Meditations on the Crucifixion and What It Means for Us: The Law

 (Note: some of this sermon was posted earlier as The Law Is Dead. This version is the first in a series of what the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection means to us in our daily lives.)

Preached at Silverton Friends Church, October 13, 2024

When God created the universe and set time in motion, God made a place for us humans to live and love and make choices.  God made us so that we start as infants absorbed in our own needs and ready to absorb the sights and sounds and relationships around us into our frames of reference. God was and is unsurprised by our capacity for selfishness and our capacity for generosity, and God was prepared from the beginning to do whatever it takes to make it possible for us to know God personally and positively.  God is not a human parent, limited as we are. God is, as St. Paul wrote, the one in whom we live and move and have our being.  Without God, we simply are not.

In a mystery that retains our fascination, God not only created but intervenes in creation, and not in a particularly predictable way. But the point I want to make today is that, because God exists outside of time, and all times are present to God, the crucifixion was visible to God from the beginning of our time.  Furthermore, it was implicit, not because of what we call the “Fall” but because of the words, “Let us make human beings in our image.” The entry of God into our time, which we call the Incarnation, was inevitable.

It is possible to see  that from God’s point of view, human beings in time have been moving through stages, like the stages of an infant, innocent and testing boundaries, to childish lawlessness, to the adolescent understanding of Law, to disobedience, to consequences, culminating in the personal God in Jesus making a way forward that is different in substance from what was in place prior to his birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection.

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In recent weeks, I’ve been drawn to consider the crucifixion of Jesus and what the Bible says that means to us and for us.  Today, I’m focusing on what it means for us with regard to the Old Testament Law and to law as a general concept. To people like me who were raised in the church, it can be a challenge to understand and live into what the apostles James and Paul call the law of liberty and the law of love. We may also have wasted significant time trying to figure out what parts of the Law apply to us today. I remember a number of these discussions from my time as NWYM superintendent. We may even have turned parts of the message of grace and love into a new law for Christians. 

Some of you know that I’m a missionary kid. My parents went to Burundi, in central Africa, right at the end of WW II. I was born in Kansas, but went back with them at 6 months old. Eventually, they put me in the School for Missionary Children, a boarding school. I was seven. 

At boarding school, I had to make my bed, tidy my drawers and surface spaces, dust and sweep my room every morning. While I was in classes, my dorm mother inspected the rooms, and if they were not up to her standards, we came back to find our names in the doghouse. We had to clean it to passing standards right away. 

If we got put in the doghouse three successive days, we were confined to our rooms for the time between school and supper. I can’t remember what happened if our tidiness still didn’t meet standards, but I’m guessing it involved more of the same.

It was embarrassing to be put in the doghouse and have the fact posted in public. But even worse was the consequence for wetting the bed. My roommate was a chronic bed-wetter, and every morning she had to drag her soiled sheets up to the laundry room and wash them out by hand. Again a public event. One night I had a bloody nose and had the same consequence. I told everyone who would listen that it was a bloody nose, not wetting the bed. This public humiliation was hard to bear.

And that same year, I deliberately broke a rule by reading a Nancy Drew mystery under my covers with the flashlight after lights out. My roommate told on me, and my dorm mother confiscated the book and I got into significant trouble. 

This is vivid to me because at seven, I left the somewhat lawless existence of childhood. I doubt if I knew how to make my bed, and I certainly didn’t know that I should make it. I was unaware of obligation, to a large extent. And since at home we had to turn off all our electricity at 9 p.m. or so, I may have been reading by flashlight without penalty before I went off to boarding school. I entered a system of law.

Now the apostle Paul has some interesting things to say about sin and law in Romans 5:12-21:

I need to make some things clear, says Paul.

Before a command was given, sin was in the world, but it wasn’t counted against anyone. 

(To connect this to my story, my not making my bed was not a disgrace before I went to a school with rules.)

Paul says: Sin is not part of the reckoning without law. However, until God gave the Law to Moses, death had the upper hand even over those who did not directly disobey God’s command as Adam did. 

(For me as a little girl, even though I wasn’t punished for messiness before I went to school, I did in fact cause messiness, and someone had to clean it up. Messiness does rule if no one cleans. And when there is a rule against messiness, shame arises. And shame is a kind of death.)

In fact, the Law came in so that we humans could see how sinful we are, how prone to error; but where sin increased, grace hyper-increased, grace filled and overflowed the deficit caused by sin.

(For me, the rules made clear to me just how messy I naturally was and am.)

The Hebrew and Greek words we often translate as “sin” have in them a number of pictures that help us understand this theological concept. 

