Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
Oct. 2, 2011 Proper 22
Exodus 20: 1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Then God spoke all these words:
2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 3you shall have no other gods before* me.
4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
7 You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
8 Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9For six days you shall labor and do all your work.
12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
13 You shall not murder.*
14 You shall not commit adultery.
15 You shall not steal.
16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
17 You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
18 When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid* and trembled and stood at a distance, 19and said to Moses, 'You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.' 20Moses said to the people, 'Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.'
At the end of World War II, when the United Nations was being created and the world was coming to grips with the fact that civilization had arrived at a time and a technology when, for the first time in history, we possessed the ability to kill everyone and bring life and history itself to a halt. When even the skeptics were having to face the reality of a holocaust with millions of casualties and atomic bomb craters from which countless thousands has simply evaporated into a mushroom cloud, the United Nations drafted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
My thoughts were naturally drawn to this declaration of human rights when I saw that our Biblical text for today was to be the Ten Commandments. Those of you who are in my Wednesday night class may recall the picture I showed you of the Code of Hammurabi, that stone monument with the ethical laws of the land in Babylon inscribed upon it and at the top of the stele was an image of King Hammurabi being handed the code of laws by God.
This image must certainly have framed the ancient Israelite telling of how Moses went up on Mt Sinai and received the Ten Commandments written in stone by the finger of God. The purpose of the Decalogue was to establish the ancient Israelite civilization in a way that was both stable and just. For a people trying to survive the transition from being wandering nomads to an increasingly agrarian society with set land boundaries and consistent neighbors, the whole not killing one another and not taking each other's stuff was suddenly very important.
We have tended to paste these up in public school classrooms and Circuit Court Clerk's offices as a kind of wordy oblation to the Jewish and Christian traditions but the real purpose was to establish their nation around a religion and a set of emphatic human rights laws. You can say that the Ten Commandments were written for a community that had escaped cruel slavery and were trying to establish a secure and peaceful nation in much the same way that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written in the modern era to help us to establish a secure and peaceful world.
But, you don't see the Ten Commandments posted in public much but perhaps more importantly, you don't hear much about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights anymore.
It was not especially well written, in the sense that it is not great literature, it isn't poetic, it cannot be set to music, even though I believe some have tried.
You can look it up on-line and I have some printed copies out in the narthex you can pick up on your way out today. I just didn't want to put them in your hands ahead of time because I don't want to have to compete for your attention while I'm preaching.
It was written at a time when the world had just survived its most bloody and destructive war and the world's statesmen recognized that the root cause of international conflict is injustice. The survivors of World War II wanted to create a world in which universal respect for the rights of every human being would help to secure a peaceful world in the future.
Of course, a certain ominous die was cast when there were eight nations that voted against it, including Soviet bloc nations and Saudi Arabia. But the real reason it is not often mentioned is that even 60 plus years later, we have yet to take its noble standards seriously.
The universal declaration of human rights forbids slavery and forced labor but slavery abounds in the Eastern Hemisphere and the fruits of slavery are purchased without a twinge of conscience in the West.
On the heels of the Holocaust the declaration insists that everyone has a right to nationhood..... and we were so determined to give nationhood to the surviving Jews that we took it away from Palestinians, solving a European crime with Middle Eastern real estate and even now, as Palestinians beg the United Nations to vote to recognize their nationhood, the United States has assured them of a veto and we, sixty years later, tell them that they should try some more negotiation..... take two aspirin and call me in the morning.
I don't want to sound anti-Israeli in saying that. In fact, I must count myself among those who have been entirely seduced by the city of Jerusalem, its history and its architecture. I love Israel and I want for them to have both peace and security but I can't stand the fact that the victims of the Holocaust are exacting a pound of flesh from every generation of Palestinians and they are doing it with our tax money and military support.
The Universal Declaration of Human rights also says that everyone has a right to have freedom from torture.... Which appears to be a standard viewed as quaint by some in our own nation. It also says that everyone has a right to marry and have a family though even then they may not have considered the fact that "everyone" means "everyone."
The most apparently redundant of the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights goes to a series of statements about equal treatment in courts of law. Clearly, several people on the committee writing this document wanted to repeat this guarantee in so many different forms as to make it unavoidably obvious that ever court system in every nation has to treat everyone who stands before a judge with absolute impartiality, a presumption of innocence until proven guilty and no favoritism to be shown for any reason.
There are a number of things in America about which I have become rather cynical but nothing in recent years has disappointed me as much as my occasions to see the seamy underbelly of our court system and the penal system that does the court's bidding.
Favoritism is not only shown to corporations and the wealthy but it has become unavoidably obvious to me that our justice system is managed by a good-ole-boy system of lawyers who run the courts almost as if it were their private vineyard and playground.
I had one proud moment, finally representing myself in court, when I stood before a judge and quoted Howard Zinn who said that the justice system does not seek to decide who is right and who is wrong, it serves only to determine who can pay the lawyer the longest. With few exceptions, only the wealthy can afford to either seek justice or to defend themselves against injustice in our judiciary. And if there is corruption and favoritism in the American justice system, I shudder to think what might be true in Mexico, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Russia or China.
We have just witnessed the eventual release of two American hikers who have spent two years in prison in Iran on trumped up charges and they were only released on the strength of what amounts to a million dollar bribe.
And, even when the whole health insurance industry was in its infancy, the writers of this declaration of human rights said: (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Amazing, isn't it? When you just sit down to think about how the world should be run, it is obvious that sick people should have access to health care and old people
should have access to retirement and widows and orphans should be able to live with dignity. The profit motive seemed small at the end of World War II and human rights seemed very large but in the decades since we nearly blew ourselves up, corporations have become people and people have become expendable.
The Ten Commandments represented an ancient faith community's attempt as establishing peace, security, stability and human rights for everyone. I am certain that they largely failed in their application of these principles but they knew in their hearts that they needed to try.
In the modern era we've attempted to write a Bill of Rights, a constitution, even our own 8 points of progressive faith and internationally we have composed his statement of universal human rights but it is all just so much talk if we don't work, sacrifice, testify, demand, provoke and sometimes even threaten our own society to pay attention to human rights.
Torture is wrong and it should never happen. Nations have a right to exist and live in peace with self determination. The judiciary should be held to a sacred standard of justice and equality. And people who love one another and want to pledge themselves to become a family shouldn't need any government's permission to do so.
The Ten Commandments were written to inspire faithfulness, peace and security among an increasingly settled population of former nomads. In our day we have to respond realistically, ethically and responsibly to our situation and our challenges.
We can destroy virtually all life on this planet either through warfare or careless pollution and we have a moral responsibility to make certain that neither of those things happen.
And even though we have gleefully escaped the tyranny of mind and heart imposed upon us by neurotic organized religion, we have an even more important obligation to our faith in a God who is the author of justice and mercy to make certain that justice roll on like rivers and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. Let the people of God say "Amen."
