Our Least Favorite Commandment

[powerpress]http://www.fuub.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Our-Least-Favorite-Commandment.m4a[/powerpress]

Welcome to another episode of my podcast.

For some reason I can’t quite figure out, Lynn Westmoreland, a Republican Congressman from Georgia, agreed to go on the Colbert Report and be interviewed. He had been actively working to get the Ten Commandments installed in all courthouses in this country. In the course of the interview, he explained, “The Ten Commandments is not a bad thing for people to understand and to respect. What better place could you have something like that than in a judicial building?”

 

Colbert replied, “That’s an excellent question. Can you think of any better building to put the Ten Commandments in than in a public building?”

 

Westmoreland said, “No.”

 

Then Colbert asked, “What are the Ten Commandments?”

 

Westmoreland looked like he had been hit by a two-by-four. “What are all of ‘em? You want me to name ‘em all?” And he couldn’t do it. I almost felt bad for the guy.

 

Obviously for Westmoreland, the Ten Commandments is primarily a cultural icon – and I say “is” in the singular because that’s they way he said it (“The Ten Commandments is not a bad thing for people to understand…”). Collectively they are one thing to him, and the cultural meaning of that thing far outweighs its content. He wants the Ten Commandments in public buildings because that would help legitimate the values of his culture, which are not necessarily identical to the values of the Ten Commandments. If the content were what mattered, he would know what the content was.

 

The poor Ten Commandments. They are used and abused in so many ways for so many different agendas. Like the Bible itself, they are mainly a Rorschach test at this point, revealing more about their viewer than about their own content. You have conservative Christians like Westmoreland who want to use them as a banner of so-called “traditionalism” to march under. You have orthodox Jews who try to take them so literally that, through a long chain of legalistic reasoning, you wind up with elevators in hospitals that stop on every floor so that they don’t have to push a button on the Sabbath. And you have Unitarian Universalists and atheists who make jokes and wryly demote them to the “Ten Suggestions.”

 

There are jokes galore about the Ten Commandments. One of Freud’s most famous observations is that people joke about whatever is important to them in order to reduce the tension created by that importance. There is a lot of tension around the Ten Commandments, mainly not because of what they actually say but because of what they mean in our world. “We live, not by things, but by the meanings of things.” For many of us modern liberal types, they mean oppression, misogyny, and tribalism. They smell musty and old, cranky and inflexible. Some of them make sense to us, some seem arbitrary. But to the extent that we engage with them at all, we evaluate them from a supposedly objective vantage point that some call the “sovereign self.” We reject the idea that their original context was one of divine revelation. We reject their authority and, frankly, we dislike commandments in general.

 

We especially dislike the first one: “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” We dislike it because it represents what many of us think of as the worst of religion – the tribal infighting about whose god is better than whose. The narrow-minded, even bigoted notion that there is only one way to truth and it’s my way. An anthropomorphized insecure god who needs reassurance of human loyalty. Many of us trace a direct line from that kind of thinking to all the religious wars throughout history and to terrorism today. And there’s some truth to this. For people alive at the time this commandment was formulated, it may have meant exactly what it seems to mean – they had their tribal god and that god was better than the other gods and so they were going to worship him and only him (I say “him” intentionally here). So on its surface, the first commandment is primitive, it’s dangerous, and seems to have no place in the modern world.

 

But in my studies in Biblical interpretation, I remember being blown away by a passage from Dr. Eliezer Diamond, a noted New York professor. He offers a beautiful alternative for how moderns can engage with ancient Scripture. In this passage he’s specifically talking about how feminists can interact with blatantly misogynist texts but the same principle could apply to any modern liberals who are tempted to write the Bible off entirely.

 

Here’s Dr. Diamond’s quote – he uses heady language so I’ll paraphrase it afterwards:

The wholesale rejection of the corpus of biblical… writings as irredeemably misogynist, is an oversimplification that cuts women off from the trans-generational conversation that has been created and sustained for thousands of years. I would argue that for women and for [contemporary people in general, the study of the Bible should include observing another Biblical] commandment: to redeem those held in captivity against their will. Indeed, by redeeming those passages and teachings … that are held captive by narrowness of vision, and by understanding that narrowness to be function of the time and place in which they were formulated… we can breathe new life into texts that may seem dead to us.

