The Seventh Commandment:
Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery
February 7, 2010
The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
My first experience with adultery was in the 7th grade. I had just agreed to “go steady” with Rick Bottle (though I don’t believe we’d even kissed yet!), and he took me as his date to a school dance. I was wearing his St. Christopher medal around my neck.
But somewhere during the evening, he decided he liked a friend of mine better – and ended up leaving the dance with her. I had to call my mother to pick me up – hugely humiliating!
Now, this incident may not be how we generally think of adultery. The guy didn’t take my friend home with him, as far as I know; this was the ‘50s, after all; and as I said, we hadn’t even kissed yet.
No, we were only “going steady” – quite different from being married, or what most of us would consider a “committed relationship.” Still, the implication in those days – especially if a guy had given his St. Christopher medal to someone! – was that a promise existed between the two of them – a promise of faithfulness. And Rick Bottle broke that promise; he left me for someone else – a friend of mine, no less! (Guess she didn’t know about the “girlfriend rule!”)
I want to talk a bit today about the 7th Commandment, “Thou Shall not commit adultery.” I imagine that when God delivered this Commandment to the Israelites – one of ten laws he supposedly handed to Moses on Mt. Sinai – he wasn’t thinking about relationships between a couple of 13-year-olds. Instead, this Commandment addressed a covenantal relationship between two people who had agreed to share their lives in marriage.
In both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures, we find that even if only engaged to be married, a person could be found guilty of adultery if they had had a sexual relationship with someone other than their betrothed. After marriage, the only reason allowed for divorce was adultery; and the penalty for this offense was usually death by stoning – though Jesus thought differently, according to the Gospel of John. In that Gospel is the often-told story of the woman accused of adultery and about to be stoned by a group of men, when Jesus defends her by suggesting to the group that only those who had never sinned should cast the first stone; they all leave without throwing a single one.
Now, I imagine that all ten of the Commandments were a creation of Moses himself – maybe with the help of his sister, Miriam. Perhaps he climbed Mt. Sinai in order to have some quiet time to strategize. What was needed, he might have been asking himself, to help this wandering group of former slaves remain cohesive? How to create, from their fragmented selves, a community with a common vision, a common covenant?
Perhaps he prayed to his God for guidance in this difficult task. And maybe he even heard the voice of God speak to him, outlining these ten laws that would ensure that the Israelites would have a sacred relationship with their God, with themselves, and with one another. All of the Commandments are about some form of relationship.
But perhaps none of them address this as deeply as the one about adultery. Because that’s the one that deals with the most powerful of human conditions: Love and sexuality. And in ancient Israel, the combination of those two aspects of a human being made for a sacred, covenantal relationship; neither was to be taken lightly.
The Hebrew word used in the Bible for sexual intimacy was “yada” – meaning “to know deeply.” We sometimes hear jokes about knowing someone “in the Biblical sense” – and what’s assumed by that joke is having sex with someone. But actually, “yada” is more than merely sexual; it’s about knowing one’s lover as a full human being, in all their complexity – or in the words of Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, “respecting and caring for each other in both the physical and spiritual dimensions….”
That’s what real love is – a deep connection with another human being that’s different from any of our other relationships – that calls us to transcend our own needs at times – taking us out of ourselves, and into something larger. “Love makes us better people,” says author Chris Hedges.
Yet love is also difficult – challenged by the routine and “noise” of a life together, as the poem by Susan Griffin suggests. Most couples in a first marriage have little idea how a relationship changes over time – how very “ordinary” and even boring it can feel – paying bills, schlepping kids to various activities, attending the obligatory family events. If not attended to, it can seem as if love has gone elsewhere.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in her book Gift from the Sea, wisely observes that “When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment….It is even a lie to pretend to…And yet this is exactly what most of us demand.”
“Security in a relationship,” she writes, “lies in living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now….One must accept the security …of the ebb and flow, of intermittency.” But that “ebb and flow” of love can make us feel very insecure.
My second experience of adultery didn’t happen to me, but to my best friend from high school, Patty. She had moved to San Francisco, fallen in love with Robert, married him, and had just given birth to their child. My husband and I, along with our 3-year-old daughter, flew up for a few days to visit with them and celebrate this new life.
On the final day of our visit, my husband left the house early to get a hair cut. A little while later I was awakened by Patty screaming downstairs. I raced down and found her holding a piece of paper. “He’s left me!” she cried hysterically; “he’s left me!”
I read the note, and sure enough…Robert said he couldn’t take being a husband and father any longer, and had left Patty for another woman; Patty was devastated. I stayed a few more days with her, until I could be sure she’d be OK by herself. She eventually moved to Davis to attend medical school, raising her daughter by herself, and today is back in San Francisco with a successful medical practice. But neither she nor her daughter have seen much of Robert over the years. Nor have Patty or Robert ever been able to maintain a long-term relationship with another.
