“Commandments or Helpful Guidelines?”

“Commandments or Helpful Guidelines?”    March 4, 2018

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Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Exodus 20:1-17         Then God spoke all these words: ²I 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. ⁴You 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. ⁵You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, ⁶but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. ⁷You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.⁸Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. ⁹Six days you shall labor and do all your work. ¹⁰But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.¹¹For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

¹²Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. ¹³You shall not murder.¹⁴You shall not commit adultery. ¹⁵You shall not steal. ¹⁶You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. ¹⁷You 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.

You may notice the next time you change your sheets at home that all of your mattresses have a tag attached. A tag that tells you that the federal government forbids you to ever remove the tag.                 

So I cut it off. No SWAT team kicked in the front door. Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, has not called. I am certain that at some time, somewhere, there was a perfectly good reason for having a tag permanently affixed to bedding. I am equally sure that whatever that reason is, it does not apply to me and my mattress.

Similarly, there is a provision in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky that if anyone within the state is operating an automobile on any road in Kentucky, that they must send someone ahead on horseback or on foot to warn people that an automobile is coming through. Kentucky had the misfortune of holding a constitutional convention early in the 20^th century when automobiles were still a novelty, a noisy, intrusive, and bothersome novelty that often scared the horses and made the cows stop giving milk.

Laws are never written in a vacuum. They are written to provide guidelines that serve the greater good of the society. We set a speed limit on our streets and roads so that cars will not go so fast that they cause accidents. School zones and crowded neighborhoods get the speed limit down to 15 or 20 miles per hour. City streets usually hold it down to 30 or 40, while highways and interstates will go up to 60, 70, and even 80 miles an hour. But there is nowhere in America where we are simply turned loose, as you are on the infamous German Autobahn.

There are times and places, driving through rural Oklahoma, Kansas, or the Dakotas, where it seems a speed limit is unnecessary, or maybe it could be 100 or 110 miles per hour, though, as a patrolman in South Dakota explained to me last year, they don’t really agree with that. Lesson learned.

I suspect that the fastest cars being driven on the Autobahn are not being driven by Germans but rather by American tourists who simply don’t know how to behave without rules. When you grow up with rules, it is difficult to imagine life without them.

Look, most of us here were indoctrinated into a belief at a very early age that we are immortal creatures whose time on earth is short but this brief life is the basis of judgement for where we will spend eternity.

As absurd as the claim would seem on its face, we were assured by our parents, pastors, priests, and Sunday School teachers that it was all real. We went to church and saw our school teachers, politicians, bankers, doctors, and lawyers there and they all seemed to believe it too. So, fearfully, and unquestioningly, we were drawn into that mythic reality.

It has been a long time since anyone here nervously believed in a final judgement but most of us did at one time and that fear was used to compel us to be decent human beings. If you can remember the first time you had a serious conversation with someone about the possibility that there is not final judgement, no heaven above, no hell below, your first thought was likely, “then what keeps you from just doing anything?”

You were trained, consciously or unconsciously, to hear the ten commandments as a threat. It was fear of eternal torment that made you resolve not to lie, steal, commit adultery, or even to commit murder. There were always a lot of complicated matters about believing the right things, sacraments, rituals and the like, but basically, we had been trained to avoid egregious sins and to behave like decent people to avoid the fires of hell and to possibly attain to some eternal reward.

Once that moral threat and promise is removed, what is to keep one out of the brothels, opium dens, and gun shops…. Well, church never was good at keeping people out of gun shops but, you know, those other things.

As with many other laws, we have often found the loop holes in the ten commandments that still at least allow us to have killing machines even if we know that we are not supposed to use them. But I digress….

In modern times, thinkers began to question the church’s claims of authority and the threat of hell and the lure of heaven began to lose its grip on society. The

18^th century French philosopher, Claude Helvetius, who was one of the thought leaders who inspired the French revolution, plainly said: “Our inner conscience is not the voice of God, but the fear of the police.” Even without a supernatural deity threatening us with eternal punishment, society found it necessary to enforce powerfully negative consequences for behaviors that hurt the larger society.

