The Demon Named Legion

The Demon Named Legion

The story of Jesus’ exorcism of the demon named Legion is one of the most important stories in the Bible. If we will take it to heart it will change everything. The oldest version of the story that we have appears at Mark 5:1-20. It goes like this. Jesus and the disciples have crossed the Sea of Galilee to a place the text calls “the country of Gerasenes.” This means that Jesus and his disciples have entered a Gentile region not a Jewish one. A man comes from an area of tombs to encounter them, and he has “an unclean spirit.” His unclean spirit makes him uncontrollable. The people of the area have tried to restrain him with chains, but he breaks them. No one could subdue him. He would spend time “howling and bruising himself with stones.” We would say he had a severe mental illness, but the ancient world of this story knew nothing of mental illness as a disease process. So it said people like this man were possessed by an unclean or demonic spirit. The man sees Jesus and runs up and bows before him. He shouts at Jesus: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” Mark tells us that the man said that because Jesus had already said to the demon “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”

Up to that point this could just be another exorcism tale about Jesus, but then it takes a crucial turn. Jesus asks the demon: “What is your name?” If we think about it that question will probably strike us as odd. The demons Jesus exorcises from people don’t usually have names. Beyond that, why would Jesus care what the demon’s name is? It seems that what really matters here is that the demon come out of the possessed man, that the man be restored to his right mind and made well. Jesus, who of course has power over demons in these stories, doesn’t really need to know the demon’s name or even if the demon had one before he heals this tormented man. Still, he asks the demon: “What is your name?” The question is so odd that we should sense that something important is coming next, and indeed it is. The demon replies: “My name is Legion; for we are any.”

Two important things have happened here. First, it turns out that the man was possessed not by one demon but by many. Second, these many demons have but one name, and that name is Legion. To understand what this story is really telling us we have understand the name Legion the way the first audiences for this story would have understood it back in the first century CE. What did the word Legion (or legion) mean in that world? I think we can already sense the answer. We’ve all heard of the Roman legions. Mark’s audience so long ago would have known immediately what a legion was. For us the word has come to mean only many, a great number of anything. If we say someone’s troubles are legion we mean the poor soul has many of them. In Jesus’ world (and in Mark’s) the word legion had a much more specific meaning than that. A legion was a unit of the Roman army. It was a large unit numbering in the thousands. A Roman legion was something like today’s army division, a large, primary unit of military organization. Today we may miss the association of the word legion with a military unit and specifically with a Roman military unit. Mark’s original audience would not have missed that association.

The next line is telling too. Mark states: “He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.” Note the odd confusion of the singular and the plural here. This sentence refers to the demon both as “he” and as “them.” A Roman legion was made up of individual soldiers, but it acted as a unit; and surely the important thing for the people being subjected by a Roman legion was how it acted as a unit, not how the individuals in it behaved. Mark’s use of the word “them” in his sentence again emphasizes that we are dealing not with an individual demon but with demons collectively. The demon(s) ask(s) Jesus to let them go into a herd of swine grazing on a hillside. Remember that the story is set in Gentile territory. That’s why there could be a herd of swine in the area, something you’d never see in Jewish lands. Jesus agrees, whereupon the “the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank and into the sea, and were drowned.” The demon named Legion drowns in “the sea.” The story says that the possessed man was then restored to his right mind. Legion has been removed from inside him, and he is sane again.

To understand the deep meaning and power of this story we must next consider the cultural context in which it was first told. It is set in a Gentile area, but it is a story about a Jewish man (Jesus) told to and for Jewish people. In the first century CE, the time of Jesus and the time of Mark, the world of the Jews was a world of poverty and oppression. Israel lived under Roman occupation. The Romans with their legions had occupied the area of Israel in 63 BCE. They or their successor the Byzantine Empire would occupy the region for centuries thereafter. In the first century CE Roman occupation was not a pleasant thing. Because the temple authorities for the most part collaborated with the Romans the Romans more or less left Jewish religious practice alone. There was no attempt like that of the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanis IV in the second century BCE to impose foreign, gentile religious practices on the Jews. The Romans didn’t interfere with Jewish religious practice, which they respected in some ways because it was so ancient. What they did care about was taxes. They taxed the Jewish population heavily, so heavily that they kept most people in abject poverty. Not that most people would have been wealthy without the Romans. They wouldn’t have been. But Roman taxation was a heavy burden on most Jewish people in the first century CE. The Romans also cared about law and order. They wanted the people of the lands they had conquered and occupied to be peaceful subjects of the Empire. They oppressed any resistance to their rule with brutal force.

Perhaps most galling of all to most Jews was the reality that they were ruled from abroad by a Gentile, pagan power. They had to be obedient to Gentiles who were in the eyes of many unclean because they offered sacrifice to gods and goddesses who weren’t real and made their emperor in some way divine, if not during his life then after his death. Jewish people had to use coins with images of one emperor or another with words that said he was somehow divine. The Jews found Roman occupation so unacceptable that they rebelled against it from time to time. They had done so in 4 BCE when Herod the Great, the Romans’ puppet king, died. They did it again with some temporary success in 66 CE, a rebellion that resulted in 70 CE in the Roman destruction of the temple and the scattering of the people across the world away from Jerusalem. For the most part the Jews hated the Romans and the way Rome occupied their land.

Because the Jews so hated the Romans there arose various movements that identified as messianic. Many Jews hoped for the coming of a figure called the Messiah. Our English word Messiah derives from a Hebrew word that means “anointed.” In the ancient Hebrew kingdoms a king wasn’t crowned as king, he was anointed as king. That is, he had oil poured on his head. He was anointed with oil as a sign of God’s favor and even of God’s selection of that person to be king. In Jesus’ time many Jews longed for the coming of a long promised new Messiah, a new king chosen by God to rule the people and to reestablish their independence and glory. People did not see the hoped for Messiah as divine. The notion that a human being could also be divine was (and is) one Judaism could never entertain. The Messiah was to be a king who would raise an army, drive the Romans into the sea by force, and reestablish the kingdom of David. For many Jews Rome was out there in the world, their world, and they had to be driven out of it.

Christians proclaim Jesus as the Messiah, but he certainly was not that kind of Messiah. He never raised an army to fight the Romans. He never even thought about raising an army to fight the Romans, or at least as far as we know he never did. Yet he too knew that Roman occupation was an enormous problem for his people. He, however, understood the real problem with Roman occupation very differently than most of his Jewish contemporaries did, and we see quite clearly how he understood the problem of Roman occupation in the story of the exorcism of the demon named Legion.

Legion, the symbol of the Roman Empire, was inside the possessed man Jesus healed. Legion made the man insane. Legion made the man something other than his true self, something violent, something ugly, something people could not control and so tried to avoid. The man’s problem wasn’t that Rome was out there, outside of him. His problem was that Rome was inside him, in his mind, in his heart, in his soul. We know that this is a truth this story is telling us because the demon that possessed the man had a name, and the name was Legion. The name was Roman army. The name was a word so intimately associated with Roman occupation that no one in the first audience for this story would have missed the connection. Rome was inside this man. That was his problem.

