There are any number of
jokes about the Ten Commandments. For example, when Moses came back to the
Israelites after receiving the commandments from God, he said, "I have
some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I negotiated them down to
ten. The bad news is that adultery is still in there."
The Episcopal Church and
the Ten Commandments seem to be uneasy companions. Episcopalians are
sophisticated people. We are more comfortable with ambiguity than with
absolutes. And frankly, we don't especially enjoy being told "thou shalt
not" anything. Someone once said that if God had given the Ten
Commandments to the Episcopal Church, they would have to be called the Ten
Suggestions and there would only be eight of them -your choice.
There are many for whom
the Christian life is mainly about rules; there are lots of "thou
shalt" and even more "thou shalt nots." A quick glance at the
Bible seems to offer a lot of support to this view. Not only do we find the Ten
Commandments, but our Jewish sisters and brothers tell us that there are a
total of 613 mitzvot or commandments in the Torah or first five books of
the Bible. There are plenty of commandments in the New Testament, too. Jesus
spoke of the "first and great commandment," namely, to love God and
love our neighbor, but there are lots of others.
On the other hand, Jesus
sets aside the Sabbath commandment and tells the Pharisees that the Sabbath was
made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath. Even more significantly, in Mark's
gospel, Jesus seems to forbid remarriage after divorce altogether, but in
Matthew, he appears to allow remarriage for the innocent party in the divorce.
Also, note that today's
Old Testament and gospel readings appear to be in conflict with each other. In
the reading from First Kings, Elisha's responsibility to his parents takes
precedence over Elijah's invitation to follow him and become his disciple. But
in the reading from Luke, Jesus rebukes the would-be disciple who wants to do
exactly what Elisha did, that is, say good bye to his parents.
In other words, even
though there are hundreds or even thousands of rules in the Bible, there is
also a great deal of ambiguity, conflicts between one rule and another,
situations in which it is not obvious which rule we should follow.
So is the Bible a
collection of absolute laws and rule from which we stray at our peril? Or does
the Bible offer us a set of general principles that guide us and shape our
ability to make ethical decisions but don't establish a rule for every
situation that we may face?
Many of us were raised to
believe that religion is mostly about rules. We may have been brought up in
churches where smoking, drinking, card playing, movie-going, TV-watching,
make-up wearing, and dancing were not only suspect but thought to be the work
of the devil. We were told that Christians must adhere to a higher standard. It
was confusing, because the Old Testament clearly speaks of dancing; David
danced before the ark of the covenant. Jesus drank wine, and Paul urged Timothy
to drink a little wine to settle his stomach. I know some conservative
Christians who were raised to believe told that Jesus and Paul drank only
nonalcoholic wine. Oh, really?? So, of course, we couldn’t wait to get to
college or out on our own so we could do exactly those things that we had been
forbidden to do at home.
So, how are we to live
our lives before God? What is responsible Christian behavior? What is the
ethical standard for Christians? Is the Christian life a matter of absolute
rules harshly applied? Or is the Christian life a matter of the freedom about
which Paul writes in today's reading from Galatians: "For freedom Christ
has set us free. Do not submit to a yoke of slavery."
Sometimes the set of rules
which we were taught as children are inadequate; they conflict with other sets
of rules. What do we do when rules conflict?
I was raised to believe
in an ethic of rules, and I suspect that most of you were raised in a similar
way. Then in young adulthood we began to realize that rules could not cover every
situation. We began to experience the tyranny of rules. Many of us adopted a
version of situation ethics, although we may not have called it that.
What I want to suggest is
that neither an ethic of rules nor an ethic of situations is entirely adequate.
What Christianity calls for is something in between.
The stories from I Kings
and Luke clearly suggest that rules alone are inadequate. A rule that works
today may not work tomorrow. As the hymn, “Once to every man and nation” says,
“New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth”. That makes
the fundamentalists very nervous. How can a rule that held for my parents not
hold for me? But the study of history shows that nothing is more certain than
that standards change. Two hundred years ago, most Americans were convinced
that the Bible sanctioned slavery.
A few days ago the Supreme
Court of the United States struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, a decision
that will allow the federal government to recognize and extend benefits to gay
and lesbian couples who marry in the District of Columbia or in any of the 13
states that permit same sex marriage.
For many, perhaps for some
of you, this decision seems to fly in the face of an eternal rule set down in
scripture. Others regard it as a triumph for human rights or as the latest
development in our continuing interpretation of Thomas Jefferson's words in the
Declaration of Independence: "... all men are created equal and are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..."
I cannot agree with those
who believe that the Supreme Court's decision runs contrary to the teaching of
the Bible. First, there are only three
unambiguous references to homosexuality in the entire Bible. Two are in the Old
Testament book of Leviticus, and one is in Paul's letter to the Romans.
