Sermon for September 22nd, 2013

Matthew 22:34-40

34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’

Deuteronomy 5:15-18

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. 18 Neither shall you commit adultery.

You Shall Not Commit Adultery

Well, here it is, the sermon everyone's been waiting for since we started our series on the Ten Commandments: You shall not commit adultery. The seventh commandment. Some of you have already told me you were curious to hear what I was going to say about this one. To be honest, I was curious to hear what I was going to say about this one. First Presbyterian Church in Midland, Texas did a sermon series on the Ten Commandments awhile back--they have four pastors who take turns preaching, and I understand they actually drew straws to see who got stuck with this commandment.

Why is this one so hard? Adultery has to do with sex, and in our culture, we're pretty uncomfortable talking about sex--although we certainly have no problem "communicating" sex in our culture, through our movies and TV shows, magazines, fashions, music. But I'm not going to go on a long rant against all those things in our culture. Actually, I hope to make the point that the seventh commandment has far less to do with sex than we tend to assume. But to do that, we are going to talk about sex--what it is and what it was to the people who first received this commandment, how our view of it has evolved through the years, and what that means for us today.

But first...to break the tension in the room: There was an old Roman Catholic Priest, who got so tired in confession of hearing his members confess to adultery, that he said from the pulpit one Sunday: If I hear one more person confess to adultery, I'll quit! Well, his congregation genuinely liked him, and they didn't want to see him go. But they didn't want to give up their adulterous ways, either. So they came up with a code word: Someone who had committed adultery would say in confession that he or she had "fallen." This worked well for many years, until the priest died and a new priest came to town. After the new priest had been there for a month, he came to see the Mayor, and he was very concerned. "Mayor, you have to do something about the sidewalks in this town--people tell me they are falling down everywhere!" The mayor laughed, realizing that no one had told the new priest about the code word. Before he had a chance to explain, the priest interrupted him: "I don't know what you're laughing about; your wife fell three times this morning already!"

The word adultery comes from Latin. It is made up of two stems: ad + alter, or "to another." A common Latin legal phrase was "ad alterum se conferre" which was used in contracts to confer property upon another person. This makes sense, because in the ancient world, both in Roman culture and going even further back in ancient Israelite culture, sex was all about property. Consider the tenth commandment (which we'll look at in more depth in a few weeks). Exodus 20:17 reads, "You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour."

So in that category of "anything taht belongs to your neighbor," i.e. his property, nestled somewhere between the house and the donkey, we find the wife. Now, please understand that I am NOT advocating this view, or saying that it was ever a good idea (especially for the wife!). I said at the beginning of the sermon that our view of sex has evolved through the years, and is continuing to evolve, and I think that's a good thing. But it's an important starting point for us to understand that in ancient culture the wife is the property of the husband, making sex--and therefore adultery--largely a property management issue. Adultery sounds so much less...sexy...when described as a property management issue, doesn't it?

According to the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, the definition of adultery in Roman law is "the offence committed by a man, married or unmarried, having sexual intercourse with another man's wife." Notice how narrow this definition is? It only goes one way. That's not to get women off the hook more easily...it's because women are property. The sin of adultery is the sin of one man taking something that rightfully belongs to another man. Notice also that in ancient understanding, it is NOT adultery for a married man to have sex with an unmarried woman. There's different name for that: it's called taking a concubine. Nor is it adultery for an unmarried man to have sex with an unmarried woman. They had a name for that one too: "impromptu wedding."

But as bleak as this all sounds for women, even here in this ancient understanding there is still some hope, some progress, some measure of the status and importance of women in marriage. I think the placement of the commandment here is important. "You shall not commit adultery" comes before and separate from the commandments "you shall not steal" and "you shall not covet" even though committing adultery IS actually coveting and then stealing your neighbor's wife.