SunOct22011
EXODUS 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Is drunk driving wrong? What about cheating in school? Or cheating on a partner? In a recent column forwarded to me by a thoughtful Federated member, New York Times writer David Brooks reports on a study done by a team of sociologists at Notre Dame. The team has studied a sizable sample of young adults, and found that, among them, there is a striking inability to think morally about such matters. The team asked a variety of moral questions of the young people, and found them generally incapable of identifying a moral dimension to the questions they were asked.
What the authors found instead is that the subjects of their study would say they were not in a position to make judgments about what people should or shouldn’t do in situations like drunk driving, or cheating in school or on a partner. “Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked.” They knew that rape and murder were wrong. But beyond that they were unwilling to make judgments. “The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are a matter only of individual taste. ‘It’s personal,’ the respondents typically said. ‘It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?’”
What the people who were studied were acutely aware of is that, with almost any moral issue, there’s a huge variety of perspectives. So the only thing they could come back to was to say, “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.” Or, as another one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”
The subjects of the study seem to have no moral referent outside themselves. In fact, they even have a difficult time identifying what’s moral. “When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html?_r=1&emc=eta1).
So now into that world of individual conviction and taste, enter the Ten Commandments. To the moral relativism of that study is brought this series of absolutes: do not have any god but God; don’t make idols; do not misuse God’s name; remember the Sabbath day; honor your father and mother; do not murder or commit adultery or steal or bear false witness or covet. There it is, all laid out before us, clear as can be, moral dictates for a faithful life.
Except, of course, that it isn’t entirely clear, and it certainly isn’t comprehensive. For example, we’re told that murder is wrong, but is capital punishment permissible? We’re to honor our parents, but what if they were extremely abusive and violent—are we still supposed to honor them?
To say nothing of the fact that countless contemporary moral dilemmas aren’t remotely covered by these ancient laws. Is cloning acceptable? What about genetic engineering? In the interests of public safety, do we want hidden cameras recording our every move, or is that too much of an intrusion on privacy? Do employers have the right to limit their employees’ criticisms of the workplace on Facebook, or does that extend the reach of the company too far? Is it immoral, in what we perceive to be a righteous war on terror, to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born leader of al-Qaida, without due process in a court of law? Needless to say, we could go on and on.
We think of the Ten Commandments as defining the rules for life, as though they cover every circumstance. But of course they don’t. So from one angle, they’re woefully inadequate.
But maybe, on the other hand, it’s a mistake to think of the Ten Commandments as a simple rule book. Maybe they’re something different, something much more than that, in fact. It’s revealing to me that the story calls these ten items “words” (20:1) rather than commandments. They are “words” from God about what it means to live a full and gracious life.
These ten words from God don’t by any means cover everything there is to know about how to live, because they’re not intended to be an exhaustive list. They’re spoken with something else in mind. They’re uttered to remind the hearers what it means to live as children of God and a community of the faithful.
Of all the zillion things that could be said about these words, two cry out to be lifted up this morning. One is that these are not laws that must be obeyed if God is to love us. This is not God saying to the people, “Unless you follow these rules exactly, I’m not going to watch over you and care for you.” That gets the perspective entirely backwards. The thrust of the Exodus story could not possibly be more clear: God already loves the Israelites. There’s nothing they have to do to earn it. Why else would Moses have been spared as a baby and then encountered the burning bush on top of the mountain? Why else would God have led the people out of slavery, through the Red Sea, and into freedom? Why else would God have fed them manna and water as they wandered in the wilderness? God isn’t setting out rules as if to say, “Obey these or else!”
These words aren’t God’s way of setting out conditions by which God will love the Israelites. It’s just the opposite. These words are instead God’s way of saying, “If you want to receive my love and show your love for me in return, if you want to live as people who embody my acceptance and care, if you want to respond to the offer I’m always making to you, then these words will help shape for you a full and worthy life in return. There will be other words along the way—I will continue to speak in every new situation—but these are the foundation of all the rest.”
So the first thing we need to pick up on this morning is that these words are not a demand, but an assurance of unconditional grace. The second thing we need to take in is that the response that’s asked of us is fundamentally about relationships. It’s as though God is saying to the people, “If you want to be connected to me, this is the way I act toward you, and it’s how I expect you to act, toward me and each other, in return.”
