THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Sermon preached by Rev. Mike Young
at The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu,
December 6, 1998
I have a brand new computer program. I can now hook a microphone to my computer, talk into it, and there will be my words, spread across the screen. The program guarantees me that I should be able to get 95% accuracy, which is better than my mouth has ever produced.There was an old story about the early days of computer translation. The CIA was interested in translation programs because of the tremendous volume of information they had. There simply weren't enough transcribers with linguistic training to transcribe them. One of the major computer companies came in with a program that was supposed to translate from English to Russian and Russian to English and solve the problem. To test it, the representative of the company said, "Just speak into the microphone. On the screen you will see what you have said." So, thinking for a moment, the CIA guy went over and said, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."
The machine cranked and groaned and there in Cyrillic letters across the screen was some Russian. Well, he didn't speak any Russian so he didn't know whether it translated it accurately. "Can you make it translate back into English and we'll see whether it got it right?" he asked. So the guy went over to the keyboard, pushed a couple of keys and translated it back into English. Only it said, "The vodka's O.K. but the meat is spoiled."
For several thousand years we have been dealing with things getting lost in translation. This is the third episode in my attempts to share with you some insights about the Ten Commandments. The Commandment at issue this morning is the one where God says, "Make unto me no graven images."
There are several versions of the Old Testament story of giving the laws to Moses. In the one you're familiar with, Moses goes up onto the mountain and God writes the laws on a couple of tablets of stone. Moses goes down the mountain and finds the people worshiping a golden calf. Moses throws the tablets down and breaks them.
Moses goes back up the mountain and, this time, he has to chisel the law into the stone himself. Punishment for having broken the first ones.
Did you ever wonder what was on those original tablets?
There is another version of that story which is that Moses went up onto the mountain and spent all that time up there wheedling the Ten Commandments out of God. He insisted that he needed them to control those recalcitrant people. If he didn't have some orders, some commandments from God himself, no way Moses was going to be able to carry out the job God had given him. According to that version, when Moses came to the Second Commandment, trying to wheedle the Commandments out of God, he said, "Now, God, you've got to have a commandment that says: No graven images, no idols." God resists this commandment but is finally nagged by Moses to give in. But as a last aside, before they go on to number Three, God says to Moses, "You know, Moses, the very first idol you're going to get as a result of this Commandment is these Commandments of yours."
The Commandment against idolatry may be one of the most insightful religious inspirations of all of the rich tradition that Judaism has given us. Most people think of idolatry simply in terms of statues and idols. Judaism has not understood it in that limited fashion, at all. I recall, as a Baptist, being told that those terrible Catholics down the street were a bunch of idolaters because of the statues of the saints, and Mary, and--my God!--that crucifix on the front of the Catholic church with the guy dripping blood out there! Clearly, they were worshiping idols, we were told. And yet, you know, I've had an awful lot of Catholic friends over the years and not a one of them seems to think that the statue was the thing portrayed. They never thought of themselves as worshiping that statue. I've never met a Buddhist who was not able to make the distinction between a statue and Buddha; whether it was the huge ones in some parts of southeast Asia, or the little tiny ones that you have to peek in the bead to see.
Who or what, then, is the commandment aimed at? Who was the competition in those days?
Recall the historical setting: Judaism is on its way to Palestine, the land flowing with milk and honey. They're going to take over the joint. God has assured them of this. Well, there's this problem. The land flowing with milk and honey was also flowing with a lot of early Palestinians. They worshiped the goddess Ishtar, or Ashtora. Some of them also worshiped Baal, which actually is a plural -- there were a whole bunch of Baals.
The problem being addressed in the commandment was not idolatry in the crass, "Let's go worship a statue" sense, at all. The problem had to do with syncretism, the human tendency to pick up and adopt each other's practices and customs. How do you take a rag-tag bunch of folks off the desert, with no history of being a people, a nation, a coherent culture, and mold them into something approximating a community willing to commit itself to those rather radical notions of justice ?
The problem was not the statue itself, but of Yahweh being treated as just one more statue there on the altar along with the various and sundry family gods. The problem was cultural integrity.
Monotheism, after all, was a very new idea. It was a strange and counterintuitive idea. It is still a counterintuitive idea to those who have been raised inside a cocoon culture which never acknowledged anything other than the one religion of that one culture in the first place. Like much of our so called Christian culture, for example.