So Jesus got Rome out of the man. He exorcised the demon named Legion, but he didn’t just exorcise the demon. He granted its (their) request to enter a herd of pigs. The original audience for this story must have loved that part of the story. The unclean Romans entered unclean animals. How appropriate! Then the pigs possessed by Legion ran into the sea and were drowned. It was the Sea of Galilee not the Mediterranean; but it was still a sea of sorts, and most of all the hated Roman Legion died in it. That is exactly what so many Jews longed to see happen to the Roman legions that occupied their land and oppressed them. Get them out of here. Drive them into the sea. That’s what people wanted, and that’s what happens to them, metaphorically at least, in this story.

Notice once again, however. Where was Legion? Not out there. Not outside the possessed man. Inside him. In his mind. In his heart. In his soul. This story makes a powerful and central point about how Jesus saw the world’s problems. The man’s problem wasn’t that Rome was out there, outside him. The man’s problem was that Rome was in here, inside him. The man’s problem was that he had internalized Rome. He had internalized empire. For Jesus the solution to Roman occupation wasn’t to raise an army. It wasn’t to look outward at what Rome was doing in the world, it was to look inward to see what Rome was doing to your soul. At least that’s where the solution to the evils of empire had to start, in the mind, heart, and soul of every person living under empire.

Like every great Bible story the story of the exorcism of the demon named Legion isn’t just about something that happened to someone else a long time ago in a place far away. It is a story about us too. It is a story for us. It is a story that points us toward the real problem in our lives, indeed toward the real problem with the life of the world. The world’s problem is the reality of empire, but the problem is less that empire is out there than that it is in here. It is in our minds, our hearts, and our souls every bit as much as the demon named Legion was in the mind, heart, and soul of the possessed man in Mark’s story about Jesus. We too have internalized the ways of empire.

Now, a great many people today are going to find that statement puzzling at best, or at least wrong, or even as downright offensive. We don’t think we’ve internalized empire even if we have some notion of what that statement means. We think the ways of empire are just the way things are. But to understand what it means for us to have internalized empire we must start by understanding what the ways of empire are. The ways of empire are the ways of violence, oppression, and injustice. Empire always functions for the benefit of the wealthy not the benefit of the people. We know that a great many Americans have internalized the ways of empire when we see how they support policies that are essentially imperial. When our nation goes to war we say that all Americans must support the war, or at least support the troops and probably the politicians who sent them to war. Richard Nixon’s war crimes in Viet Nam and Cambodia aren’t what eventually drove him out of office. Polls showed that most Americans supported his policies there. No one has prosecuted George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Condaleezza Rice for war crimes in Iraq though they are clearly guilty of them. Only the internalizing of the ways of empire can explain those undeniable facts.

Today (November 16, 2017) one of the issues before us is the proposed tax legislation in Congress. Republicans control both houses of Congress, and the tax bill they are advocating is a clear statement of Republican beliefs and priorities. That bill benefits the wealthy and big corporations. It does nothing or next to nothing for middle class Americans, and it certainly does nothing for poor Americans. It actually raises taxes on some middle income people. The Senate’s version even has a provision in it repealing the universal mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Polls show that most Americans just don’t care about that bill or the issues it addresses. How can people not care? That bill is an embodiment of gross injustice. How can we not care about it? We don’t care about it because we have internalized the ways of empire. Empires always benefit the wealthy not the people. When we internalize the ways of empire we accept policies that benefit the wealthy not the people simply as reasonable, simply as the way things are. We even believe that they will be beneficial in ways in which they clearly will not. Likewise we accept environmental policies that destroy the earth but make the rich richer simply as reasonable, simply as the way things are, the way things have to be, the way things will always be. We accept a criminal law system that incarcerates Blacks at a rate far higher than whites because whites are dominant. For empire the dominant matter more than the powerless, and we have internalized the ways of empire. The examples of how we accept grossly unjust and violent policies because we have internalized empire could go on and on, but I trust the point is made. We have internalized empire. Legion is inside us.

Jesus knew that Rome, that empire, was inside the people of his day as well. He wanted people to be liberated from imperial oppression as much as the leaders of violent revolts against Rome did, but knew a couple of things that they didn’t. He knew first of all that God is nonviolent and calls us to be nonviolent. Beyond that, he knew that the Jewish people had no hope of defeating Rome militarily, and the history of the Jewish rebellions against Rome after his time prove that he was right about that. He knew that Rome was oppressive and unjust, but he knew better than anyone else how to deal with it. Not by hopeless, violent rebellions but through personal, inner transformation. Liberation comes from the inside out. Free your mind, heart, and soul from Rome, and you will be free.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Jesus passively accepted the dominance of Rome in the world. He didn’t. He wanted Rome gone from Israel as much as anyone else did. He preached an equality that was radically anti-Roman. He preached nonviolence, again something that was radically anti-Roman. He lifted up those Rome oppressed. He chastised Rome’s accomplices in Jerusalem. He was no friend of the Romans, and the Romans knew it. They, after all, were the ones who executed him. No, Jesus didn’t accept the dominance of Rome in the world. He just knew better than anyone else how truly to get rid of it. Work from the inside out. Transform enough people from the inside out, and Rome will disappear. It will no longer have enough people to go along with its brutal policies. Get Rome out of your heart and mind, he said, then Rome will no longer be a problem.

Folks, we Americans live in the Rome of the 21^st century. Far too many of us, probably all but a handful of us actually, have internalized the ways of empire, for we all grew up in the world empire of our day. We all grew up being taught both explicitly and implicitly that the ways of empire are just how things are and that on the whole they are good. At least we were taught that they are good if the empire in question is the American empire. Our country needs a revolution. A peaceful revolution. Don’t ever forget the peaceful part. Don’t ever get violent, for violence is the way of the structures we need to overcome. We need a revolution, a turning, away from the ways of empire and toward the ways of peace and justice. Call this revolution what you will. Socialist. Or Christian, for socialist and truly Christian are very similar. Call it social democracy or democratic socialism. Call it Christian socialism. It doesn’t much matter what we call it, though of course it must benefit all not just Christians. What matters is that we bring about a nation devoted not to the ways of empire but to the ways of peace and justice.

Jesus told us how to do it. The Gospels tell us how to do it in the story of the exorcism of the demon named Legion. Don’t get violent against the institutions of empire. Get intentional about cleaning empire out of your own person. Stop thinking like empire wants you to think. Stop pledging allegiance to what empire wants you to pledge allegiance to. Learn God’s will and ways from Jesus. Analyze the world through the lens of God’s will and ways. Reject violence. Reject injustice. Reject oppression. Reject prejudice. Reject anything that denies or diminishes the value of any human being. Reject anything that harms God’s good earth. Reject anything that harms any of God’s people.

But don’t just reject. Support and work to elect politicians who stand for peace and justice. Give money and work with organizations that promote peace and justice. Speak truth to power. Model your life on Jesus’ life. Love. Care. Take care of. Forgive. Expunge all hatred from your heart. Be at peace in your soul and you will be at peace in the world. Jesus knew that if enough people will live that way empire will fall. Empire will fall because it depends on hatred and violence for its very existence. So love don’t hate. Resist evil assertively, creatively, but never violently. All of that will exorcise the demon Legion from your mind, your heart, your soul. If we will do that, we can change the world.