Since then I’ve witnessed adultery numerous times – both in the relationships of family and friends, and in my own. And almost every time, the real tragedy has not been that someone was hurt, or that a relationship ended – though that was all very painful to watch or to experience directly. The real tragedy was that we didn’t know how to accept the “ebb and flow” of the relationships. We didn’t have enough faith in ourselves and in our relationships to open up and talk about what was missing, and trust that the love between us was strong enough to endure such honesty, such vulnerability.
But that’s what love is, and that’s what it calls us to do. To keep faith. When we lie to that person to whom we made a promise of fidelity, we undermine that faith; we undermine love.
Being honest might mean acknowledging that this was never the right relationship for either of us, and ending it with love and respect; not all endings are tragic. It is the deceit that is so destructive.
Hedges writes that, “We live in an adulterous age, when promises and faithfulness, the hard work of fidelity to values, to the moral life, seem secondary to the drive to attain fleeting scraps of pleasure.”
Certainly if we depend on the stories we hear in the news, we’d have to conclude that Hedges is right. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t learn about a Mark Sanders, or a John Edwards, or a Tiger Woods – individuals who went after “fleeting scraps of pleasure” rather than facing “the hard work of fidelity” – though at least Sanders claimed that his lover was his “soul mate” – and perhaps she was. If that was the case, then he needed to treat his wife with the respect she deserved, and let her go.
But Hedges doesn’t say we shirk fidelity only to our relationships; he says “fidelity to our values” and to “the moral life.” Ultimately, the commandment against adultery is a call to remain faithful to our deepest values – beginning with fidelity to the one with whom we have covenanted to share our life – if that applies to us; but moving outward from there to keeping faith with all that we hold dear.
For most of us, that would begin with the people in our lives who we cherish – our family, our dearest friends, the people who look to us for compassion and guidance. To them we must remain faithful; to them, we must act with truthfulness.
But we also are called to remain faithful to our ideals. For Unitarian Universalists, that would mean remembering that every person is born with “worth and dignity” – even those who seem to lose sight of it within themselves later on.
It would mean seeking “justice, equity and compassion” for all people, and working for peace in our world.
Remaining faithful to our ideals as UUs would mean using our minds and our hearts to seek “truth and meaning.” It would mean “accepting (not just tolerating) one another” – even when we disagree politically or theologically. And it would mean listening to all sides of an issue and speaking one’s own truth, as part of the democratic process.
Remaining faithful to our ideals as UUs would mean treating the earth and all her creatures with respect and care – knowing we all share in that great “interdependent web” of God’s creation.
It is not easy living our lives in faithfulness to our deepest values. Nevertheless, the seventh Commandment calls us to try. And it should apply not only to individuals, but to communities of faith such as ours, as well as to nations.
We can support one another in remaining faithful to our ideals. But we can also be the voices that call our beloved nation to faithfulness to its ideals.
This country was founded on the principles of freedom for all people, on the idea that everyone deserves “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and on a vision of wholeness and peace.
But we are a nation of human beings, and therefore we constantly fall short of these ideals that we cherish so; we do not always remain faithful to our visions. Throughout our history, we can point to tragic instances where we have succumbed to practices that benefited the powerful, while hurting those most vulnerable.
Today our nation still struggles to remain faithful to its deepest values. We have allowed our resources to create wars rather than peace, to increase the wealth of a few rather than the wellbeing of many, to desecrate the land to accommodate the comfort of the people. We have sometimes forgotten who we are as a people.
But it is love that can restore our faithfulness. Whether the love between two people, or our love for our deepest values, or the love we have for this nation and what we know it can be…we must call on that love to keep us strong and filled with faith and hope.
With love, we can open our hearts to those with whom we are most intimate – reach out to them in the rocky times, with trust and honesty, and be reminded how deeply we are known by them.
With love, we can call on a power greater than ourselves – by whatever name we call it – to help us live those values we hold most dear.
And with love, we can keep the mirror of this nation’s founding principles in front of those who govern. With love, we can remind our leaders that they are there to ensure that even the poorest among us have a place to live, enough to eat, the promise of health care, and the possibility of a meaningful life. With love, we can insist they create a world of peace and well-being.
All this week, we will be inundated with ads beckoning us to buy their products – their cards, their candy, their flowers, and other tokens that will be the perfect reminders to our loved ones that we still love them. And all that is fine.
But let us also use this upcoming Valentine’s Day to reflect on what it means to be faithful – to keep a covenant with those we love, with ourselves, and to all we hold most dear.
May we know that we are all embraced by a Love that is larger than ourselves, that flows in us and through us, and never dies.
And for this, may we give thanks.
Amen.
© 2010 Rev Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