Think again about the young people we mentioned a few moments ago. The real issue, when it comes to the moral realm, is relationship: do we take the lives of others as seriously as we take our own? Are we willing to grant to others the same right to life and property and fulfillment that we assume for ourselves? If we have no moral sense, it means that we haven’t thought at all about the claims others have on the basics of life. It means we haven’t reflected on the possibility that it may be our greed that keeps others hungry; that it may be the developed world’s rapacious acquisitiveness that keeps others in poverty; that it may be our intense focus on our rights that keeps us from living out our responsibilities.
A moral sensibility is fundamentally a recognition that there are others who share this globe with us, and that we are responsible for them as well as for ourselves. A moral sensibility grants that our choices affect others, sometimes in chillingly dehumanizing ways. A moral sensibility acknowledges that we are intimately tied to every other person who walks this earth, and that there are ways we can care for them.
We can’t do everything, of course, but we can do something. We can invest resources in organizations that work to alleviate poverty. We can advocate for national spending policies that assert international aid as a priority. We can recognize that fossil fuels and toxic waste are eating away at this blue marble we call home, and alter, in response, some of our careless behavior. A moral sensibility recognizes that we are inseparably tied together, and that our task, as children of God, is to care for each other as best we can.
Today is World Communion Sunday. All over the globe, other Christians are sharing with us this holy meal instituted by Jesus. Maybe more than any other day of the year, on this day we call to mind those incredibly deep ties that bind us together. Somewhere a house church is receiving the elements in a mud hut. A Gothic cathedral celebrates with pomp and flare. Ten thousand Koreans gather in a huge arena for this meal. And nearby two deacons deliver the bread of heaven to a person who will never again leave their home.
And our deepest hope is that all these meals are but a foretaste of what God allows and encourages in and for us all. In this meal we are tied to each other. In this meal we recognize that we’re part of one interconnected web uniting us all. In this meal we are commissioned to go forth to share the love of God with our sisters and brothers, with the odd duck who lives down the street, with the tenement dweller in a dilapidated neighborhood of Cleveland, with the people of Sudan and Iraq and France and Peru and Australia. Together, this communion meal and the Ten Words remind us that we are intimately bound with all of them, and that everything we do should enhance our common life.
Regina Brett, who will speak here tomorrow night, says in her recent book that she grew up with a contorted sense of who God was. The church and parochial school she knew were punitive and unpleasant, full of nasty teachers and leaders who demanded more and more of her, and who soured her on God.
Then she met Father Joe. Joe was a Jesuit with a bright smile and an extremely warm manner. Joe also had a terribly bent spine that made it impossible for him to sit comfortably in a chair or sleep on his back. And this twisted, hunch-backed priest became, for Regina, the light of her life. He told her about the God he knew, the God who adored both him and her.
And Regina unloaded on him, spitting out her disdain for the church and the bully-God she knew. She ranted about all her frustrations, and he just smiled, letting her get it off her chest. When she had finished, “his warm eyes filled with light, a light that came from the inside. He smiled like a man in love.”
“‘Look,’ he said, ‘at the end of it all, God is going to ask just one question: Did you love? . . . That’s all that matters. Did you love?’” (God Never Blinks, pp. 196-7).
The Ten Words God hands down at Sinai and the richly symbolic meal we eat this morning are points in the love story between God and us. They are an attempt to get us to be just like Father Joe: to love. That’s our whole reason for being here at Federated Church: to inspire a love that reaches beyond ourselves and makes a difference in the lives of others. GPS—identifying our Gifts, Passions, and Skills and putting them into service—is an attempt to do that. Stewardship that stimulates significant and sacrificial giving is an attempt to do that. Mission 1, an offering we’ll engage in next month, is an attempt to do that.
Every day, the choices we make are moral ones. They impact our neighbors near and far, they affect the very air we breathe and the water we drink. They “touch the earth lightly” (hymn by Shirley Erena Murray, Chalice Hymnal, #693) or mar it destructively. The life we’ve been given is precious and sacred. The Ten Commandments, those Ten Holy Words, remind us of that. They call to mind God’s inconceivably immeasurable love for you and me. And they invite us to share the bread and the fruit of the vine with a world that hungers and thirsts for love and hope and joy. May we be agents of that love, near and far.