Our Relationship to the Ten Commandments

3 Lent B      March 8, 2015

Exodus 20:1-17  Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 1:18-25   John 2:13-22

Lectionary Link
  A priest was sitting at the counter of local diner and being in a collar can make one a sitting duck in the public.  The man sitting next to him said to him, "Father, I think that there should be an eleventh commandment added to the Big Ten."  And the priest inwardly sighed ready for another joke and he asked, "What would your eleventh commandment be?"  And the man replied, "My eleventh commandment would be, "Thou shalt not get caught breaking any of the first ten."

  Does the tree in the forest really fall if no one witnesses the fall?  Does one really break a 10 Commandment if one does not get caught doing so?  We may have a relationship to the 10 Commandments like we have to speeding laws; it is only wrong if you get ticketed otherwise it is a blessing to get to your destination a minute quicker

  The reading of the Ten Commandments today, gives us the opportunity to reflect upon the nature of the Law and law making and the practice and the reception of the Law within communities of people.

  I actually think that the secret to the 10 Commandments and the secret for establishing the necessity of Law is found in the 10th commandment.  

  Thou shalt not covet....Really, you are asking me and every human being suddenly to stop being engines of desires who are always, already from birth wanting and desiring all sorts of things, people, events, fame et cetera?  Surely you are not asking us to do the impossible, namely putting a cork on this seething bottle of desire.  You know that with pressure, the cork is going to pop off.

  In the long history of humanity as humans discovered the necessity to being able to live together to survive, human communities had to develop into cultures which provided for the sublimation, the transformation of the energy of desire but also for the interdiction and punishment in the aftermath of human acting out upon the energy of coveting.

  One could trace all war and fighting to coveting because when two parties covet the same thing, they also covet the disappearance of their competing party to attain their desire.  As the ancient sages observed community behaviors for many years and collected the lore on how people could live together without destroying themselves through the destructive actions due to competitive desires, they devised statistically approximate rules or best practices for achieving community stability.

  The famous Ten Commandments within the context of 613 laws within the Torah, are an important watershed in the development of the function of law within the history of humanity and within our own Judeo-Christian tradition.  We need to be careful about isolating the Ten Commandments from their contexts by "over-Christianizing" them.  We need to remember that in theocratic ancient Israel the Torah functioned in the same way that many traditional Muslims understand Sharia law to function because in theocratic circumstances one does not separate religion and secular society.  Some States in our country have banned or want to ban Sharia law while they want to establish the 10 Commandments as the model of law for their courtrooms. But these Ten commandments originally existed within the contexts of the 613 other laws in a society governed totally by the Hebrew religion.  For all people to be governed by religious law was not the intentions of the writers of our American Constitution, who sought to disestablish religion from public government even while completely establishing the freedom of practice of religion for all in their private and individual lives.

  The Ten Commandments  seem to be highlighted among all of the other 613 rules of the Hebrew Scriptures.  These other laws include rules about cloth, cooking, sickness, states of ritual impurity, social structure, family law, temple and priestly ritual, dietary rules, slaves, foreigners and child raising.  What psychologists would designate now as "Oppositional Defiance Disorder" was considered to be willful insolence of a child which could actually be punished by stoning of the child.  It is very important to understand the context of the Ten Commandments and to understand that the purpose and function of any wise application of law is the transformation of one's life toward something like our founders proclaimed, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not just of the individual, but all of individuals in society together toward just outcomes.

  The Ten Commandment gives us both some wise rules for maintaining peace and concord in community but the commandments are based upon learning transformational behaviors.  How does one sublimate and transform the deeply profound energy of coveting desire into an energy which empowers us to enjoy a wide variety of human experiences without propelling us into destructive competition or harmful individual addictions?

  A debate issue between people of faith and secularists has been about the necessity to ground judgments of law upon the higher authority and power of God.   Can we have reasonable law without any reference to God?  Is it enough for the basis of all laws to reside within each community which has the power structures to simply discipline and punish its own member? Does it require a higher authority?  When someone asks “Why do I need to obey the law?”  Do we say simply because one's community authority say that you have do it?  Or do you say, because beyond any temporary authority structure there is a higher realm of divine justice which exists before and after any temporary structure of rules or practice of law?

  The 10 Commandments are based upon the establishment of recommended community behaviors established upon the regulating Force and Effect of God's presence within this world.  The great story of Moses going to the Mountain Top to receive the Law from God is how the ancient people appealed to divine legitimization for this great code of Law.  You should obey the Law, why?  Because Moses received these laws from God and this is how it happened.

  If this seems too mythical for the modern mind, I believe that we in our own time have to experience the legitimization of law through an experience of Sublime Grace.  Within the chaos of a disaster of emergency, people in uniform arrive as clergy of the secular law to symbolize law and order in face of the fury which cannot be prevented or controlled.  And in the presence of those uniformed people we experience the calming effect of the law.  It is an event of Sublime Grace and we think we know where it comes from but it partakes of the same sublime nature of a mother comforting a distressed baby.  
  Some have to come to divine imperative of law through personal failure.  People in their lives can let coveting desire reduce them to people out of control and to get back to control and sobriety, the ones who are successful confess the graceful experience of the Higher Power.

  Do you see how the wisdom behind the Ten Commandment recommends starting everything by directing one’s time and worship towards the Higher Power of the One God, who in turns becomes the graceful regulatory Spirit to help us channel our coveting energies toward sufficient pleasure and enjoyment.  Through the regulatory Higher Power of God's Spirit we avoid destroying ourselves and others through our selfish competitive powerful instincts.

  So one can arrive at the Graceful Higher Power of God through the process of transformation of spiritual practice: this transformation is what defines the calling of the church.  One can come to the Graceful Higher Power of God without the support of the church community even while a secular AA group might be one's support context to experience God as Higher Power.  One way or another, all must get to the Graceful in breaking of the Sublime.

  The apostle Paul and the Gospel communities developed spiritual practices for coming to the lawful and appropriate expression of our coveting energies.  When coveting energies are gone wild, one can think that the only way to stop coveting energy is one's death.  If I’m a drunk and I die, then I will stop drinking, yes and everything else too.     St. Paul proclaimed, "Wretched man that I am; who will deliver me from the body of death?"  Who will help me harness this coveting energy of desire which is running amok?  St. Paul used the death of Jesus on the cross as the wisdom of God in transforming his life.  Death means the cessation of good things, but also bad things such as pain and evil.  St. Paul called the wisdom of Christian practice a process of learning to be "living sacrifices," which is the process of dying to hurting behaviors which arise from uncontrolled desires and riding the Spirit of the resurrection of Christ to the rightful use for one's life desire.

  It is also expressed in the "Temple theology" of the early Christian communities.  The physical body of Jesus and each human body are called  Temples of the Spirit.  The tabernacle and temple centered upon the Holiest of Holy, where the Ark of the Covenant was placed which included the copy of the Law.  In the Temple theology of the Christian community, Jesus was the new Temple who was the one in whom God dwelled in Divine fullness for humanity.  And each body of each person was to be known too as a dwelling place, a temple of the Holy Spirit, so that the law was no longer just an external coercive rule; it was written within the heart as a living Higher Power to achieve the transformations towards the excellence of justice, or appropriate behavior for each human occasion.

  Let us be thankful for the Law today and let us assess our relationship to the law.  Let us assess how we are doing in achieving the optimal transformation of our coveting energies.  I wish and pray for each of us the graceful and sublime experience of God's Higher Power, God's Holy Spirit as the event which does not condemn us for our non-practice of the law, but as the affirming force to guide us with wisdom to the appropriate practice of lawful behaviors for each situation of life.  Amen.