Sermon, "Back to (Bible) School: Prophecy," Ezekiel 37:1-14

Sermon 10/1/17

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Back to (Bible) School: Prophecy

            This week is the last week in our series studying the kinds of literature we find in the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. We’ve looked at the Law, the history books of the Bible, and poetry or wisdom literature in the Bible. And today, we turn our attention to large chunk of the Hebrew Scriptures that make up the writings of the prophets. I think prophecy as a biblical genre is probably the most misunderstood, because we use the word prophecy to mean many different things.

            What first comes to mind when you hear the word “prophecy”? Often, people think immediately of predicting the future, a kind of fortune-telling. We seem to have a fascination with anything that suggests we could accurately predict the future. I saw some posts going around on facebook in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, I think, linking the dates of the storm and certain verses from the gospel of Luke. Some folks might be avid readers of their daily horoscope, astrology, the thought that the position of the planets and the time of our birth shapes the events of our daily lives. I used to read mine pretty regularly when I was a teenager, waiting for predictions of true love to come my way! Taurus is my astrological sign, and here’s my horoscope from yesterday (from one website at least!): “A couple, perhaps friends, could visit today. Perhaps you've moved into a new home or redecorated and want to show them around. They'll be impressed and you'll enjoy the company.”[1] I’m sorry to report I had no visitors yesterday, and I haven’t moved or redecorated, unless you think of cleaning diligently before the Trustees walk-though of the parsonage as redecorating!

            What’s the appeal of trying to predict the future? Why are we fascinated by anything that appears to be a prediction of future events? I can only imagine that it is our general anxiety over things unknown, and our general dislike of things that we can’t control that makes us want to believe that something, someone, somewhere can predict the future with accuracy. Otherwise, we have to live with the unsettling reality that things outside of our control, like disaster and illness, can just come on by and bring upheaval to our lives with there being nothing we can do to stop it. The idea of predicting the future, I think, is about control and security.

            That’s not, however, what the prophets in the Bible were all about. Prophets are truth-tellers. Prophets are truth-tellers, particularly when no one else wants to say how things really are. You know what I mean: Everyone knows what’s really going on, but no one wants to speak unwelcome truths out loud. A prophet is the child who tells the emperor he has no clothes, when no one else is brave enough to say so. A prophet tells it like it is, says how bad things really are, talks about where the path we are on will lead if things don’t change. But a prophet doesn’t necessarily want what he or she speculates about to come true. Instead, a prophet wants people to stop and repent, wants them to get back on God’s path before things go too far the wrong way. In its simplest version, you might think of prophecy like this: a parent tells a child that if they don’t get their grades up, they will flunk out of college, live at home for all of their days, and never get a real job. The parent isn’t predicting the future, even though this might be exactly what happens. Instead, they’re truth-telling. If you don’t change, this is the probable future consequences of your current actions. Prophets are visionaries too – they don’t only tell the bad things that might happen if we don’t get our acts together, they also try to hold before us the truth of the potential good that might come if we do change our ways. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”[2] King was a prophet: a truth-teller, calling us to account for our racism, and holding before us a vision of what could be, a world where his children no longer faced discrimination and prejudice. He certainly was not predicting the future. He was offering up a vision of the possible paths we might take as a nation. A prophet.

            In the Bible, there are what we call “major” prophets and “minor” prophets. These aren’t more or less important prophets. Rather, the designation refers to the length of the book in the Bible. We have long writings from prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, and just tiny entries from those like Obadiah and Nahum, books you might not even have heard of! The books of prophecy in our Bibles are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

Today we’re looking at a passage from the prophet Ezekiel, a passage known as The Valley of Dry bones. Ezekiel was a priest living in exile in Babylon, with other Israelites. I think it is hard for most of us to imagine our whole community being conquered and living in exile in a foreign land, but the time of exile, in the sixth century BC, was Israel’s most devastating experience since their slavery under Egyptian rule. They were a people whose religious roots were deeply tied to their land – the Promised Land – and living in exile represented a great turning away from faithfulness to God.

