"Anyone who knows the Ten Commandments perfectly knows the entire scriptures." Thus spoke the famous Protestant reformer Martin Luther. (See The Book of Concord, ed. Theodore G. Tappert, 1959, p. 361)
Yes, this Decalogue that was given to the world by God has proven through the ages to be an indispensable aid as Jews and Christians alike have striven to channel our energies of love into patterns of righteousness that express our Creator's will for humankind.
Now, many people think of the Ten Commandments simply as a bunch of "Thou-shalt-nots," but Jesus showed us how complex each of these really is, for each prohibits or requires not only the action it most literally describes but also some much broader categories of both outward behaviors and inner attitudes.
For example, Jesus showed us that the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" also prohibits the emotions of nursing anger and hungering for revenge, and that "Thou shalt not kill" also requires the positive actions of living in peace with our neighbors and doing good to our enemies. Therefore, the Ten Commandments stand before us not as the sum total of all God's law but rather as a starting point—a starting point for extending ever more broadly our religious and moral reflection, discussion, and action.
Today, we are focusing on the third of these commandments, which, like the first two, is part of what we Christians sometimes call "the First Table of the Law," those commandments in the Decalogue that have primarily to do with "love for God."
An older translation of this commandment—the one that's probably filed somewhere in your memory banks—is this: "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain" (KJV). More modern versions read: "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God" (NRSV), which is the translation we heard in this morning's First Lesson; or "You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God" (NIV); or "You shall not swear falsely by the name of the LORD your God" (JPS).
So, in our God-talk—in our speaking both about God and to God—in our God-talk, the name of God is not to be taken in vain, not to be sworn falsely by, not to be made wrongful use of, not to be misused. But what does all of that mean, really?
I believe it means this: we are to show love for God by telling the truth about God, by telling the truth to God, and by not dishonoring God or attempting to control God by invoking God's holy name for evil or selfish purposes—whether that's in false oaths, or in curse words, or in empty formulas, or even in the language we use in worship. So let me now seek to explain this summation of mine.
"You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God." Now, "what's in a name?" you, along with Shakespeare, may well be asking. Well, attributing great importance and consequence to a name is a phenomenon as old as human history. For people in just about every culture on earth have believed that a name somehow represents the very being and essence of a person.
We find it affirming when someone remembers our name, don't we. And we find it upsetting when someone forgets it, or misspells it, or mispronounces it, or misuses it—for example, by reporting something in my name that I never said. Yes, there's a sense in which my name is me, and your name is you. So it's only natural that what others do to our name, or with our name, affects us.
And if the misuse of a human name has such potential for injurious consequences, how much more so the misuse of God's name!
I think that Jews somehow maintain a keener sense of the fundamental importance of this Third Commandment than we Christians do. For Orthodox Jews, in particular, are so alert to the ever-present danger of taking the name of God in vain—that is, of using it without due respect or piety—that they will never directly write or pronounce the name of God at all, always substituting for it some other word or symbol-most usually, in Hebrew, Ha-Shem—which means, "the Name"—or 'Adonai—which means, "LORD." [By the way, I find it interesting that we Christians use "LORD" as a name for God, whereas Orthodox Jews use "LORD" because it's not a name for God.]
Anyway, in ancient Israel, this Third Commandment was originally seen as applying primarily to the realm of taking oaths or making promises in which the name of God was used.
Now, coincidentally, today happens to be Scout Sunday, and scouts understand oath-taking very well. For both Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts have an oath or promise that uses the name of God and that is regularly recited. For instance, here's the promise or oath made by a Cub Scout:
"I, [Byron], promise to do my best
To do my duty to God and my country,
To help other people, and
To obey the law of the Pack."
And I earnestly hope that each and every Cub Scout really means that promise when he says it, for he is using the name of God, and he definitely is, therefore, in the zone of the Third Commandment.
But returning to the cultures and courtrooms of ancient Israel and the Ancient Near East—back then and back there, oath-taking was quite a basic and frequently repeated action taken by everyone. How could a society make sure that a person was telling the truth? Well, the way thought to be most effective was to have that person swear an oath by the name of a deity. Then, even if no human were ever to discover that that person had really lied, or "shaded" the truth, punishment would surely be visited upon that offender anyway by the God in whose name the oath had been sworn.
A modern example of this quite ancient practice of taking oaths in the name of God is the oath that's administered in most American courtrooms to this day, namely: "Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God."
