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Swearing By God's Name
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 17, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Joshua 2:1-14 Acts4:1-12
This is the third Sunday of our series on the Ten Commandments and, lest the first moments of each proclamation this summer begin to sound like "The Twelve Days of Christmas", I promise to quit offering a summary of previous points…after I do so this morning! I do so today because the first three commandments taken together serve as a foundation for the rest, a foundation necessarily rehearsed in the midst of a season when Sabbaths [the subject of our commandment for next week] are barely kept. So in case you have been away…or asleep…here are the basics. Last Sunday we began by saying that the sum and substance of God's command is that we be free, free to be who we are in glad obedience to God's claim upon our days. The first commandment, then, sets our hearts free to trust completely in God alone and no other [the first commandment being about what it means to have a God]. The second commandment sets our minds free to seek God in the world not in things or in nature or in nations but in Scripture, in the history of the community chosen by God to represent God to the world and finally in the only-begotten Son who is alone the image of the invisible God. Now in the third commandment, a case in point of the first two, our speech is set free for praise! "What it means to have no other gods but the Lord is now carried into a particular sphere: the place, function, and use of God's name," writes Pat Miller. Or, in the words of Paul Lehmann, in the third commandment we are guided to be who we are by the command not to "go about with the name of God as though it made no difference." We do, of course, but in what sense is our indifference, our vain or deceptive use of God's name forbidden by this commandment? The commandment is most literally translated, "Do not lift up the name of the Lord your God lesaw," a Hebrew word whose root meaning, according to Pat Miller, ranges from speaking deceptively or falsely to speaking uselessly, to no purpose, in vain. It is from this latter meaning that the third commandment has been popularly understood to forbid profanity…and so with profanity we will begin the morning! "The first things that issue and emerge from the heart are words," wrote Martin Luther in his commentary on the third commandment. Yet the words that issue from our mouths and are considered profane by polite society generally do more to reveal our essential vulgarity or vacuity than to convict us of blasphemy these days. When "Christ," for instance, is spoken to fill the space until a thought can be completed rather than "you know" or when God's name becomes an explicative expressing our emotional peak, the name uttered is empty of meaning, referring to nothing, spoken in vain. So a person flings God's name into mid-air saying, "Oh Christ, never mind!" and had better hope Christ does not! Though listen to the gravity that takes hold of the same name, the power that is blithely invoked when one person looks into the eyes of another saying "God damn you!" "The trouble with the first-named instance," says Lehmann, "is that it tends to become habitual and to convert carelessness into indifference, if not into exhibitionism. The trouble with the second-named instance is that [it nurtures] the violation of limits designed to safeguard difference", designed to honor the human in the other, I would say, which has been forever hallowed in Jesus Christ. Then there is a third case of taking the name of God lightly which, I think, straddles the fence between profanity and profundity. "Oh, my God!" we cry at the sight of innocent suffering or before evidence of the human race's depravity. Here says Lehmann, "the familiar extremis outcry…should remind us all that all of us are vulnerable to the despair that drives us, however uncontrollably, across the threshold of faith." By and large most biblical scholars agree that profane speech is not the primary subject of the third word spoken to Moses from out of the thick cloud atop Mt. Sinai. Rather the issue addressed in the context of Israelite social reality is, in the first place, swearing by God's name falsely or deceptively: in a word, using God's name to lie and, in so doing, to lie about God. For if, in the words of Pat Miller, "the proclamation of the name [of God] is the proclamation of the way God is in the world," then we lie about God when we use God's name to justify in ourselves the very actions God abhors. Henry Sloane Coffin's sermon on the third commandment, delivered in the fall of 1914, no doubt means to do business with this more consequential meaning of the commandment. From the pulpit of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, referring to the invocation of God's name in relation to the Great War which had just begun, he roars, "…to invoke the name of God, of the Christian God, in the work of slaughter and destruction, to claim Him as sanctioning national self-aggrandizement and the use of force for its accomplishment, is a sad indication of the widespread ignorance of what the name of the Christian God really signifies." That ignorance persists today, though Muslims surely are noting as well the widespread ignorance "of what the name of Allah really signifies." So in the first place, the