A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her five and six-year-olds. After explaining the commandment to "honour thy father and thy mother," she asked, "Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?" Without missing a beat, one little boy (the eldest child of a family) answered, "Thou shall not kill."
Having grown up the baby of the family, I’m sure that my older sister would have to agree with the little fellow.
This is week six of our A Return to Civility series, and we’ve been looking at the Ten Commandments. This came about after I wondered back in the spring how we, as a society, had lost our civility and public respect. Maybe the civility was fake, it was all an act and a persona that we adopted, but it certainly seemed that there was a time when people could agree to disagree, and public discourse didn’t have to devolve into name-calling and demonizing people we didn’t necessarily agree with.
And I wondered if we had come to this place when we lost our common morality, a shared sense of what is right and what is wrong. And for many that common morality was summed up in the short little moral code called the Ten Commandments.
Now if you’ve been keeping track then you know that this week I should be speaking on the fifth Commandment, which is found in Exodus 20:12 Honour your father and mother. Then you will live a long, full life in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
And next week, I should be speaking on the sixth commandment, which is Exodus 20:13 You must not murder.
And that was the plan until I realized that next week is one of our summer family Sundays, and the kids will be joining us. And realized that talking about murder might not be super kid-friendly, whereas all the parents were asking that their kids be present when I spoke about honouring your parents. So, here we are at commandment number six.
Now just to recap where we’ve been, you may have noticed that the first four commandments dealt with our relationship with God. They were vertical commands, and now they have become horizontal commands in that they deal with our relationships with one another.
You might remember the first commandment was to not replace God, the second command was to not reduce God, the third was to not belittle God, and the fourth was to honour God by celebrating the Sabbath. But then we get to commandment number five, and it takes a different direction. It’s as if God was saying, “now that you’ve got our relationship straight let’s work on your relationship with others”. And so, we went from the vertical to the horizontal. And so, next week we will discuss honouring our parents which is the fifth commandment.
So here we are at number six, a commandment which most of us, I’m sure, figure that we are pretty safe on. It says: Exodus 20:13 You must not murder.
I’m aware that most of us grew up hearing the commandment as “Thou shalt not kill” but it’s a little narrower than that. First, regardless of what the International Vegetarian Union and Peta might say this commandment had nothing to do with animals. It is not talking about us swearing off meat and becoming vegetarians. Did I hear a collective sigh of relief? This commandment deals exclusively with people, with human beings. Nor was it given in relation to war, or to self-defence.
Without trying to get into a deep study of the original language the Hebrew word used here refers to the intentional and conscious act of taking the life of another. It is deliberate and calculated.
And so, the first thing we need to look at this morning is Physical Murder. In its purest sense this commandment relates to:
• Murder, taking the life of another
When we were first married, we lived in Truro and murder was not something you thought about. If you did it was in relation to what had happened in the city. During our five years in Truro, I can’t remember one single pre-meditated murder happening.
Maybe there was but I don’t remember them. And then we moved to Brisbane, a city of 1.7 million people. It seemed that every other day someone was killing somebody else. Two weeks after we arrived a murderer was arrested less than a kilometre from our house, Angela wanted to move home.
And people seemed pretty nonchalant about it. It was about the same time, Marion Barry, the Mayor of Washington, DC said, “Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”
And so, we begin with this prohibition of physical murder. And there wouldn’t be anyone here who would challenge that commandment, but let’s make it a little more difficult, I believe by implication it also deals with
• Abortion, taking the life of the pre-born
• Infanticide, taking the life of the newly born
• Euthanasia, taking the life of the elderly or infirm
• Genocide, taking the life of a group of people
• Suicide, taking your own life
As I said earlier the original meaning of the word did not reflect acts of war or self-defence and so we are not going there this morning.
Those questions about those issues are ageless as are the answers to them. So, that is something that you will have to settle in your own heart, between you and God. No one else can settle it for you and they aren’t easy questions, and they don’t have easy answers.
Some people would even say that this commandment doesn’t apply to capital punishment.
At one time I’d say that I agreed with that statement, and I was a fairly vocal supporter of capital punishment, however over the past number of years I’ve changed my mind. In our country, we don’t have to look further than the case in Saint John in January. If you missed it Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie, had been in prison for more than 40 after being convicted of the murder of George Leeman. Last year the crown went, oops, we might have been wrong, and they were released.
