Several Summer Fun bags were delivered to our Sunday School children today! Be sure to check in between your front doors, your front door knob or mailbox. If you didn't get one, please ask me for one, I will be happy to get one to you. These bags contain instructions for earning the Golden Ticket and the Golden Ticket checklist, as well as a little something else.
Sunday School Students stay tuned to find out how you can earn your own Golden Ticket and to find out how it works. Sunday School students will soon get a letter detailing all the necessary information needed to earn one of these Golden Tickets.
We had a great community worship service this morning! We welcomed Rev. Rick & Mary Warne back this morning and Rick preached our message. The music was amazing; combined choirs from community churches, soloists and groups. And the food was really great afterwards, too!
Many thanks to EVERYONE who helped out in any way.
It was a great time to renew old acquaintances and make new friends!
Deuteronomy 20:10-20, Matthew 5:21-26, Psalm 72:1-14
Two days ago, Canadians everywhere stood up a little taller, threw their heads back a little further and stuck their chests out a bit more as their hearts swelled with some well-founded pride. But as they heard or sang the noble tones of the Canadian national anthem, it was quite possible that some felt a little stirring of frustration in their patriotic hearts because, if you have been paying any attention to national affairs lately, you know that there has been talk of that thing that fills the hearts of all Presbyterians with fear and dread. There has been talk of change.
Now, I have absolutely no intention of getting into the middle of a discussion about whether or not Canada ought to change the words of its national anthem. I’ll let others argue and fight over the virtues and vices of change. I just mention it (with some trepidation) because it leads us to an issue that I do want to raise. All the discussion has focussed our attention on one line that we all learned like this: “True patriot love in all thy sons command.” My question is this: whether or not we all want to be called “sons,” what does “true patriot love,” look like today and what does it mean to “stand on guard” for our country?
When those words we are presently disagreeing over were first added to the anthem (and, no, they aren’t actually the original English words, they were changed in 1914), at that time I think that people had a pretty clear understanding of what they thought “true patriot love” looked like. It seems very likely that that a reference to “sons” was added as a way to boost the recruiting of the young sons of Canada to go and stand on guard for their country in the battlefields of the Great War in Europe.
And, while I know that we would offer nothing but praise for the sons and daughters of Canada, past and present, who have served their country in the military, surely none of us would suggest that that is the only way to give patriotic service to your country. So I think, in the aftermath of Canada Day 2016, we have to be willing to ask what are the best ways for us to stand on guard for our country today.
There is a commandment in the Book of Deuteronomy that I think might be helpful to us as we think of these things. It comes in the midst of a section that is all about war, sieges and other not-so-pleasant stuff. There is a whole lot of it that would be absolutely unacceptable today: attacks, wholesale slaughter and mayhem.
I included that part of the passage, not because if find it admirable, but because it is a fair depiction of what people back then were dealing with. It was generally accepted that this was the kind of stuff you had to do in that world to stand on guard and preserve your country. Taking care of your country meant that there would be a difficult struggle in which some people would be hurt. I’m not saying that was wonderful or glorious; it was just how things were.
But I notice, in the midst of this struggle to build up their land, a curious law comes up. It is something that applies specifically to laying siege, a common part of war in the ancient world. When your enemies shut themselves up behind protective walls, the business of getting them out of their secure location could be very difficult indeed.
The law restricts where you can get wood from while conducting a siege because wood was always needed. Armies needed firewood, stockades, ladders, towers and a host of other things all made of wood – wood that they would commonly cut down from the surrounding countryside. “If you besiege a town for a long time,” the commandment states, “…you must not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them. Although you may take food from them, you must not cut them down…. You may destroy only the trees that you know do not produce food.”
It is a very specific commandment very much tailored to the kinds of warfare that people engaged in at that time and to the materials that they used. On a very practical level, you might say that it has absolutely no application to modern life at all because, first of all, the besieging of cities almost never happens in modern warfare and, second of all, modern armies do not use hardly any wood for their arms or defences. So I guess we can just forget about this one, an ancient commandment that has absolutely no modern application.
Or does it? Maybe if it was just an arbitrary rule that God gave for no particular reason, we could say that. But I don’t happen to believe that God gives arbitrary rules. There is reasoning behind this commandment that we need to pay attention to. The prohibition is specifically against cutting fruit trees to obtain wood to besiege a city. In that part of the world, it would include plants like olive trees, fig trees, date palms and pomegranates trees. The thing that is special about fruit trees, of course, is that they produce food. But it is also very true that they were made of wood and wood could be very useful in a siege.
