THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
THOU SHALT NOT KILL ANOTHER'S JOY
Part six of the Series on the Ten Suggestions
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
March 14, 1999There is an ancient document called the Babylonian Talmud. The collection begins shortly after the Children of Israel were carried off to Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem, 586 B.C.E. It contains, among other things, commentaries on Old Testament pieces. It's there, for example, that you find a somewhat different story of Adam and Eve. In the Babylonian Talmud there is the story that Eve was not the first of Adam's wives. Therein lies an interesting tale I'll tell you sometime.
In a commentary on the Ten Commandments an ancient author insists that if you obey any one of the Commandments you will have obeyed them all. And specifically, he says, the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is only fully obeyed when you understand it to mean "Thou shall not kill another's joy."
The basic point of view I have been working from and tried to share with you in this series on the Ten Commandments is that what we have in this heritage is both more than and different from a set of abstract moral injunctions. The story that we have in our minds, largely because of Cecil B. DeMille and more recently "A Prince of Egypt," is of Moses going up on top of the mountain and coming down with these two great, big tablets on which there are ten Roman numerals. Never mind Roman numerals weren't invented yet. The Ten Commandments were chiseled into them by Moses because he had broken the first pair and had to do it again all by himself.
The original story, bear in mind, had Moses going up there and receiving an extensive bit of teaching. You find it in the Book of Exodus and continuing into Leviticus. A long batch of stuff that would not have fit on even a dozen tablets. The difference between those two images tells much about what the followers of the heritage, including Western Civilization right down to the present, have done to this teaching.
The Ten Commandments became, first, a symbol of that larger corpus of law, then began to be treated as a summary of it. Then we turned them into the "Ten Abstractions;" allowing us to play street corner lawyer and debate whether or not, in fact, we have done this or that or to what degree. The law is an unfortunate label for this incredible heritage. It comes across as the arbitrary edict of an Oriental absentee potentate, somewhat with the same arbitrary feel as "Don't eat the apples in the middle of the orchard" from the early chapters of Genesis. It carries the implication that somehow we are all such flawed and terrible creatures that if it weren't for the law, if it weren't for the Ten Commandments, we wouldn't know any better. We'd be running around killing and stealing and carrying on like a bunch of I-don't-know-whats.
What I have tried to share with you is that this incredibly fascinating corpus of heritage is, first of all, one part fabric of agreement for an incredibly diverse community. It is one part a device for setting that community apart in the face of very strong forces of fragmentation. Buried in it, also, is perhaps for the first time in the history of civilization a serious attempt to express in that fabric of agreement some deep commitment to the notion of justice across those lines that normally divide us, of class and wealth and power. And finally, one part of that heritage, the accumulated wisdom of social problem-solving. If you decide that it is in your particular best interest, at a given moment, to violate one of the pieces of this heritage you'd better look at it long and hard. You may be right, but the wisdom buried in those laws is hard-won.
A major part of Jesus' teaching was an attack upon what had happened to the law, an attack upon the dead letter of the law in the name of the spirit of that ancient heritage. Jesus does two very interesting things to the law in the "You have heard it said, but I say to you" section of the Sermon on the Mount. The first thing he does is that he universalizes it. Judaism never did that. It walked right up to the edge of it in the late years, after the Diaspora, as they found themselves scattered into the Persian world. Isaiah can call them to become a "light unto the nations," to behave even toward that scattered populace of humanity as a testimonial to the ways in which human beings might live together in community.
Jesus takes the law a step that no one in the history up to then had taken it, a step that even today continues to be controversial. He applied the law to the enemy as well, to all relationships.
The objective of the law, in Jesus' view, was not mere obedience. The objective of the law was the transformation of individuals and relationships.
These two are inseparable. We human beings do not come to consciousness as isolated individuals. For most of us, the values we live by were acquired growing up. We may change how we describe and explain and rationalize those values, but very few of us stray very far from them. So much is this so that when someone really does stray very far from the values that they were raised with, it's a matter for notice. When a person from a wretched family situation is taught, as if by intention, to be a really terrible slob--vicious, mean, unable to empathize with anybody-- and then becomes someone of significance worthy of respect; we pay attention. When someone raised with the values of compassion and empathy, honesty and justice, becomes a real crook, it's a matter of note; because most of us, most of the time, do not stray very far from the values that we acquired as small children. It's that reality that lies behind the saying, "Raise up a child in the way that he (or she) should go and they will not depart from it."
The psychologist says that parental approval becomes introjected. We then turn around and project that onto the cosmos and say "God," says the psychological oversimplifier. As the Super Ego is internalized, God is externalized. That crude and stylized point of view still points in the right direction. We may go through stages in how we apply those values, says the developmental psychologist. But the core values remain much the same. We come to consciousness in that relational situation. Our notion of how we behave as individuals is conditioned from the outset by being raised in relationships.
The issue, when one looks at ethics, sometimes is "Who's doing the accounting?" I was raised with the notion that, somehow, God was sitting up there in heaven with a book, going, "Ah ha! Black mark. Oh! You got a white one for that." Somebody watching over my shoulder, giving me Brownie points or taking them away.
Is it only a question of getting caught? How many times have you heard someone say to their child, "Don't let me catch you----" and the child says, "You won't, you won't (Catch me). I'll be careful next time." That projected God who plays "Gotcha!" sometimes is the introjected parent figure. I suppose much of my niceness is that my father wouldn't have approved of any other behavior, but it has become a part of my own self image. "I am the kind of person who does . . . ." When I find myself not being that kind of person, there is an internal dissonance that is bothersome, irritating. We call that "guilt."
