeachably correctly while behaving unjustly and shredding the fabric of the community. Once we abstract the understanding of moral behavior out of the fabric of the community that it serves and turn it into moral absolutes, morality becomes something else entirely. It becomes mere brickbats with which to whack each other over the head. If you seek moral absolutes so as to avoid any possibility of your being blameworthy, for God's sake stay away from other people. Hermits can do that. Persons living in relationships cannot do that.
That's what the Ten Commandments, and the Covenant in which it is imbedded, is about: persons in relationship.
The Commandments at issue this morning are Commandments numbers III and VII . The first, number III, is "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain." Now, I long thought, when I was in Sunday School, that this had to be the pettiest of the Ten Commandments. I mean, God passed a rule against cussing? Come on!
It took a while for me to finally find someone who knew what they were talking about to teach me what "taking the Lord's name in vain" was about, and it is certainly not about cussing. God does not care one whit if I say a long string of blue words. God does not blush when I say, "Phi Upsilon Chi." He doesn't even blush when I say it in English, although you might. God is not offended when I mention excretory and biological functions by their colloquial names. And the whole notion of blasphemy is utter nonsense, anyway. IF God exists, he knows what's in my mind and how it got there. If He is offended by that, who's to blame?
Cussing may be stupid, sub-literate and tiresome; but it is not a violation of the Third Commandment. To read it so is to be in the wrong ball game entirely.
Now, I don't believe that God believes in magic words. Unfortunately, the culture of Moses' day did believe in magic words.
In those days, it was thoroughly believed that if you knew the name of a god, that gave you power to invoke that god. As a result, the Jews did something really interesting with the name of God. Four consonants in Hebrew make up the name Yahweh or Jehovah. In Hebrew, they don't have vowels; they only have consonants. If you're going to read in Hebrew you have to already know what the vowels are or what you are presented with is a bunch of consonants with no notion of what might be in between them. This is why every 13-year-old Jewish young man has to learn for his Bar Mitzvah what the vowels are in between there so that when he gets up as a part of the Sabbath service to read from the Torah he knows what the words are.
What the Hebrews did was to take those four consonants and throw away the vowels. The name of God became a secret known only to the priests until finally enough priests had died off that the complete name of God was permanently lost. Instead, in between those consonants they put the vowels from the word for "Lord," Adonai , and that gives you the word "Yahweh" or "Jehovah." The word that has been used from time immemorial to speak of the Hebrew God is not God's name. When you open up the Old Testament and the word LORD is written there in those funny capital letters -- that's "Yahweh." That's the way the translators translate this scrambled-up word.
The clever thing about it was that they made it impossible for anybody in their arrogance to speak the name of God and try to get God to do what they wanted him to do. Now, we preachers have been prone to continue to try to do that, despite the fact we have been robbed of the magic word. But that's what lies behind that funny word in the Old Testament and the Third Commandment.
Oaths in those days were frequently written down on a piece of crockery. The oath was then smashed and only if you could put the pieces of broken crockery back together were you free from the oath. In the Jewish wedding, there is a wine cup ceremony where the couple drink from the wine cup and then the cup is smashed. The Hebrew prayer that is prayed upon the smashing of that wine cup goes as follows: May you stay together until the pieces of this glass reunite of their own accord.
I did a garden wedding once where we used the Jewish wine cup ceremony. Near the end of the ceremony, the goblet was produced, filled with wine and the couple drank. Then the cup was wrapped in a cloth napkin and smashed under the groom's heel. During the reception, I heard laughter and turned to see its cause. There was the mother of the groom carefully picking up the napkin and glass, being careful to get every shard of the very smashed glass. Was she retrieving the pieces so as to have them on hand, just in case?
It's that way of thinking about oaths that lies behind the Third Commandment. The thrust of the Third Commandment is "Keep your commitments." Whether you wrote it down on a piece of crockery, swore in the name of God, whatever you did or didn't do, keep your commitments. Do what you say you're going to do. If you can't, say that you can't, take full responsibility for breaking your commitment and renegotiate.
We make commitments because we know that, later, we may not feel the same way about this thing, whatever "this thing" was.