The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Joseph were not monotheists. There are wonderful stories in the early chapters of Genesis involving the family gods of the patriarchs. They believed in many gods, but they believed that this one called Yahweh was the best and strongest. Sort of a, "My god can beat up your god," kind of thing.
Monotheism was a peculiar, new, strange idea. Who has not noticed that, in this world we live in, with all its many expressions of deity, one god seems to be just as good as another? There are just as many healings in the name of one god as another. There are just as many answered prayers in the name of one god as another. Good people produced by one god as another.
There's this wonderful quote from Dwight David Eisenhower, while President of the United States. Ike said, "This country is based on a firmly-held belief in God, and I don't care what it is."
And so, is one god just as good as another? Are they all in some sense facets, or points of view, on the same god? That's what many branches of Hinduism hold. In Hinduism people are encouraged to pick one or the other of these gods as the god that they personally shall be devoted to. The understanding, at its most sophisticated levels, at least, is that all of these gods are various facets of Brahma.
Or, is it the case that there are, in fact, no gods and this whole thing about gods is simply an illusion?
There is something at issue in idolatry that is much less trivial than mere competition -- one god against another. Much less trivial even than the problem that every religious tradition faces of people bumping into other ideas and changing their minds.
The insight of the Second Commandment had to have been an individual insight, I think. It's not the kind of thing that emerges in the collective consciousness of a community. It's the kind of thing that comes out of a peculiar insight or experience of an individual, and then eats its way through a culture until it begins to become taken for granted or, as in the case of the Second Commandment, it is turned into A COMMANDMENT.
That core insight of the Second Commandment is that we human beings have this incredible propensity to take our own personal ideas and decide that they are the ultimate ontological structures of the universe. Never mind that not a one of you has spent more than five or six years alive and conscious without making some rather significant emendations of your very basic beliefs.
Human beings tend to mistake the symbol for the thing symbolized. We tend to attribute ultimacy to the mediator or messenger of an idea.
The basic insight of the Second Commandment is: idolatry is to treat as ultimate that which is not. What things are not ultimate? Starting first in the Old Testament context, G-O-D, God, is not ultimate.
I've told you that story of how Judaism took the four consonants for the word "God," lost the vowels, and substituted the vowels from the word "Adonai" so that nobody could have the hubris of thinking they could say the real name of God. Wonderful story.
"God" is not God's name. The name of God is not ultimate. Belief in God is not ultimate.
There's a wonderful section in the book of Isaiah where the prophet Isaiah says that Cyrus, the king of the Persians--who is, by the way, going to take Israel off into exile and wipe them out as a culture in Jerusalem; Cyrus, the king of the Persians, is God's anointed son!
Cyrus did not believe in that god, but the Old Testament poets still understood that God was not limited to dealing through and with only those people who could manage to turn their belly buttons two turns to the right, jump sideways, and manufacture intellectual assent.
Paul Tillich, in The Protestant Principle, talks about the necessity for all of our religious symbols to be understood as broken. Tillich insists that we always understand that our language, our images, our symbols in things religious, must always be seen as incomplete, as partial, as containing a lot in them that's just plain wrong. Not because of any lack in the ontological structures of the universe, but because we are human beings; we, at the very least, are still growing. As the wonderful bumper sticker says: "Don't get too upset with me. God ain't through with me, yet."
In that sense, all religion, all theology, all faith, all authoritative sacred scripture, all symbols, all sacraments, all religious ritual is idolatrous. As God said to Moses, "The first idol you're going to get is these Commandments."
It was a community that tried again and again in its history to shape itself into a community that did justice in its midst. That whole body of law that is symbolized by the Ten Commandments was an attempt to build a sense of commitment to the larger fabric of community into the way people treated one another; family, neighbor, and stranger within your gates. We continue to be tempted to trivialize those Commandments as the Ten Suggestions, or to debate what behavior they do or don't apply to. What we have done to the Ten Commandments is to try to turn them into ethical absolutes instead of the agreements within a culture that must always be understood as functioning within the context of the fabric of a community. The first priority always goes to the maintenance and health of that fabric of agreement within the community. No, we wish to turn them into moral abstractions that we can then absolutize, debate and beat one another up with.