Personally, I find the continuance of this practice fascinating since Jesus had an altogether different take on oath-taking, as we heard in this morning's Second Lesson. In the first part of that lesson, from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus counsels his followers to be persons of such complete integrity, having such a well-known reputation for telling the truth, that no one at all would ever be asking them to swear oaths in the name of God (Matt 5:33-37). And in the final part of our Second Lesson—Matthew's account of the trial of Jesus before the religious court of his day—we heard that when the High Priest Caiaphas demanded that Jesus first swear an oath and then testify, Jesus instead followed his own earlier teaching, as one would of course expect. I hope you noticed that Jesus testified without ever having sworn the oath that had been demanded of him (Matthew 26:63-64).
Anyway, the Third Commandment does direct us whenever we are asked to take an oath using the name of God to make sure that we really mean what we say and that we speak nothing but the truth, lest we be making wrongful use of the name of the LORD our God.
But that's just the start of the import of this Third Commandment! For our Presbyterian tradition has always interpreted this statute, like all the others in the Decalogue, as having a wider meaning, an application much broader than simply prohibiting false oaths.
For starters, this commandment means that we dare not dishonor, mock, or trivialize God's name—or Jesus's either—by using them as expletives or curse words. You, of course, know all of these expressions, but perhaps if you hear them actually being uttered in church maybe then you'll feel to the core of your being just how profane they really are and be helped to stop using them—you know, expletives like "God damn you!" and "Jesus Christ!" You see, if affection for God is engendered by using God's name reverently in praise and worship—and it is—then contempt for God is engendered by using God's name in such profane ways as these.
And to move on to a still deeper di mension of the Third Commandment, we also dare not dishonor God by in any way linking God's name to deception and lies, by in any way using the power of religion to harm others and support evil purposes. This is, of course, the first Sunday in Black History Month, a time for confronting and confessing the fact that for centuries many white American Christians violated this commandment by invoking the name of God to justify slavery and to support the false doctrine that underlies Jim Crow—that black people are accursed and less than human. Indeed, such speech about God was nothing short of blasphemy, for blasphemy is, by definition, speech that makes God part of our lies.
And at the heart of the history of ongoing sins against black persons lay the blasphemous violation of this Third Commandment by numerous white American preachers who brazenly mounted the pulpit to speak in God's name a false theology. Make no mistake about it, there were many white preachers who regularly fueled the fires and fanned the flames of slavery and segregation by falsely proclaiming God's blessing on the sinful behavior of their own parishioners and of white society at large.
Nor is dishonoring God by linking God's name to lies and deception simply a sin of the past. It is still very much a sin of the present, for people today regularly use the name of God to support such false modern causes as fighting wars of aggression and stopping the stem-cell research that's needed to help cure people of certain diseases.
And if so much as one more politician—Republican or Democrat—ever again utters the words "God bless America" as a political tool for manipulating the public and winning votes rather than as a reverent prayer, I think I'm going to have an apoplectic fit! God's name is to be cherished, not to be wielded and brandished.
In much too much of our civic life people continually violate the Third Commandment by using the name of God without really meaning "God." Or at least that's what the courts have been telling us. Take, for example, our coins, or the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Our courts have instructed us that we are free to use "In God we trust" on our coins and "one nation under God" in our pledge because, although these phrases sound religious, they're really not! They're merely expressions of some kind of national "ceremonial deism"—the courts tell us—not statements of faith. Well, if that actually is the case, then we really are taking the name of the LORD our God in vain, using it emptily. And we must stop these practices. We must! For "ceremonial deism" leads not to people's celebration of God but to people's consignment of God to the ash heap of irrelevance.
But, to turn positive here at the end, Jesus himself has told us in today's Second Lesson that to fulfill this Third Commandment means to embody the love of God by being unconditionally truthful—both as we speak here in God's house, in sermons and in prayers, and as we speak out there in our wider world of home and workplace.
In this broken and fallen world—where misrepresentations and lies seem to be the norm in business, in politics, and in religion—there is something inevitably countercultural about living out this Third Commandment, with its call for unalloyed truthfulness in the name of God. Yet it is to the fulfillment of this commandment that we preachers and parishioners have been called.
One woman, reflecting on the high level of truthfulness she was experiencing both in her pastor's preaching and in her congregation's praying, had this to affirm: "You know," she said, "you can't get this sort of stuff just anywhere around here. You have to get up, get dressed, and go to church for words of truth like these."
It is my fervent hope that, as we strive together to fulfill God's Third Commandment in our own God-talk, in our own speaking to God and about God—it is my fervent hope that you and I will experience right here at Rutgers Church that same high level of truthfulness.
Let us pray:
O God, as we speak to You and about You, may the prayer that is constantly on our lips be the one Jesus has taught us: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name." Amen.