KILLER LANGUAGE

 

 

          Today we come to commandment number six in our study of the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments.  It’s a commandment that literally brings us up short.  All the other commandments have had some explanatory material to help us along in their application to our lives:  you shall have no other gods because God wants a special relationship with you and is prone to jealousy; observe the Sabbath because God worked for six days and on the seventh rested; honor your parents so that it may go well with you.

          You shall not murder. It’s the briefest commandment of them all, and the most difficult to apply.  We are used to hearing this commandment translated, “you shall not kill.”  Several modern translations of the Bible choose the word ‘murder’ over the word ‘kill’ because that is closer to the intent of the Hebrew.  The word used in this commandment is not a simple expression for any sort of killing.  It is a word that deals with violent acts of slaughter—specifically vengeance killing done without any kind of trial. 

          Have you ever thought about the words we use for killing?  We hear a lot of them these days:  pre-emptive strike, collateral damage, proportional response, smart bomb.  A Dallas Morning News article stated that we are ‘remarkably creative in sanitizing descriptions of the ways we kill each other.’  Even before September 11, 2000, we had been engaged in a verbal arms race that has escalated in the last 12 months.  A member of an Israeli human rights group claims, “these terms catch on very quickly with the public.  It’s important that we don’t allow this language to hide what is really happening.”

          Our world is in denial, or at the very least numb, to the ways we perpetuate violence toward each other:

·       Most children will witness two thousand violent acts on television by the time they are 18 years old.

·       Violent video games, movies, and television, including the evening news, desensitize us to murder.

·       Colonel David Grossman, a West Point instructor who for 25 years trained people to kill, says that killing is naturally repulsive.  Because we humans possess an innate resistance to killing, soldiers must be trained to kill.  In WW II only 15% of all combat soldiers were able to shoot to kill.  In the wars that have followed we have become more adept at killing people:  in the Korean War the figure was 55% and by the time of the Vietnam it was 90%.

·       Today, an estimated 300,000 children under the age of 18 are fighting in military conflict in some forty nations around the world.

 

The brevity of the sixth commandment SNAPS us out of our denial.  “You shall not murder” jolts us awake.  It says pay attention.  It’s like a flashing yellow light cautioning us to take notice of the ways we kill each other and participate in violence against our neighbor.

 

I think we need to keep in mind the context in which God gave these commandments.  It was a context of liberation and freedom.  God had just delivered the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt.  When they crossed the Red Sea not only did they leave their slavery behind, but they crossed over into a new identity as people in covenant with this liberator God.  So God gives them these commandments not to threaten them, or weigh them down with a list of do’s and don’ts.  God commands as the one who heard their cries of hardship and oppression.  The commandments are designed for the good of these freed slaves.  They are for life, joy and peace—not confusion and drudgery.

          Taken together they are a snapshot about the character of life to be lived in this new liberated community.  They provide statements that can quickly help a new member of the community be clear regarding the shape of life within the community.  In some older Christian liturgies the commandments were recited by those about to be baptized.  In doing so, the new believer entered into the vision of a social reality rooted in God.

          The Ten Commandments are like policy statements—not details for specific actions, but a framework from which specifics may be drawn.   

          At the root of the sixth commandment is the conviction that human life is sacred.  It is sacred because humans are created in God’s image.  Just as the first four commandments are about reverence for the sacredness of God, these commandments--do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal—are about reverence for the sacredness of the neighbor.  Where there is no reverence, no sense of the sacredness of life, violence becomes commonplace—and that is the principle of the sixth commandment.  It is the principle we cling to when we navigate complex issues like capital punishment, war, abortion, euthanasia.  Reverence has to do with taking the time to ponder and anticipate the consequences of our actions in each of these situations.  Reverence is the blinking yellow light of this commandment that snaps us out of our denial and numbness and says, ‘proceed with caution.’ 

          Jesus preached on this commandment (and several others) in his Sermon on the Mount. He said there were other ways we kill each other: with our anger and with our language.  By making these statements he did not do away with the hard issues of physical murder, but he called his disciples--and he calls us--into a deeper relationship with this commandment.  Jesus is not saying ‘stop calling each other names’ but he is stating that we should submit our words and thoughts about other people to God’s judgment.  God wills that people not only cease from killing each other, but also that there be no hostility between people.

In some ways we can miss the power of this commandment by getting caught up in the difficult issues of life and death it addresses.  In arguing about capital punishment, we can fail to recognize the slow murder that happens a little at a time in our abuse and neglect of one another.  Reverence for human life created in God’s image includes paying attention to the ways we treat one another, the ways to talk to each other and about each other, and the attitudes we have toward one another—attitudes and language that can lead to life or death.

          Ultimately, the language we need to cultivate around this commandment is the language of prayer.  We cannot keep this commandment on our own.  We need God’s help to discern the path of life in the midst of a violent, vengeful world.  We also need God’s help to discern the path to death.

          A few weeks ago an article in the magazine, The Christian Century, caught my eye.  It caught my eye for two reasons:  it was written by someone I knew—a seminary colleague of mine; and it had to do with the application of the sixth commandment.  My friend wrote:

Recently, I prayed for someone to die.  She wasn’t an enemy.  She was the beloved teenage daughter of two exceptionally fine church friends.  Sarah’s frail body, once so vivacious and spry, was failing, fading away—sucked of its verve and substance by a fierce internal rapacious monster:  bone cancer.

Sarah was smart, generous, friendly, and athletic—a daughter about whom a parent beams.  She was driven.  While receiving chemotherapy and radiation last fall, she took a full load at school and made A’s.  But when she finally wished to die rather than live in pain or a semiconscious state from heavy pain-killing drugs, I prayed that she would.  How does one ask God to end a life?  It felt incongruous.

So often religious people thank God for giving life; is it a failure to pray for God to end life?  If so, whose failure is it?  It is no wonder that theologians and ministers forever wrestle with these issues.  I studied Christian ethics on the doctoral level; I learned bioethics from an excellent teacher.  But while Sarah’s drama played out, I thought little about the issues I had grappled with in seminary, such as quality of life and euthanasia.

At a prayer service for Sarah, a range of emotions was directed toward God.  By the time I prayed for Sarah’s wish for painlessness to come true, choosing specific words to speak to God felt awkward, like speaking a foreign language I had not mastered.  The biblical phrase “sighs too deep for words” matched my thoughts for the first time in my life.  My sighs were my prayers.

 

What a difference the language of the sixth commandment would make if at every turn in its application we prayed.  Prayers not only for the sacredness of human life, but prayers that turn our struggles with violence and death over to God, who breathes with us in our sighing.