Ezekiel describes in this passage an image God brings to him that represents what the exiled people of Israel look like emotionally – like a valley dry bones – skeletons. “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. [The Lord] led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry,” we read. Then God asks Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel is smart, and says, “You know, God.” God tells Ezekiel to prophesy that God will breathe into the bones and cause them to be covered with flesh and come to life again. Ezekiel does as he’s told, and it happens just as God describes, and the bones live again, given flesh and breath. These newly living beings say that their bones are dried up and their hope is lost. But God responds to them: “I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord … I will put my spirit within you and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil.” Ezekiel knows that God is faithful, even when we are not, and so Ezekiel knows that Israelites are not abandoned. Eventually, Israel does come home from exile, and slowly, they come back to life, and reclaim their identity. 

Some of you may have seen that I asked some questions on facebook in a couple places; I asked three questions about this text. First, I asked 1) When have you felt like "dry bones?" 2) When/how/did you experience some way of God breathing new life into you? And 3) What does that phrase “in your own soil” bring to mind - what's your soil? People seemed to know exactly what it means to feel like dry bones – not in body, but in spirit. Folks shared that there were “too many” dry bones times in life “to count,” or talked about years of struggle trying to have a baby, or how it felt like dry bones to be inundated with hateful words and messages online. One pastor, retired in the last few years, said trying to find a new identity after years of ministry sometimes felt like dry bones. Some felt like they were “dry bones” right now, and it was hard to imagine an end to it. What about you? When have you felt like you could fit right in to that Valley of the Dry Bones? Have we ever been “dry bones” as a congregation? Community? Nation? World?

            Many folks have experienced new life, finding direction, finding a calling, a purpose. I asked Dede Scozzafava if I could share her response in particular. She wrote, “Sometimes I feel like "dry bones" when I am just going through the daily motions of living. Almost like functioning on auto pilot...going from point A to point B and not really taking the time to think about the what and the why of the action. But sometimes God reminds me that I need to take a deeper dive than wading through the superficial surface waters. God directs me to see through different eyes and listen through different ears ... sometimes that interface changes my course and makes me evaluate the purpose of my actions. My soil is my faith ... sometimes growing...sometimes thirsting...sometimes looking to be nourished...sometimes nourishing others...sometimes balanced...other times unsteady...” We know what it is like to be dry bones, don’t we? I hope, too, that we also know what it is like to have God put flesh on our dry bones and breath into us God’s Holy Breath, Holy Spirit, Holy Wind. But I hope for us it is more than just a passive thing. I hope we aren’t just dry bones laying around, waiting for a breath from God, a word of hope from a prophet, when we already know that we serve the God of Resurrection and Life.              

            What do we do when we’re feeling like dry bones – as an individual, a community, a people? This is a question we can we can work on answering together. But here’s what struck me. Ezekiel kept his trust in God, listened for God’s voice, and did whatever God asked, even though he, too, was in exile, just like all those souls in the valley. Ezekiel seemed to have no doubt in the power of God to make dry bones live again. In The United Methodist Church, we still have in our Book of Discipline something called “The General Rules.” They were the rules that guided the early Methodists, when they met together with John Wesley, founder of the movement. Look them up this week, and read them in full. But here’s the gist: First, do no harm. Second, do good. And third, “attend upon the ordinances of God.”[3] These ordinances are practices or disciplines that help us stay connected to God. Wesley lists being part of the worshiping community, sharing in communion, praying alone and together, studying the Bible, and fasting as ordinance we ought to practice to ground ourselves in life with God. Even when we feel like dry bones, these practices help us stay ready, stay faithful, stay listening for God’s voice, ready to let new life and God’s breath fill our hearts again. It’s watering and tending the soil in which God seeks to plant us, digging deep. And eventually, in God’s right time, they’re the practices that make us ready for new life. Can these bones live? God knows. And with God, the answer to the question of new life is always yes. Amen.  

           

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[1] https://www.horoscope.com/us/horoscopes/general/horoscope-general-daily-today.aspx?sign=2

[2] King Jr., Martin Luther.

