Joy and the Lively God

Exodus 20:1-21; Matthew 22:34-40

Presenting Engagement: gathered people.
When we speak of a gathering of Christian believers, we often say we are called to be together as a community. And we do things in worship that give evidence of our calling to be this community. We pray together. We recite our creeds together. We listen to or read scripture together. We gather together for the Lord’s Supper. As the hymn goes: “we gather together to receive the Lord’s blessing.”

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the creation stories in Genesis is to point out that the true order of things lies in the fact that we do not exist for some human purpose but for God’s purpose. We exist for God’s joy and we find our own joy in that divine joy.

So, when we gather to worship, our worship practices make God come alive in our community and we begin to figure out the true order of things through God’s liveliness among us.

Now, let your mind wander to a scene thousands of years ago. You are a community gathered around a campfire out in the open at night or perhaps gathered together for a meal. Someone in your group is speaking, narrating stories about the history of your community. Everyone is here- from young ones to venerated old ones and you are all listening to the story teller.

There’s a theme in the tale and it’s a theme that is larger than any human or natural event no matter how dramatic or catastrophic. This theme ties together all those human events and natural events and interprets them. It’s a theme that is larger, that goes beyond, that transcends human experience and it gives meaning to the community’s experience. It’s a theme that shows how every person in your community’s entire history has been called to a similar gathering and called to listen to the tale.

It’s a story that actually molds a community out of a rabble of isolated, wandering people.

And as this tale unfolds, you hear about the God who lives at the center of your lives and your world interacting with you in mundane events, during great harvests and meager ones. And sometimes you hear the narrator speak of God’s powerful intrusions in your community’s life.

These are larger than life moments when God is assertive for some particular purpose that becomes part of the foundation of your community’s history. Sometimes that purpose is some intimate transaction that sanctifies your community’s relationship with God like the making of a covenant or liberating your people from oppression and captivity.

And sometimes that purpose is a little scary and threatening. Sometimes it’s a display of power and sovereignty that is not negotiable and announces an unavoidable claim that your community belongs to this God and not to any other.

It’s easy to hear about those powerful and conclude that your God is either/or. Either a loving, mutuality-seeking, miracle-working God or a wrathful, legalistic, rigid God. But doing that would split the character of your God into two competing divinities and it would polarize your community into two different camps with each one following a different version of God.

The fact is that all of these powerful intrusions unify your community in faith and demonstrate that God is both loving and sovereign.

God’s giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai is one of those powerful intrusions that can easily divide the Christian community.

Biblical Context: what is going on in the text?
Now fast forward to today. Today, we read the printed word in books and computers all by ourselves and for ourselves. And we read this scriptural testimony about God in our own native language, in whatever current vocabulary fits our personal life-styles. We are a techno-savvy society with an economy based on consumer preferences rather than seasonal human need and a belief in the uninhibited political right to exercise individual free will.

Did you know that out of the 50,000 or so years theat human beings have had spoken language, the concept of the person as a distinct and autonomous individual, has only been around for 400 years? That means that for 49,600 years, human beings did not understand themselves as anything other than as part of a whole. Community today is simply a group of individuals who choose to come together… or not.

So how can we ever hope to relate to the witness of that bronze age tribe gathered around the campfire whose ideas of what community looks like are so very different from ours? And how can we ever hope to understand the single connection between them and us which is this nearly 4000 year old belief in God?

Well, the campfire witness we’ve read this morning lies squarely in the period of Israel’s oral rather than written history.

We all know that God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai and that it sets down numerous requirements for every aspect of Hebrew life together: for worshipping, for eating, for farming, and a host of other things. We know the ten commandments in Exodus best, but the Torah is more than that.

The second Torah reference we read is the testing of Jesus by Pharisees who ask him a theological question. According to Matthew’s gospel they want to trip him up by asking, in the academic and rhetorical manner of their day: which commandment out of all those laws covered in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy is the most important?

For the average Hebrew, that is a tall order. The entire Torah is important. How can you boil down the whole of the Torah into just one or two elements?

Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
We tend to think about history cinematically. We picture a great movie scene about Moses receiving the law in the mists and smoke of Mount Sinai and returning to the Hebrews with this glorious revelation of God. Charlton Heston is Moses and Edward G. Robinson is Aaron. We see thunder and lightning in tecnicolor from a variety of camera angles. We spectators take in all the action as concrete fact brought to us through the eyewitness of that camera lens.

But understanding the Torah in its entirety, as the Pharisees knew, is not simple or literal. If it were literal, their question would have been a no brainer for even the least theologically knowledgable Jew. Their question wouldn’t trip up anyone.

Consider the 13th commandment which forbids murder.[i] Under the Torah laws of restitution, we learn that you can murder a thief breaking in to your dwelling if the killing occurs at night.[ii] This isn’t a matter of self defence but a matter of the thief paying with his life for his act.

