Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent, "The Redemption of Scrooge: The Life of Christmas Present," Luke 15:1-7, Matthew 26:11, Deuteronomy 15:11

Sermon 12/15/19

Luke 15:1-7, Matthew 26:11, Deuteronomy 15:11

The Life of Christmas Present

Today, in our travels with Scrooge, we meet the Ghost of Christmas present. Dickens describes the spirit as, ““a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn.” When Scrooge first sees him, he’s sitting on a kind of throne of sorts, made out of rich and sumptuous foods, in Scrooge’s room which had been cold and bare, but is now decorated and boasts a blazing fire in the fireplace.  

Scrooge dreaded the visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past, but he’s ready to learn from the Spirit of Christmas Present. Upon reflection, he tells the spirit that the lesson from Christmas Past is “working [in him] now.” And so the Ghost takes Scrooge out into the town. Dickens describes the town: “There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.” That’s what Scrooge sees everywhere - people who might not be well off, or who are outright poor, but they are laughing and joking and smiling, throwing snowballs, and so on. Scrooge peers in the Grocers’ windows and sees abundance everywhere. The descriptions are lush with vivid imagery. Folks are going to and from church for Christmas. And everywhere, the Ghost of Christmas Present sprinkles some of his spirit on them from his torch. A touch of the spirit makes people forgive where they might have quarreled, brings good humor even when people are jostling each other in the busy streets.  

Scrooge and the Ghost make a visit to Bob Cratchit’s small house. Cratchit’s big family is happy, anxious to see each other, full of warm greetings. Bob and a sickly Tiny Tim arrive home from church, and Bob reports on Tim’s behavior: “[Tim] told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” (emphasis mine) 

When they eat their Christmas goose for dinner, everyone is effusive in their thanksgiving for their meal. Dickens’ writes, “There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration.” “Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.” Mrs. Cratchit wants to give Scrooge a piece of her mind, but Bob won’t say a harsh word against his employer. 

Scrooge asks the Spirit: Will Tiny Tim live? The ghosts responds that unless something changes, the child will die. Scrooge is distressed: “No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.” The Spirit tosses Scrooge’s own words back at him: “If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” And Scrooge is wracked with grief and regret at hearing how harsh he had been. 

Scrooge also visits the home of his nephew, Fred, with the Ghost. Again, he gets to listen in on people talking about him. Fred says, “He’s a comical old fellow, that’s the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be. However, his offences carry their own punishment. His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it. He don’t make himself comfortable with it.” Nonetheless, Fred says, “I am sorry for him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims! Himself, always … He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can’t help thinking better of it—I defy him—if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you? If it only puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds, that’s something; and I think I shook him yesterday.” Fred is sure that his persistence with his uncle might eventually do some good, and might soften his hard heart, even just a little. 

Finally, Scrooge notices that the Spirit is travelling with two small children - they both look sickly, dirty, poor. The Spirit tells Scrooge that they belong to all of humanity - and they are Ignorance and Want. “Have they no refuge or resource?” cries Scrooge. And just before the Spirit leaves Scrooge, he again turns Scrooge’s own words back on him. “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” For the second time, Scrooge is shaken to the core by a Ghost’s visit. 

What the Ghost shows Scrooge - it’s just what is going on all around Scrooge every day, in the “now”, but Scrooge hasn’t been able to see it. The Ghost of Christmas Present is all about showing Scrooge abundance and plenty - but the Ghost’s focus is on the abundance of spirit, love, good will and compassion. Scrooge has only been focused on an abundance of coin, even that, as his nephew notes, he doesn’t really enjoy, because he’s more interested in having it than using it. And since Scrooge can’t even appreciate the kind of abundance he does have, he doesn’t see all the ways he could use his abundance to help others experience abundant life too. And since Scrooge can’t appreciate the abundance of Spirit and love others have, he can’t receive it when they try to share it with him.  