Is it hard to keep your commitments? Yes.
Is it inconvenient to keep your commitments? Often.
Do others fail to keep their commitments? Yes. And that may be a reason to renegotiate your commitments but not to abandon them.
A world that works is a world that keeps its commitments.
What kind of world do you want to live in? We are social animals. We come to consciousness already socially involved; maybe even socially embedded. Our long childhood -- the neoteny of the species -- is both curse and blessing. We are born so dependent that we cannot avoid that social imbeddedness. But that same neoteny means that we come to adulthood with a far more complex repertoire of behavior than any other species. We dominate the planet today, not because of our individual prowess, but because of our ability to pool our prowesses, even over time -- passing the knowledge and wisdom of one generation on to the next.
We are social beings who wonderfully complexify our environment. Without the social fabric of agreement, of covenants, that complexity would fall into chaos. Just to get around we need agreements like the line down the middle of the road to get us from one place to another without dramatically demonstrating the law of physics that says two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We need the Sanitary Commission to see to it that our latrines are not upstream from our water supply.
It has been suggested that we would have significantly fewer problems with industrial pollution if the owners of every factory in the world were required to live downwind of their factory and to get their water from downstream of their factory.
Some of us, it is true, desire to have control over others out of all proportion to our need. These folk are deeply distrustful of the choices other folk might make if they are not carefully controlled. I suspect that much of this desire for control resides in the fear of what they imagine they would do were they ever out of control. One of the more extreme forms of this is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is essentially a social institution dedicated to creating sufficient rules that no one will ever actually have to make a decision, or be permitted to make one.
In an earlier time, a part of the attraction of the Frontier was its relative scarcity of controllers. But with the luxuries of civilization comes the necessity for a fabric of agreement that keeps each other's behavior sufficiently predictable that we can stay off each other's toes. We shall debate endlessly what the minimally necessary fabric of agreement might be. Some will want collar to ankle uniforms, others would be content with a bikini. Some of us might be happy to have well-marked "Fabric Optional" areas. Very few would choose to live in the nudist colony, but the fabric of agreement is absolutely necessary.
Even those of us who would choose fewer limits and controls, would not choose to live in communities where commitments, once made, were randomly kept. Even if we chafe at being expected to keep our own commitments, we're pretty clear that we expect others to keep theirs . . . especially to us.
What kind of community do you want to be a part of? The Children of Israel saw the fabric of their community torn again and again and again. They knew the preciousness of kept commitments within the community; whether in the face of the arbitrary power of warring armies passing back and forth through town, killing people and breaking things, or in the face of predator individuals that collect commitments but do not keep them.
A world that works is a world that keeps its commitments.
Such a world is not built or maintained by grandiose gestures, nor is it built or maintained upon the appearance of approval -- though it has come to be in our society that if you behave in a way that seems to appear to approve of something, that is seen as worse than actually doing it.
I am always amused, at election time especially, when I hear endlessly the word "condoning." For the life of me, I'm not sure what "condoning" means, what I would actually do that would "condone" something, or what something looks like once it's been "condoned." But everybody is worried about how we might appear to be "condoning" this, that or the other horrible, terrible thing.
A world that keeps its commitments, rather, is built in the small, ordinary acts every day of keeping our commitments to one another. If you say you're going to do it, do it.
Now some may squirm, but the next Commandment that I want to talk about is the Seventh Commandment. It is like unto the previous one. It is indeed an illustration of a specific of which the other Commandment, keep your commitments, don't take the name of the LORD in vain, is the general.
If you commit to a monogamous relationship with another and you don't keep that commitment, you tear a hole in the fabric of community . . . whether or not you ever bothered with a marriage ceremony. Even if you're single, a one-night stand wheedled out of the other by false representation of an intended relationship is a violation. This isn't about sex; it's about keeping commitments.
In the About Your Sexuality class we tell the youngsters, "Anyone who says they want to make love to you without contraception, including what you agree do to if the birth control fails, does not want to make love to you. They have something else in mind entirely."