Sin is To Miss the Way, to Stumble, to Wander, to Misstep, to Slip.

Sin is To Miss the Mark, to Miss the Goal

Sin is To Fail at the Assignment, To Avoid, to Neglect, to Overstep

Sin is To Run the Wrong Way when Terrified, To Lose Oneself

Sin is To Bend, to Make Crooked, to Distort God’s truth

Sin is To Overturn God’s truth, To Trespass, to Rebel, to Break Away From, to Defect

You can see that “sin”—or trespass, or iniquity, or transgression, or other synonym—is a living word that works on several levels of intentionality. We can try to do right and end up messing things up even if we have given ourselves to God, and we can decide to do wrong, and we can deliberately assert that we belong to ourselves, not to God. All are kinds of sin.

The fact that we can’t keep the Law, in other words, creates in us the awareness of ourselves as sinners, and this is a hopeless position to be in.  So it is very good news that the Law died with Jesus on the cross.

John 1:17 The Law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ

Colossians 2:8-14

Jesus blotted out the handwriting of ordinances [ the Law] that was against us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.

Gal 2:16-21 We are justified by the faith of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faith of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law.

Romans 3:20-24, 28 Keeping the Law does not justify, but we are justified freely by grace through the redemption accomplished by Jesus; justified by faith in Jesus, not by works of the Law

As John says in the first letter, if anyone says they are without sin, they lie. But if we confess or own up to how we have messed things up and gone the wrong way and avoided what we know God wants from us, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sin and clean us up and set us straight. This verse is about how those who want to belong to God can keep themselves moving with rather than against God. 

There is a path God wants us to travel through our lives; there is a purpose toward which God wants us to aim; there are things God wants us to do; there are things God wants to make plain to us; there are principles God wants us to live by. What are these?  Jesus said the two great commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. How do we do this? We live out of love as much as we can, we ask God how to live out of love and we do what God puts before us to do, and we try not to harm our neighbor or ourselves. And when we fail, we confess it to God and let God work to help us do better the next time we have an opportunity to show love. We live under the law of liberty and we count on our gracious God to help us use our freedom lovingly.

James 2:12 speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty, 

Gal 5:5-9, 13-25 For in Jesus Christ all that counts is faith working through love.

James 1:18-25 God chose to birth us through the word of truth; we need to humbly accept that word which is planted in us and which can save us, and obey it, the perfect law of liberty; be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry

1 John 1:7-9 But if we really are living and walking in the Light, as He is the Light, we have true fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ the Son cleanses us from all sin and guilt. If we say we have no sin, we delude and lead ourselves astray, and the Truth is not in us. If we admit we have sinned and confess our sins, He is true to his own nature and promises and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

The Law helps us realize we have missed the mark and are sinners in need of grace. However, when the Law brings us to the point of trusting Jesus, it has done its work and has no more to say to us. It is an eternal truth that the Law is dead because of Jesus’s death.  “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, and the life I now live in this body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

We know that Jesus is the answer to our frailty, our imperfect attempts to do the right thing, our mistakes, and even our deliberate wrong-doing. We know that when we come to Jesus, he does not condemn, even when he does instruct. Sadly, we can also turn our backs on God and insist on owning ourselves, of earning our own way, and when we do this, we cannot grow in grace and we rely on keeping rules rather than obeying the Holy Spirit of God.  This kind of active rebellion can occur in church-goers and in atheists, and it prevents the rebels from knowing that God is Love.

Let us give ourselves to God, accept the grace Jesus gives, and live guided by the Holy Spirit. Let us embrace our freedom from the Law in order to live out love for God and neighbor.

The Fruit of the Spirit Is Love

Preached at Wayside Friends Church, 2023

When the pastors asked me to consider speaking on Love, I became immediately conscious of many failures to love in my daily life, and I nearly declined. But often in preparing to speak to others, I find God speaking to me, so I thought this sermon prep might create that opportunity.

I’ll start with a confession that when I was discussing politics, I said, “I despise that person. He’s a liar.” So there’s that. And then, I’ve been married to a lovely man, Mark, for 48 years and counting, and I find that instead of worshiping the ground he walks on as I did at 16 when we began dating, now I snap at him daily for one thing or another. It reminds me of my dad who came up to my house one day from his room at Friendsview and said, “Your mommy loves me, but she doesn’t love all my ways.” So there’s that, also.  And then I have not outgrown neediness—particularly with those I love the most.  To quote the movie “What About Bob,” “I want I want I want, I need I need I need.” Perhaps the most embarrassing on this list.