[3] http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/the-general-rules-of-the-methodist-church

Sermon, "Back to (Bible) School: Poetry," Psalm 136

Sermon 9/24/17

Psalm 136

Back to (Bible) School: Poetry

            Do you like poetry? Have you ever read or written poetry? I think we can feel both daunted and bored by poetry. Daunted if we have to try to figure out what it means. One of my favorite movies is In Her Shoes, based on the book by the same name from Jennifer Weiner. In the movie, one of the characters, Maggie, is dyslexic. She ends up working at a nursing home, where one of the residents is a retired English professor. He encourages her to read to him, and not just read, but he helps her understand what she is reading. The first time she reads to him, she reads a poem. When she’s done, having struggled through word by word, he asks what she thinks. She says, “Good.” He says, “Unacceptable,” and then proceeds to ask her question after question until she realizes that she can figure out what the poem might mean to her, how it applies to her life right now. It’s a beautiful scene that captures how disinterested we can be in poetry, how much it overwhelms us, how afraid we are of getting the meaning “wrong,” and yet, how beautiful is can be when these artful words of others can speak deeply to our spirits.

            Do you like poetry?

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.[1]

You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.[2]

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.[3]

The Lord is My Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still water.” (Psalm 23)

            Have you ever written any poetry? I went through a phase of writing poetry when I was in late elementary school and junior high. I was inspired, believe it or not, by an episode of Roseanne, the soon-to-return sitcom from the 80s. The character Darlene, who I loved, wrote a poem on the show, a poem that revealed her deep, unspoken emotions, and I was enthralled and inspired. I thought Darlene was very cool, and I set about to write my own deep, insightful poetry. It was not the greatest stuff. I’ve had pity on all of you by not digging some out of my old journals to share with you today. But truthfully, writing poetry, even bad poetry, helped me process all the myriad and overpowering feelings one has in the tumultuous tween and teen years. Writing poetry gave me a place to creatively process all the stuff that was in my heart at a time in my life when I felt pretty misunderstood.          

            Do you like poetry? Do you like music? Consider all the lyrics to songs that you have stored away in your brain. Consider the songs that shaped you as a child, as a young person, as an adult. Sometimes hearing a particular song can transport us back to a time, a place, an experience, help us recall things so vividly. The lyrics to all our favorite songs are poetry set to music, a kind of poetry that most of us are more familiar with today.

            The Bible is full of poetry. We find it in both the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, though less frequently. In the Hebrew Bible, the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs are considered books of poetry. These books are sometimes also referred to as books of wisdom. As I said a couple of weeks ago, the books of poetry in the Bible are not primarily about communicating facts, even though many of the passages of poetry refer to and respond to historical events. Instead, in the poetry of the Bible, we see the authors pouring out their hearts, sharing their deepest feelings in words they’ve written. To me, that makes the words of poetry in the Bible very meaningful and contemporary, because although our world has changed, I don’t think the range of emotions that we experience has changed. The authors of biblical poetry bring to us the feelings, the spirits, the souls of people of faith who lived thousands of years ago, and we discover that we experience the same intense emotions, and struggle with the same searching questions of faith.

            Today we’re looking together at Psalm 136. There are 150 psalms, songs, in our Bible, and they fall into several categories. Some are called “royal psalms” – they have to do with the business of the kings of Israel and Judah – psalms about a royal coronation, a blessing on a new rule, a royal marriage, or accounts of a king’s military leadership. Some psalms are laments – individual laments and communal laments – mournful psalms written in times of despair. Others are psalms of thanksgiving. They’re meant to praise God, give thanks for God’s actions. More than a third of the psalms are addressed to the Director of Music. They were meant to be sung as a part of worship. Our psalm for today is like that, meant to be shared musically in the call and response way we read it together today. A key feature of Hebrew poetry is a style called parallelism. Parallelism is a repeated pattern where we find one verse stating an idea, and the very next verse restating the same or a very similar idea in a slightly different way.[4] For example, our Psalm today starts with lines about giving thanks first to “the God of gods” and then to the “Lord of lords” in the very next verse.

            In Psalm 136, the focus is on praising God, particularly because of God’s steadfast love. The psalmist praises God’s faithfulness, driving the point home by repeating these words as every other stanza of the poem. God’s love is forever, God’s love is forever, God’s love is forever. The psalmist writes in a way that will have the congregation repeating these words again and again, etching them into their memory, helping the congregation feel the truth of them. “God’s love is forever” is like the refrain, the chorus of the song, sung over and over.