Addendum

My friend and colleague Rev. Norm Erlendsen, a Congregationalist pastor in Connecticut, read this essay and sent me some additional information. Citing a source for the material, Norm told me that the Tenth Legion of the Roman army was stationed in Syria in the first century CE and that some of it was stationed in Galilee. It's emblem was the boar. Mark sets the story of the demon named Legion on the Syrian side of the Sea of Galilee. He has the demons enter a herd of pigs. A boar is of course a swine, related to domesticated pigs. Mark's symbolism would have spoken even more powerfully to the first audience for this story than I thought. The place where the story is set was occupied and oppressed by a boar, a pig, the Tenth Legion of Rome. This additional historical information makes my analysis of the story stronger, much stronger, than I ever thought it was. Thanks, Norm.

To Serve the Lord

This is the written text of the sermon I gave at First Congregational Church of Maltby on Sunday, November 12, 2017. It was well received, and I think it says something important. So I'll post it here.

To Serve the Lord

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 12, 2017

Scripture: Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; Amos 5:18-24

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Not many of you were here last week to hear the first part of this sermon series on servant leadership, so I’ll give you a brief recap of what I said in that sermon. I said that servant leadership was a phrase I heard over and over again in seminary. It is the kind of leadership we were trained to do, not that any of us does it anything close to perfectly. I said that the servant part of the phrase servant leadership meant that a leader must lead for the benefit of the people she or he leads and not primarily for his or her own benefit. Servant leadership is leadership that puts the other first, that weighs the benefit of an action or statement for those one leads more than the benefit for the leader. I ended that sermon by saying that there is another word in the phrase servant leader, namely of course leader, that I would focus on more this week. So here goes.

What does it mean to be a leader? It means of course to lead, but in what sense does a servant leader lead? If the servant leader is to look out most of all for the benefit of those led, in what sense is a servant leader a leader at all? That question really boils down to another one: Just what does benefit a group that the leader leads? That question is actually one that sometimes gets the leader sideways with the group he or she leads, perhaps most of all when the leader is a parish minister and the group led is a congregation. I think that happened here between some of you and me. My experience here tells me that getting a clearer understanding of the leadership role of a pastor could do this congregation a lot of good. So let me talk specifically about at least one way in which a good pastor leads as well as serves a congregation. And I want to do that by introducing you to what we call “the 3 p’s” of the parish minister’s office.

I was introduced to thinking about the call of a parish minister in terms of the 3 p’s early in my time in ministry. It is a traditional way of thinking of the parish minister’s call that I find quite useful. The 3 p’s of pastoral leadership designate three roles that a minister of a church is called to fill. The ordained minister is called to be priest, pastor, and prophet. Those are the 3 p’s: priest, pastor, and prophet. Now of course in our Congregationalist tradition the ordained minister isn’t a priest in the technical sense because he neither offers sacrifice nor mediates between the people and God. In our context, however, the minister does perform priestly functions. That means that she presides at the sacraments of baptism and Communion and otherwise leads the community in worship. That’s the priest p.

The pastoral p is the function of caring for the congregation. The minister exercises the pastoral part of her call first of all when she is paying a pastoral visit on a member of her church. That visit may be in a hospital, or at the parishioner’s home, or at the church, or most anywhere. In the pastoral function the minister seeks to be present with and for a parishioner or the entire congregation in every setting in which the minister is in contact with the church or any member of it. The priestly and pastoral aspects of an ordained minister’s call rarely cause friction between the minister and the church. But there is that third p, prophet. That one causes trouble sometimes, and it is the one I want to focus on this morning.

What is a prophet? In common usage prophet has come largely to mean someone who predicts the future. In the Judeo-Christian faith tradition, however, prophet actually means something different. Especially in the Old Testament being a prophet is only partly about predicting the future. Yes, many of the Hebrew prophets whose sayings made the cut into the Bible predicted bad times ahead for Israel and Judah that indeed occurred, but that isn’t primarily why they are important to us. We see a good example of what the Hebrew prophets were all about and of how predicting the future relates to their work in our passage from Amos.

That passage begins with Amos predicting a bad day coming for Israel. He says: “Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord!...That day will be darkness, not light.” Amos 5:18 He goes on about what that “day of the Lord” will be like, and it isn’t pretty. It will be a day, he says, of darkness, pain, and fear. OK, there Amos is predicting the future. But notice how then the tone, the format of the passage changes. All of a sudden the text has the prophet speaking in the name of the Lord. The text says “I hate, I despise your religious feasts….” Amos 5:21 It isn’t Amos who hates Israel’s religious feasts, although he may well have hated them. It is God who hates them. Speaking a word from God Amos says that all of Israel’s worship, their sacrifices, their songs, their music, God will not accept. The passage ends with God saying “But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream!” Amos 5:24 In that last line we see what the Hebrew prophets are mostly about. Yes, they predict the future; but mostly what they do is proclaim a word of Israel’s God. And that word is almost always about two things. We see one of those two things here. The one we don’t see so much is a demand that the people worship only Yahweh. The one we do see is God’s demand that the people, and especially the rulers of the people, do justice. “Let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream!” That’s primarily what a prophet is, someone who has heard a word from God and is called to share it with the world. And the most important word the Hebrew prophets heard from God was God’s demand for justice.

In the Bible a prophet is less one who predicts the future and more one who brings a word from God. And in the Bible the people to whom the prophets spoke their word from God mostly didn’t want to hear it. Do you think the rulers of 8^th century BCE Israel wanted to hear Amos call them on their injustice to the poor and vulnerable? Do you think they wanted to hear him cry that God was going to plunge them into darkness, fear, and pain because they didn’t do justice for the poor and the vulnerable? I very much doubt that they did. Rulers, be they kings or democratically elected representatives, don’t much like being told that they are ruling unjustly, especially when they are ruling unjustly. That the rulers of Israel didn’t want to hear what Amos had to say didn’t stop him from saying it. That the Romans and their allies in the temple leadership more than seven hundred years after Amos didn’t want to hear what Jesus had to say didn’t stop Jesus from saying it. The thing about true prophecy is that the prophet who feels called to bring it has to say it, and does say it, even or especially when his or her audience doesn’t want to hear it.

So what does that mean for the parish minister part of whose call is to be a prophet? It means that when she or he acts as a prophet she or he can and often does get in big trouble with her or his congregation, or at least part of it. There is a fundamental tension in the local parish church in our time between a minister who believes he is called to proclaim all of God’s truth as far as he knows it, to proclaim all of the Gospel as far as she knows it, and people in the congregation who don’t want to be challenged, who want to hear only positive things from the pulpit, who want only to be comforted and lifted up in the worship service. And yes, the word of God’s unfailing love, God’s eternal care for each and every person, God’s presence that can get us through whatever it is we must face in life—all of that is part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ too. An important part. A life-enhancing, uplifting, joyous part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But it is not all of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! Jesus brought us our ultimate revelation of God’s love, but he also brought us God’s demand that we transform our hearts and our lives from bondage to the ways of the world into the freedom of the ways of God. He brought God’s demand that we live lives of justice and that we demand justice from our rulers, justice for the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable, the ones the rulers don’t hear, the ones the rulers want to ignore at best and suppress at worst. Jesus didn’t think most of the people he preached too were bad people, but he knew that they needed to hear a new word from God. They needed a call to transform their hearts and their lives. Those in positions of privilege and power needed to hear it most of all, but everyone else needed to hear it too. Did they all want to hear it? Heavens no! Did that stop him from preaching it? Most certainly not!