Or consider the dietary laws which roused such controversy between Paul and Peter, James, and the rest of the Jerusalem church when Paul claimed that converted gentiles did not have to obey Torah restrictions on eating or circumcision.[iii] In Leviticus, the Torah forbids the eating of any animal that dies “of itself.”[iv] But in Deuteronomy, we find that such unclean food as this can be sold to non-Hebrews because they are not the holy people of God.[v]

So it’s helpful to admit that the Old Testament as we read it is a version of a version of a translation of a translation. We are not watching an eye witness video of events. And when we read the New Testament, we read an English translation of a Latin or Greek version of another Greek version of original documents written by people with various degrees of literacy who recorded oral accounts. Jesus spoke neither Hebrew nor Greek, but Aramaic. Few of us read the Bible in any of those languages.

In fact, the Old Testament is an edited fusion of several different written records based on oral tradition and each record has a distinct social purpose for formulating the history of Israel in a particular perspective.

One record, written around 950 BC, is a royal chronicle from a Judean perspective in which all the peoples of the earth are related in distant kinship and begins with the second story of creation.[vi] When this writer recorded the 10 commandments in Exodus 34, he did not include the matter of God’s having rested on the seventh day as the reason for keeping the Sabbath on the seventh day.[vii] That’s because the second story of creation (Genesis 2) doesn’t number the days of God’s work.

The next source dates from about 850 BC, after the break-up of the unified Israel into the northern and southern kingdoms.[viii] It is written from the northern perspective and has a more populist oriented agenda. This chronicler gave us the version of the 10 commandments we read today and later in Exodus 24 shows his antipithy toward monarchs and dynastic rulers by having Moses sprinkle all the gathered Hebrews with sacred blood to seal them all in God’s covenant. The Judean account has only Moses and the priests being sealed in the covenant. [ix]

Around 620 BC, yet another source revised a copy of the Judean Torah which was found during repairs on the Temple in Jerusalem.[x] This revision is known as Deuteronomy which is Greek deutero-nomas for second giving of the law . This source was a reformer purifying worship customs, showing God as a nationalistic deity, and proclaiming Jerusalem as the only holy ground for worshipping that God.[xi]

Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
We could go on and on disecting the various sources and contradictions of the biblical witness. But our purpose today is not to try to disprove the Torah’s value or authenticity. Our purpose is to put it into some kind of perspective that we can draw something out of that has meaning.

We need to find in the Torah something that connects us to those people gathered around the campfire. Something that is useful when we celebrate our common belief in the one living God: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.

When we look at the final version of the fused compilation of Old Testament sources edited, organized, and formatted into high literary style by Hebrew priests in Babylonian exile, it’s easy to read the Torah as simply a legalistic code of ethics that cannot be subjected to critical scrutiny. It’s easy to see the ten commandments as our national standard of right and wrong for individuals and to judge others as unpatriotic if they disagree with that opinion. It’s easy to subordinate this religious witness and make it serve some social or political purpose.

But when we do that, two things happen that devalue God and devalue God’s word to us.

The first is that when we use the Bible to support a human goal we are making God relevant for our lives and not making our lives relevant for God. We are cutting ourselves off from God’s joy and replace it with momentary satisfaction.

The second thing is that when we make the Torah a rigid legalism interpreted only through our contemporary social concepts and individualism, we cut ourselves off from any historical connection to our forefathers in faith. We break apart that precious link to those bronze age people gathered around the fire listening to the stories and making God lively in their midst.

Conclusion: what’s the point?
In both those cases we fail to understand that the Torah tells us the true order of things and instructs us about God’s ways and so we make God a lifeless, remote symbol with no ability to give meaning to our lives.

The word Torah actually comes from the Hebrew verb “yarah-“ which means to instruct. We are instructed in God’s ways that by practicing them sets us apart from all others who do not believe in God. Jesus affirms this when he says: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[xii]

In the true order of things we are created beings who owe supreme allegiance to a divine being bigger than ourselves and beyond our making. Jesus affirms this when he says: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”[xiii]

So I say, let us reconnect with our kinsmen so distant in time and view the Torah as that imaginative liturgical practice of ancient Israel.

Let us join in that ancient practice that makes God lively in our midst and brings us true joy.

Let us join in that ancient practice that affirms God’s lively and eternal faithfulness which is our only true salvation in a dramatic life of both plentiful harvests and meager ones.

AMEN.


[i] Ex 20:13.
[ii] Ex 22:2x.
[iii] Galatians 2.
[iv] Lev 11:39.
[v] Deut 14:21.
[vi] This is the Yahwist source which uses the name Yahweh for God.
[vii] J. S. Spong. Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p 46.
[viii] This is the Elohist source which uses the name Elohim for God.
[ix] Spong, pp 47, 49.
[x] 2 Kings 22.
[xi] Spong, p 51.
[xii] Mt 22:39.
[xiii] Mt 22:37.