March 19, 2006

Living God's Promise

by Julianne Stokstad

Rules. What do you think of them? Is that a collective groan I hear? Many of us probably go right back to being a child and feeling oppressed by rules imposed upon us by big figures of authority in our lives---parents, teachers, and our church. Waggling fingers, threats of being punished, or even of being told we are going to hell rise up in our memories. Rules define acceptable behavior, bind us together so that we might be safe and flourish in relationships and in community. Every community we belong to has rules. Without them we would have chaotic anarchy. But all rules can be misused and abused.

How can we get along in this world? Increasingly we understand how we are so connected to each other in this world. Whether we look at economics or food or cultures or religions there is an increasing awareness of how profound our shared common humanity is. We're happy we're not all alike and even though we celebrate diversity, differences hurt, scare and deeply divide us. When I taught, we celebrated diversity at the school with so much sensitivity that somewhere along the way saying what we believed became offensive. I saw around me a disturbing moral vacuum, a moral relativism that allowed almost any behavior. In pursuit of tolerance we liberal folk had lost our moral voice.

Last week Susie so eloquently preached on our UCC God is Still Speaking campaign. As she said, we are welcoming. We welcome anyone wherever one is on his or her spiritual journey. We accept all who want to be here to worship God with us. But this isn't the school; I wonder if we can articulate what the commonly accepted rules are here in this church? Call them out right now and will somebody take notes?

We have been talking about covenant during Lent. The first two covenants were relatively easy for humans to keep. The Israelites didn't have too much responsibility. It was keeping their identity around worship of YWHV, the one God. The Ten Commandments represent a major new covenant in the on-going development of God/human relationship---the coming of the Law and moral responsibilities.

And so the Ten Commandments is a good place to start our conversations with each other and with our children about religion, about our moral values, about God. Don't tune out, thinking these are only for conservatives. They are like an outer circle of limits on human behavior---covenant responsibilities for people of God. The Ten Commandments actually appear in several places in the Hebrew Scriptures: here in the story of the Exile, also in Deuteronomy and also in another place in the book of Exodus. These basic laws revealed to Moses by God are the basis of the covenant, accepted by Jews, Christians and Muslims. The Ten Commandments can be divided into two categories: first part deals with our responsibilities to God and the second our responsibilities to each other.

The first commandment "I am the Lord Your God. You shall have no other gods before me," challenges us to take our relationship with God seriously. It lays down the authority of the one God. Accepting God's ultimate authority is challenging because for one thing it means we're not in control of everything. This sacred covenant binds us to God and God to us. This relationship, like all relationships, requires reciprocal responsibilities. This is the ground from which all others come. The problem with our unseeable, unknowable God is that we can't always know exactly what God wants from us and there are way too many people who are happy to tell us.

No Idols is the second rule. Humans can make idols of anything! This is the commandment of loyalty---nothing is to come before God, not our work, not our pleasures, not our families, nothing,

The third commandment "Don't Take God's name in Vain" is concerned with divine reputation. It's about respect! No-gossip. A name is how one is known. God's name is as important to God as any human being's name is to that person. One reason why this is so important is because giving God a bad name can lessen people's respect, belief and awe for God. These days we are all aware of the scary use of God's name by the terrorists and how they twisted this commandment and other commandments. I wonder how we diminish God by misusing God's name?

Authority, loyalty, respect and finally "Keep the Sabbath Holy". This one seems particularly anachronistic these days. Why should we even keep it? Keeping a day of rest connects us to the creation---it was the day of rest, the seventh day that completed the creation. God and we need time to rest, to remember what has happened and what is important. Without rest, we lose our perspective. Our children learn what's important by watching how we spend our time. It is hard for us with so many different possibilities for Sunday and so little time to ourselves to give a whole day to God.

The last six commandments define our personal integrity in the basic ways we treat each other. You've heard them: honor your parents; murder is not an option; be faithful to your husband or wife; don't take what isn't yours; speak the truth to all about all and don't be jealous of other people's things. While they sound perhaps somewhat old-fashioned, I believe they are a good moral framework for guiding our human interactions. All religions and moral frameworks agree murder, stealing, telling lies and sexual misconduct are wrong. Without basic standards we live in fear of each other and find trust difficult if not impossible.

One thing is very clear; our children are watching us every minute, seeing how we react, listening to what we say and watching what we do. This is how they learn what is important. It's time we accept our responsibility as adults ask ourselves if how we live is congruent with our basic values. It's time to have conversations with each other and with our children about religion, about our moral values, about God. We need to find our language around our faith.

People get up in the morning and live according to values, said Joseph Campbell. I bet many of us get up and live according to our habits and the demands put upon us without much thought to our values. We get our beliefs from our parents, our religion, and our culture and we're often not even aware of our beliefs until we come in contact with someone who holds a different belief from us.

The world is changing at an accelerating pace. We cannot go backward to the way it used to be, to that nostalgic old time religion. We are not literalists. Rabbis have always interpreted the Torah. Somebody figured out we have 35 million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments. The modern world presents us with situations the Israelites couldn't have imagined and that make interpretation very confusing. No one knows when life actually begins. Who could have imagined the reproductive technologies that have developed in the last twenty years?

The current yearning to find meaning feels to me like a call from God. We need to find a new ways to articulate our religion - integrating what we know through experience observation and testing and what we believe. I have a few suggestions for how to do this. Let's start at the center, with the Ultimate--God. In every tradition, reverence and respect for God demands attention and listening. In every tradition, these first four commandments are held in some way or another. We are called to listen. Listen, listen, listen: listen carefully to each other to try to understand the other's point of view and to listen to God in every way we know how.

• We must listen to our children and youth for they have much to say to us.
• We must create a safe place to dialogue and speak about our differences.
• We must learn about other cultures and religions.
• We need to become much more self-aware of how others see us.
• We must become more introspective, trying to become aware how we live our values.
• We need to speak out against intolerance because in a world of different people, cultures and religions, we must find a new way to get along.

Ways we used in the past no longer work. In our struggle to find meaning and values (and I hope it is a struggle) we will find our way by listening deeply with growing self-awareness. It all begins right here with us. I know we can trust God. My gut and my faith tell me that peace, justice and more tolerance between all peoples are in the direction of God. There isn't a way prescribed how we are to do this. Let's start here at FCCSR by beginning to dialogue, listening deeply to each other; hearing and understanding our differences; and, most of all, let's listen to God.