Now, everyone I know in parish ministry, myself included, knows full well that we aren’t Jesus, I probably less than most. No, we parish ministers aren’t Jesus. No, I am not Jesus. Certainly not. We’re not even Amos, but all (or at least most) of us in parish ministry have discerned a call from the Holy Spirit to be ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That call is not limited to the call to be a prophet, but it includes the call to be a prophet. And when God calls a man or a woman to be a prophet, God calls that person to be a prophet whether all of the people of the person’s parish want to hear prophecy or not. That’s why the prophet part of the 3 p’s gets ministers in trouble with their congregation. It gets us in trouble with our congregations, or with parts of them, because people don’t always want to hear what we are called to say.

Which brings us back to the leader part of servant leader. A leader, especially in a church, has discerned a call. A pastor leader in a church has a call that some of his people won’t understand. He has a call to say things they don’t want to hear. If he refuses to say what God is calling him to say because some people don’t want to hear it he is no kind of leader. A leader has a vision, or at least should have. A church pastor has (or at least should have) studied the Bible and other aspects of the Christian faith for years. A church pastor does (or at least should) keep on top of the best recent developments in Christian theology and share them with her people. Even if they don’t want to hear it.

Folks, a parish minister is a leader not a follower. Or at least not only a follower. A parish minister’s call comes on one level from the congregation, but on a much deeper level it comes from God. That doesn’t make us perfect. It doesn’t mean we won’t make mistakes. We all do. It does mean that while on one level we are responsible to our congregation, on a much deeper level we are responsible to a power far greater than that congregation. We are responsible to God the Holy Spirit. And if we ever let the fact that some of our people don’t like something we are convinced the Holy Spirit is calling us to do or to say stop us from doing it or saying it we have failed in our response to our deepest call. And if we fail in that deeper call we will fail in the call of our congregation too, for that congregational call to be authentic must be grounded in the deeper call of the Holy Spirit.

So. Being a leader doesn’t always make you popular. It’s not supposed to make you popular. It’s supposed to make you lead, and sometimes you have to lead where your people don’t want to follow. So be it. If the congregation can accept a pastor’s leadership whether they like it or not the pastorate can be a successful one. If it cannot, that pastorate will fail; and many do. That is not to say that anyone in a congregation must or should accept anything any minister says without doing her or his own prayerful discernment. We are all called to do our own work around all issues of faith and never to accept anything uncritically. That work will probably lead you to agree with somethings your parish minister says and disagree with others. That is how it should be. The issue is whether you can accept your minister’s ministry when you disagree with some of the things she or he does or says.

You are or soon will be looking for new pastoral leadership. As you do I hope you will understand that the pastor’s call is to love you, but it is also to lead you; and you may not always like that leadership. So be it. Jesus’ leadership of the people got him crucified. A pastor’s leadership of her people sometimes gets her fired, or causes her to resign. As you look for new pastoral leadership for this church I pray that you will be open to men and women who truly have been called by God to be your leader; and when they lead you’ll listen. Listen critically, but listen. I ask you now to be prepared to be loved, but also prepare to be challenged. That’s what authentic ministry does. Amen.

American Madness: Freedom and the Second Amendment

American Madness: Freedom and the Second Amendment

My country is insane. It may be insane in many ways, but most of all it is insane about guns. Guns kill people every day in this country. Guns kill thousands of people a year in this country. Most murders in this country (and we have thousands of them every year) are committed with guns. Most gun killings among us go unnoticed beyond the locality in which they occur, but sometimes gun violence makes big news. Aurora, Newton, Orlando, San Bernardino, Charleston, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, the names of these towns and cities evoke images of gun-inflicted horror. It happens again and again in the US. It happens far, far more among us than it does in countries that have sensible restrictions on guns—and that’s every other advanced country in the world besides us. I have heard Canadians call us insane about guns and wonder why in God’s name we don’t do something about them. Good question. Yes, oppressive regimes like the one that ruled the Soviet Union enforce severe restrictions on private gun ownership; but democratic countries that value freedom as much as we do restrict gun ownership too. We are tragically unique among the world’s nations in the extent to which we tolerate gun violence. The rest of the world quite properly thinks we’re nuts.

So why do we tolerate the nearly unrestricted sale of all kinds of guns other than fully automatic rifles, sale of which is more strictly regulated (though not outright prohibited) than the sale of other types of weapons? The answer is the legal interpretation that the courts, up to and including the United States Supreme Court, have given to the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. That Amendment reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Resolution of the legal issue of whether or not the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms was unclear until the Supreme Court decided the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). In that case the Court held by a 5-4 vote that the Second Amendment does guarantee such a private right. In reaching that decision the Court disregarded long-accepted principles of Constitutional construction and read the first two phrases of the Amendment out of the law. It also read the word “people” to mean “persons,” which it doesn’t necessarily mean. The Heller case made it substantially more difficult for either the federal government or state and local governments to enact common sense, meaningful regulation of firearm ownership. In reaching that decision the majority of the Heller court was quite simply just wrong.

It is a well-established principle of judicial interpretation of Constitutional or statutory provisions that a court will give meaning to every part of a provision it is interpreting if it is reasonably possible for it to do so. The court assumes that the authority which enacted the provision had some reason for including everything that it put into the law. The court will not find any part of a law to be meaningless or superfluous unless it truly can find no possible reason for a particular wording in the law. The Heller court disregarded this principle in reaching its decision.

The Second Amendment does not simply say “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” That wording is only part of the Amendment. Unlike most Constitutional provisions, this language of the Second Amendment has language that introduces and leads up to it. That language is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State….” For purposes of Constitutional interpretation we can take as given that a well regulated militia is indeed necessary to the security of a free state. The legal issue here is whether or not that language affects the meaning of the phrase that it introduces. The legal assumption must be that it does. Otherwise, why would the drafters have put it in the Amendment? We must assume that the men who wrote the Second Amendment weren’t sitting around throwing words into an amendment for no reason. The language they put into the Amendment refers to two significant issues of government, the maintenance of a “well regulated Militia” and the security of the state, somewhat inaccurately said in the Amendment to be free. People drafting a constitution for a new country would of course be concerned with those two issues. Those issues are not peripheral to the structure and running of a country but are central to it. The opening phrases of the Second Amendment are not irrelevant to the Amendment’s meaning. They can’t be, the majority of the Heller court to the contrary notwithstanding.

So if we are to give meaning to the Amendment’s reference to a well regulated militia and the security of the state, what is that meaning? The quite obvious first meaning of that language is that the Amendment does not refer to an unlimited individual right to keep and bear firearms. Instead, the Amendment creates some kind of right to keep and bear arms in connection with the state maintaining and operating a militia and to promote the security of the state. Note: Not the security of the individual, the security of the state. To understand what that provision may have meant in the late eighteenth century when the Second Amendment was drafted, let’s consider the historical context of that amendment.

When the Second Amendment was drafted the United States had recently won its independence from England in the Revolutionary War. That war was fought in part at least by local militias. That is, it was fought by citizens who brought their own rifles—muskets actually, about which more below—to the battle. Surely the framers of the Constitution and its Amendments assumed that any threat to the security of the new nation would be met in the same way, with private citizens bringing their muskets and banding together to defend their country. So they said in the Second Amendment that the right of the people to keep and bear arms for that purpose shall not be infringed. There is no reason to believe that the men who drafted the Second Amendment intended anything other than that. Had they intended something other than that they would not have included the first two phrases in the Second Amendment.