 

So he’s basically saying that the beautiful, truly inspired spiritual wisdom contained in the Bible is being “held captive” by the constraints of the time and place of its authors. It’s buried underneath a pile of junk. And it’s our job to redeem it, to excavate it; to set it free and give it new life. Because it has wonderful things to teach us. I believe passionately in this project. I believe in adding our voices to that trans-generational conversation. Rather than rejecting the traditions that gave rise to our own, we can work somewhere between surgery and channeling, separating out what is truly inspired from what is just a product of a painful historical moment. And we should be very careful with what we consign to the trash bin of history because, of course, we too are held captive by the constraints of our time and place. We are not omniscient. We know more than the ancients in some ways but we have to remain open to the possibility that they may know more than us in others.

 

So with this in mind, come with me on this journey: this is the first of a monthly sermon series I’ll do on the Ten Commandments to try to free the captive beauty and power of their messages for us. Over the course of the year, our Lay Worship Leaders will also each be offering a homily on a Commandment that he or she chooses. I invite you to join the conversation – talk with each other, talk with me, email me, write down your thoughts. Maybe we’ll put a book together or a portion of our website with all our reflections. I think it could be a very powerful thing for religious liberals to engage with these ancient principles in a serious way.

 

So today, let’s look at the first one: how can we set free what is being held captive in that first commandment, our least favorite of all? First, when we read it I think we want to know who the speaker is. Who, exactly is the “Me” in the statement, “You shall have no other gods besides Me?” This is actually clarified in the sentence that comes right before it, in kind of a preamble to the Ten Commandments. It says, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage: You shall have no other gods besides Me.”

 

The word “Lord” in that sentence is really great because that’s not actually what it says at all. Lord is just a placeholder for the name of God that’s actually written there, spelled YHWH. This is considered the most sacred name of God. But it’s not a name, it’s a form of the verb “to be,” like “I am becoming” or simply “I am.” It’s a word that signifies the ground of being itself. You’re never supposed to try to pronounce that word because pronouncing it would limit it; make it finite. It’s the biggest word in the world. So when you plug that concept into the commandment, it’s not a small, tribal god at all: it’s saying, “You shall have no other gods besides that which is!” Existence itself is your God.

 

And it gets even more interesting. Listen again to how this God is described. It could have been described as the God who made the world or who judges human beings or who makes the sun rise. But no. Of all the ways it could have been described, it’s described as the God “…who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.” The one thing they want us to know about this God is that it’s the God of liberation – the power of liberation itself. It’s not just existence as a static fact, but existence as something that is expanding and pushing us all to expand from our places of constriction. It is that which brings us from slavery to freedom, from suffering to joy, from injustice to justice. You shall have no other gods besides that!

 

It sounds almost like a Unitarian Universalist concept when you put it that way. We may have lots of things that we value, but if we worship anything it’s the power of liberation in our world. Liberation from poverty, liberation from addictions, liberation from modern day slavery, liberation from racism and homophobia and all forms of oppression, liberation from all that holds us back from realizing our highest selves. And yet we know that the temptation to “have other gods” is great. It’s so easy to worship other things in this world or to lose hope. It’s so easy to fear that the Universe is indifferent to our struggles for justice. The people of the ancient world must have shared this fear, as have people in every era since. It’s hard to stay clear on exactly what one’s guiding principles are and to maintain faith in their power. Like Lynn Westmoreland, we sometimes have trouble even remembering them.

 

So what’s our takeaway from this first commandment? The Universe is not static; it’s always evolving toward freedom and redemption. I want you to adjust your dial, clear away the static voices that tell you that when you struggle for liberation – your own or on behalf of others – that you are alone. See if you can tune into the awareness of a tailwind rather than a headwind. If my take on the message of this first commandment is even partially true, when we do the work of liberation and justice, we are bringing some serious backup. We are aligned with the essential energy of the universe. We are doing God’s work. And if there are any other gods lurking around, they’d better get the hell out of our way.