            Psalm 136 also shows us an example of Israel telling its story. Over and over in the scriptures, we hear reference to the Exodus, God leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land. It’s their defining story. Remember, when we talked about the law, the commandments, the Exodus, God’s saving the people is the reason given behind many of the laws for the new nation. So too, in the poetry of Israel, the story of the Exodus is told again and again. It is the story that shapes Israel, that provides the example of God’s faithfulness, that provides their sense of future and purpose, and binds them together as a nation. This psalm, like many others, reminds the people of their core identity. As Christians, we do this with Holy Communion. We tell ourselves the story of Jesus sharing a meal with his disciples, and sharing his life with us again and again, until we know it deep in our bones.

            I wonder, what’s our defining story as a congregation? What’s the story we tell ourselves again and again about our relationship with God? As a church, what story do we need to remind ourselves of again and again? What’s your defining story with God? What’s the message of your life, the way that God is showing up all through your days, again and again? How are you reminding yourself of God’s faithful presence in your life? And I wonder, what’s our refrain? What’s our chorus? What are the words that we need to etch onto our hearts about who God is? God is forgiving. God’s love is unconditional. God’s grace is for you. With God, everything is possible. What refrain do you need to hear over and over again? 

            I want to challenge you, as I challenged the children this week, to try to write your own poetry, your own praise song, your own words that help you share your heart, your feelings, your emotions with God. You don’t have to share your words unless you want to – they can be just for you. And if writing really isn’t your thing, I want you to think about how you might best express your praise for God, your love for God. Is it through art? Painting or drawing? Through music? Dance? How can you open your heart to praise God in a creative way this week? Try something.

“O give thanks to the Lord, for God is good, for God’s steadfast love endures forever.” Amen.

           

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[1] Frost, Robert, “The Road Note Taken,” http://classicalpoets.org/10-greatest-poems-ever-written/

[2] Angelou, Maya, “Still I Rise,” http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/world-poetry-day-28-of-poetrys-most-powerful-lines-ever-written-a6944301.html

[3] Shakespeare, William, “Sonnet 18,” http://classicalpoets.org/10-greatest-poems-ever-written/

[4] “Psalms,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalms

Sermon, "Back to (Bible) School: History," 2 Samuel 7:1-12

Sermon 9/17/17

2 Samuel 7:1-12

Back to (Bible) School: History

           

            Today we’re looking at the books of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, that we consider History books. These include the books immediately following the Law books, the first five books in the Bible, up to the section of Bible that we call Poetry, which starts with the book of Job. So the history books of the Bible are Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings, 1&2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. Are you “good” at history? Was it a subject you enjoyed in school? I’ve always enjoyed history, but I often struggle with dates, chronology. I can tell you what happened, just don’t ask me when it happened. When it comes to the books of the Bible, I often have to remind myself of what is happening when. If you read our summer newsletter, you’ll know that I have been reading some of our biblical history books as part of my personal devotional time, particularly trying to get a clearer sense of chronology as I read. Chronologically, the biblical books of history take us from the time that Joshua, successor to Moses, leads the Israelites into the Promised Land, all the way to the time described in Ezra and Nehemiah, when the Jewish people are allowed to return to their homeland after a long time of exile in foreign lands. This covers a span of about 1000 years. We have 1000 years of history in these 12 books of the Bible.

The word “history” comes from a root word that means literally someone who is wise and learned. From there, the word came to mean “finding out,” figuring out the narrative.[1] To know your history, to know the story of where you came from, what has happened, to find that out is to be a wise, learned person. Sometimes we like to think of history as unbiased, as simply a statement of facts. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. Not open for dispute, just how it is, right? Of course, that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny, which we know from personal experience. History isn’t just facts – it is a narrative, a story, and a story always has a point of view. Think of biographies that you might read. Depending on who is writing the biography, they might tell very different stories, different histories, of the person’s life. Two biographies from different authors of any of our US Presidents might read very differently.