Now, the world today is very different from the world of the late eighteenth century. The United States Supreme Court has often interpreted Constitutional provisions in ways that fit the life of the country and her people at the time the case before them arose that the framers of the Constitution never considered. A classic example is the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. ___ (2015), which used the equal protection and due process clauses of the US Constitution to guarantee the right of marriage to same gender couples. Did the men who drafted the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution ever think that they were creating a right for same gender couples to marry? Of course not. Does that make the Obergefell decision wrong? No, it doesn’t. The world has changed since the Fifth Amendment was adopted in 1791 and the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868. Reasonable expectations around the issues of equal protection have changed. Judicial interpretation of the Constitution must and does change to reflect the changing life of the country’s people. If it did not the Constitution would quickly become a dead letter unable to regulate the common life of those people. So conservative “strict constructionists” to the contrary notwithstanding, the Constitution does grow and adapt to a changing world and a changing country.

Now consider the world in which the Second Amendment was written. National security depended on well regulated militias, as I noted above. Moreover, the “Arms” that the Amendment has in mind are muzzle loading muskets. They were the arms that existed at the time. They could at best fire perhaps one round per minute. That there would ever be such a thing as an automatic or semiautomatic rifle capable of firing multiple rounds a minute (or second) never occurred to the men who wrote that amendment. Can we say that they intended that there be a nearly unregulated right of the individual to keep and bear such modern arms of which the framers never conceived? Of course not. We cannot blindly apply their language from another era to the question of gun ownership today than we can blindly apply the equal protection language of another era to the issue of same gender marriage without considering how a changed world affects the meaning of that language. While the notion of equal protection has expanded to create previously unrecognized rights while the reality of weapons and national security has changed to make restriction of gun ownership more necessary and tenable than ever does not change the analysis. Constitutional interpretation must adapt to the changing realities of life. The realities of guns today are nothing like they were when the Second Amendment was adopted. So even if the men who wrote that Amendment thought they were creating a private, individual right to gun ownership (which they clearly weren’t), the realities today mean that that right, if it exists at all, must be strictly regulated, more strictly regulated by far than the right to bear muzzle loading muskets ever had to be.

There is no such thing as an unrestricted legal right under the United States Constitution. The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, but in Reynolds v. US, 98 US 145 (1878) the court held that freedom of religion was not a defense to a criminal complaint alleging violation of a statute against polygamy. Neither is the right of free speech totally unlimited. There is truth in the old saw that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire. The First Amendment guarantee of free speech does not mean that the state can’t limit child pornography. It is not legal to urge the use of violence to overthrow the government of the United States. No constitutionally guaranteed right is unlimited. They are all regulated, some of them quite strictly regulated. The supposed right to keep and bear arms can be strictly regulated too.

So let’s be done with the absurd notion that the sale of rapid fire weapons, whether rifles or pistols, can’t be more strictly regulated under the Second Amendment than it is. Of course it can. The realities of life today mean that it must be strictly regulated. Indeed, those realities mean that the sale and ownership of automatic or semi-automatic rifles must be prohibited altogether. Stephen Paddock did not kill nearly sixty people in Las Vegas with a muzzle loading musket. He did it with modified semiautomatic rifles. Devin Patrick Kelly did not kill nearly thirty people in a Texas church with a muzzle loading musket. He did it with a semi-automatic rifle. These realities cannot be ignored.

This madness must be stopped. Yes, mental health issues are often in play when mass shootings happen, and our country handles mental health issues miserably. Nonetheless, the ready availability of rapid fire weapons increases the harm a mentally disturbed person, or any person for that matter, can do by orders of magnitude over what they could do with the weapons of the late eighteenth century. So let’s stop letting the NRA and its gun manufacturing sponsors decide our firearms law. Let’s get some national mental health treatment and get over our insanity about guns. Guns are designed and built for only one reason—to kill. That means that if they are to be allowed at all they must be strictly, indeed very strictly, regulated. The Heller decision to the contrary notwithstanding, the Second Amendment does not prohibit such regulation. Heller itself leaves open the question of how much regulation of the private right it creates is permissible. Our country is mentally ill about guns, and this madness must stop. May we do what is necessary to make it stop.

Letter to the Maltby Congregation

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

14751 N. Kelsey St., No. 105-384

Monroe, WA 98272

425-268-0649

pastortoms@msn.com

October 9, 2017

To the Members of

The First Congregational Church of Maltby

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:

This is to give you formal notification of my resignation as your pastor effective December 31, 2017. I think I owe it to you to give you an explanation of why I have found it necessary to resign as your pastor. The basic reason is that in recent times it has become clearer to me than ever that we simply are a bad fit as pastor and parish. We have ignored that reality for too long. That we are not a good fit doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with you. It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with me. It just means that we do not fit well together. We are sufficiently different in our approaches to the church and to the Christian faith that it is not tenable for me to serve as your pastor any longer. I mean by that that it is not tenable for me. Whether or not it is tenable for you is not for me to say, although I know that it certainly is not tenable for at least a significant number of you. Let me explain to you some of the ways that I see us differing so dramatically that it is time for me to go.

I am a very progressive Christian theologian. Most of you are considerably less progressive theologically (and politically) than I am. There is of course a very broad range of opinion in the Maltby congregation, and the breadth of opinion in the church creates issues for the pastor that I am not able to negotiate while retaining my personal and professional integrity. Perhaps there is some pastor out there who can do it. I am not that pastor. I am not willing to reduce the faith to its lowest common denominator in my preaching and teaching, yet when I preach or teach something other than the lowest common Christian denominator some of you are offended, often powerfully and personally offended. It is not my call as a pastor to offend any of you, but neither is it my call as a pastor not to preach the full Gospel of Jesus Christ as I have come to understand it through years of study and work in the church. I have become convinced that I cannot do that at the Maltby church without offending some of you in ways I have no desire to continue doing. It is time for me to go.

Many of you have a very different view of the pastor’s role in the church than I do. I will focus on just one aspect of that difference as a way of illustrating the point. I am convinced that the pastor’s main responsibility is creating and leading Sunday worship, especially in a small church like Maltby Congregational. That church as an institution does not see the Sunday worship service as belonging primarily to the pastor. You see it as belonging more to the people than to the pastor. You expressed that view of the matter when you took from me responsibility for choosing the hymns for the service. I have resented that action of yours from the time you first did it. I accepted it because I didn’t want to stake my ministry with you on it, but it has never sat well with me. In addition, recently one of you put an insert in the Sunday bulletin without even telling me you were doing it. That act showed great disrespect to me as the pastor. It may have been the final straw in convincing me to resign. To me that bulletin is mine. To you it is not. That is a difference I am no longer willing to live with. It is time for me to go.

You have shown disrespect to me as the pastor in other ways as well. Recently some of you turned what I had planned as a constructive congregational gathering to talk about the church’s identity and mission into an assault on me and everything some of you think is wrong with me as pastor of the church. Those who perpetrated that assault never came to me personally to express dissatisfaction with me or anything I have done or not done. Instead they sprung it on me unannounced at an open meeting called for a different purpose. The actions of those who did that hurt me deeply, not just because of what was said but also because of how it was done. I do not need to deal with such disrespectful conduct. It is time for me to go.

