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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 10, 2012
It is often said that our nation’s ethics derive from the Ten Commandments of Moses. If you look closely at them, though, they don’t reflect American values very well at all. Solon the Athenian was born around 638 B.C.E. In 594 B.C.E he was elected to create a constitution for Athens, in the process becoming the founder of Western democracy and an early proponent of equal rights for all citizens.
Call to worship:
Spirit of life, be present with us this hour. Join us today as we gather in a wider search for truth and purpose. In this quest, may we greet one another with open hearts and minds; may we inspire each other to consider new questions and seek deeper meaning; and may we cultivate wisdom and compassion. Let all who enter this sanctuary see a welcome face, hear a kind word, and find comfort in this community. And may all that is done and said here today be in service to love and justice.
Source: 1997 UUMA Worship Materials Collection
Reading:
Morning Poem
by Mary Oliver
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
With the election coming up, I know the Christian Right is going to be more in our faces than it is normally, talking about this being a Christian nation, telling us that the framers of the Constitution built it on the morality of the Ten Commandments. I thought you should have some good information about the Ten Commandments. I’ve noticed that we have a big granite monument to the Ten Commandments on the Capitol grounds, and I read about the Supreme Court’s decision in 2005 that this was not unconstitutional. I wonder if the people who fought so hard for that decision could in fact recite all ten.
On his pseudo news show “The Colbert Report,” Steven Colbert, who is from SC, interviewed congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, who was fighting hard for a display in the House and in the Senate.
“You co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Why was that important to you?” “Well, the Ten Commandments is -is not a bad thing , uh, for people to understand and respect.”
“I’m with you,” Colbert responds as the congressman goes on, “Where better place would you have something like that than a judicial building or courthouse?”
“That’s a good question, Colbert says. Can you think of any better building to have the Ten Commandments in than in a public building?”
“No. I think if we were totally without them we may lose a sense of our direction.”
“What are the ten commandments?”
“What are all of them?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to name them?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Let’s see, don’t murder. Don’t lie, don’t steal-uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh– I can’t name them all.”
In the faith story of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, the Ten Commandments were given to Moses in the Sinai desert; In the Hebrew they are called Aseret ha-Dvar”m, best translated: “the ten statements.” The story is found in both Deuteronomy (5:6-21) and Exodus (20:3-16) The Hebrew people followed Moses out of Egypt and they traveled through the Sinai Peninsula to the land of Canaan, which was promised to them by God. After about three months they came to Mount Horeb, also called Mount Sinai. God told Moses to come up the mountain alone, that he would speak with Moses in a voice the people could hear so they would always trust Moses to lead them. The people were told to wash their clothes, to have a consecration ceremony, to abstain from sex, and they were not allowed to go up the mountain. Moses went up the mountain to talk to God. Smoke came on the mountain, like the smoke from a furnace, because Adonai (one of the Hebrew ways of naming God) descended on the mountain in fire, and there was the sound like a trumpet that grew louder and louder. On the mountain, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, and many more commandments the people were to follow. According to the Talmud, there are 613 laws the Jews must follow. When public reciting of the ten was giving them more weight with the Jewish people than the other 593 commandments, the recitation was discontinued.
It took Moses so long to come down from the mountain that the people grew restless, and Aaron, Moses’ brother, was pressured to make some gods who would go with them to the Promised Land. He asked for all their gold earrings and bracelets; he melted them down and made a statue of a golden calf. The people celebrated with dancing, shouting and revelry. “Revelry’ is Bible translator language for wild partying. Moses heard the noise. The text says it sounded like war. Have you ever been to a party that sounded like a war?
He came down with the tablets, which were carved on both sides (rabbinic tradition holds that they magically had writing that went all the way through, yet read correctly on both sides. The “O” shaped letters still had the circle of stone hanging in the hole, floating there without connection to the surrounding stone.) Moses saw what the people were doing, and became angry and broke the tablets into pieces. He ground up the gold statue, spread it on their water and made the people drink it. Then he went back up the mountain and got two more tablets inscribed by God. Swedenborgian teaching says that the first tablets had the higher law on them, but when the people proved themselves less than highly evolved, the second tablets had a lower form of the law on them.
Here are the ten:
1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall make no graven image.
