Sermon: Milk In A Hardware Store: The 7th Commandment, Do Not Commit Adultery

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Sigmund Freud says we joke about the things that are most important to us to reduce the tension created by that importance. There are probably more jokes about sex than about anything else in the world. I could start my sermon with one, but that would probably be in poor taste. (You know the genre anyway and most of them are not actually that funny.)  But sex, obviously, is very important to us humans and there is great tension created by that importance. Sex doesn’t mean just one thing – it has as many meanings as there are people on the planet. It’s how the world gets peopled and how we express love and sometimes violence. We write songs about it, wage wars over it, and will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to get it. So religious people, predictably, have a lot to say about it, as does pretty much everyone else.

 

This is the final sermon in my series on the Ten Commandments and as you can see, I’ve saved the best for last. This is the juiciest and the trickiest of all the commandments. I was talking with a young couple a few days ago who told me that they found these sermons so provocative they would sometimes go home and have fights about them afterwards. I said, “Yeah, well, you might want to skip this week, then. We’re talking about adultery.”

 

Adultery. The word itself seems strangely out of place in a liberal religious context. Before we’re even out of the starting gate, speaking it out loud seems to already take something out of the private sphere and inappropriately transfer it to the public sphere. What business does something like that have in a sermon? What business does it have, for that matter, in the Ten Commandments that are directed at the community as a whole?

 

The whole topic feels puritanical – you think of the Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter in which the female protagonist commits adultery and is forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” around her neck for the rest of her life. She is forever defined by that one sin. Adultery. You think of tongue clucking gossipers. You think of double standards where female adulterers are punished whereas male adulterers get a “boys will be boys” shrug of the shoulders. You think of the homophobic politics in which every kind of sex other than sex between a married man and woman is called adultery and is therefore sin. You think of fire and brimstone.

 

Even beginning a public conversation in a church about what goes on in private bedrooms gets our hackles up – and by “our” I mean liberal religious people who value privacy of conscience and who include a wide range of sexual practices in the big tent of okay-ness. Some of us have open relationships, some of us are polyamorous, many of us have cheated on partners at least once in our lives. For each of the other commandments, I think I’ve been able to show that a teaching intended for people of another culture thousands of years ago has great wisdom and relevance for us today. But is this commandment the exception? Does a commandment about whom you shalt and shalt not have sex with have any place at all in our world?

 

Let me answer this in part by placing the commandment in the context of the rabbinic writings that came after it. You might think from the popular culture that the Biblical traditions are prudish on sex – that sex is a necessary evil to be used only for procreation. This is actually not true. And in fact the Talmud – a body of rabbinic writings that interpret the Hebrew Bible – has some of the most progressive and sex-positive teachings – certainly for its era and by some standards even for today. Granted, the context is always a heterosexual marriage (this was the early middle ages after all), but within that context sex is celebrated as a mitzvah and a gift from God. A husband is not permitted to force his wife to have sex and, conversely, sex is a marital right that the wife specifically is entitled to. A woman can divorce her husband if he doesn’t have enough sex with her even if they already have children. A woman can divorce her husband if he doesn’t give her sexual pleasure. There are rules about how often the husband must offer his wife sex. In case you’re wondering, here they are: If you’re independently wealthy and not working, it’s every day. If you’re a day laborer it’s twice a week. If you’re a donkey driver, it’s once a week. If you’re a camel driver, it’s once a month. And if you’re a sailor, it’s once every six months. And what specifically are you permitted to do in the bedroom with your spouse? After a long, explicit discussion of various options, the Talmud says, “In the final analysis, a husband and wife can do whatever pleases them most.”

 

So with this context in mind, the prohibition against tinaf, adultery, is not a prohibition against various sexual practices or sexual pleasure. Its scope is narrow. If you look at the rabbinic commentaries, adultery seems to be defined as having sex with a person other than the person you’re married to or having sex with someone who is married to someone other than you. It applies equally to women and men, and does not seem to refer to premarital sex. It seems to be solely about breaking a marriage covenant. The rationale given for it is sometimes the practical goal of being able to keep track of whose kids are whose. In the ancient Near East, you had to know who your daddy is because all kinds of important things like land and blessings flowed through the paternal line. Again, a vestige of a patriarchal world, all about the impact on the wider society. Very practical and culturally bound and this-worldly.