Many of you accuse me of being too “political” in my preaching. My response is that I am no more political in my preaching than the gospels of the New Testament are in their proclamation of the message and mission of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is inherently political. It is political because it is about how God calls human beings to live together, how God calls us to behave toward one another, and how God wants to see human society organized. It is about justice for the ones the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus call “the least of these.” Many of you think that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is only about what we have to do to guarantee that our souls go to heaven after we die. I am convinced that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is hardly about that at all. This is a profound difference between many of you and me that we are not going to overcome. It is time for me to go.

For much of my time as your pastor I have enjoyed working with you and getting to know you. You are good people, and nothing I have said here is intended to deny that reality. You care deeply for and about one another, and that is a very good, Christian thing. I pray that you will find a way to continue forward together as Christian community, but you will be doing that without me. God will be with you as you go on both together and as individuals. I pray that you will be open to the ways in which the Holy Spirit calls you in new directions toward new life.

Yours in Christ,

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

Wicked Tenants?

This is the sermon I gave the day I told the First Congregational Church of Maltby that I was resigning as of the end of the year. One person called it the best sermon she ever heard me give. Others thought it was entirely inappropriate. Perhaps that will give you some idea of why I resigned.

Wicked Tenants?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 8, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 21:31-46; Isaiah 5:1-7

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

You all know that I see the Christian faith differently than some of you do. For one thing, I am much more willing to look at its failings and shortcomings than some of you are, and I’m willing to preach on them even when some of you don’t want to hear it. Well, for better or for worse I’m going to do that again today. Don’t worry. I don’t intend to give many more sermons like this one; but this one has to be said, for the passage we just heard from the Gospel of Matthew cries out for a response. That’s what I’m going to give it here. Now, there is good news in what I have to say, and I’ll get to that too. But please understand first of all that I am going to deny what this Gospel passage says. Please understand that I consider it to be un-Christian. Please understand that I agree with the scholars who say Jesus never spoke this parable. It comes from the later Christian community for whom the Gospel of Matthew was written, and they were really mad at the Jews in a way that Jesus never was. I’m going to try to explain why I find it to be so false and why seeing the matter it addresses differently opens up great good news for the world and for our Christian faith. So here goes.

The Gospel of Matthew presents this passage as a parable of Jesus. The passage is set in the temple in Jerusalem after Jesus has entered that city riding on a donkey. Matthew says Jesus is teaching in the temple, and he says that this parable is one of Jesus’ teachings. The parable posits a vineyard. A landowner develops it, then rents it to some farmers and goes away on a journey. At harvest time he sends his servants to collect his share of the harvest from the tenant farmers. The tenant farmers beat up and even kill some of the owner’s servants. So he sends another group of servants, and the tenants do the same horrible things to them. So the owner sends his son, saying those tenants will at least respect him. Of course they don’t. They kill him. So the parable says that the owner will “bring those wretches to a wretched end” and will rent to vineyard to others who will give the owner his share of the crop at harvest time.

So far there isn’t necessarily anything objectionable about this parable, although the tenants killing the owner’s son is kind of a red flag. What really makes the parable objectionable is how it ends. Matthew ends the parable this way: “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. They looked for a way to arrest him....” The way the Gospel of Matthew ends this parable turns it into a piece of nasty early Christian anti-Judaism. The Jewish leaders, the story says, knew that Jesus was talking about them. This story is of course a parable, so we need to consider just who the various figures in the parable represent to see why Matthew would say those Jewish leaders thought he was talking about them.

In Jesus’ parables a figure like a landowner can often be seen as representing God. That certainly seems to be who the landowner in this parable represents. It says he planted a vineyard. Now, Hebrew scripture sometimes portrays Israel as God’s vineyard. We saw that way of thinking about God and the people in our passage from Isaiah. There a landowner described as “my loved one” built a vineyard, tended it well, but instead of getting good grapes he got only bad fruit. The owner asks what more he could have done for his vineyard. The implied answer is nothing, but the vineyard did not produce good grapes; so that owner is going to destroy it. Then the text tells us directly: “ The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the garden of his delight.” So a vineyard representing Israel and its owner representing God are images the original audience for the Gospel of Matthew would have known well. We are on solid ground when we think of the landowner in Matthew’s parable as representing God.

If the landowner is God, and if the vineyard is Israel, then the tenants to whom the landowner rented the vineyard are pretty clearly the religious leaders of the Hebrew people. They are the ones in charge of the Lord’s vineyard, that is, they are the ones God has chosen to shepherd God’s people. The parable says they have done a terrible job of it. They refuse to give the landowner, that is, God, his due at harvest time. They kill the servants the landowner sends to collect his crop. Matthew’s audience would immediately have heard an echo of how the Jewish scriptures say Jerusalem kills the prophets. Then the landowner sends his son. Now, for the author of the Gospel of Matthew the landowner is God, and that makes his son Jesus Christ. The parable says the wicked tenants killed the son the landowner had sent. Matthew’s audience would have heard that the Jews kill Jesus Christ the Son of God. Never mind that it was really the Romans who killed Jesus not the Jews. The New Testament tries again and again to shift the blame for Jesus’ execution from the Romans who did it to the Jews who didn’t. This parable is part of that effort. Matthew is saying the Jews, or at least the Jewish leaders, killed Jesus, the Son of God.

The parable says that God will punish the Jews for having killed Jesus. It says “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.” The early Christians thought that God’s anointing of a special people had passed from the Jews to them. That’s what the text is claiming here. The Jews have botched the job God gave them of tending the Kingdom of God, so that task has now passed to the Christians.

Texts like this that blame the Jews (or at least their leaders) for having killed Jesus and having been unfaithful to God are common in the New Testament, and they have a long and bloody history. The Holocaust didn’t spring from a vacuum. It sprung from century upon century of brutal Christian anti-Judaism. Christian anti-Judaism is a heritage we must all admit the church has, and it is one of which the church must repent in clearest and strongest terms possible. The last day of the current month is the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, and beginning the Protestant Reformation. Over the next three Sundays I will have some very positive things to say about Martin Luther and his theology, but there is one aspect of Luther’s thought that we must unequivocally condemn as we praise other things about him. Luther was a horrible anti-Semite. He hated Jewish people with a passion. His writings against them are among the most disturbing—and false—writings in Christian history. Luther could use New Testament passages like the Parable of the Wicked Tenants to justify his condemnation of Jewish people. That’s why we must reject this parable.

Folks, it simply isn’t true that God abandoned the Jewish people when they declined to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Jewish faith was a valid, rich, and treasured way of connecting people with God before Jesus, and it has been a valid, rich, and treasured way of connecting people with God after Jesus. Jewish faith, worship, scholarship, thought, and writing are as grace-filled as the best Christian faith, worship, scholarship, thought, and writing ever were.