3. Do not take the Lord’s name in vain.
4. Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
5. Honor your father and your mother.
6. Do not kill.
7. Do not commit adultery.
8. Do not steal.
9. Do not bear false witness (do not lie).
10. Do not wish for your neighbor’s wife, nor his donkey, nor anything that is his.
These are time-honored precepts, and they encapsulate more than one ancient culture’s wisdom about how to live a good life. In fact, they borrow heavily, verbatim in parts, from the code of Hammurabi, whose tablets we have in the British Museum. I remember, in seminary, being taken aback to realize how much of Mosaic Law was taken directly from Hammurabi, which argued against it being given directly from God to Moses. Once your mind can let go of literalism, though, you can see that these laws are a good way for a new society to be structured, especially one made up of people who had been slaves, used to being told what to do for four hundred years.
Did we start putting monuments in court houses and capitol buildings in the eighteenth century? The nineteenth century? No. They were a Hollywood marketing scheme. Cecil B DeMille had a movie coming out called “The Ten Commandments.” He heard about a judge in MN who wanted to send framed copies of the Ten Commandments to courthouses all over the nation to stop the moral decline he saw. A Christian organization, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, was helping with the funding.
Eager for publicity, DeMille contacted the judge and suggested that they replace the framed certificates with bronze tablets, but the judge said no way. Moses’ tablets were in granite, so bronze wouldn’t do So, with DeMille’s backing, around 150 granite tablets were made and distributed across the country, with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner dedicating a few of them in person. After the movie, the Order of Eagles kept giving out the monuments, the last one in 1985. Our monument is one of those made to publicize the movie.
Many courthouses in Utah have chosen to take down their displays because a religious organization called Summum wanted to erect monuments of Summum’s precepts next to the Ten Commandments. The cases were won on the grounds that Summum’s right to freedom of speech was denied and the governments had engaged in discrimination. Instead of allowing Summum to erect its monument, the local governments chose to remove their Ten Commandments.
I can’t resist telling you that Summum is a religion and a philosophy that began in 1975 as a result of a fellow named Claude “Corky” Nowell’s encounter with beings he describes as “Summa Individuals.” I will attempt to speak of this faith with respect, but it challenges my ideals. I hope to become a better person as I live on. Summum’s faith story says these beings presented Nowell with concepts regarding the nature of creation, concepts which are continually re-introduced to humankind by advanced beings who work along the pathways of creation. As a result of his experience, Nowell founded Summum in order to share what he received with others. In 1980, as a reflection of his new found path, he changed his name to Summum Bonum Amen Ra, but apparently he just goes by Corky Ra. Here is what the sign would have said: “The grand principle of creation is: ‘Nothing and possibility come in and out of bond infinite times in a finite moment.'”
Are the Ten Commandments at the foundation of our morality? Well, we teach our children not to lie, cheat, or steal, but we also teach freedom of religion, which goes against “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” and our whole advertizing industry is built on coveting, or wishing for, what our neighbors have. . A capitalist, consumer driven, democratic culture is antithetical to the holiness codes of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is why there is such tension between people with the values of our culture and fundamentalists of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) who want to base a culture on the Commandments. Democracy was unknown in Moses’ time. We believe in religious freedom, free speech, and the rights of the individual, disestablishment of a state religion. All of those go against the Ten Commandments, and all were insisted upon by the framers of the Constitution.
Historian Richard Carrier suggests that, if we are looking for the foundation of our democracy we look to the ethical precepts of Solon the Athenian. Solon was born, we believe, around 638 B.C.E., and lived until approximately 558. He was elected to create a constitution for Athens in 594 B.C.E. Solon is the founder of Western democracy and the first man in history to articulate ideas of equal rights for all. Solon was the first man in Western history to publicly record a civil constitution in writing Solon advocated not only the right but even the duty of every citizen to bear arms in the defense of the state, set up laws defending the principles and importance of private property, state encouragement of economic trades and crafts, and a strong middle class. Those ideals lie at the heart of American culture, but none of them is found in the Law of Moses. Do you wonder why those who follow the Bible deeply feel themselves at cross-purposes with American culture?
Diogenes listed the Ten Commandments of Solon (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 1.60):
1. Trust good character more than promises.
2. Do not speak falsely.
3. Do good things.
4. Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.
5. Learn to obey before you command.
6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.
7. Make reason your supreme commander.
8. Do not associate with people who do bad things.
9. Honor the gods.
10. Have regard for your parents.
What would your ten be? What are bottom line rules for you? Do they come from experience, from Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” from scripture, from habit? I like Solon’s, but for me, I would add “Don’t be boring.” How about you?