To quote US author Agnes Smedley “There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.”
Even though the Old Testament clearly stands in favour of capital punishment there were several safeguards that were put in place to assure that the wrong person was not executed. The most obvious of course was that a person could not be convicted of a capital crime without the testimony of two eyewitnesses. And if someone was executed, and it was later found out that the witnesses had lied, they received the same punishment.
One of the arguments used in favour of Capital punishment is that the recognized authorities carry it out, and therefore in a democratic society, the government has a mandate from the people, so it is legitimate.
In 1693, Mary Bradbury and Rebecca Eames were convicted of witchcraft in Salem and sentenced to hang. That was done by the recognized authorities of the day. Luckily, they were both able to escape, I’ve mentioned before, that they were two of my 8th Great Grandmothers.
But enough of that. Why is there a prohibition against physical murder in the Ten Commandments? It must go beyond what Oscar Wilde said “Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.”
Two reasons, the first is We Are Taking Authority That Doesn’t Belong to Us.
It is God who is supposed to decree how long a person will live. We read in 1 Samuel 2:6 The Lord gives both death and life; he brings some down to the grave but raises others up.
And time after time, in the Bible we are told that God numbers our days. No one has the right to number a person’s days, including in the very first months of life
And by the way, you don’t have to look very far into pre-natal development to discover for your self that what is growing in a mother’s womb is a lot more than fetal tissue, it is a life. David wrote in Psalm 139:13–16 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.
The story is told of the Rabbi, Priest and Minister who were having a discussion about when life begins. The priest says, “I believe that life begins at conception.” The minister said, “I believe that life begins when the baby’s heart begins to beat.” To which the Rabbi says, “I believe life begins when the kids move out and the dog dies.”
We may not agree on the when but very few people are willing to say that the preborn child doesn’t become a human being until they take their first breath.
I also realize that as time passes there becomes a greater and greater chance that there will be someone sitting in front of me when I make a statement like that about abortion.
And I truly believe that abortion is wrong. I truly believe that it ends an innocent life. But the preborn child isn’t the only victim, often the mother is a victim too.
Let me reiterate that abortion is not the unforgivable sin, but I would be amiss in my duty as a pastor if I didn’t tell you that it is a sin and a sin that you need to ask forgiveness for.
Nor do we have the right to determine at what point the elderly or the infirm should die. That is the providence of God, and God alone.
I realize that this is a touchy subject but active euthanasia, however noble the motive, cannot be condoned. Even if it is intended solely for the purpose of ending the person’s suffering. It is not our right.
The simple fact is that it is not up to us to play God by deciding when somebody’s time is up. Active euthanasia is when steps are taken to end a person’s life. Other terms for it are Physician-assisted suicide, or the new sanitized term, MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying.
Trudo Lemmens, a University of Toronto professor of law and ethics, wrote, “When MAID was legalized, it was framed as a practice that was exceptionally required to ease the dying process or give some control at the end of life, we have veered very far from that and now uncritically accept the most aggressive provision of MAID and see growing attempts to describe this as the most meaningful form of medical practice.”
According to a recent article in the National Post, “In Canada, the law no longer restricts MAID to people whose death is reasonably foreseeable. As of next March, people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness will also be eligible for assisted death.”
I find it interesting that Canada has a national suicide prevention action plan and at the same time has one of the most liberal MAID policies in the world.
Dr. John Maher is an Ontario psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of severe mental illness, and he recently wrote, “Holding a gun to your head, sticking a needle in your arm, or holding a poison pill and a glass of water in my hands for you to take, are all morally equivalent actions. And don't tell me your desire to die changes the moral nature of my complicity. Your desire to die should call forth in me all possible action and means to keep you alive.”
And, you may not know it, but in Nova Scotia, Doctors can’t refuse to refer a patient to a doctor who will provide MAID. If that bothers you, and it should, there are cards like this one on the information booth with more information.
The sixth commandment would consider active euthanasia murder; however, the use of passive euthanasia is less clear.
Again, you will have to decide for yourself on this one, but personally, I consider discontinuing medical procedures that are dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected outcome to be legitimate.
I once was in a hospital room where some of those extraordinary procedures were explained to a family and the Doctor ended by saying, “Or we can let God decide.” The family let God decide, and that wasn’t wrong.