Well, I was wrong. I suppose it is about sex. It just isn't only about sex. Sex is about intimacy and intimacy has consequences. Sexuality is one of the deepest places where we see the full implications in our lives that intimacy has consequences. When we make commitments to each other, when we reach out and make agreements with one another, we become bound up in each other's lives inexorably, whether we like it or not. Those who engage one another intimately are responsible for the consequences of that intimacy. Morality has absolutely no meaning and significance unless we are ready to say, "Yes, I am responsible for the consequences of my behavior." When you get into bed with another, the two of you are making a minimum of an eighteen-year commitment. Even my vasectomy can grow back. There may actually be a free lunch. Free love, there ain't.
People bonded are changed by that bonding. That means that when we tear that hole in the fabric of community we take responsibility for the consequences of that hole. We pay the child support, not because the partner is that important. We pay the child support, not because some moral principal is that important. Certainly not because some law is that important. We pay the child support because that child, and the fabric of community upon which that child is absolutely dependent, IS that important.
Now, all of you adulterers, and all of you contemplating it, relax. I am not working up to calling you sinners, calling for the reimposition of criminal or civil penalties, nor of otherwise outing you. My position on adultery is similar to my position on abortion. Abortion and adultery are almost always, at best, the least worst alternative. And the one entity that ought not have its nose in that tent whatsoever, at all, is the government. But adultery, like abortion, is almost always the consequence of a prior tragedy: the failure to successfully find the ways to keep the original commitment intact.
Its outcome is not always the tearing of the fabric of community.
Marriages have survived it. Even after the tearing of the fabric of the community, lives and the fabric of the community have survived it. And I have known more than one divorce that needed to happen, a commitment that needed renegotiating, precipitated clumsily and half intentionally by adultery. But I have known many more in which at least three lives -- more if there were children or additional spouses -- were torn up.
As Damon Runyon said, "The race does not always go to the swift, nor the fight to the strong; but that's the way to bet."
There is a niggling problem stuck right smack in the middle, however, of that Commandment about adultery. The problem is revealed in the rest of the law handed down. Moses got a whole lot more than the Ten Commandments up there on Mount Sinai, you know. Go back and read in the Book of Exodus. Page after page after page of laws and rules are handed down, having to do with slaves and property and all kinds of things. And when you read all of the laws that have to do with the sexual relationships in the nation of Israel, you come to the startling conclusion, if you are a male, that the women have been right all along. This thing has been based on property rights from the outset.
"Thou shalt not commit adultery" is a property rights law. It has to do with you messing over my property, guys. You can tell as you read the rest of the rules and regs, the women were always incidental to it here. They're the piece of property that you lowered in value. And so you owe me.
And so, quite to the contrary of Mr. Reagan who, a few years ago, said, "You can't improve upon the Ten Commandments," I think you can improve on the Ten Commandments. In the last couple of decades women have grabbed us by the throat, given us a good hard shake, and, by golly, improved on the Ten Commandments. They have insisted that this bit of property rights crap be removed from the heart of our understanding of what it means to be moral, ethical people. Women are not pieces of property.
The ways in which we come to our fabric of agreement have to do with a whole lot more human things than mere property. But even more, it makes that whole set of relationships fall again under the original "keep your commitments."
There is one small final piece to it, and that has to do with who deigns to speak for God. The role of prophet. The word "prophet" comes from a Hebrew word nabi, "one who speaks on behalf of another." There is in each of us the would-be desire to be the Lord's prophet, to speak on behalf of God about how everybody else ought to behave, to stand in moral judgment, to pick up the moral cudgel and commence whacking folks on the head. The temptation seems irresistible -- we must either have been taught it very efficiently in childhood, or it must be deeply rooted in our genes. It's down there deep! And it is always illegitimate.
No one of us ever can stand in that space. No one of us ever can stand in the place of telling another how the world must and ought to be to them, for them. And within that unwillingness to play God on each other we still have to find ways to agree together how we shall be together. It's so much easier to do it by passing fiats, by making huge impressive rules and laws and constitutional amendments and laws of the Medes and Persians. It's so much harder to do it by negotiated agreement.. And yet, you know, they seem to last a whole lot longer. That's what the children of Israel, at their best, were up to -- trying to find the ways to make the Covenant, the agreement, that we shall be a people who live in justice.