Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
In her 2021 book “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness,” historian Elizabeth Samet challenges the near religious framing of the Second World War, especially after Tom Brokaw and other media personalities turned the fiftieth anniversary of that war into a celebration of what they framed as a simpler and better time. We saved Private Ryan and fought with a Band of Brothers, trying not to talk about our own sins, including the racist internment of Japanese-American citizens.
Samet’s book is an example of one simple fact: the past is always seen through the lens of the present. Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s “Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II,” which challenges the hero myths surrounding Allied leaders like Churchill, Montgomery, and MacArthur, was written in the context of the bad wars of the 20th century, the strategic failure in Iraq, the utter defeat in Afghanistan.
And now, we are at war with Iran, a war we are meant to believe isn’t truly dangerous because we have no “boots on the ground.” I’d say “tell that to the families of those killed in action,” except Pete “Testy” Hegseth is doing his best to prevent the public from knowing the true toll, “Testy” because he is obsessed with morning woodies and the testosterone levels of all service members, even the women, when he should be obsessed with the drones and missiles that are killing our troops.
Using “boots” to represent women and men in uniform is an example of a synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is meant to represent the whole. Another example is when unionized laborers refer to corporate executives as “the suits.”
And I want to suggest that when we speak about God, the words we use are a bit like a synecdoche, Divine Mystery so great, so transcendent, that we imagine and speak of a part, not the whole. But first, let’s go back to our reading.
In the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism, the first five books of scripture, called the Torah, are normative. They contain 613 rules for Jewish life, referred to as mitzvot. Though tradition says all five books were written by Moses, we know that texts referring to the Temple cult and priesthood come after they were established, certainly no earlier than the reign of King Solomon. We know that the Book of the Law, “discovered” by the High Priest Hilkiah during restoration of the Temple during the late 7th century B.C.E. is what we now call Deuteronomy, one of two sources for the Ten Commandments. The other, the one we read this morning from the Book of Exodus, is of uncertain origin.
If you are like me, you were taught that there is only one god, and that the Jewish people only ever believed in one god. You were probably also taught that the Israelites and Judahites often fell into the sin of worshipping false gods represented by idols. Generations of orthodox Christians, orthodox with a lower case “o,” would have us believe that there is one straight line from Abraham and Sarah to Moses, from Moses to David, from David to Jesus, from Jesus to Peter, and on to that White Sox fan in Rome. Protestants see that same trajectory until Martin Luther rebels in the early 16th century. Any pretense of a single trajectory falls apart for Protestants after that.
In reality, the earliest layers of scripture are polytheistic. Yahweh is conflated with the Sky-god head of the Canaanite pantheon, El, and worship of other Canaanite gods, including El’s consort, Asherah, continued for centuries after the reigns of David and Solomon. It was in Israel, the Northern Kingdom and the first to be destroyed, that the Yahweh cult became exclusive. Refugees from that kingdom found their way to the surviving Southern Kingdom of Judah, where their belief eventually took hold, leading to a series of reforms, and putting early Judaism on a path to what we know today, an ethical monotheism.
The Ten Commandments land somewhere in the middle of this trajectory. They represent the human role in constructing belief, but also the evolutionary pressures on belief, for belief must contribute to thriving in its current context to survive, even if that is only thriving for a powerful subset of the population.
The Ten Commandments do not say there are no other gods. They simply demand exclusive worship of Yahweh. They prohibit wrongful use of Yahweh’s name, for names were believed to have magic power. We see remnants of that belief in folktales from many cultures. Think Rumpelstiltskin here.
In fact, in parts of Rabbinic Judaism, it is even prohibited to write out the word God, much less Yahweh. And as we recently discussed, the pronunciation we use for that name is a guess, the historic pronunciation lost with the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of the Jewish priesthood.
But to me, the portion of the contract between the Jews and Yahweh that was most innovative was the prohibition on making idols. In certain traditions and certain periods, this has been expanded to include prohibiting any depiction of God, with a broader prohibition on icons generally.