And I have made my views and my wishes known to my family, that at the end of the day, I want God to decide.
In Truro I had a woman from my congregation approach me concerning her mother. The mom was quite elderly, probably in her 50’s just kidding. She was in her late eighties, had several major strokes and could do nothing for herself, she was comatose in a vegetative state.
The doctors approached my friend and her two sisters and told them that at this point the only thing that was keeping her mother alive was science. That she would only survive if a feeding tube was placed down her throat.
It would keep her alive, but she would never recover. The question they asked me is “What should we do?”
Man, I was 26 years old. What did I know? I still hadn’t figured out how to program our VCR.
And so, with all the grace I could muster I responded, “If you are looking for my permission to allow your mother to die, I can’t give it to you, but I hope if I’m ever in that situation that my family won’t keep me alive in those circumstances.”
That night their mother died in her sleep, and they didn’t have to make the decision, but it doesn’t always end that easily. I guess it comes down to whether are you hastening death or accepting death.
When someone ends the life of another or themselves then they are trying to be God, they are assuming an authority that isn’t theirs to assume, and power that’s not theirs to exercise.
And second, We Are Destroying That Which Was Made in The Image Of God.
Genesis 1:27 So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
The thing that makes man different than all the other critters on this earth isn’t that we can verbally communicate with one another, it’s not that we have vertically opposed thumbs, it’s not that we walk upright or any of the other explanations that science tries to give.
What makes us different is that God created all the other animals in the world. Period. But God created man in his own image.
When Capital punishment is first mentioned in the Bible this is what is says Genesis 9:6 If anyone takes a human life, that person’s life will also be taken by human hands. For God made human beings in his own image.
And so, to murder isn’t just to kill a living creature it is destroying something made in the image of God. And again, when people break this commandment, they are trying to put themselves above God, because what they are saying is; “Look at how powerful I am, I can destroy what is made in God’s image.”
Probably most of us here will never struggle with physical murder, you’re thinking, “Hey Denn I’m cool here. No problems.” Unlike our neighbours to the south, you probably don’t have guns in your home and if you do, they are for show or target practice or maybe once a year you take them out to shoot little birdies and bunnies. Oh, that was low, wasn’t it? And intentional.
But I’m sure that if Jesus was here today, he would look out and say, “There are murderers among us.” And you would look nervously around and wonder who they were, and what they looked like. And maybe, as if he could read your mind, he would hand you a mirror. You see not only was Jesus concerned with Physical murder he was also concerned with Verbal Murder.
It was to a crowd on a hill that Jesus spoke, and this is what he said, in Matthew 5:21–22 “You have heard that our ancestors were told, ‘You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment.’ But I say, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell.
I’m sure those people were a little taken back that day. This probably wasn’t a saying that they immediately embraced and talked about. This was a tough one; this is something we all struggle with even today.
It’s not a scripture that people talk about as being their favourites passage in the bible. It’s not one of those scriptures that we memorize to pull out in hard times. It’s a tough one. That’s why Jesus’ brother wrote in the book that bears his name James 3:5–8 In the same way, the tongue is a small thing that makes grand speeches. But a tiny spark can set a great forest on fire. And among all the parts of the body, the tongue is a flame of fire. It is a whole world of wickedness, corrupting your entire body. It can set your whole life on fire, for it is set on fire by hell itself. People can tame all kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, and fish, but no one can tame the tongue. It is restless and evil, full of deadly poison.
Now I know that he wasn’t talking about anyone here, but never underestimate the destructive power of the tongue. Even words said in jest can cut and destroy people. Words can murder a person’s self-image and self-esteem.
Remember what we used to say when we were kids and someone was picking on us verbally, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But that’s a lie, isn’t it? They do hurt. At least broken bones heal; a broken spirit can stay with us forever.
The initial command prohibited only the outward blows, which would kill. Jesus expanded the command to include the inward things such as resentment, bad feelings, anger and insults. Jesus is saying that the only difference between murder and anger is degree.
Resentment, insult, hatred and finally murder. And sometimes we don’t even have to speak a word. Mary Ann Evans said, “There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.”
And while I wouldn’t suppose there are people here today who need to talk to God about physical murder there are probably people here today who need to talk to God about verbal homicide.