None of these things I confess to you make me love myself. In fact, I am ashamed of my unloving actions and words. I am also sad that as I age, I am not becoming sweeter and kinder. This actually dismays me.

When I was in graduate school for English literature, I chose to do my doctoral research on George MacDonald. MacDonald was a 19th century Christian who wrote fiction, poetry, and sermons. His thinking has shaped me in more ways than I can identify.

He lost his preaching job because of his beliefs. He believed that God’s love would never rest until hell is emptied, though the way out of hell is to give up saying "I am my own," to cede our sovereignty to God. We must give ourselves to God, and the way we do that is to obey what God says to us to do.

I turned to my friend and mentor George MacDonald and his disciple C. S. Lewis for help in thinking through this topic of love with something that I hope you and I will find useful. Together, George and I will cover topics of vengeance, justice, forgiveness, and obedience, all as aspects of love.  

Much of what follows is directly quoted or my paraphrase of things George MacDonald wrote, particularly in his 3 volumes of Unspoken Sermons.  His writing is infused with scripture.

As St. Paul confessed, “The good I want to do, I don’t do; the evil I don’t want to do, I do.” What MacDonald says is that we do not know the sources or causes of our impulses, our desires, our tendencies, our likings. To put his ideas into modern terms, we are subject to neurological diseases, we catch the contagious evil around us, we have hatreds rooted in our childhoods, we have inherited genetic tendencies and traits. MacDonald also says that God will make every excuse for us that can be made, that God is pleased with every effort we make in the right direction toward love, and that God will not rest until we have been made right from deep within.  MacDonald is fond of quoting that “Our God is a consuming fire.”

We must recognize the inward opposition to love comes from the part where God is not yet present; we need to realize that it takes time for our whole selves to be redeemed because God goes to the roots of ourselves beyond our consciousness, starts there—when God inhabits that part which is presently opposing our desire to love, it will become holy.

MacDonald counsels honesty. Don’t try to feel good when you recognize that you are not good, but cry to God who is good. Wait in the quietness until light goes up in your darkness, and in the meantime, do something positive that needs doing—make your bed, prepare a meal, visit a friend, weed the garden. He says, astringently, we must give up any notion of playing the hero when we are not yet barely honest. Indeed, the purest efforts of will of which we are capable cannot keep us from doing wrong to our neighbor.

Now on to MacDonald on love (what follows are assorted quotations from MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons, many of then collected in C.S. Lewis's George MacDonald, An Anthology):

Why do we love? We do not love because we see why but because we love. In the main, we love because we cannot help it—there is no merit in it but neither is it selfish. The love that is born in us is our salvation from selfishness.  

Where we do not love, the not-loving seems rational. How can we love a man or woman who is mean, unlovely, fault-finding, untrusting and untrustworthy, self-righteous, self-seeking, sneering and contemptuous? These things cannot be loved. But are they the whole of the person? Is there not within the person the divine element of brotherhood or sisterhood, something lovely and lovable, something human, however it seems to be fading or even dying?

Though we cannot make ourselves love, we can and must fight against the hatred inside us.  Hate concentrates itself on the thing hated. Love makes everything lovely.

If your neighbor, who owes you love, gives you hate, you must nevertheless pay that neighbor the love you owe them, says MacDonald (and also Jesus).

Do not heed much if people mock you and speak lies of you, or even in goodwill defend you unworthily. Heed not much if even the righteous turn their backs on you. Only take heed that you turn not from them.  

In the dungeon of self we are breathing in the same air we breathed out.  “Love your neighbor” is the only way out of  this dungeon. “Love your neighbor” frees us into God’s sunlight and the sweet winds of the universe.

However, the impossibility of following God’s command to love our neighbor drives us to God for help.  

God says, “Vengeance is mine.” When we understand God rightly, we might as well pray for God’s vengeance as for God’s forgiveness. God’s vengeance is to destroy the sin, to make the sinner reject and hate it. The same unblinking purifying love God has for us, God has as well for our enemy. No one escapes the flame of God’s love.

Indeed, Christ died to save us not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. A human being is not made for justice from another human being but for love, which is greater than justice. Love is the law of our condition without which we cannot render justice.

It may be … less evil to murder a person than to refuse to forgive them. When we will not forgive another, we cannot believe that God is willing, even wanting to forgive us.

The will of his and our Father is the yoke Jesus would have us take and bear together with him—it is this yoke—shared with Jesus—that is light and easy.

Do you ask what is faith in God? I answer, leaving your own way, your purposes, your self, and taking God’s way, God’s purposes, God’s self—the leaving of your trust in humans, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and instead doing as God tells you.