Let me offer the following piece of writing by a Jewish rabbi as proof of that statement. It is by Rabbi Will Berkovitz, Executive Director of Jewish Family Services in Seattle. Rabbi Berkovitz sent it to Ed Meyer, and Ed sent it to me. Ed procured the Rabbi’s consent to my using it here. At the time of the Jewish High Holy Days this year Rabbi Berkovitz wrote:

We are living in an era when attention spans are assumed to be 140 characters or less — two bits as my dad would say. That’s how much we are willing to “pay” for our attention. In Hebrew, “pay attention” is literally translated as, “place your heart..” Placing our hearts requires effort. It requires us to focus beyond the chaotic white noise that fills so much of our lives.

Like many people, I witnessed the total eclipse. With the coyotes howling and geese taking flight, experiencing that 360-degree, midday sunset was profound. But the awareness that millions of people were experiencing the same thing was even more profound.

We were doing more than merely looking up at the same time. We were sharing a transcendent experience, a bending of the natural order. It was extraordinary that so many people, with so many different beliefs and perspectives, could pause, step outside and have a collective, uniting experience. Imagine what could happen if we made that choice again.

With the Jewish new year and the communal season of reflection upon us, we have an opportunity to make that choice. We can choose to start placing our hearts with the people around us, willingly and freely. We can choose to look up and look beyond ourselves. To have a collective moment of reflection. To place our hearts outside our expectations. To seek a fuller, deeper understanding of those around us.

Placing our hearts requires a measure of humility and an openness to encountering something beyond our expectations. Placing our hearts means imagining a world where we see people for who they really are, where we seek to understand the lived experience of those around us, from their perspective. Not with judgement (sic), but with compassion.

And then, rather than penciling in their lives from our assumptions about who they are and what they believe, we pause. We place our hearts, as individuals and as a community. We truly listen — with openness, curiosity and vulnerability. And with those first rays of new light, we can, if we choose, see our world and those around us, as if for the first time. That is the hope offered with each new year, if we are willing to choose it.

That, folks, is a grace-filled proclamation of how God calls us to live with one another. God calls us to “place our hearts” with the people around us, to listen carefully, and to accept all of God’s people as they actually are without reducing them to our own often prejudiced understanding of what we think they should be.

Does it matter that Rabbi Berkovitz is Jewish not Christian? Are his words less true because he is Jewish not Christian? Certainly not. Is he a “wicked tenant” of God’s world? Certainly not. He is a man of faith who speaks grace-filled truth and works hard to serve people in need in this area—all people in need not just Jewish people in need. Are the Jewish people with whom he serves wicked tenants of God’s world? Certainly not. They certainly are no more wicked than most of us Christians are. Thanks be to God!

So when you see the New Testament heaping scorn on Jewish people, please do not take that scorn as divine truth. It isn’t. It is rather the centuries old anger of small communities of people who were angry at larger Jewish communities from which they were being excluded because of their confession of Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus never heaped scorn on Jewish people. He was one of them. Their faith was his faith. Their scripture was his scripture. He wanted to reform Judaism not destroy it. Judaism and Christianity developed into separate religions, but Judaism is still our mother faith. It always has been. It always will be. We are grounded in it. Christianity is impossible without it. My Hebrew scripture professor in seminary was fond of saying “Christianity is one way of being Jewish, but it isn’t the only way.” He was right about that. Israel’s God is our God, the one and only true God.

So when you hear anyone disparaging Judaism or Jewish people (or any other great faith tradition and its people for that matter) just say no. No, that’s not how it is. Every religion is true to the extent that it connects people with God. Judaism connects a great many people with God, and it has done so a lot longer than Christianity has. No, Jews are not wicked tenants of God’s world. They never were despite what the author of the Gospel of Matthew thought. They are as faithful people of God as the best Christians are. Getting beyond the horrible history of Christian anti-Judaism let us see how great God really is. How much God loves all people not just Christian people. Getting beyond the horrible history of Christian anti-Judaism opens our hearts to love all people, especially all people whose commitment to peace, justice, and care for all people is grounded in the love of God however they kn0w and worship God.

Folks, Christianity isn’t about discrimination against anyone. It certainly isn’t about hatred of anyone. So let’s not learn bad lessons from bad parables like the one about the wicked tenants. Let’s open our hearts and minds to all people who love God and work for good in the world. If we can do that we be truer disciples of the Jewish man we call Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

The Ten Commandments? Really?

The Ten Commandments: Really?

Republican voters in Alabama have nominated Roy Moore, twice deposed former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, as their candidate to fill the vacancy in the United States Senate created when Jeff Sessions became US Attorney General. He will face a Democratic opponent in November; but Alabama hasn’t elected a Democratic US senator in roughly forever, so it is a virtual certainty that Moore will become Jeff Sessions’ replacement in the upper chamber of our federal legislature. Moore first came to notoriety and was first removed from the state supreme court because he refused to obey an order from a federal court that he remove an installation featuring the Ten Commandments from state property. Moore is but the latest right wing Christian who has insisted that the Ten Commandments should be displayed in courthouses all over the country. Displaying them on public property is beyond any shadow of a doubt a violation of the Anti-Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. I certainly object to displaying them on public property on those grounds, and I’ll come back to that objection at the end of this piece. There is however another question about the Ten Commandments. When we really understand what they are and what they say (as opposed to what we may have been told that they are and what they say or that we may want them to be or to say) it becomes clear that they are hardly the infallible guide to moral behavior that their advocates seem to think that they are. I want to share here an analysis of some of the Ten Commandments (similar to the one I included in my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians). Perhaps if we better understand what the Ten Commandments are and what they say we won’t even have to get to the constitutional arguments before we will strongly oppose posting them in any courthouse.

The Ten Commandments are found first at Exodus 20:1-17.¹ Exodus says that Moses has been up on the mountain communing with God. He comes back down with the law that the people’s god Yahweh has given him. He begins to share that law with the people. Jewish tradition gives the total number of laws that Moses got from Yahweh as 613. The Ten Commandments are the first ten of those laws. To understand them we must first of all understand them in their historical context. When we do we see that some of the commandments don’t really say what we think they say because we don’t read them carefully and others don’t say what we think they say because words didn’t mean the same thing in the commandments’ original context as they do today. So let’s look at some of them and see what we can find.

The first of the Ten Commandments is one of the most misunderstood. It reads: “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:2-3² The way the word Lord is printed here tells us that the Hebrew original is the four letter name of God that we usually transliterate as Yahweh. In the very early stages of the Hebrew people’s understanding of God Yahweh was their tribal war god. We see that understanding of Yahweh a little bit earlier in Exodus in what we call Miriam’s Song. At Exodus chapter 15 the people have just successfully escaped the pursuing Egyptians through God’s trick of parting the Red Sea, then closing it down on the Egyptian army. At Exodus 15:20-21 we read:

Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing And Miriam sang to them:

‘Sing to the Lord, for he has

triumphed gloriously

horse and rider he has thrown

into the sea.’

In these lines, which may be the oldest preserved bit of oral tradition in the Bible, Yahweh, rendered here as “the Lord,” is clearly a war god. He is the god who has fought the people’s battle against the Egyptians and won it. He is not necessarily more than a war god here. In any event, he is the god of the Hebrew people who has liberated them from Egypt by drowning all of pharaoh’s soldiers.