Many of you know that I’m my family’s genealogist. I’m the one who does the bulk of family research, and I try to keep good records, and figure out family puzzles. Sometimes, I make discoveries that surprise everyone in our family. Not long ago, while researching my great-great grandfather Julius Motsch, who became Julius Mudge when he came to the US from Germany, I discovered several things that no one in my family seemed to know. First, although we all knew that Julius changed his named from Motsch to Mudge, I found the passenger manifests from the ship he traveled on from Germany, and discovered that when he left Germany, he was listed as Gustav, not Julius! No one in my family remembers ever hearing such a thing. Knowing I should be searching German records for Gustav, not Julius, made my genealogical inquiries much more fruitful. I also discovered that Julius and my great-great grandmother, Mary Margaret Starr, actually divorced and remarried a few years later. I was shocked when I read about their divorce in a newspaper article from the early 1900s. Apparently, my great-great grandmother was accused of running around with other men, but apparently she and Julius reconciled. Surely, this was something that at least my great-grandfather must have known about, but I know that my grandfather had no idea that this had ever happened. It wasn’t a part of the history that anyone shared over the years, just like Julius never shared that he’d once been called Gustav. These things might be facts, but they were not a part of the history that we’ve told ourselves as a family.

We’ve also had a lot of conversation recently in our national dialogue about our history and how we tell our stories as a nation. In Charlottesville, Virginia, a white supremacist rally followed shortly after the renaming of a town park from Lee Park, named for Confederate soldier Robert E. Lee, to Emancipation Park, honoring the end of slavery in the United States. These events have opened a national dialogue about racism and history and how we tell our history. What does it mean to make a monument or name places in honor of people whose beliefs and views don’t align with the values we uphold, or at least try to uphold? Is it “erasing history” to rename a park? Or is it trying to tell a more truthful version of our history? Whose story are we telling in history? 

Think about how many of us learned about Christopher Columbus as a child. In elementary school, we learned about Columbus “discovering” America. We also learned that he was brave and thought the world was round, while others thought it was flat. It wasn’t until we were older, for me at least, that we learned about Columbus not really knowing where he was, ending up in the Americas by mistake, and that basically everyone already knew the earth was round. And later still, we learned that maybe Columbus wasn’t actually a very nice person, and maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense that we have a holiday named after him. Many communities and groups, including our Annual Conference, are now choosing to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, instead of Columbus Day, a way to honor all the people who were living in these lands long before any Europeans arrived here. 

             These contemporary questions are the same questions we can bring to the biblical text of history. Whose story are we reading? What’s the point of view that we read in the Bible? What are the themes that are emphasized for us in this particular way of telling the history of Israel? In the scheme of things, on the world stage, Israel is a little nobody people. They’re a tiny nation. It’s hard to find much about Israel outside of the Bible from this time period. There are little snippets, written from the point of view of people who don’t really care about this little nobody people. But in the Bible, of course, they’re everything. Today, we turn to a text that’s key in Israel’s sense of history, identity, and future.

            In our text for today, we find ourselves in 2 Samuel. Samuel was the last in the line of Judges of Israel, the leaders of Israel in the time between their formation as a nation and their first King, Saul. Samuel was a judge and a prophet, a spiritual advisor for the people. Samuel, acting on God’s commands, anoints first Saul, and then, when Saul fails to follow God, David as king over Israel. But it takes a long time between Samuel anointing David and David actually coming into power as king. In fact, by the time David becomes king, Samuel has died, and a new prophet, Nathan, acts as spiritual advisor to David. Here in chapter 7, David has finally been named king over all Israel, and he tells Nathan that he wants to build a temple for God. After all, David is now living in a palace, a house of cedar, but God, represented for the people in the ark of the covenant, a container that holds the Torah, the law, the book that represents God’s relationship with Israel, God in the form of the ark of the covenant gets carried around and housed in a tent. David feels like this isn’t right. If David has a house, a palace, then God should have a house, a temple.

            At first, Nathan tells him, “Yes, build this. God is with you.” But shortly after, Nathan returns to David, after receiving a vision from God. God says, “Are you the one, [David], to build me a house to live in?” I’ve never lived in a house, but have been moving about, God says. And in all the time I was moving among the Israelites, have I ever said, “Why haven’t you built me a house?”

            God continues, “I took you out of the pasture where you worked as a shepherd boy and made you the leader of Israel. I’ve been with you wherever you went. Through me, you’ve been able to defeat your enemies. And I will make you a great name. I will make a place for my people Israel, and plant them there, and give them a time of peace from their enemies. And I, says God, I will make you a house David. God continues, just after our text closes, to say that God will make David and his house, his descendants “sure forever,” David’s kingship, his line, “established forever.”