Ask yourself whether today you have done one thing because God said "Do it," or abstained from one thing because God said "Do not do it."

To those who obey and thus open the heart’s door to receive the eternal gift, God gives the Spirit of the Son, the spirit of God’s Self to be in them, and lead them to the understanding of all truth…true disciples shall thus always know what they ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do.

God does not by the instant gift of the Spirit make us always feel right, desire good, love purity, aspire after God’s self and God’s will. The truth is this. God wants to make us in God’s own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. For God made our individuality, our apartness, so that freedom would bind us divinely dearer to God’s self with a new and inscrutable marvel of love.

To be right with God is to be right with the universe: one with the power, the love the will of the mighty Mother/Father, the cherisher of joy, the Lord of laughter, whose are all glories, all hopes, who loves everything and hates nothing but selfishness.

It is only in God that the soul has room. In knowing God is life and its gladness. The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know God who knows its secret.  

It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.  Let us be compassionate and humble, and hope for every person.

Let us also be compassionate toward ourselves, humble within ourselves, and hopeful for ourselves.  God is faithful and God’s love is unstoppable until it achieves God’s purpose for us which is to love God wholly and first and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Jesus and His Bible, Epilogue

Love Is At the Center

I started this study genuinely curious to see how Jesus used his familiarity with his Scriptures, what authors/books he quoted, when he quoted them, and what the contexts of the quotations revealed about his passions in his ministry.  I leaned entirely on the NASB’s cross references in the gospel of Mark, and I used present-day Jewish commentators on the quoted scriptures to get at least a flavor of what Jesus’s community might have understood them to mean. It has been so much fun to do this work.

Jesus quoted from the Law (the first five “books of Moses”) on nine occasions. What he emphasized from the Law were the following themes:

God is present to us at all times

What we do with our own and with others’ bodies matters to God and has profound effects on us; we are eternally present to God

We need to love God wholeheartedly

We need to love our neighbor, showing generosity and compassion to all other human beings

We need to put human need above the letter of the law

He also took his hearers to task for their failure to read the Law with open hearts that saw the love at the heart of all things. “What does the Law say?” he asked; “Have you not read…”; “What did Moses command you?” “Why do you put your tradition above what God has said?” In his claim to be Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus implicitly took precedence over the letter of the Law, even while paying tribute to its heart of love for God and neighbor.  

Jesus quoted from the Prophets on ten occasions. He clearly associated himself with Isaiah and Ezekiel in being a prophet, particularly one who preached to willfully deaf and blind audiences. He expected to be misunderstood and dismissed. His association with Ezekiel, who famously acted parables of his prophecies, teaches us to see Jesus’s actions as acted-out parables. Specifically, what he emphasized by quoting from the Prophets were the following themes:

God does not want ritual obedience when the heart has strayed

God does not want ritual obedience from those who go on to do whatever they want

God wants repentance because the present actions will lead to violence, exile, and ruin

God judges the nation for continually missing the mark and rejecting God’s messengers

God wants the place of worship to be inclusive and free from commerce

God will do what is necessary to cleanse the people in order to effect reconciliation with them

Jesus clearly identified himself with the prophets, calling his people to repent, to be contrite, humble, and reverent before God, so that God might comfort them and care for them like a mother. People are judged by their lack of repentance, their refusal to admit need, their stubbornness in wanting their own way rather than God’s way.

Jesus quoted from the Writings, specifically the Psalms and Daniel on five occasions. As he neared the end of his life and ministry, his mind turned to the apocalyptic visions of Daniel, This turn to apocalypse coincides with the intensity of his experience of moving toward death. At his trial, he quoted Daniel and Psalm 110 to assert his messiahship. As he was dying on his cross, he Identified himself with David, poignantly quoting  the opening of Psalm 22; he invoked thereby the whole of that psalm which moves from his sense of abandonment to his assertion of confidence in God.

Jesus took from his familiarity with his scriptures the understanding that love was and is at the heart of the Law and the Prophets and the Writings. Violations of love toward God and neighbor must be recognized and repented of; if people insist on putting other things ahead of this one, they are moving toward judgment and misery. God will do all God can to bring people into reconciliation with God and with each other. Let those who have ears, hear.

 

Jesus and His Bible, Part 14

The Messiah and Politics

In Mark 11, Jesus entered Jerusalem to wild acclaim, disrupted the Temple businesses by throwing the vendors out and overturning their tables, and signaled his sense that the temple system was fruitless and would die by cursing the fig tree. Subsequently, through Mark 12, people ask him a long series of questions.  The first, asking where he got his authority from, he answered with a question. The second, asking if it was according to Jewish law to pay taxes to Caesar, Jesus answered with the famous “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” The third, asking about whose wife the much married woman would be in the resurrection, and the fourth, asking which was the greatest commandment in the Jewish Law, we have already discussed.