What kind of abundance and plenty do you see? If the Ghost of Christmas Present was visiting you, where would the Ghost take you? What or who are you neglecting to see clearly right now? In his book The Redemption of Scrooge, Matt Rawle writes that it is our sin that causes us to be afraid that we don’t have enough, to close our eyes to God’s abundance. And so, thinking we don’t have enough, we buy more food than we need, more clothing than we need, bigger homes than we need, more stuff than we could possibly ever need. He shares a message from a 4th century monk, Basil of Caesarea, who said, “This bread which you have set aside [for yourself] is the bread of the hungry; this garment you have locked away [for yourself] is the clothing of the naked; those shoes [of yours] which you let rot are the shoes of [one] who is barefoot; those riches you have hoarded [for yourself] are the riches of the poor.” (82-83)

Thankfully, Jesus, who is the Bread of Life himself: he shares his very self with us. Jesus clothes us in his very love and righteousness. And the kingdom over which Jesus reigns - he tells us it is ours, and it is here, now, among us. Every bit of abundance God has, God shares freely with us. Sin and fear make us worry that God’s going to run out of good stuff to give us. But that’s not how God works. Our parable today from the gospel of Luke is one of three in a set about losing and finding. The set of parables culminates with the parable of the prodigal son and the older brother, where we see a father welcome home his son who had been lost to him and remind his older child that he is beloved too. And before that, there’s a woman who has lost one of ten coins, and searches her home until she finds it. But we start out with a shepherd and some sheep - one hundred of them. Jesus asks: What shepherd who had one hundred sheep, wouldn’t, upon losing one of them, leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the lost one until they find it? And when the shepherd finds that one sheep, Jesus says, they’ll rejoice with friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” 

Jesus doesn’t wait for an answer to his question, but we can fill in the blanks. What shepherd wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine sheep to find the one? None of them would do that! Who would leave ninety-nine sheep alone in the wilderness to find the one sheep that probably already had been eaten by a predator? No shepherd wanted to get paid would take such a risk! They’d just be thankful they still had ninety-nine sheep, and watch them all the more closely!

But, Jesus is telling us that God sees things differently. God’s sense of abundance doesn’t just mean that God has so many people to follow God that one of us doesn’t matter. God’s loving abundance means that each one of us is precious and beloved, and that God has such a lavish abundance of love and grace that God doesn’t have to take anything away from the ninety-nine to seek out the one. God’s abundant resources of compassion allow God to love and care for the ninety-nine and to seek after the one with God’s whole heart.    

God is Abundance and Plenty. But God isn’t storing up stuff, maintaining abundance by refusing to share. Rather, God is abundant in Spirit, in self-giving, in love. Simon Tugwell writes, “If we keep clamouring for things we want from God, we may often find ourselves disappointed, because we have forgotten the weakness of God and what we may call the poverty of God. We had thought of God as the dispenser of all the good things we would possibly desire; but in a very real sense, God has nothing to give at all except [God’s very self].” (From Prayer, as quoted in The Redemption of Scrooge, 105) And that, friends, is just what God gives us: God’s very self. In Jesus, we receive God’s very self, the most lavish gift of all.

Sometimes, like Scrooge, we’re so focused on holding tight to what we have, trying to create an abundance for ourselves, that we don’t realize and don’t have room in our lives to receive what God has already given us: God’s self, God’s love, God’s grace, God’s mercy and forgiveness. We can’t claim those gifts if we’re too busy trying to make sure we have enough of everything else. Jesus helps us make room, asking us to find a place in our hearts for a tiny babe in a manger - a small thing that will fill our hearts and lives completely. And when we let Jesus make room in our hearts and lives, when we embrace God’s abundance, God opens our eyes to the people around us with whom we can share our abundance without anxiety, without fear we’ll run out. We have to wait till the rest of our journey with Scrooge to find out how he opens his eyes to a new kind of abundance, but thankfully, we don’t have to wait to start seeing things differently ourselves. Even as we wait to welcome Christ again this Christmas, he’s already with us, ready to fill our hearts and lives and world. Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Sermon, "The Story, Part I: Wandering with the Law," Deuteronomy 6:1-9