While some find religious icons and statues a helpful point of focus in their spiritual practice, there have been waves of iconoclasm, the destruction of statues and icons, in the Christian tradition. This includes the relatively better known iconoclasm during the 8th century in the Byzantine Empire, and the lesser known destruction at the hand of our own theological ancestors, as both Reform Christians and Anabaptists rejected what they would classify as “graven images.” As you can see from the beautiful stained glass around you, we are, from that perspective, theological backsliders.
The prohibition on images, especially of Allah and Muhammad, is a core part of Islam. That is not to say they lack beauty and focus. These can be found in their sacred calligraphy, as well as in their architecture.
But even with a million images of Jesus, statues of his mother, Mary, even angels not quite as freakish as the divine beings described by Isaiah and other prophets, one would think that God was still off limits. Alas, this is not completely true. While there are many images of God, there is no better example, none more well known, than the image of God painted by Michelangelo in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, an old white man in the sky.
And it is not just images that are a problem. Even the courageous religious innovators who gave us the Ten Commandments still thought of God in human terms, as gendered, as having ego and will. Human God justified human exceptionalism and the idea that everything else in creation was less, to be used and abused as we willed as little gods of a sort, made in the likeness of God. In truth, this has been a tradition of sinfulness, humans making God in our likeness.
We project our human framework onto our pets, as we have only the most abstract ideas about the cognition and emotion of animals. It is not surprising that we read God through the lens of our own being in the world.
Like an icon, the idea of something of God in the human is useful, allows for our focus. Thinking of God as a being with will and agency makes the mystery of the divine manageable, less terrifying. But we must always know that that God, the one that is in the order of being that we occupy, is a bit of a synecdoche, naming one aspect as if it is representative of the whole, but knowing that it is not the whole.
Thinkers would call this a category mistake. The classic example is someone wandering around a historic campus and asking “But where is the university?”
Or maybe we might say “What color is the Number Seven?” Since a number is not in the category of objects, it doesn’t have a color.
And as an aside, the multiple uses of the word “church” lead to constant category mistakes, the church as the “ekklesia” in Koine Greek being a gathering of people, not a physical structure or bureaucracy.
God beyond our categories is so much more than an old white man in the sky, so much more than an omnipotent and immortal version of a bipedal primate at one end of one evolutionary branch, one incredibly dangerous primate. We may touch the elephant’s trunk. We should not confuse the trunk for the elephant.
And so with God, who is feverish and scared as she tries to get clean, is hiding in a subway station in Kiev, is growing on a hillside in China, is running across the savanna, is here, in the midst of the dance.
One part of us seeks to understand, to label and box and dissect. One part of us seeks to transcend, to lose ourselves in something bigger, in music, in a cause. God is in both. We are both. Or, as Walt Whitman wrote:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
May it be so, for me, for you, for mystery, this day and always. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Many will celebrate Francis of Assisi this week. A military veteran with PTSD, his commitment to the vulnerable was a radical reformation in the context of the early 13th century Roman church, much as the gospel of Christ was a radical reformation within the Pre-Rabbinic Judaism of his time. Francis is especially associated with animals.
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
God of All Creation,
we are not a category apart
despite our hubris,
but are animals in relationship with other animals,
some our domesticated companions,
some domesticated as tools,
some domesticated as food.
These, our fellow creatures, have been so critical
in the development of human civilization,
and yet we have been careless,
have destroyed habitat,
driven to extinction,
have sometimes killed for no other reason than to have killed.
We pray for the animals trapped in war zones,
the dogs and cats in our local shelters,
the strays wandering our streets,
and the faithful servants
who volunteer and sacrifice,
who sometimes place their own bodies on the line,
glorious primates with opposable thumbs.
Oh, miracle!
Jesus knew the partnership
of humankind and our fellow animals,
tradition telling us that he was born among the beasts
in what we call a stable.
We pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father who art in heaven..