A number of years ago a gentleman by the name of Professor Fletcher published a thin little book called Situational Ethics. It was demonized by preachers and pastors all across the country who had largely never bothered to read the book. Professor Fletcher described an ethic of Love. He argued that, since Love only lives in the real world, all ethical norms must be understood in this tentative sense of being something that goes on in the fabric of the community, not abstract principles to be applied cookie-cutter fashion to the behavior of human beings.
The Catholic Church recognizes this. There's a wonderful document from medieval Europe, a big book of what is called casuistry, that is instructions to priests. When people come to them in the confessional and confess sins, the priest has this wonderful book for figuring out how to take the abstract principles that have an awful time being pressed into the real tangible experience of human lives and somehow manage to make them apply.
The Jewish Rabbi does a similar thing in a process called pilpul.
What we have done to the Ten Commandments is to assume that, somehow, those abstract moral principles are the basic idea. To do anything that appears as relativizing them, trying to make them function in the fabric of a community, is seen as doing something basically wrong with these clear absolutes that God has handed down to us. We do not realize that the very absolutizing was what God was talking about when he told Moses, "You know, the first idol you're going to have is these Ten Commandments."
We have the interesting obsession, particularly in the west, with creed. We have for 2,000 years been wrestling with them. When westerners go to look at other religions of the world, the thing we do is to ask what do they have that's like what we have. We go to Buddhism and say, "O.K., what's the Buddhist creed? What eight, nine or ten things do you have to believe in order to be a Buddhist?" And when the Buddhists say, "Don't know what you're talking about," we say, "Oh, that must not be a religion, then." We go to Hinduism and we say, "What are the eight, nine or ten things you've got to believe to be a Hindu?" And the Hindu master says, "Boy, are you in the wrong ballpark!" Islam's a little easier: they'll give you five easy ones. Except those five easy ones all have to do with things that you have to actually do in your life and we didn't want to hear about that, we wanted to hear about beliefs.
All you get in return for belief is fraudulent certainty. Faith, as that word is used in our religious heritage, east and west, is not about having the correct ideological propositions on your tongue. It is about going ahead with the necessary decisions of life, making them on the best information and convictions that you have, knowing that the information is incomplete, knowing that those convictions may be wrong but you have to make those decisions, anyway, and you do it.
We are, unfortunately, stuck with the word "belief," at least in the English lexicon, for "the" word that describes religious ideas. I say stuck with it, for it unfortunately also makes it sound as if we were describing with absolute certainty the ontological structures of the universe. Probably we shall not escape it when we talk about those things that are of deep importance to us with others without sounding awfully dumb; without constantly having to refer to 19 footnotes at the bottom of the page which nobody's interested in hearing.
We will need to learn to hear that word "belief" as devotional language, not systematic theological language. And let it be the slippery word that it is. After the word "belief" has been used, we can then go on to ask the questions that are far more important and far more interesting. Not "what do you intellectually assent to," but "what are your life commitments?" "What things are so important to you that even before you know for certain that they are true, you are willing to take them out into the world and actually try to live them?"
Dorothy recently confronted me. She said, "You sound very authoritarian," and I conceded that I probably did, but insisted that nothing that comes out of my mouth is ever anything but what Mike Young thinks on this particular occasion. What I didn't go on to say, and should have, is that I'll probably change my mind tomorrow or next week or next month. Hang around. If you didn't like what I said this time, you may like something better later.
The commandment against idolatry is not best understood as a commandment against anything. It is a constant reminder that nothing in the world we live in, nothing in the community that we share together can ever be known by us for sure to be absolutely so. Even the most important things in our lives have to be treated to a certain degree as tentative hypothesis. For surely, if God exists, he's not through with us. If Goddess is there, she is still nurturing greater wisdom and insights on our insides. And the saddest mistake we can make is to assume, as I tried to as a 14-year-old kid, that after 14 years I had it all straight and I wasn't about to surrender my integrity and ever change again. Any of you still 14 years old inside?
Make not unto me any graven images, including creeds, including bibles, including high-flown and fancy words, including all of those pieces we are so tempted to take from our own insides and declare to be the ontological structures of the universe.