Now Jesus poses a question of his own. “How is it that the scribes say that the Christ, the Messiah, is the son of David? David himself said in the Holy Spirit, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put thine enemies beneath thy feet.’ So if David calls him Lord, in what sense is he David’s son?” (Mark 12:35-37). 

The religious authorities do not answer this question. And it is a puzzler.  

Here is the context in Jesus’s scripture:

Psalm 110:1 “The Lord says to my Lord: sit at my right hand until I make thine enemies a footstool for thy feet.” This Psalm is full of political promises. God tells the king to rule over his enemies. Later in the psalm, God promises that he will be at the king’s right hand, shattering kings, judging nations, filling them with corpses. The scribes and religious leaders cannot safely talk about this psalm without sounding like rebels against Rome.  

Further, this Psalm is a promise made by God to the king, promising him a priesthood like Melchizedek’s, an ancient priest/king at the time of Abram.  Both Saul and David occasionally took priestly roles. Additionally, Melchizedek is also possibly a pun meaning rightful king (Jewish Study Bible, 1408, n.). I suspect its interpretation was controversial at the time of Jesus, and Jesus knew it.  

The way Jesus quotes it is to take David as the speaker and the “my lord” as a son of David.  This is not a self-evident interpretation. Some present-day Jewish commentary suggests instead that David is the psalmist writing about himself as king in the third person and reinforcing the idea that God is on his side. 

Though Christian commentators adopt the whole of this psalm as a prophecy for which Jesus is the Messianic fulfillment, it is in fact full of puzzles. For example, the victories described are military and partisan, in that God works judgment upon “the nations, crushing heads far and wide.” This does not accurately describe the work Jesus said he came to do. Further, expecting that Jesus in a Second Coming will be qualitatively different, even militant and violent, does its own violence to the character of Jesus demonstrated at his first coming. Jesus was militant against hypocrisy, greed, power-hunger, and pride when he came the first time, and these will be the great enemies he defeats when he returns.

Jesus quoted this verse to silence those baiting him. He asked the people how it is that the scribes say the Messiah is the son of David, particularly since David in his Messianic psalm calls his “son” my Lord.  The crowd enjoyed hearing him riddle the religious experts. (This reminds me of the religious debates so popular with the ordinary folks in the 17^th century in England, a time when people went to war over versions of the Christian religion.) 

But it is hard to imagine Jesus simply engaging in riddling one-ups-manship. Why this riddle at this time?  The immediate context in Mark is one in which Jesus was frequently quoting the Hebrew scriptures at his enemies, making clear that he knew they were opposing him, making clear that he would be the murdered son of the vineyard owner, who is God, and making clear that God is the God of the living, not corpses, and that death will not be the end. He also made clear that the mission of Israel was not self-involved purity but loving each other as neighbors and loving the stranger as oneself also.  They were meant to bring God to the world, not keep God to themselves.

He followed this quotation with specific criticism of the hypocrisy of the religious experts, who showed off their prayers while impoverishing the helpless.  This reinforces his teachings elsewhere about taking care of human need as being more important than religious observances.

This particular quotation spoke to the Jewish hope for military victory over national enemies, and Jesus invoked this in a way that both put his questioners on the spot and undercut this political understanding of the Messianic aspect of the psalm. 

Jesus and His Bible, Part 13

 The First of All Commandments and the Second, As Well

After the last round of thrust-parry-thrust-touché between Jesus and the Sadducees, a scribe asked his question. He asked it because he liked how Jesus had dealt with the previous question, and it was this: “Which is the first commandment of all?”

Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And the second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:29-30). 

The first part of this quotes from Deuteronomy 6. Significantly, Jesus included this theological prologue—“the Lord our God is one.” This recapitulated his answer to the Sadducees, God’s self-identifying formula to Moses (Exodus 3:14), “I am who I am.” The present tense, Jesus said, shows that God is present and presence. Jesus required his Sadducee questioners to confront the enigma that all of time is present to God, all humans are present to God, all of God is present at any time; to admit that their model of the past is not God’s reality. This is such a mystery.  It may be one of the questions a human can pose but, when answered, cannot understand. 

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! And  you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5). This particular quotation from Deuteronomy 6 has two words for God in it: Elohim, which is plural (remember “Let us make human in our image…male and female”) and Yahweh, which is singular. Specifically, “Yahweh, our Elohim, is one Yahweh.” (This nuance is lost in Mark, written in Greek, in which the words are Kyrios and Theos, both singular.)