third commandment forbids God's name be associated with human actions that bear no relation to what God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human. Then in the second place, there is the invoking of God's name in relation to the truthfulness of what one says. Not lying or telling the truth "so help you God" may, in most instances, appear to be unambiguous. The truth off the top of our heads is simply the highest degree of verbal veracity. "What did you witness on the night of July 16th?" Most of the time, we can answer such a question with words that come as close as words can come to speaking the facts. Yet if the truth-telling of the third commandment were understood only to require verbal veracity, then had a Nazi knocked on your door demanding to know which of your neighbors were hiding Jews, you would be enjoined by God's third command to tell him. Immediately we are confronted with a wrinkle in real time: discerning to whom we owe the truth in God's name is an aspect of not using God's name falsely, of not using God's name to further the very thing in the world God does not will. Though there is a further wrinkle. For if "God is not a general principle, but the living God who has set me in a living life and who demands service of me within this living life," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then "the truthful word is not in itself constant; it is as much alive as life itself." Hence if we dismiss the context into which we speak the words that issue from our hearts, then we are not swearing "by the God who entered into the world in Jesus Christ, but rather [we are swearing by the name] of some metaphysical idol." To wit, when Joshua sent spies into Jericho as God's people waited on the boundary of the Promised Land, they went to the house of a harlot named Rahab. The king of Jericho demanded that Rahab bring the men out, but Rahab responded, "True, the men came to me and I did not know where they came from. And when it was time to close the gate at dark, the men went out. Where the men went I do not know." Factually this was a lie, but in the context of God's purposes, Rahab told the truth. She then returned to her home and said to the men hiding there, "The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below. Now then, since I have dealt kindly with you, swear to me by the Lord that you in turn will deal kindly with my family." "Our life for yours," the men swore. To whom did Rahab owe the truth?: to the men representing the living God in the world. What was the living context in which the men swore to do the truth in God's name?: in the house of a harlot through whom God's purposes in human history were being accomplished. The commandment commands us to tell the truth not from the vantage point of the top of our heads where all is black and white and we are riding the high horses of our principles. Rather we are commanded from the bottom of our hearts to speak the word that does the truth of God, the truth that turns us to follow the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the truth that represents the God who is acting in the world to make and keep human life human. Even so, at the end of the day, we also may only pray for God's grace and forgiveness. All of which brings us, in the third place, to conclude that the third commandment positively enjoins us, as far as it is possible, to do justice in God's name, the justice revealed in the parabolic speech and actions of Jesus Christ. In this sense, swearing by God's name as members of a people whose Lord is God is "a practice not just a moral obligation," writes Miller. Or as Lehmann puts it, "Justice is the principal outward sign that the heart and its words have been led and directed into the right relation with God." Life is lived, in God's name, at the intersection where the last become first and the first are therefore last, where in God's name, the lame leap because a society is ordered to secure the health and wholeness of all and in God's name a prisoner's chains are loosed because redemption is the purpose of incarceration, where in God's name the color of a person's skin or the sexual orientation of a person's heart or the size of a person's bank account makes one no less human than the other! Such is the justice done in God's name, a justice that is in no way fair from a merely human, top of the head point of view, but is full of grace…the same grace in which our human speech is redeemed from profanity and freed for praise. My friends, all of this that God commands in the third word is revealed in him who did everything he did and said everything he said in God's name. He is the Word that issued from God's heart and became flesh and not stone. His life, death and resurrection are the living context of truth-telling. His name is the name above all names which our hearts have been given to invoke as the sick are healed, the prisoner visited, the hungry fed, the homeless taken in, a little child received, and the dead buried in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. What else could Peter and John on trial have said to the rulers and elders of Jerusalem but that "this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth." So swear by God's name! Go about as though the name of God makes all the difference in the world! For thus are our hearts set free to utter the praise and thanksgiving for which we were made. Thanks be to God! |