The ancient Israelites conveniently put their laws into the mouth of God so that obedience had a very stark and divine consequence. Now our laws come from the mouths of politicians, many of whom seem to think that they are gods. Punishments come, as they often did even in ancient Israel, in the form of fines, incarceration, and, in the most extreme cases, execution.

It really is a shame that children are ever trained to be decent people in order to either be rewarded or to avoid punishment.

It may restrain us at some level of immaturity, but it also robs us of the much more natural inclination to love others and to want to be a good person.

We are a small church in a city full of big churches. I would argue that we have the best musicians and while I may not be the best preacher in town, I’m gonna say that I’m better than whoever is in second place, but we remain much smaller than most other community churches because we are not offering that golden ticket for the train ride to heaven, nor can we make you quake in your boots in fear of the final judgment.

I don’t know if that is a whole explanation for why we have a few dozen folks in attendance and many of them have a few thousand, but I am willing to bet that is the largest single reason. Even in an age of science and reason, a huge portion of the population is still deeply invested, not always consciously, but still meaningfully, in magical thinking…. Even if they are just hedging their bets.

Oddly enough, many who are able to see through the veil of ecclesial lies and snake oil, will fall headlong into every more silly and intellectually embarrassing practices to fill their need for some kind of magical control of the universe. I actually know grown ups who believe in Tarot Cards,

horoscopes, Ouija boards, and various occult practices as if the movie, Jumanji, was some kind of PBS documentary.

Of course, we have to take care not to be too harsh in our judgements, especially for those who grew up in Catholic tradition wearing a scapular under your shirt to keep a demon from jumping into your soul, or a crucifix, a saint’s medallion, or a rosary to protect you from all manner of evil.

And you know that Holy Water is not just a prop in vampire movies but that people actually ascribe divine qualities to properly blessed tap water,

and I won’t even wade into the muddy waters of iconography and statuary, much of which has real value as art but what they appear to do to the brains of the gullible is quite embarrassing.

And I am not even going to comment on the magical underwear that Mormons are supposed to wear…. Just acknowledging that such a thing exists should be all that needs to be said about that.

I hope that what I am trying to say here is not obscure. God didn’t write the Ten Commandments. They were composed by an ancient Semitic tribe that was moving from a wandering sheep herding society into being a settled agrarian society that needed rules that would hold them together and keep them from killing, raping, and stealing each other out of existence.

The Bible wasn’t written by God but rather it is a collection of texts from several nations, over several centuries, as they attempted to record what was their highest and best moral understanding of their existence. And they conveyed these stories, letters, poems, and philosophical writings in a way that was intended to instruct and persuade people to be good people.

Admittedly, it hasn’t always worked very well but it was, in all likelihood, better than nothing. The relevant question is that once we have awakened from the darkness of fear and selfish lust, who do we want to be?

Once you are not being manipulated with magical thinking . . . once you have risen above the purely selfserving motivations of traditional religion, what is it that you do believe? What does govern your personal behavior? What sort of world do you want to create? Because that is the more honest reading of the ten commandments in the first place.

I took a stab at just restating the big ten and I printed it in your liturgy today. I don’t mean for this to be a new ten commandments, I’m just showing you there is a way to state these principles with an understanding of what makes for good people living in a good society.

Rather than insisting that everyone must observe exactly the same religion in exactly the same way, doesn’t our modern culture demand a value that allows for freedom to choose your religion or to choose no religion at all?

I don’t know if a white, Protestant, boy from Kentucky can adequately channel Moses, but I just think if he were restating the 10 commandments today, it might look more like this:

I don’t know if that is entirely fair to Moses, but I am sincerely saying that we do not have tablets of stone handed down to us from on high. More than that, there is no carrot and there is no stick to prompt our civil conduct. There is only the hope that there is a divine spark within you, a sacred and precious desire to be good people who will create a good society, a society that can therefore must provide adequate housing, food, medical care, and education for everyone. A society that is capable of living beyond racial and national prejudices and can bring an end to war… and therefore we must.

We can discipline ourselves to act in favor of saving the earth and preserving human dignity without allowing capitalism to solely chart our course. Humanity is no longer in its infancy, it is time for us to grow up and make responsible decisions to fulfill our potential as a great society.