Again, we are plunging into an ocean of mystery.  This is (or is like?) the mystery of the Trinity, the three-in-one, affirmed by Christian creeds for centuries, often in response to challenges to trinitarian belief. Jesus emphasized the unity of purpose between himself and his Father, and in John’s Gospel, emphasized the unity of substance between himself and his Father, and said that when he was no longer physically present,  the Father would send the Spirit of truth to guide them.  The Trinity fits in well with the Elohim part of the Deuteronomy quotation.

The rest of the quotation is about loving God. Robert Alter says that this emphasis on love in Deuteronomy is new, that it is an addition to the traditional “fear of the Lord.” He also adds that it is the word used in treaties which pledge loyalty. 

Alter goes on to explain that the heart is the seat of understanding and is also associated with emotions. The “soul” is better translated “life-breath” or the “essential self.” And the word “might” is usually an adverb “very,” meaning “over the top.” (Alter, Moses, 641, n.) So if I put this into my own words:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your understanding and feelings, with your essential self and your life-breath, and with an unbreakable and complete loyalty.

I notice that Jesus added “with all your mind” into this list.  The questioner responded with his own list, which I suspect we are to consider parallel: “the heart, the understanding, the soul, the strength.” They were on the same page, despite the differences—Love God with all you are. This is the most important of all.

The second, which Jesus said is like the first, is to love your neighbor as yourself. This also derives from the Torah: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18).

This positive command occurs in the Levitical context of many “thou shalt not” admonitions centering on the following:

• Do not reap all your field, but leave some for the poor and the stranger
• Do not steal
• Do not deal falsely
• Do not lie to one another
• Do not take false oaths in God’s name
• Do not oppress your neighbor
• Do not rob your neighbor
• Do not withhold the wages of the day-laborer overnight
• Do not curse the deaf
• Do not trip up the blind
• Do no injustice in judgment
• Do not be partial to the poor
• Do not defer to the rich
• Do not slander others
• Do not take vengeance nor bear a grudge

All these are implicit in loving the neighbor as one’s self, but are made explicit for those of us who want to limit our love for our neighbors. Further on in the Leviticus chapter this occurs: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”  There is no exception to the command, in other words. 

The questioner and the crowd before Jesus were well aware of the context of this second command and likely squirmed over their own failures to love. Even if we can say, “Oh, I love God wholeheartedly and more than anyone or anything else,” can we say, “I love my neighbor as myself, and my behavior toward my neighbor is in line with the expectations of Jesus’s Testament?” I’m feeling a little uncomfortable right now.

Running Ahead of God

Exodus 17:1-7, Numbers 20:1-13; Matthew 17:1-8

Preached at Tigard Community Friends Church

Oct. 6, 2019

            I mentioned last week that we have dug 80+ holes for trees, shrubs and plants, and some of those holes were into rocks. We did have enough sense to wait until rain softened the top 4 inches of soil, but nothing softened the rocks.

            I really enjoyed the work, to be honest. I watched my spouse use the 26-pound prybar to evict sizable rocks and break up the hard clay, and I used it myself (though I thought I might lose my balance on the sloping surface, fall on prybar and break out my front teeth). One day, I felt a decided burning in my tricep and thought, “Well, that’s enough for the day.” So I waited a day or two before using that prybar again. And I congratulated myself on paying attention to my body.

            A couple of weeks into heavy digging, I noticed my hands were really sore in the morning. They got better as I used them during the day, and when I really got going, endorphins took all the pain away. Then my middle fingers on both sides started catching in the phenomenon known as trigger finger. Now I get them caught in the shape of claws and they stick there for a bit until I can pry them open. They wake me up in the night to complain. So I warm them up, massage them with various liniments, and continue digging. 

            The amount of work I did made me proud of myself, and I wanted to impress my spouse when he got home each day. Also, I just love planting things. So I pressed on, until a little voice whispered, “You might want to get those hands looked at.” I made an appointment and got referred to physical therapy. Where my therapist “congratulated” me on doing so much hard work as a happy way to transition into telling me I’d better take it easy if I want my hands to improve. This is annoying. I could, of course, ignore her warning and persist with my shoveling and raking and digging. But I’m going to try to listen and obey.

            The significance of my story is that all the work I was doing was positive, and I enjoyed doing it despite all the aches and pains that ensued from it. But I didn’t quickly listen to when to ease up, and now I owe my body some rest. I pressed on when I should have put my feet up. Maybe some of you can relate. 