            The message that Nathan delivers to David from God might seem simple, but it is a very important statement for Israel’s sense of identity and their hope for the future. Nathan’s words are sometimes known as the Dynastic Oracle.[2] A dynasty is when one family stays in power over a long length of time. And what God says through Nathan here in this passage is that David and his descendants will be established as the family who rules Israel forever. That’s a significant promise! And so during later times in Israel’s history, when there was a disruption in power in the line of David, when the people were conquered by foreign rulers, when someone in the line of David wasn’t ruling Israel, the people looked for, longed for a time when a descendant of David was king again. When people were imagining a messiah, that as an anointed one, a king, they would imagine someone who would restore the throne of David, restore someone from the House of David to the role of king. You can imagine, then, why some of the gospels writers take great pains to show us that Jesus is a descendant of David. The gospel writers wanted to demonstrate that in Jesus, a descendant of David, these words of promise made way back in 2 Samuel are fulfilled forever. Whoever else might rule on earth, Jesus is the ruler, the ruler from the house of David, and yet the highest of all, a ruler beyond even beloved David himself. This passage, this bit of history has a big meaning, big significance in the story of Israel, in the story of the church, and how the early church tied itself to the promises of God’s covenant, how we tie ourselves to that covenant.   

            The other part of this text that I find compelling is God’s insistence: I’ve never asked you to put me inside a building! I’ve been just fine where I’ve been, moving among you all this time. Now, God eventually does allow David’s son Solomon to build a temple, and it serves some important purposes for the people of Israel, drawing them together as a worshiping community. But the point remains: God wants us to remember that God has always and will always be with us, and maybe trying to box God in, limit God to dwelling in a stationary place isn’t the best idea we’ve ever had. It might seem like we’re trying to make a special place for God in our lives. But sometimes it’s really a sign that we want to get God into our lives in a controlled way, where God can be involved in certain parts of our lives and not others. In this text, I think God reminds us that that is not how God works. God doesn’t want a corner of our world, a corner of our hearts. God wants us to know that God is already in all of it, our whole world, our whole lives. How will we let knowing and trusting that change us?

            As we see how God is at work in the story of Israel, as we remember that God is not boxed in, but on the move, as we give thanks for God’s promises that we see fulfilled in Jesus, ruler of all our days, we get a sense of the richness of biblical history. And we can ask ourselves: what is the story of our own lives? What is our history with God? When we look back over our days, and we look to the future, where do we see God at work in our lives? Our own history is the story of our identity. Who am I? Who are you? How are our lives shaped as disciples, as people seeking and struggling and growing in faith through the years? Just as God promises to David, so too these promises are for us. For all of our days, in all of our stories, God is with us, beginning to end, to beyond. How will we let that promise shape our history, and our future? Amen.

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[1] From Google’s Dictionary: https://www.google.com/search?q=history+definition&rlz=1C1CHZL_enUS691US691&oq=history+definition&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.3095j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

[2] “2 Samuel Chapter 7,” United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, http://usccb.org/bible/2samuel/7#10007008-1. 

Sermon, "Back to (Bible) School: The Law," Deuteronomy 5:1-21, 6:1-9

Sermon 9/10/17

Deuteronomy 5:1-21, 6:1-9

Back to (Bible) School: The Law

This week we’re starting a new sermon series called Back to (Bible) School. Each week, we’ll be looking at different parts of the Bible, particularly the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. I’ve been encouraging folks all summer long to sign up for our Disciple Fast Track Bible Study, a twelve week study that takes us deep into the writings of the New Testament. And it isn’t too late to sign up – we start this Wednesday evening, and I would love for you to be a part of it! It is never too late to learn more about the Bible. You never have “advanced” far enough that you couldn’t enjoy a Bible study, and you are never too new to the Bible and too inexperienced in reading the Bible that you should fear studying the scriptures is not for you. It is one of the best ways I can think of to explore and deepen your faith, studying the scriptures, and studying them together is a special blessing of a community of faith. So alongside our Bible study Wednesday nights, we’ll also be trying to learn more about the Bible during worship.