In other words, the Bible
says very little about homosexuality. It says far more about feeding hungry
people, caring for widows and orphans, protecting those who are among us as
strangers and exiles, but we get so much more upset about homosexuality than by
our failure to care for the poor and vulnerable.
But rather than focus on a
few texts, I would like to spend a few minutes talking about how the first
century church re-interpreted one particular commandment and what light that
might shed on the controversy about same sex marriage.
In today's reading from
Galatians, Paul says, "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm,
therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." What is Paul
talking about?
Keep in mind that Jesus
was a Jew, as were all the earliest Christian, including Paul. Probably all the
writers of the New Testament were Jews.
When Paul traveled from
town to town proclaiming the Christian message, he went first to the
synagogues. He won very few converts there, but he converted many non-Jews.
Before long, Paul was faced with this dilemma: Did the Jewish law apply to
non-Jews? Paul concluded that only the moral precepts of the Old Testament
applied to non-Jews, not the ceremonial rules. In other words, non-Jews need
not be circumcised.
Many disagreed with Paul
and taught otherwise. The letter to the Galatians was addressed to a church
that was mostly non-Jewish. Someone had gone there and contradicted Paul and
taught them that even non-Jews needed to be circumcised. Paul was outraged. His
letter to the Galatians is by far his angriest letter. "O foolish
Galatians," he wrote. "Who has bewitched you?"
Paul, of course, was
right. His decision not to require non-Jews to submit to circumcision allowed
the Christian faith to become a worldwide religion. But it raises for us this
question: Where do we draw the line between the Old Testament's moral law and
its ceremonial law?
It seems obvious to us
today that the rule about circumcision is very different from the rules about
murder or adultery or telling the truth. But in the first century setting aside
the rule about circumcision caused a bitter controversy.
Throughout the centuries,
Christians have drawn the line between the moral law and the ceremonial law in
different places. Or to put it another way, where is the line between those
rules that are products of their culture and time and place and those rules
that are eternal and binding?
Another rule about which
Christians have sometimes argued fiercely is the rule about usury or loaning
money at interest. Leviticus 25.36-37 says, " ...if your brother
becomes poor, and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall maintain him; as
a stranger and a sojourner he shall live with you. Take no interest from
him or increase, but fear your God; that your brother may live beside
you. You shall not lend him your money at interest."
That seems at least as
clear as the statements in Leviticus 18 and 20 forbidding homosexual behavior
but has not caused nearly as much controversy. I wonder why??
The medieval Catholic
church made loaning money at interest an offense that could be punished by
excommunication. It wasn't until about the time of the Reformation that the
principle of loaning money at interest was accepted, but that involved setting
aside the clear statement of the Bible. In other words, Christians re-drew the
line between the Bible's eternal ethical principles and its culturally
conditioned statements.
Think also of what the
Bible says about slavery. The Old Testament orders the people of Israel to be
kind to their slaves but accepts slavery as a part of life. Paul urged slaves
to obey their masters.
Or think of what the Bible
says about women. The Ten Commandments reflect a worldview that understood
wives to be the property of their husbands.
Today many believe that it
is time to re-draw that line once again and to move the small handful of
statements that the Bible makes about homosexuality from the category of
eternal ethical truths and put them in the box with the rules about loaning
money at interest, buying and selling slaves, regarding wives as the property
of their husbands, and other culturally conditioned statements.
Paul draws the line
between what he calls "the works of the flesh," and "the fruit of the Spirit", that is
"love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control," against which he says "there is no
law." In other words, a relationship characterized by "love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness" and so on can only be a product of the Spirit.
So, back to the question
I asked earlier, How are we to live our lives before God? What is there to
guide us in ethically ambiguous situations?
During the Protestant
Reformation, Martin Luther was aided by a young scholar, Philip Melanchthon.
Melanchthon was terrified that he was going to commit a sin and go to hell. One
day, in exasperation, Luther said to Melanchthon. “Philip, sin boldly! But love
God more boldly still.”
Fred Craddock, professor
of preaching at Emory, tells this story about his boyhood. When he was a
youngster, he lived on a farm, and his family had one old cow that would get
out through the fence and run off. And it invariably ran off to the town
cemetery. Fred’s job was to go into the cemetery to retrieve the family cow,
and he was afraid of the cemetery. “Mama,” he would say, “I don’t want to go
get the cow”. “Go get the cow”. “But I have to go through the graveyard.”
“That’s all right, it won’t bother you, go get the cow”. “But what if I step on
a grave?” “Well,” Mrs. Craddock would say, “I’ll tell you what; when you go
through
the cemetery just take
big steps. That’s the best we can do”.