When you are conducting a siege, when you are in the midst of most any military situation, you are almost always dealing with a certain amount of desperation. The need for victory seems paramount in that situation and you feel the need to use whatever resources you have to feed that victory. The temptation to cut down any tree (fruit bearing or otherwise) when you need wood that desperately is very real.
But this commandment says no. Why? Well, understand this fact (a fact that ancient Israelites would have understood without being told): fruit trees require a long-term investment. Take olive trees for example – perhaps the most import fruit tree for them because olive oil provided their diet’s only source of fat, without which human beings cannot survive. Did you know that if you plant an olive tree and allow it to grow, it will not produce any olives at all for five or maybe six years? Thereafter it will produce a bigger and better crop every year until it is about fifty years old when it produces a truly abundant crop but also begins to die. Fruit trees such as olive trees take a long term commitment but if you let them grow undisturbed for many decades, they will bless you in great abundance.
So that is what this commandment is talking about. In that world, cutting down a fruit tree to get wood to besiege a city was about sacrificing years and years of abundant production of olives or figs or dates for the sake of the immediate need for victory in battle. An olive grove sacrificed in order to take a city was something that would take five decades – half a century – to replace.
Can I make a confession? When it comes to Biblical commandments, I always prefer to hear them in the King James Version of the Bible. Modern translations just don’t seem to cut it. So for me, this particular commandment will always sound like this: “thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them.” So I’m wondering, given what this commandment meant to the ancient Israelites (what it meant about not sacrificing long term blessings and life to seek short term gains), what would be a consistent application of it in our modern world. What does it mean today to “not destroy the trees thereof.”
What does it mean, for example, if you happen to run a company or corporation? I know that it’s tough to be in business today. And one of the things that makes it particularly tough is the unrelenting expectation of growth and profits. The company has to make money for its shareholders and the more it makes, the better the rewards for management. That is just what business is like these days, it seems.
What that means is that the returns for this quarter become the thing that you obsess over kind of like you might obsess over getting enough wood to win a siege if were in the middle of one. And when short term gains become the most important consideration, what do you do? Do you cut back on research and development, laying people off, in order to trim expenses this month because research and development may take years to come up with that new product that won’t bring profits until years after that? Do you fire all of your employees who have experience because they’re expensive and replace them with cheap temporary workers? Sure, the temps won’t care about the long term health of your company and will probably mess things up completely within a few years, but boy will the balance sheet look really good this quarter? Those are the kinds of things that companies find themselves doing as they prioritize short term gains. I suggest that what they are really doing is destroying the trees thereof.
And if it were just businesses who were so tragically focused on those short term needs, that would be trouble enough because, of course, these companies affect the lives of many people including their employees and the communities in which they are established until they decide to move to some other country where they can pay people less.
But this fixation on short terms needs infects more than just the business world. Even as I celebrated our country on Canada Day, I continued to be concerned with how our country has fallen into such thinking.
Too often, it seems national decision making has seemed to be all in service of that short term with little consideration for the long term costs. When, for example, the price of oil rose to unprecedented heights several years ago, our government saw this wonderful opportunity to create all kinds of prosperity in the economy. Huge amounts of money could be made, thousands of really well paid jobs could be created so all kinds of resources were dumped into and used up in the tar sands areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
And, don’t get me wrong, the benefits to the economy, to employment and to government revenues were fantastic. If there might be long-term losses in terms of the irreversible pollution of groundwater and surface water, environmental destruction and increases in greenhouse grass emissions, well those problems would be with us for the long term and we could deal with them later. That seemed to be the thinking. The short term gains made theoretical long term risks seem okay. Of course, the trade-off didn’t seem so great when the price of oil took a nosedive.
But that is exactly the kind of thinking that often dominates our political thinking. It is practically built into a system that is geared towards winning the next election cycle. That is why we must do our best to support those rare leaders who are willing to lift their heads up from the ground and look down the road to where our policies are leading us. Sadly, however, we often end up destroying the trees thereof instead.
As loyal Canadians, we promise to stand on guard for our country. We promise it every time we sing the anthem and nobody is talking about changing thosewords. But if we’re going to stand on guard for this country, we need to be willing to look beyond immediate threats and short term needs. To truly stand on guard for Canada means that we have to find a vision for long term greatness and prosperity. To do otherwise is simply to destroy the trees thereof.
And all of this continues to happen at all levels of society. In the church it is so easy to focus only on our immediate needs and not bother to look beyond that to the mission that God is calling us to in the world. But without a mission, without a vision for the long-term, the people will perish.
In our personal lives, even there, God would encourage you to lift up your eyes and look at where you are going and not get bogged down by the needs of the moment. God is wise, he knows that if we can’t do that, we will end up destroying the trees thereof.
