Sunday, March 25, 2007
YHWH
Since it is the season of lent, we said the decalogue during the liturgy this morning. The third commandment is translated like this: "Thou shalt not invoke with malice the name of the Lord thy God." (The answer, of course, is "Amen. Lord have mercy.") Now, my fundigelical upbringing ingrained it into my head that the third commandment (always given as not taking the Lord's name in vain) means essentially "don't curse, don't use profanity" (or, since I was raised in west Texas, "don't cuss" would be more verbatim). Invoking God's name with malice sounds like something quite different. It sounds more like, "We need to make sure that homosexuals can't get married in this country because God said marriage is a man and a woman." It sounds, in short, like using God's name as an excuse to follow your malicious heart and not welcome your neighbor. Less an arbitrary restriction of personal piety and more the royal law of love that commands love your enemy, welcome the alien, I have washed your feet (next Thursday) go and do likewise. Just a thought, but a hospitable thought.
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The response is, of course, "Amen. Lord have mercy." The response is of course-- that is, a necessary answer in the course of events-- because we fail, because we always fail to keep this commandment. Even by trying to read this injunction through an absolute welcoming, through a hospitality held open to the other, a gesture that simultaneously stands in awed silence before the name G-d and welcomes the alien because of that name-- even, and even especially, then we invoke with malice the name of God (or, precisely because we do not speak it, the name G-d). Demanding that God's name not be invoked maliciously against any stranger, alien or guest (and pointing to a particular site of this invocation) risks taking a position of arrogance or purity or enlightenment that condemns another as arrogant, corrupted, in the dark-- and it does it silently in the name G-d, demanding that no malice pass our lips under the name of God. But we must speak. We have been commanded to speak, to keep these commandments always on our lips, to write them on the doorposts of our homes and teach them to our children. So we ask for forgiveness. We say Amen. Lord have mercy.
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