Yahweh as the god who freed the people from Egypt appears at the beginning of the Ten Commandments too. The Ten Commandments begin: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”³Christians invariably take this commandment as containing a statement of strict monotheism. We read “you shall have no other gods” as “there are no other gods,” and we pretty much overlook the phrase “before me.” Yet this sentence clearly is not a statement of monotheism. So far from denying the reality of gods besides Yahweh it clearly assumes it. It doesn’t say “there are no other gods.” It says “you,” that is, you Hebrews, shall have no other gods before Yahweh. The text would hardly bother telling the people not to have other gods if it assumed there were no other gods. It would say there are no other gods, but it doesn’t. The first of the Ten Commandments is a statement not of monotheism but of henotheism. Henotheism is a belief about the gods that says there are lots of gods. In fact, it accepts that every people has their own gods and goddesses. Henotheism says not that there are no other gods but that a particular people shall have only one god. Let the others have their gods, it says; we have only one. In the case of the Hebrews that one was Yahweh. Does Roy Moore or any other Christian today want to put a statement of henotheism in their courthouses? I assume not. They want to put the Ten Commandments in courthouses in part because they erroneously assume that the first commandment is a statement of monotheism. It isn’t.

We run into another big problem with the Ten Commandments in the next commandment, the prohibition of idolatry. At Exodus 20:4 we read that the people shall not make for themselves an idol that looks like anything on earth. The next verses, Exodus 20:5-6, read:

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Does Roy Moore or anyone else believe that God punishes the children of wrongdoers through three and four generations though the people of those generations may have done nothing at all to offend God? I doubt it. Even if an extremist like Moore does, surely most American Christians and other Americans don’t. Does Roy Moore or anyone else believe that God is unaffected by the sin of persons of subsequent generations descended from a person who was faithful to God? I doubt it. Even if an extremist like Moore does, surely most American Christians don’t. The text of Exodus 20:5-6 expresses an ancient understanding of generational responsibility for wrongdoing, an understanding that the Bible itself reverses later on. See for example Ezekiel 18:1-4. Does Moore or anyone else really want that understanding on display in the local courthouse? I doubt it, for it simply isn’t our contemporary understanding of how God works.

Now let’s turn to Exodus 20:14: “You shall not commit adultery.” Now, I think, or at least I like to think, that all Christians and most other people believe that adultery is a bad thing (although of course it is no longer illegal under our secular law). Yet there is a hidden problem with the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery. The problem is that in the ancient Hebrew world in and for which the Ten Commandments were written adultery didn’t mean what it means to most of us today. Today to commit adultery is usually understood as being having sexual intercourse with anyone to whom one is not married. At the very least it is a married person having sexual intercourse with a person other than the person’s spouse. Both women and men can commit adultery in our understanding of the term. In the ancient Hebrew world adultery was understood much more narrowly. Adultery was only the act of a man having sexual intercourse with a woman who was married to another man. A sexual act was adultery only if the woman were married to a man other than the one with whom she had sexual intercourse. The reason for this understanding of adultery was clear enough. It had nothing to do with sexual morality per se. It didn’t even have to do with marital fidelity in anything like our sense of that virtue. It had to do with property rights. A man could be sure that a child born to his wife was really his child only if his wife never had intercourse with anyone but him. If she had sex with another man a child born to her might not be her husband’s at all. If the child were not his, his family estate would pass to someone not of his family, something the ancient Hebrew world considered to be a great evil. That’s what the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery was trying to prevent. That certainly is not why we consider adultery to be immoral today, but it is why the Ten Commandments consider adultery to be immoral.

The last of the Ten Commandments also bears some consideration. It reads: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Certainly coveting things that belong to your neighbor is a negative thing. This commandment against such coveting could work to reduce tensions and hostility within a community. But look at one thing that this commandment takes for granted. It says you shall not covet your neighbor’s “male or female slave.” The Ten Commandments take the existence and acceptability of slavery for granted. Indeed, nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery other than the slavery of the Hebrew people in Egypt. In this day and age we all (or nearly all) see slavery as an abomination, as profoundly unjust and immoral. Today we see the earlier existence of slavery in our country as something of which to be ashamed. Some of us think it is something for which we should still make reparations to the descendants of the slaves. In today’s America, where we generally reject slavery but in which racism and white supremacy are still very much with us, do we want to put an ancient document that takes slavery for granted up in our courthouses? I trust not. I sure don’t.

It is clear then I think that one problem with the Ten Commandments is that we often misunderstand them because they were written in and for a culture so different from ours. Yet even if we assume that most of the people who saw the Ten Commandments displayed in a courthouse wouldn’t understand that reality about them, putting them up in public, governmental structures is still quite obviously illegal. Roy Moore refused to recognize that truth when a federal court told him to take them down from the Alabama Supreme Court building. Yet the federal court that ordered him to so was clearly legally correct. Putting the Ten Commandments up in a courthouse is illegal first of all because a courthouse is a governmental structure. The courts are part of our system of government. They are operated for the benefit of all Americans by institutions that belong to all Americans. Because courthouses are governmental installations, the First Amendment of the United States Constitution applies to them. The First Amendment has within it what we call the “Anti-Establishment Clause.” It reads: “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion.” That provision of the First Amendment applies to the states through the operation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Now admittedly, the Anti-Establishment Clause doesn’t seem to say much. Yet all Constitutional provisions become effective and gain their meaning from the ways the federal courts interpret and apply them. The federal courts have long held that the Anti-Establishment Clause means that no governmental agency may do anything that privileges one religion over another or that privileges religion over non-religion. So the only way that the First Amendment would not prohibit displaying the Ten Commandments in a courthouse would be if the Ten Commandments were not a religious document.

Yet of course the Ten Commandments are a religious document. They come from two of the books of Hebrew scripture that are part of the Torah, the most sacred texts of Judaism. Because long ago Christianity adopted Hebrew scripture as Christian scripture, they are also part of the sacred texts of the Christian religion. They appear nowhere except in the parts of the Bible that are sacred to both Christians and Jews. For many of us that means that we must treat them with great respect and deference, and I trust that I do even though I don’t accept all of them as still valid. It also means, however, that the Ten Commandments are undeniably a religious text. That the notions they express are shared by many of the world’s other religious traditions besides Judaism and Christianity is beside the point. Similar passages that might be found, say, in the Koran would also be religious texts. It would be illegal to post them in a courthouse too. Even putting up similar texts from several different faith traditions would not solve the problem, for those text too would be religious texts. The Ten Commandments are religious in their very nature. They come from sacred scripture. They talk about God. There simply is no way that putting them up in a courthouse could comply with the First Amendment of the US Constitution or with similar provisions in many state constitutions.

I could object to the idea that morality consists only of obeying the Ten Commandments on other grounds as well, but I trust the point is made. The Ten Commandments are not the pure statement of good morals that people like Roy Moore take them to be. Putting them up in any public facility violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution. So let’s be done with this nonsense about putting them in courthouses, shall we? And let’s be done with people like Roy Moore who refuse to recognize the obvious truth that putting them up there is illegal. Let’s be done with people like Roy Moore who claim to be state court judges, who take an oath of office as a state court judge, then refuse to obey directives from a federal court on a matter of federal law. Moore didn’t deserve to serve on the Alabama State Supreme Court. He doesn’t deserve to serve in the US Senate either.

1They appear in virtually the same form again at Deuteronomy 5:1-22. The differences between the two versions of the Ten Commandments are not significant for our purposes.

2The scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version bible, copyright (c) 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

3Exodus 20:2-3