            On a day off from work at the yearly meeting (denominational) office, I thought about what things I should get done, and I asked God, “What do you want me to do today?” And, to my surprise, God said, in my inner self, “It’s a nice sunny day; get outside and enjoy it.” So I went and sat in my swing. Another time, after the career disappointment I mentioned, I said, probably angrily, to God, “Now what? What am I supposed to do now?” And God said, “You don’t have to achieve another thing in your whole remaining life. I’m fine with that.” Notice God didn’t say, “I forbid you to achieve” or “you better not try another job.” Just that God didn’t require me to continue to be ambitious and aspirational, God isn’t pushing me to fulfill my potential, God is just happy for me to be.

            I’ll add, right up front, that my whole spiritual life took a turn for the better when, as a young adult, I heard Bill Vaswig at Newberg Friends Church say, “Jesus promised that the Spirit would guide us into truth, so why not ask what the Spirit of truth would have you do, take some time and space to listen, and then do what you hear.” St. Augustine said, “Love God and do what you will, acting always out of love.” (No law but the law of love: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.) This sounds enormously free and a little scary if we aren’t accustomed to working without a net of rules and guidelines, without expectations we are trying to meet.

            (Just a word about what I “hear” when I say I hear God. Some of what I hear are mental impressions, metaphors, ideas about things I’m turning over in my mind. George MacDonald said that God sits in the darkness where the light of our consciousness goes out and sends us up beautiful things. Sometimes also, when I’m working on a course of action, I receive in my mind a simply factual statement about what I need to do next, such as “take the day off,” or “take the next step in forgiveness,” or, in the middle of an argument with my spouse, “you know you’re going to have to get over this, so watch what you say.” God’s word doesn’t come clad in shaming, guilt-producing, manipulative language. I’ve never had God thunder at me, despite my various wayward tendencies.)

            And look at the arrangement in the garden, before humans took their fate into their own hands. Every evening, after the humans doing anything they wanted to (except that one thing of eating the fruit of the Tree of Death), God showed up to walk and talk with them. This sounds like a golden age to me, and we do keep trying, on our own steam, to get back to the garden.

Last week I mentioned the problem of running ahead of God. God wants humans to live in ongoing conversation and responsiveness to God’s leading. The temptation in the garden speaks to us of human beings running ahead of where God leads, putting our own ideas of how we want things to be in the place of listening to God, pushing forward because that’s what we know how to do.

            So today, I want us to look at the story of Moses, who led the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery to the edge of the promised land. I am going to simplify the story, leaving out huge portions to focus on three incidents in Moses’s life.

            To recap, for those who are unfamiliar. Moses was born a Hebrew in Egypt at a time when all Hebrew boy babies were supposed to be killed at birth. His midwives disobeyed this law, and his mother nursed him up until she felt he could survive, then put him into a little boat on the river, where he was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. She brought him up as a prince in Egypt, and she employed his mother to be his nanny.

            One day Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and he flew into a rage and killed the Egyptian. (This is Moses acting on his own, by the way.) He fled the country and went to work as a shepherd at the back of beyond. After decades, God got in touch with Moses via a miraculous burning bush, and God told Moses to  use what was in his hand, which was his shepherd’s rod. This rod became imbued with powers that looked magical: it could turn into a snake and then back, for instance. God sent Moses back to Egypt, saying, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say.” So Moses went.

 After a lengthy negotiation period between Moses, Pharaoh and God, Pharaoh let the Hebrews go into the wilderness to worship God. When Pharaoh saw that they had escaped, he and his army pursued them, thinking them trapped by the Red Sea. But God told Moses to lift up his shepherd’s rod over the water, and it parted so that the Hebrews could escape.

Now I’m going to take you to three times when the Hebrews murmured against God and complained to Moses about having no water. The first time was not long after their escape across the bed of the Red Sea. Three days into the wilderness they ran out of water.  The only water was a stream called “Bitter” (Hebrew: Marah) because of its nasty taste. They couldn’t drink the water. And God said to Moses, “Take the tree I’m pointing out and throw it into the stream.” Moses did exactly that, and the water became sweet and drinkable. Moses took the opportunity to point out to the Hebrews how important it was to listen to God and do what God says.

Some time later, the people arrived in another place in the wilderness where there was no water. Keep in mind that they had livestock as well as families along, so there was a lot at stake in having an adequate source of water. Moses asked God for help, saying “Help! They are about to stone me to death!” and God replied, “Take the elders of the people with you, and bring your shepherd’s rod that struck the sea. I will go with you to the rock, and you will smite the rock with your shepherd’s rod, and water will come out of it.” So Moses obeyed God’s word, and indeed, water flowed out of the rock.

