Sermon for September 15th, 2013

Luke 10:25-28

25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ 26He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ 27He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ 28And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

Deuteronomy 5:15-17

15Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. 16 Honour your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. 17 You shall not murder.

Ten Laws, One Love: You Shall Not Kill

-There's a slang expression I've started to hear a lot lately: "You killed it!" It means you did something really well, you "nailed it" or you did it so well there's a finality to the act--you killed it. It's an interesting expression, because I think it shows our fascination with and our casual usage of a very violent concept, to kill someone or something.

We've been talking about how the ten commandments are not about rules, they're about relationships (3+7).

If you kill someone, it makes it a little bit difficult to have a relationship with that person. So the sixth commandment is a show stopper, a deal breaker. A covenant killer.

Because it's so huge, we tend to think it's easy to keep (and for those who break it, it's all the more devastating)

I'd like to argue this morning that this one isn't as easy as it may seem. On some level, we're all killers.

I've been using the word "kill" but you might have noticed that our scripture passage says "you shall not murder." About half of the English translations of the Bible use "murder" and the other half use "kill." The NRSV, which is what we use, says "murder" but then it has a footnote that says "or kill." So which is it? In our language, there's a pretty important difference between the two.

Kill vs. Murder. רְצָֽח (ratzach) It means both. Deuteronomy 4:41-42, accidental killing. Numbers 35:30 state execution. Nuance between "murder" and "killing" is a modern distinction not present in ancient Hebrew. Anyone who kills another person breaks the 6th commandment, even those who do so in self-defense, or in the line of duty to their government.

That's hard. But it's about to get harder.

You shall not Kill. Notice there are no qualifications or explanations attached to this commandment. It doesn't say, "you shall not kill unless..." or "you shall not kill anyone except..." In fact, it doesn't even say "you shall not kill any...one. This commandment is not necessarily limited to human beings. In the broadest, most simple sense, I believe the sixth commandment expresses God's desire that his people not kill any living creature. That would include animals and insects, too.

Now wait a minute, you might be saying...that's ridiculous. And maybe even impossible. And you might be right--but I wouldn't throw a radical statement like that out there without backing it up, so let's go back to the very beginning of the Bible, in the garden of Eden, at the dawn of creation.

Genesis 1:28-31. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

Now notice that at this point, man is given "dominion." That's not necessarily a license to kill...and eat. Because listen to what comes next:

God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, on the sixth day.

Once again...God's original plan for his creation--mankind, animals, everything that "has the breath of life"--was to get along, and live in harmony together, not eating each other, not killing each other.

So what happened? Sin entered the world, and Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden. I would probably add to that a healthy dose of evolution, Darwinism, and survival of the fittest.

It is only later in Genesis, after the flood, that God tells Noah and his family that "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. This is a concession to what God has already acknowledged by destroying most of the world in a flood: Humanity has not lived up to God's ideal, and God allows for our weakness, even if it wasn't the original, or the ultimate plan.

In fact, there's a very familiar passage from Isaiah 11:6-9 that describes the future, "peaceable Kingdom of God" in these words: "The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox....They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea."

By the way--in the interest of full self-disclosure, there are two things you should probably know about me. One, I'm a hunter. I hunt white-tailed dear with my father-in-law and brother-in-law about every year, and have a great time doing it. The second thing you should know about me is this: I love bacon. A lot. And while I'm not anywhere close to letting go of my 30-06 Winchester rifle OR Keith Wilden's Double-bacon-wrapped Jalapeno poppers, I think somehow, deep down, we instinctively know that it's wrong to kill animals. We rarely raise an eyebrow when a cow is slaughtered at some distant ranch in order to provide us with cheeseburgers. But if someone were to violently take the life of the family dog, or the family cat, we would see that as inherently wrong. Incidentally, what's the difference between the two? A relationship.

Alright, if you've never killed anyone AND you're a vegetarian, you're probably feeling pretty good about yourself right now. Hopefully that won't last too much longer. But before we turn our vegetarians into killers, I'd like to turn briefly to the question of WHY God asks us not to kill in the sixth commandment, even in circumstances where it seems like a good and necessary idea.

Do you remember a few weeks ago that I said the Ten Commandments were intended to be a treaty, a covenant between a King and his people? In an ancient middle-Eastern Kingdom, the power to grant life and death belonged solely to the King, and his word was the final appeal in any life or death case. But even an earthly king would never have had the ability to truly "grant" life...only mercy or an extension of life to someone who was already living. God on the other hand, the King of Kings, breathed life into every living thing, and is the only one with the power to do so.

Following the sixth commandment is really following the first commandment, "I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me." Any person or entity that takes another person's life puts himself in the place of God, taking away what he cannot give. Not only is this idolatry, but since we are made in the image of God, to kill someone is to kill God's image, a direct attack on God.

About Relationships, Not Rules: 1.The ten commandments are a gift; a representation of who God is, to help us discover who we are...and who we can become. 2.The ten commandments are a treaty, a covenant between a King (Yahweh) and his people (Israel). 3.The ten commandments call us to turn away from the powers and Empires of the World and follow God into a new kingdom.