Appealing to common prejudice.

March 15, 2009 by Dan Hooper.

People make fun of the Ten Commandments nowadays. We’ve had our battles over conservatives trying to stick them on a granite monument in court rooms, etc. Make the Law of Moses loom over our daily lives, our justice system, our bedrooms. they get a lot of bad press.

And in these liberal, crazy times, most of us who are open-minded and compassionate seem to think there is little left of value in the Ten Commandments. they have become, literally, the Ten Suggestions. And of course all of us, including all who are religious to any degree, have found our way to work around them. We make ourselves all manner of “wiggle room.”

This past week, the Ten Commandments surfaced in the common ecumenical Lectionary for Sunday readings. I bit the bullet and spoke about them. But it set me thinking whether or not Christians in our time should be about the business of filtering out the heavy stuff and lightening-up the burden of legalism by trivializing these Ten Words (in Hebrew, the Words of God). Or should we start where the Lutheran Reformers started, by acknowledging that the Commandments (and the entire Law) do not save us, but they do convince us of our need for grace. They convict us of our own sin.

Ordinarily I cringe from applying any word of Law to other people’s sins, errors, excesses or missing-the-mark. But one thing jumps up to me as I try to apply the Commandments to our contemporary scene: I find that they still point at what is flawed in us with dead aim.

The Small Catechism published by Mobipocket.com.  How cool is that?

I have written before, for example, about the Eighth Commandment (”you shall not bear false witness”) as something our right-wing Christian people should look at carefully when they make derogatory, misleading or false statements about gay and lesbian people. Luther’s Small Catechism, for example, says this to explain the Eighth Commandment:

We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their refutations. Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light.

One cannot help thinking that Fred Phelps could do a little introspection on this. But what of those in the gay community who have engaged indiscriminately in “outing” other LGBT people? Clearly the commandment of God says, we are not to do things which harm others (no matter how tempting and delicious!).

During Lent this time around, it was the Second Commandment which struck me also. and yes, I am thinking too much of other people’s wrongs (not to put others down, but to clear say that I, and other LGBT people, have been disastrously hurt, and I appeal to this Second Commandment in our defense). “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God.” Again from Luther’s catechism: 

We are to fear and love God, so that we do not curse, swear, practice magic, lie, or deceive using God’s name, but instead use that very name in every time of need to call on, pray to, praise, and give thanks to God.

(I must yawn in the reference to “magic” ~ as an occasional visitor to the Magic Castle here in Hollywood, knowing that it is all the art of illusionists, but yes there are other sorts, and Martin Luther lived 500 years ago in a more fearful era…). What does it mean to deceive using God’s name?

Am I deceiving others, if I offer them comfort and assurance of God’s unconditional love, when there are hundreds or thousands of conservative preachers who think that the word of God is utterly clear that LGBT people are going to hell? Dare I interpret the Scriptures to say, God’s word for us is grace, for the sake of Christ, and sexual minority persons are recipients of that grace along with every other human being? Or is it the right-wing conservative who is deceiving others?

But after waging this battle within the Christian church for decades, I am tired of being overly polite and self-effacing, allowing the deceiving, negative, hurtful, even murderous word of the Religious Reich to be spoken in the name of God. This is wrong. This is evil. Isn’t it a misuse of God’s name to invoke God in the service of hating people? shaming people? taking people’s rights away?

We’re all used to bad-mouthing attorneys, politicians, and used car salesmen for being dishonest. The finger of God also points at preachers, too, if they use God’s name to condemn, to defame, to bear false witness, to deliberately harm other people (in this case, LGBT people). They think that appealing to common prejudice in their pews will fill their collection plates! We’ve just seen this happen again in the religious right-wing campaign to pass Proposition 8 — people misusing the name of God to sell prejudice to the voters, and bolster stereotypes, bigotry and fear, rather than to less those things.

The bottom line of the commandment is as relevant as ever, once we see that people are being harmed when religion breaches the basic purpose of the commandment and the justice and rightness of God. “Don’t go there,” God says. “You shall not do that!”

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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