Sermon 9/29/19

Deuteronomy 6:1-9

The Story, Part I: Wandering with the Law

We’re skipping ahead in the scriptures today, as we continue our journey through The Story of the Bible. Last Sunday, as we read from Exodus, the Israelites were on the brink of leaving Egypt, being emancipated from their generations of slavery, and now they’re not far from reaching the Promised Land, this place described as a land “flowing with milk and honey.” It’s a land of abundance, a land that will be their long-term home. But in the interim, between then and now, forty years have passed, and all this time, the Israelites have been wandering through the wilderness, led by Moses. And over these years, besides the grumbling and complaining that they do about their long, meandering journey, and besides the times they really screw things up and forget where they’ve come from and where they’re going, they’ve also been learning about the laws that will guide and shape them as they enter the Promised Land and form a new society. In Exodus, in Leviticus, in Numbers, and in Deuteronomy, we find chapter after chapter of rules and laws about what to eat, what to wear, how to grow and plant, how to worship and pray, how to build, how to be a neighbor, how to deal with crime, how to care for possessions and finances. So many laws. 613 laws or commandments is the traditional count given to the total of all the directives we find in the Torah, the Law, contained in these books of the Bible. 

Even as we work on memorizing Bible verses every week this fall, I feel pretty sure that I cannot remember 613 of them, not by heart. But there’s hope. Aside from a system of teaching and guidance that will help the Israelites learn the laws well, we find in our text for today the key to the laws, the heart of the laws. You might say, for the most part, that all of the other laws are able to be understood as expressions of what we read in Deuteronomy 6 today. What we read here is the most important thing, and we studied it a bit least year. It’s called the Shema, from the Hebrew word “hear,” the first word of these key verses. “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.” There’s just one God to be god in your life, and you should love that God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Eventually Jesus will call this the greatest law. He’ll say that all the teaching of the law and of the prophets really boil down to this, that God is the only god worth putting first in our lives, and we should put God first with everything we’ve got. And Jesus will clarify for us that these laws also include the second greatest commandment, a way that we express the meaning of the first, of loving God fully: by loving our neighbor as if we they were our own self. 613 commandments, important, to be followed, but narrowed down in their essence to this: There’s one God to be worshipped. Worship and love that God with everything you’ve got. And you can demonstrate that love in loving others well. That much we can remember, right? 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we try to remember this week, and how we go about remembering them. I remember when I was little and my paternal grandmother would visit, I would watch in astonishment as she took her pills every day. There were so many! I swear she had about 15 pills she took each day. Now though, I’ve managed to work my way up to my own impressive collection of daily medications - iron to combat my anemia, and pills for high blood pressure, and another to boost my “good cholesterol” with a vegan source for Omega 3, and so on. With all these pills, I’ve found myself needing help remembering to take them every day and to take them at the right time. And so I have them all set up in one of those daily pill dispensers, and I have alarms set on my phone - morning and evening every day - so I don’t forget. And as long as I’ve been taking my pills now - if the alarm didn’t go off … I know I would forget, even still!  

I also adore Google reminders. I can tell my phone to remind me to do things, or add them on my google calendar, a reminder to do such and such thing at a certain time on a certain day, and at the appropriate time, my phone will ding and tell me what I’m supposed to be remembering. It is one tool that’s helped me become more organized and better at following through on things I’m supposed to be doing, a big help for this not-very-detail-oriented person. My mom wants to remember to read her Upper Room Devotional booklet every day, and remember to use her hand weights to strengthen her arm muscles - so she sets them on her kitchen counter every day, right near her laptop, and she doesn’t move them until she’s completed those tasks each day. There’s no shortage of methods we can use to help us remember things that are important to us. What techniques do you use? How do you remember who has what after-school activity? How do you remember what you need at the grocery store? How do you remember all the details of life? 

But I wonder about the most important things. How do we remember the most essential things of all, the kinds of things we can’t just check off of a to-do list? An alarm reminds me to take my pills, and then it’s done for the day, and I don’t have to think about it again. But how do I remember that God loves me, when I need to have it as part of the core of my understanding, and not something I can “complete” on a to-do list? How do I remember, when so many other messages in our culture try and tell us we have to earn love and that it is conditional and temperamental. How do I remember that God loves me even when I think I’m unlovable? How do I remember to treat others with kindness and compassion, to look at them with Jesus’s eyes, to see Jesus in them? That’s not a task I can mark “complete” and just move on. How do we remember the most important things? 

