Ten Words

For Sunday October 2, 2005

           Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year A)
           Exodus 20:1–4, 7–9, 12–20 or Isaiah 5:1–7
           Psalm 19 or Psalm 80:7–15
           Philippians 3:4b–14
           Matthew 21:33–46

Moses receives the 10 commandments, Jewish prayer book, Germany, c. 1290.

           On June 27, 2005, the US Supreme Court handed down two 5–4 decisions regarding public displays of the 10 Commandments. The court allowed an exhibit at the state capitol in Texas, but barred them at two Kentucky courthouses. By one count there are some 4,000 public displays of the commandments around the country, including the Supreme Court itself and the Library of Congress. Zeal for the 10 Commandments runs high in America, but so does a breathtaking ignorance. A 2004 Barna poll documented that 79% of Americans oppose the idea of removing displays of the 10 Commandments from government buildings, even though a survey by Polltronics released one day after the high court's decision indicated that fewer than 10% of Americans can identify more than four of the commandments.

           Across the last 3,000 years the Decalogue (literally, "ten words") has functioned as a moral gyroscope to maintain the ethical equilibrium of societies of widely divergent times, places, cultures, and religions. Christians inherited them from Judaism, Islam honors Moses as a prophet, and Hinduism and Buddhism embrace the spirit if not the letter of them. Here are the "ten words" that Yahweh gave to Moses on Mount Sinai:

Moses, Salvador Dali, 1975.

* You shall have no other gods before Yahweh.
* You shall not make for yourself an idol.
* You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.
* Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.
* Honor your father and mother.
* You shall not murder.
* You shall not commit adultery.
* You shall not steal.
* You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
* You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The first four commandments inform our relationship with God, while the last six speak to our relationships with each other.

           Even though all of us have broken many of these commandments, most people acknowledge that they serve all humanity as a moral compass to point us in a direction that promotes a "true north" of health and wholeness, and that in neglecting them we lose our way. In this sense the 10 Commandments are promises that give life rather than prohibitions that repress. Hurricane Katrina ripped the roofs off thousands of homes, but watching the looters and shooters reminded us that when the moral fabric of society is ripped off we descend into a Hobbesian "state of nature" that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Katrina's natural disaster was bad enough, but with time, money, and will power New Orleans can rise above the flood waters. The ensuing social disaster was worse, for our moral capital is not so easily replenished.

Moses and the 10 Commandments, 16th century church fresco.

           A favorite author of mine, Chris Hedges, recently published a book about the Decalogue, Losing Moses On The Freeway; The 10 Commandments In America (New York: Free Press, 2005). As an award-winning war correspondent in 50 countries over 20 years, Hedges brings a remarkable life story and passion to his story-telling about these most famous Ten Words—mystery, idols, lying, sabbath, family, murder, adultery, theft, envy, greed and, in an epilogue, love. Hedges grew up in rural upstate New York, where his father was a Presbyterian pastor. Five years at an elite boarding school, the loneliness of his childhood, left him with "a deep hostility to authority and a visceral distaste for the snobbery of the 'well-born.'" Six days after graduating from Colgate University he began a two year stint as a pastor in the violent ghetto of Roxbury in metro Boston, an experience so unsettling that it provoked him to leave both church and seminary. After a year in South America he completed his divinity degree at Harvard.

           The Ten Commandments are not moral abstractions divorced from daily life, Hedges insists: "There is nothing abstract about the commandments to those who know the sting of their violation or have neglected their call." His book desacralizes the contemporary idolatries we so readily worship—the state, nation (especially in its glorification of war and legitimation, even sacralization, of violence), race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sex, and economic class. His chapter on murder recounts the tortured conscience of an Episcopal priest who estimates that he killed 300 people as a young solider in the Vietnam War. For theft he explores the breadth and depth of corporate greed through the experience of R. Foster Winans, a writer for the Wall Street Journal who did prison time for succumbing to insider trading.

           Hedges includes himself in the struggle for moral integrity and personal authenticity that we all experience: "The darkness I discovered in Roxbury was my darkness." No one, he reminds us, is immune from corrosive impulses, but to flaunt the moral grammar of the universe is to court spiritual, emotional and psychological death. Hedges has experienced enough to know just when and how this happens, whether in a bar in Sarajevo or a gleaming skyscraper office in Manhattan:

The wars I covered from Central America to Yugoslavia were places where the sanctity and respect for human life, that which the commandments protect, were ignored. Bosnia, with its rape camps, genocide, looting, razing of villages, its heady intoxication with violence, power, and death, illustrated, like all wars, what happens when societies thrust the commandments aside.

The commandments, he concludes, save us from false covenants and idols that promise so much and deliver so little. They help us to frame the most important questions that a person can ask, like the mystery of good and evil, the meaning of living in community, the nature of integrity, the meaning of fidelity, or the necessity of honesty. In honoring the commandments, we embrace the sanctity of life, the power of love, and their function to bind us together in life-affirming community.

           Only the courts can decide whether it is legal to display the 10 Commandments in public spaces; but only you and I can can choose whether they will strengthen the social fabric that knits us all together.

For further reflection:

* Idea: As a family, small group, or Sunday School class, watch the classic film The Decalogue (1988) by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, a series of ten one-hour films about each of the commandments. Available for purchase at Amazon.com, if otherwise unavailable. Also available as a book by K. Kieslowski, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments (London: Faber and Faber, 1991).
* Kieslowski explored the interior lives of his characters and not just whether they kept external commands. Love, he observed, was "in your heart, not between your legs." In what sense are the commandments more about inner goodness rather than external rule-keeping?
* Identify some of the modern manifestations of the Decalogue's prohibitions (idolatry, murder, envy, theft, greed, etc.).
* Consider Paul's words from the epistles for this week: "...not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith" (Philippians 3:9).
* For further reading, see David W. Gill's book on the 10 Commandments, Doing Right; Practicing Ethical Principles (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004).