I’m particularly interested in not only encouraging you to read the Bible regularly, but also in helping you feel like you are understanding what you’re reading. We learn a lot of reading comprehension skills when we are in school. Having excellent reading skills is one of the things that will set students up for success in any number of other areas of learning and in any number of future life endeavors. In the midst of these Back-to-School days, I looked around online to remind myself of some of the ways elementary teachers talk to student about reading comprehension skills. How do you figure out what something you’re reading is all about? I found lots of great tools creative teachers use, like this poster, that encourages young readers to ask lots of questions: “What is happening in the story? What’s happening with the character? Is the character changing? What do I think will happen next? What is the problem? Was the problem solved? If so, how? What does this word [that I don’t know] probably mean [based on the words around it]?” (1) For adult readers, fluent readers, when we’re reading books and newspaper articles, magazines, even messages from our friends online, we employ these reading comprehension skills all the time and don’t even think about it. We automatically are asking ourselves these kinds of questions when we read. It eventually becomes second-nature for us. But in my experience, we do this weird thing when we start to read the Bible. We stop using all of the skills that we’ve built up over the course of our lives and approach the Bible in a completely different way.

I’m not sure why exactly that is. I think we get a bit hung up with the Bible. I think sometimes people are scared of understanding it incorrectly, and so we can get overwhelmed or confused, and it makes our minds a little muddled when we come to the text. Or, we’re so aware that we consider these words sacred and holy that we can’t believe we have any skills that could be useful when we’re reading the Bible. Whatever the case, I want to encourage you to put to use all of the skills you already have when you read the Bible. Ask those same questions teachers might ask young students to consider: What’s happening here? What’s happening to the people? How do people change? What’s the problem and how does it get resolved? How can I figure out what this means based on what comes before and after?

In this sermon series, we’re going to look in particular at some of the types of literature we find in the Bible, and we’ll think about how we read different types of literature. For example, if you go in a bookstore or library, you’ll see that books are group together by genre – cookbooks are all in one section, and biographies are all together. Reference books have a spot. Fiction is in one place, and non-fiction is in another. Newspapers and magazines – everything gets its own spot. We expect a certain type of content, a certain style of writing when we read a newspaper, and another type and style when we read the latest book in from a mystery writer. If we read a book of poetry, we wouldn’t go hunting for facts, probably. Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you! That’s not something that’s meant to be a fact, even if all the words are true. The purpose of a poem is different than the purpose of a textbook, and how we read each of those things, then, should be a bit different.

As our Fast Track looks at the New Testament, here we’ll look at the 4 main types of literature in the Hebrew Bible (although not only!): Law, History, Poetry, and Prophecy. Today, we’re starting with the law. If you’re ever read through all the details and specifics of modern day legal language, you might know that it can be tedious and incomprehensible to someone without legal training. Thankfully, the biblical books of the law are a bit different. The first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, are known as the Torah, the law books of the Bible. Through these five books we see origin stories, stories that lay out exactly who Israel is and who Israel is called to be as God’s people. And a large chunk of the law relates to the journey of the Israelites from living as slaves in Egypt to entering into the land that God promised them as their own people, God’s own people. These books are not the only sacred text of Judaism, but these five books are at the core of Jewish faith and identity still today. They’re called books of law because once Moses and the people leave Egypt, God, speaking through Moses, works to set up a covenant, a set of rules for living that will govern the Israelites in their new home.   

If you were trying to set up a brand new nation, a brand new community of people living together, where you were writing your laws from scratch, what would it be important to include? I think there was some reality show a couple years back that tried to ask these questions, throwing together a group of people and asking them to create a mini-government of sorts. I’m not sure how it worked I suspect that it wasn’t as easy as folks thought it was going to be. I think that ideally, people don’t uphold the laws of a community only because they are laws. Hopefully, for example, most of us don’t drive 100 miles per hour not only because it is a law, but also because that would be dangerous, putting our lives and the lives of others at risk. But laws provide a framework that the community agrees to uphold at least because they are laws, ordering a community, if nothing else.