Much later, after the Hebrews have reached the promised land and denied themselves entrance by their cowardice and then disobedience, they arrive again at the place in the wilderness where there is no water. They complain against Moses and God, saying, “Why have you brought us up into the wilderness to die of thirst? Why have you taken us out of Egypt, a place of figs and pomegranates, to this evil place?”

So Moses went to seek God’s face and will. And the Lord spoke to Moses, and said, “Take your shepherd’s rod, bring your brother Aaron along, and gather the people together. Then speak to the rock, and water will gush out of it right before their eyes.” Moses got Aaron, picked up his shepherd’s rod, and gathered the people together.

And he said to them, “Listen up, you rebels! Must we fetch you water out of this rock?” Then he smote the rock with his shepherd’s rod. Nothing happened. So he struck it again. Uh-oh.

Moses does not follow God’s leading. Moses takes the rod into his own hands and does what worked in the past, rather than trusting that this time, it will be enough to be simply obedient and speak to the rock. Now, God is kind and the people are thirsty, and God still provides water gushing from the rock. But there will be consequences for Moses.

Some here may have a hard time believing the miraculous parts of this story, thinking of wizard’s wands, and magic spells, and so on. And certainly, in Egypt Pharaoh’s sorcerers were able to match Moses miracle for miracle up to a point (which, somewhat amusingly, was the plague of lice. They could make frogs but not lice. Perhaps once you’ve hidden a louse up your sleeve, it sticks around.) And I don’t want to worry about defending whether these things did or did not happen exactly as written in the Bible. What is written is for our correction, encouragement and instruction in right living, so that’s how we’ll use it.

What I want us to focus on is that the Bible faithfully recounts both Moses’s obedience and Moses’s disobedience. The Bible tells that this man, who talked “mouth to mouth” with God, chose, after decades of obedience, to take matters into his own hands and do what worked in the past.  And God took note of this break in relationship. Moses did not live to enter the promised land after all his wandering through the wilderness with the wayward Hebrews. Instead, God took Moses up on a mountain to see the promised land, and said, “Because you rebelled (the Hebrew word is Marah, like the bitter stream) against my commandment in the strife of the congregation and did not honor my name and word as holy at the water before the congregation, you may not enter the promised land.”

This is instructive to us. The life of the Christian is a life lived in obedience to the living Word, God’s Holy Spirit, a daily and ordinary obedience. We are always likely to let the clatter and conflict around us rattle us so that we can’t trust what God is saying to us. We are likely instead to do what worked before. When we disobey, our actions have consequences. Otherwise, our actions do not have any meaning. But God is not harsh with us. I notice that God allowed Moses to draw water from the rock because God is kind and gracious. And as an important side note, God promises Moses that he will be gathered unto his people, which seems positive, perhaps even more positive than entering the physical promised land. So though Moses didn’t get to fulfill his hope of entering the promised land, he moved on into a dimension of unbroken and unbreakable conversation and relationship with God.

Jesus showed us what it looks like to be a human being in living, continual, responsive conversation with God. He said that he did nothing but what his Father told him to do, and that we could see God by looking at Jesus. If you have questions about why Jesus did one thing with a particular person and something else with another, perhaps here is your answer. He was and is responding to the guidance of his Father in his responses to individual human beings.

One day toward the end of the three years Jesus ministered publicly, he took Peter, James and John up a mountain (reminding us of all those mountains Moses climbed to be with God). On that mountain, Jesus was transfigured: he lit up from within and his clothing glowed with light (reminding us of how Moses’s face glowed with light). He looked for once like the Son of God might be expected to look.  And importantly, Jesus had visitors on the mount where he was transfigured. Here is Moses, along with the prophet Elijah, signifying that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets.

And because humans want to memorialize big events like this one, Peter says, “Let us build three tabernacles here for you, Moses, and Elijah.” You see, if there are tabernacles there, people can make pilgrimages, people can hope to capture some of that experience again. People like to have a place of worship that holds still so they can find it whenever they want.

But God says in response to Peter’s suggestion: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” And isn’t that the way of following Jesus? We tend to pray at Jesus, telling Jesus what should happen next. Like Peter, we find it challenging to be quiet so we can hear Jesus, so we know what our next act of worshipful obedience will be. God doesn’t give us a nice shrine we can revisit every year or every week. We get an ongoing, intimate, personal, instructive, loving relationship with the Son of God.

Jesus promised us a relationship to God like his Father/Son relationship. Like Moses, like Jesus, we too can have an intimate (if usually invisible) mouth to mouth conversation with God, and our part in life is to enjoy that relationship and do what God tells us.