What we are worshiping, we are becoming

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 9, 2014

We begin our series on the Ten Commandments with the first one. From Rumi to Emerson, we’ll talk about a UU understanding of the truth and usefulness of the commandments.

On his pseudo news show “The Colbert Report,” Steven Colbert, who is from SC, interviewed congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia. Remembering that any show can take any piece of an interview, it is still telling.

“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 courthouse?”

“That’s a good question. 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-uh– 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-Dvarim, 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. Moses went up the mountain to talk to God. Smoke came on the mountain, like the smoke from a furnace, because Adonai (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 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 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. Use your imaginations. Moses heard the noise. It sounded like war, the text says. 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 got two more tablets inscribed by God.

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.

This morning, starting this series on the Ten Commandments, I will talk about the first one. “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Egypt was moving toward monotheism about this same time in history, around 1550 BCE. Maybe it’s an evolution of human understanding. Today when we talk about there being god in everything would say it’s the same sacred energy, Being, or quickening or Oneness, with many names. To most people, giving gods different names made them different gods. I have a family member who wanted a doctor who “worshiped the same God” he did. A Muslim doctor had the skill, unquestionably, but worshiped Allah, who was a god, but a different god, a false god. I was taken aback that there were still people who didn’t think of god as one, with many names. There are still some who think that way, calling “Allah” a “false god,” We watch movies about the Greek myths, thinking Zeus is an old fashioned action figure of a god, not thinking that Zeus is the same word as Deus, which is Latin for God in all Christmas cantatas. It is the understanding of the Divine that changes throughout the ages.

A cynical way to see it might be that the first commandment was a way to control the people – if there were just one god, there was just one group of people who could speak to that god and tell the people what he wanted.

From within the faith, the explanation is that The Hebrews had to become the Jews. If they were absorbed into the surrounding culture, there would be nothing distinctive left of them.

Nature religions had many gods with different roles: death and rebirth, being taken apart and put back together, male and female coming together for the fertility of the land, rain and sun and earth and wind all playing their parts, or not, for the life or the suffering of the people. History, in an earth-based religion, is made of circles and cycles. With one God, who works in the lives of the people, the movement is more in a line. This happened, then this. Telling the stories of God’s interaction with the people became more important than the regularity of the rain and the seasons.

To bring this to a Unitarian Universalist place, let me remind you of the Emerson quote we read together.

Emerson wrote: “The gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And we will worship something – have no doubt of that either. We may think that our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of the heart – but it will out. That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we are worshipping, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted [and slightly adapted] by Chaim Stern in Gates of Understanding, vol. I [New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1977), p. 216)

The word “worship” comes from two old Anglo-Saxon words “weorth” and “scipe” The first means worth, the second is to shape, as in scoop or shovel. So we are shaping what we see to be of worth, here in worship. That’s why atheists can worship next to theists, because, whatever your understanding of god or no god is, you have things you consider to be of worth. Coming here on Sundays shapes what you value. What makes you feel awe, feel like there is something greater than you are present? For some it’s freedom, for some it’s security, for some it’s power, for others it’s not hurting anyone but yourself. All of those values shape your life and your choices.

What I want to say this morning as you considerwhat you organize your life around is that I vote for love to be our highest worth. Truth is good, and I’m an addict, but truth without love can be destructive. Freedom is wonderful, and I need it like air, but freedom without love can be destructive. Destruction is necessary sometimes, but destruction without love is not generative, it doesn’t lead to more life.

Here is your homework, that no one will check or hold you to: What would your Ten Commandments be?

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776