David Lose writes that biologists would tell you that we’re designed to look out for our own wants and needs over all others, and that this is where the concept of the strongest and most self-interested surviving comes from. Theologians, he says, would tell you that this is what human sin is: self-interest, selfishness that puts our needs above the needs of others, but actually limits “human flourishing” and contradicts God’s desire for us to love one another. The law, then, at its most basic level, is something that God gives us to curb us from our tendency to put ourselves first. The law creates boundaries that enable us to flourish as a whole, that “create room in which we can live with each other.”  Lose concludes, “That’s the law, in its first use, functioning as a gift from God to tell us – children and adults alike – “no” so that we can then say “yes” to a richer and more abundant life together.” (2)

For the Israelites, the Ten Commandments are a starting point of the new community that they’re building. A way that they will agree to live together, so that all people in the community have the chance to flourish. The Ten Commandments are perhaps the most famous section of the law of Moses. Many of us memorized the commandments when we were young, and we tend to memorize them in their simplest form. But as we listened to them again today, I hope you heard that they have more depth to them. They’re a bit more complicated than the simple words we might know.  The first several deal particularly with our relationship with God. I am your God, the one who brought you out of slavery. Don’t forget it, and don’t have any other gods. Don’t make idols, or worship anything other than me in any form. Don’t make “wrongful use” of the name of the Lord. To me that goes far beyond simply not using God’s name while you’re cursing, although I also consider that a bad idea! How often do we use God’s name wrongly, to hurt instead of heal, for our purposes instead of God’s purposes? Five verses are spent focusing on the commandment to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. Not only are we meant to rest, but we’re meant to let others rest too. The words in Deuteronomy ground our need for Sabbath not in God resting at creation, but in the fact that the Israelites were once slaves in Egypt. They should remember, always, what it was like to have to work without rest, and never make things so that they and others cannot seek rest going forward.  

The rest deal more with our relationships with each other in community, and are simple, shorter, more direct. Honor your parents, because doing so will help build a long-lived community in a new land. Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery. Don’t steal. Don’t say things that aren’t true about one another. And don’t covet things that belong to others – family, homes, property, livelihood. So, the commandments provide a framework for our relationship with God and one another.

Shortly after these commandments are given, we find a short passage that emphasizes the importance of knowing, deeply knowing these words, not as an “at least” minimum requirement, but as something that is at the heart of our relationship with God and others, something that guides our lives, our actions, a covenant for living together that leads to experience God’s blessings. The Promised Land that Israel is about to enter is described here, as elsewhere, as a land flowing with milk and honey, meant to signify a rich, sweet abundance.

We find next the words known as the Shema in Judaism. Shema means Hear, the first word of chapter 6 verse 4: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. God is God alone. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Jesus will, in the gospels, affirm this as the greatest commandment, pairing it, as Deuteronomy does elsewhere, with love of neighbor. Keep these commandments in your heart, the law says. Recite them to your children. Talk about these words when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down, and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and gates.

As a way to honor these words, the Shema is still recited daily by many faithful Jews, morning and evening, at Shabbat services, at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most sacred day in Judaism, before bedtime, when one’s death is imminent. And indeed, these words have sometimes been kept on doorposts, and bound to hands and head.

These last verses of our text tell us that keeping these commandments is as important as knowing them, living with God’s word in such a way that it is a part of all that we do. How will we do that? Keep these commandments – not just because they’re God’s law, but because we have a deep desire to live in communion with God and one another? This week, I have a challenge for you. I want you to take a moment right now to write down the words of Deuteronomy 6:4-5. And I want you to carry those words with you all week, and try to follow the directions of the text we’ve shared today. Share these words with your children or folks in your household, and pray them in the morning and at night, and when you leave for work and when you come back home, and each time you come through the door. I challenge you to try it for a week. See what it does to your days to make these words the first and last words of your day, and the words that mark your comings and goings. This is how central God wants to be in our lives, how much God desires for us to be living with God at the heart of all we do. And that’s the heart of the law: it’s beyond just, “Well, I didn’t break any of the Ten Commandments today!” That’s the law reduced to its lowest meaning, but not the fullness of the gift God means it to be for us. This week, let’s see if we can experience the fullness of the gift of this covenant, these words that shape us as God’s people. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Amen.

 

(1) Life in Fifth Grade, as quoted in “21 Anchor Charts That Nail Reading Comprehension,” https://www.weareteachers.com/21-anchor-charts-that-teach-reading-comprehension/

(2) Lose, David. “Law, the First Use.” http://www.davidlose.net/2013/10/law-the-first-use/