My first real theft: I was 12 years old. I had ridden my bicycle into the next town which was only three miles away. I had been to the war surplus store there previously and had lusted for a set of calipers. Why did a 12-year-old want a set of calipers, you ask? I don't remember. But I had lusted for them. The price was 50 cents, and I had the 50 cents. I went in, picked them up and looked around. I pocketed them, wandered around and started to go out the front door. There was the proprietor with his hand out. I put the 50 cents in his hand, mumbling something about almost forgetting. It was a long time before I contemplated the possibility of stealing again. But not merely because he caught me. What prevented me from stealing for a very long time was that acid, almost aluminum metallic, taste in my mouth. I did not like feeling that way and that taste in my mouth was there before I ever walked past the hand held at the door.
In Buddhism there is also a list of things that you are recommended not to do. There is an interesting difference. They are not presented as "Thou shalt not," as if someone were watching over your shoulder to keep track of whether you obey them or not. They are instead understood as "These are the things which, if you do them, stand an excellent chance of disrupting your own spiritual growth. It's in your own best interest to not engage in these rather self-destructive pieces of behavior."
The western point of view says, "You are supposed to have integrity and always be the same person that you are today forever and forever." The Buddhist point of view in its ethical teaching, presumes exactly the opposite: you are expected to change. Do those kinds of things and refrain from doing those kinds of things that will keep that changing moving in the direction of your own spiritual growth.
One of the lines that has come up, with great righteous indignation, of course, over this last year is that "character is what you do when no one is looking." And yet, the ways in which we in the West are brought to moral consciousness is exactly the opposite: Character is what you do just in case somebody might be looking.
Jesus' responses to the "You have heard it said of old" are quite interesting. With each one of them he does not deal with the abstract moral principal at all ! What he does with each of them is push back of it to the most concrete human situation, bringing us always back to the relational reality in which we actually live. "Thou shalt not kill" is not about whether or not you decide that the world would be better off without that person over there. "Thou shalt not kill" has to do with the small failures to deal with anger and resentment over a whole lifetime; the failure to learn to handle our emotions in constructive, useful ways. It's those little, tiny pieces that end us up, sometimes, in the situation with one more small piece of anger or rage than our system can contain; and we lash out and destroy. The act of murder does not happen in that moment with a weapon and a decision. It happens in all of those small moments of the failure to decide leading up to that moment. So Jesus says, "If you remember you have a conflict, go resolve it." That's more important even than the ritual law.
In adultery, too, Jesus pushes us back to the concrete human experience. When I lust after a woman, that's what my relationship with her has become. When the testosterone flows, I could acknowledge that my glands are functioning normally and let go of it. When I don't, I am transformed by my failure to deal with my own emotions. And I am likely to distort my relationship with her, as well. That failure, become a habit of mind, is what creates adultery.
Jesus' teaching on divorce has always been problematic. It is referred to as one of his hard sayings. In our society, with its 50% divorce rate, many of you are either divorced or your parents are divorced, or at the moment you're contemplating it. You don't want to hear about this. Jesus' says that if you divorce your wife, you make her an adulteress. Oh, not literally. He's not talking about the kind of things that could be enforced at law. What he's talking about is that, in the social context of the patriarchal society he was speaking in, the rejected female has no further marketability. She has no status. Maybe the elimination of a good many of those pieces of patriarchy and our no-fault divorce produce a somewhat saner, or at least different, situation; but the point is not the fine distinctions of law. The point is always pushing us back to the actual consequences of our behavior in the relationships between people, which is where are lives are in fact lived.
Even swearing. I reminded you, some sermons back, that the "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain" is not about cussing. It's about taking oaths. Jesus' twist on it is typical of what I've been talking about. An agreement that requires an oath is not an agreement at all. Let your "Yes" be "Yes" and your "No" be "No." If it is, nobody will ever ask you for an oath.
We are in relationships. We come to consciousness that way. Even the Anchorite praying in the desert, says T. S. Eliot, does so in the name of the whole church. His relationship, his relationality, remains. Even Robinson Crusoe, before he stumbled across Friday's footprints, is still who he is because of the relationships that have brought him to who he is. The imagined isolation of individuality does not exist. When we begin talking about individual ethics as if ethics somehow only had to do with whether or not my individual behavior did or did not violate a particular understanding of the literally understood text of the law, we miss entirely what it means to be persons in relationships. Personal ethics, individual morality, is not in fact the way we experience it. We come to moral consciousness with the feedback loop of the consequences of our behavior on other people already there. In fact, I would argue that it is the discovery of that feedback loop, the discovery that "My God, my behavior actually has consequences on other people!" that is the moment of coming to moral consciousness. We experience our own awakening with act and consequence immediately and intimately tied together. Not merely act and intent to be judged without or separately from the consequences. It's the consequences that shred personal relationships, that tear up the fabric of community.
One of the objectives of spiritual discipline is for me to become sufficiently enlightened, in touch with my own insides, conscious and intentional about what happens in my own insides, habits examined and conflicts resolved enough, that you can trust me to be spontaneous.
And so the ancient Jewish writer: When you kill another's joy, you kill your own. We do not exist apart from those relationships. We exist enmeshed in them, and in that enmeshing is the delight and joy of human community. In that enmeshing is the constant challenge to our imagination, our perception, our self-awareness to find the ways to live together in relationships. We must learn the ways that indeed nurture the other's joy. For in that process our own joy is nurtured. It is not in the big acts, the big moral issues of our lives, that our joy and the joy of those we share this space with is acted out. It's in the little every day ones. It is in the ordinariness of our lives that joy is born and nurtured.