 

It’s interesting to notice, though, what the parallel commandment is on the spiritual side. If you recall, some rabbis believe that we are meant to read across the two columns of the Commandments, so that each one having to do with our relationship with humans has a corresponding one having to do with our relationship with God. In this case, the corresponding commandment is the second commandment – the one prohibiting us from making sculptured images and bowing down and serving them. It’s the prohibition against idol worship – investing something artificial with the power of the real; locating your hopes and dreams and loyalty in something false. In the case of that commandment, the idols were money and power, image and possessions that are so easy to start to worship in place of God or our highest, most sacred values.

 

There’s an obvious parallel here to having an affair. In a relationship in which you’ve promised one another sexual exclusivity, the partner or spouse is the “real” God and the outside lover is the idol. Adultery is investing an outside relationship with the intimacy that you have promised to reserve for your partner. You break a commitment in hopes of somehow “trading up” or having your cake and eating it too. You see something shiny, like the golden calf, a hot woman or man’s body so enticing because of its glittery simplicity, and you reach for it.

 

And this really is how it often works. You make a sexual commitment to a primary partner and at some point or other, the temptation is great to break that commitment. The primary partner can never compete on the level of pure appeal with someone new – real relationships are demanding and marbled, complicated and imperfect. Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship knows that it’s hard to keep the fires of passion burning as you do the mundane work of building a life together. It’s such a common problem, entire branches of therapy and bodies of literature have been built on solving it (my favorite book title on this topic is Mating In Captivity.) And the temptation is even greater if there are serious problems in the relationship.

 

The relationship with the lover, by contrast, has no baggage; it is unencumbered by the hard work of commitment and compromise. The lover can be what we want them to be, what we imagine, what we project. The lover is, in this sense, an illusion. He or she is something we make with our own hands, like the golden calf, and then proceed to worship.

 

The problem is that adultery, as a rule, doesn’t work. You rarely get what you want out of it. Unless what you want is to explode your relationship – it often accomplishes this quite nicely. But ultimately if you’re with a new person or not, you’re still going to be with yourself and all that you bring to a relationship in gifts and wounds and needs. And any other real person will bring their gifts and wounds and needs. And you will wind up with a messy and imperfect partnership with someone else.

 

On the most practical level, the commandment lo tinaf prohibits infidelity, not only because it can be destructive to people and communities, but because it’s futile. You can make offerings to the golden calf all you want, but the rain isn’t going to fall and water the parched earth. You go out searching for love, trying to fill some need, scratch some itch, cure some ennui – looking for something where you’re not going to find it. I’ve heard this called going to the hardware store to buy a gallon of milk. It ain’t there, except in the rarest of instances.

 

There are times, of course, when the primary relationship is not good – not healthy, genuinely not meeting one’s needs – and where another relationship might in fact be better. But in that case, adultery is (let’s be honest) a cowardly way out. It’s being unwilling to face truth, have tough conversations, not wanting to rock the boat, not wanting to face change.

 

And so this commandment doesn’t say don’t get divorced or don’t end an unhealthy relationship. (Divorce was permitted for all kinds of reasons, including sexual dissatisfaction.) It also doesn’t say don’t have sex if you’re unmarried. It says keep the agreements that you’ve made until and unless you change those agreements openly with your partner. Be mindful and intentional about your choices, especially when it comes to something as important and loaded as sexuality. Don’t be deceived by the illusion of something that’s not real. Honor your own life, your own relationships, and your own body. Don’t misuse sexuality for some ulterior purpose.

 

Adultery is prohibited not because sex is bad or because sexual pleasure is an unworthy goal. On the contrary, it’s because sex is sacred and beautiful. Not everyone in this world or in this room can have sex: not everyone has a partner, not everyone is physically or emotionally able to. If you are lucky enough to be able to have sex of any kind, instead of looking for what more you can get, cultivate gratitude. This commandment teaches us that part of leading a spiritual life is to honor the power of our sexuality – to be intentional about how and why and with whom we have sex. Even when sex is just for pleasure, to respect our own bodies and those of our partners. If you’re someone who can enjoy the blessing of sex… gratitude. Gratitude. Don’t be flippant with the gift. And don’t go looking for milk in a hardware store. It’s simply not going to be there.