We talked last week about the rituals God helps the Israelites enact so that they would remember being slaves in Egypt and how God led them to longed-for freedom, like the Passover meal. God gifts us with many practices to help us remember the most important things, like baptism and communion. And today’s text includes more of God’s plans to help the people remember. After the Shema - the reminder that God is one god, the only god, and after the call to love God with our everything, Deuteronomy tells us that we should take these words and recite them, and tell them to our children, and talk about these words when we’re at home, and when we’re away, and when we go to bed, and when we wake up. And we should bind the words to our hands, and make them into a sign on our foreheads, and put them on the doors of our house, on the gates to our yards. Basically, it sounds like these words about God should be everywhere we are, all the time. They should be as much a part of our day as breathing in and out is. And indeed, the Israelites, and even some Jews today try to follow these directions as literally as possible. We could take that approach too - there’s nothing stopping you from binding these words about God and only God and God with your whole heart to your hands and head and house. But mostly - we don’t really do that, not literally. So what can we do? How do we make these words etched on our hearts and souls so we don’t forget? 

For the Israelites, on the brink of entering the Promised Land, God wanted to remind them that they were God’s distinctive people. They were not to be like other peoples, other nations. They followed God. They made God the center of their lives, and they were set apart in their beliefs, practices, and ethical way of being in the world. In the wilderness, they were mostly on their own, isolated from other influences. But in the Promise Land,  they’re going to be constantly surrounded by other peoples and cultures with other priorities, other rules, other laws, other gods. They will be constantly tempted to forget who they are and who God is and how they are called by God to live. We’ll see that over the next weeks, how hard it is for them to remain true to God. How can they remember who they are? The Shema, and binding these words to themselves every way they can is one way they stay set apart. They’re wrapped in God’s word, in the law that is a gift to them. 

What about us? How are we God’s people? What’s distinctive about our pattern of living and being? Today we’ve had an awesome morning with the Ripathon, and I’ve been thinking about our faith and fitness ministry. We’ve tried to shape it, over the years, to be that - a ministry. It’s a challenge, sometimes, to remember, to ensure that it’s about more than working out. And it’s so hard in our culture to make sure we’re sending the right messages about body image and health and wholeness and being created in God’s image instead of striving for a certain physical ideal so that we fit in somehow. 

So, at Ripit, sometimes people work with mentors - others who have worked hard to increase their strength, or endurance, or health. We practice encouraging each other - building each other up with words and deeds of kindness. RipIt folks participate in challenges - trying to push beyond where they are to reach new goals. And that’s another thing - goals. RipIt members often have something they’re working towards - not just a weight goal, but being able to lift a heavier weight, or dance longer during a song, or breathe easier after a workout. Amber has been leading devotional pilates, encouraging folks to read and reflect and meditate on messages from the scripture that remind us of our intrinsic, unshakable value as part of God’s creation. All of these parts of RipIt help make it not just an exercise class, but a community, and a ministry. These practices that are part of the program help people remember why they want to take part, work hard, and push through obstacles. 

What practices help us stay grounded in faith? Is your faith growing? Do you have goals that you’ve set for your relationship with God? A direction with God you’re hoping to go? Who are your mentors in faith? Who’s encouraging you, and who are you encouraging in discipleship? What faith challenges are you determined to conquer, and how do you work at them each day? As disciples of Jesus Christ, as those committed to following God, we need to immerse ourselves in the distinctive practices that will help us remember the things that we can’t just check off on a to-do list. In our United Methodist tradition, we’ve summarized some of these practices in our membership vows: prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. That might work as a guide for you. Or you may have your own way of setting goals in faith, and intentionally trying to grow with God. But whatever you do, let’s do something on purpose, with purpose. The scriptures attest to the fact that without remembering a purpose, God’s people also forget that God alone is god. They forget to give God their whole hearts every day. We know that we forget, too. So whether you need to bind God’s message on your head and heart, or whether you need to recommit to practices of faith and community that will ground you in God’s word, let’s follow with purpose, and be 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. 

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/