There is great wisdom in this ancient commandment. Though it was written for a very different people living in a very different world, it can certainly apply to many things today. I believe that its concern for looking beyond the needs of the moment comes directly from God through the scripture. There are so many reasons why we continue to need to be cautious about cutting down the trees thereof.
#TodaysTweetableTruth "Don't destroy the trees thereof" Standing on guard for Canada means guarding longterm life, not just shortterm needs.
Exodus 20:1-7, Matthew 5:17-20, 33-37, Psalm 119:1-8
S
omewhere around 3500 years ago (as the story is told) there was a group of tribes wandering together through the desert when they encountered their God in a pretty remarkable way. And the God that they met in that desert apparently had some clear ideas about how ancient tribal people like them needed to live their lives and what they had to do. And so God gave them commandments – rules that they were supposed to live by. Even more important, he promised them that if they lived according to these rules they would be blessed and live good lives in a land to which he would lead them.
And they were good commandments and wise commandments. But they were also tailor-made for tribal people living somewhere about 3500 years ago. What I mean is that, for them, the application of the commandments was usually pretty straightforward. The situations that they came across in their normal lives were pretty much anticipated by the commands.
But today the world has changed. We don’t live as desert nomads or tribal people anymore, yet we still revere those ancient commandments. They are part of our Scriptures. Though, as followers of Christ, we don’t believe that we are justified by following commands (we are justified by grace through faith) we would still like to know that we are on the right side of these commandments, at least as much as we can be. But the application of a 3500 year old commandment may not always be so obvious in the world today.
For example, this morning we read one of the big ten – one that many Christians look at with a great deal of seriousness. It goes, in the best known translation of the King James Version, like this: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.”
What did this commandment mean to the ancient tribal people who first received it and passed it on? It is a little hard to know. For one thing, they lived in a pre-literate society – a society in which very few people (if any) had any experience with the written word. And we know that pre-literate people thought about words very differently from how we do. The spoken word, for them, had remarkable almost magical power to shape reality. Words were alive. They sprang into being when they were spoken and they lived as long as people heard them and repeated them. Understand that we don’t see words in quite the same way that they did.
And it wasn’t just words. Names, in particular, had great power for them. The name of a person and how it was used was able to define and limit the power and influence that person had in the community. So the people who first heard this commandment had a pretty clear understanding of what it meant to take the name of their God and to use it in vain – to use the power of that name to support things that they had no business applying it to.
Application of the commandment was pretty straightforward for them. But, as you may have noticed, people have struggled with the specific application ever since – especially as people have sought to live it out in very different cultures where words don’t have quite the same powers and where names don’t quite mean as much as they once did.
For example, when Ancient Judaism went through a massive cultural shift (when they transformed from a largely illiterate society to one where reading and writing were valued and taught to everyone – which didn’t happen, by the way, until after the time of Christ – Jews began to apply this commandment in a very particular way. They became so worried about the possibility that they might misuse the name of God – perhaps even by accident – that they stopped using it altogether.
To this very day most Jews will not pronounce the name of God at all. When the ancient Hebrew name of God, which was probably pronounced something like Yahweh appears in the Scriptures, they simply will not read the name aloud and will substitute another word altogether. Many will even refuse to pronounce the English word God and the translations of that word into other languages too. I cannot think that it was ever the intent of the commandment in the original context to outlaw the pronunciation of certain syllables, but that is how later Jews made their peace with this commandment, perhaps out of an overabundance of caution.
And then, of course, there is the question of how Christians have dealt with it. I think if you were to ask most Christians today what it means to “Take the name of the Lord in vain,” they would probably say it has something to do with what we call cursing. They would say that it means that certain words and phrases are just out of bounds – at least in certain contexts. For example, it is not that we can’t say the name of God or the name of Jesus Christ but I certainly know Christians who frown on people saying, “Oh my God,” or “Jesus Christ,” when they are not actually praying, in church or in the midst of a theological discussion. In many ways, it is a similar response to the Jewish one except that, instead of not saying the name of God at all, we are just really careful about when we say it.
Of course, many will also push this just a little bit farther and apply this commandment to inappropriate speech in general. As you may have been told, there are certain words in the English language that you are just not supposed to say. They are words that are so bad, apparently, that I dare not tell you what they are – especially not here and now. Comedian George Carlin called them the seven words that you cannot say on television. You can’t say them in church either. I hope I don’t need to give you more information than that.
There is nothing wrong with the words themselves. They are just sets of sounds – the same sounds that are used in other languages with no offence. And they are not even strange or innovative words. They are, in fact, among the oldest words in the English language. People have been saying them for a very long time. Nor is there anything necessarily offensive in the meaning of the words. We have other words that we use to refer to the same things that are quite acceptable. Nevertheless, I know many Christians who would extend the rule about “taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain” to the use of such words.
So is that what it is really about – prohibiting the use of certain syllables? If the original commandment reflects, in any way, the real concerns of the eternal God, I have my doubts that God has that much of a grudge against certain words and certain syllables in certain languages. Words and manners of speaking are, above all, cultural matters. Certain words and expressions are acceptable within certain cultures and others are not.
While I am a great lover of the English language and would very much like to hear people use the language better than they do these days, I am very much aware that this comes from my own cultural bias. I know that, as a middle class white man who is a lifelong Christian, I have learned a bias against certain ways of speaking.
And some of this is actually problematic. There can be a not so subtle racism to it. Some of the words and phrases that we might call “taking the Lord’s name in vain” are simply expressions that belong to a culture that is not our own: maybe the black inner-city culture, another generation or another economic group. I think we are on dangerous grounds when we begin to treat cultural differences as matters of morality. So I really have some questions about how we have traditionally treated this particular commandment.
But I do believe that even ancient commandments like this one matter. I do believe that, in this commandment, there is wisdom that we need to figure out how to follow if we are going to thrive in the world today. That is what these commandments are for. So is there a way to understand and live out this commandment without becoming obsessed with certain words, certain combinations of sounds and certain syllables? It is a commandment that is intended, clearly, to instruct our speech, but, as far as I am concerned, it has to be about more than just the surface or the incidental sounds of that speech.
Remember that ancient people did believe in the power of words, especially in the power of a name to shape and to change reality. In this, they may well have been wiser than us. Words are more powerful than we often realize. What if this commandment was given to caution us more about how we speak than it was to prohibit certain words and sounds? Is that a radical idea?
Let’s say that you have issues with certain people in your community – people who are different from you in some way. It happens often enough. Maybe you struggle to understand a people who come from a different race, a different culture or background. Maybe it is because they are new to your place and don’t understand you or people like you. That is understandable. It is a thing that happens often enough in this world and that we all have to work through from time to time. I don’t necessarily see a problem with that, if you are working on it.
But what if, instead of working towards greater understanding, you just decide that it is you against them (whoever they are). And, what’s more, you decide that God is on your side against them. Suddenly, because you have adopted this mode of speaking, understanding has become impossible. Do you know what you have done? You have just taken the powerful name of God and applied it to an empty thing. You have taken the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
In fact, if you reject anybody, it doesn’t matter who they are, who is simply being the person that God created them to be, who is just trying to be true to themselves even though that may be uncomfortable to you, what have you done? Were they not created in the image of God just as you were? If you are denying who they are, are you not also denying the image of God within them? And if you are doing that, aren’t you taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain?
If you use God and the name of God, to accomplish something that serves yourself above all else, if you use that name to convince people to hate others and go to war against them, if you use the name of God to demonize people just because you don’t see things like they do, are you not taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain?
If you say “God bless my country” to the exclusion of all others, if you demand that God make your team win the game, if you proclaim that God is on your side, are you not making your country, your team and your side to be the master over your God? Are you not taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain?
What we say matters. The ancient Israelites certainly got that right. You can do more harm with a few misplaced words than you can do without just about anything. This powerful commandment could go a long way towards teaching us to be cautious about using the name of God to achieve our own goals, gain our own power or to bring other groups or individuals down.
What do we do with this commandment? Traditionally we just use it to police polite language. I am not so sure that the great Lawgiver would be impressed with how we use it. If we really took the application of this commandment to heart, I believe it would lead us to a new concern for how use our language about God for good and not for ill in this world.
#TodaysTweetableTruth Taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain: about outlawing bad words or how we use God to achieve selfcentred goals?
Week after week, we always have important and meaningful things going on at St. Andrews. Even though Summer has now officially begun that is still true for June 26. This Sunday:
We will welcome three more members into our congregation. Three weeks ago we had seven new members, but there were three who were unable to be present because of important family reasons. We rejoice to welcome them this week!
Martin Bohl will be filling in at the organ this week and next. Martin is a very talented organist and we will certainly be blessed by his musical leadership
We will honour the work of Amy and Laura with our youth and thank them for their contribution to the life of Christ's church.
The minister will begin a new summer series of sermons focusing on ancient commandments and asking what it would look like if we applied them to life today. The first commandment: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."
Sunday, October 16th, 2016 at Crieff Hills Conference Centre. Registration will begin at 1:30 pm, the walk/run to start at 2:00 pm. Fun & Food afterwards!
If you like, you can choose a specific person to sponsor. The church who raises the most money (in the Presbytery of Waterloo-Wellington) will win a lunch, so please help us!
