This morning, with about one month to go before the Jeff-a-thon I met with Herb Gale of Knox Church in Guelph at Crieff Hills on the site where the event will take place. It was a beautiful morning on a most beautiful site. We were going to try out the course of the Jeff-a-thon.
We started running and did a couple of laps around a bigger course than the walkathon will actually take place on
Herb set our pace (slower than I'm used to) and it was a wonderful beautiful start as the sun came up. On our first lap we scared at least three very big deer off of our path.
After about four kilometers we ran into some vagabond named Lawrence Pentalow who actually straightened us out about what the actual route will be:
After 5 kilometers, Herb said that he had done what he could do and left me. I continued (at a faster pace) for another 3.25 kilometers. It was a wonderful morning and I can't wait to see you all at the Jeff-a-thon on October 16. The path is a joy to run though I must admit that there is a bit more up and down than I expected. (You can see the graph above.)
isten, Heldai, Tobijah, and Jedaiah, we’ve got a problem and we need to talk about it. Our religion is in trouble. Yes, we have religious freedom and people are able to worship as they choose, but they just don’t seem to be choosing our religion anymore, at least not like they once did. Oh, there was a time when people would come together in places like this and lift up their voices in prayer and worship. It was the place to be and everyone felt like they were a part of something that mattered.
But then the world changed. Now, all of a sudden it seems that people have other places that they need to be. Their lives are in other places like Babylon and Persia and they don’t seem to need the old ways of their ancestors anymore.
But don’t you worry, Heldai, Tobijah and Jedaiah, because we have a plan. We’re going to get a bunch of supplies together and raise some funds and we’re going to build us a temple. And it will be the biggest, best and most beautiful temple that you have ever seen. And then we’re going to set up the best of worship services, festivals and sacrifices in that holy space. You’ll see, when we do that, people will come from all over the place to see and to be part of it.
So, what do you say, Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah, will you give us a donation of, say, 20,000 talents each so that we can build it? If you do, and if we build it, they will surely come.
That is essentially the pitch of the prophet Zechariah in our reading from the book that bears his name this morning. The issue he is dealing with is the same issue that we are dealing with in the church today: the general decline of traditional religious institutions.
And, make no mistake, that is what we are dealing with. We are living in a time that has seen the fastest decline in affiliation to all religion that has ever been seen in Western society. The statistics and social science are undeniable. The decline is no longer seen just in certain denominations or certain theological points of view. All are declining. It is not just so-called liberal churches for example. In fact, for about a decade now the fastest declining denomination in the United States of America has been the ultra-conservative Southern Baptist Church.
Some people don’t see the decline, of course, because there are, always have been and always will be significant exceptions – specific churches and groups of churches that see dynamic growth. You can definitely find those churches in most cities and we ought to study them and learn from them.
They are not all, by the way, churches that have the same theology. Some of them are extremely conservative and some extremely liberal with all the shades in between. The defining characteristic of a growing church is no longer its theological bent, but there are certainly other factors that do matter.
This decline is made all the more dramatic because it is part of a generational shift. The incoming generation, often called the “millennials” and the generation that is coming up after them (that nobody has named yet) is the least engaged in religion ever.
I don’t tell you all of this because I think it is a reason to despair or give up on the church. I actually feel that, more than anything, these are hopeful signs and that God is using these sorts of cultural changes to renew his church so that it will be strong and ready to meet the challenges of the future. But, in order to find that strength, one thing is necessary. We need to respond to these challenges in the best ways possible.
What we read this morning from the Book of Zechariah is one possible response to a very similar situation. The prophet is concerned because of the decline of the traditional religion of the people of Israel. The reasons for this decline are different – have come mostly because of a major disruption of the entire society and culture by an enforced exile of the people to Babylon. But the challenge is very similar.
Zechariah’s response is to say, “We need to build something really impressive here.” He is trying to rally the people to build a temple. And he encourages them to do so by making a promise: “Those who are far off shall come and help to build the temple of the Lord; and you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you. This will happen if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God.”The promise is a promise from God through the prophet and the promise is, “If you build it, they will come.”
And that seems to be the solution that people most often go to. If the institution has fallen on hard times, people’s automatic response is to say, “Let’s build up the institution and make it beautiful and impressive and that is what will make everyone want to be part of it. And I will admit that there are times when that kind of approach is the one that works. It seems to have worked (at least to a certain degree) in Zechariah’s time. People did return and there was a renewal of the faith of Israel. I suspect that the terrible cultural loss that was the Babylonian exile left people hungry for the stability that a new temple institution promised.
Of course, there were complaints, there always are. “This new temple just isn’t like the old one.” People got nostalgic for the “good old days.” That is something that always seems to happen whenever you try that “if you build it” approach to institutional growth. Nothing ever seems to measure up to the “good old days.” That is definitely the kind of complaint that we hear all the time in the church to this very day. But, when the conditions are right, it certainly can be true that, if you build it, they will come.
I don’t believe that we are living in such a time, though. In our gospel reading this morning, we catch Jesus at a very interesting moment. Jesus, we are told in the first verse of the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, has just left the temple. This will be, by the way, the last time that he ever leaves the temple in this Gospel. He will never enter it again. And he clearly does not leave it on the best of terms. He has already effectively shut down the temple’s revenue stream by stopping the people who are buying and selling and changing money. And he only just finished expressing his disgust at the hypocrisy and the favouritism towards the rich that he sees in the place.
His leaving the temple institution at this moment is not just a matter of stage direction. It is an act that is full of meaning. In fact, his leaving the institution of the temple is analogous to the exit from the church of some people in our own day because they have become disillusioned with the institutional church due to the failings or hypocrisy that they have seen.
And the disciples see what Jesus is doing. Of course they do. And it is distressing to them that this man whom they love and respect should turn his back on the central institution of Jewish religion and culture. So what do they do? They try to give him a reason to stay around, just like we try to do when we see people drifting away from the church.
And what is the reason they offer? “Look, Teacher,” they say, “what large stones and what large buildings!” Take careful note of what they are doing here because it is the very same thing that we do all the time. They think that the way to get Jesus to stay within the institutions of the Jewish faith is by drawing his attention to what has been built and how impressive it is. They are saying, “They have built it, you should come.”
Obviously this approach doesn’t work with Jesus. In fact, it sets him off on a rant that will go on through the rest of the chapter – a rant in which he basically says, “Stones? Is that the best you can do? You think that stones will impress me? I’ll tell you something, in no time there won’t be one stone left on top of another in this place.” His message is that the “if you build it” approach may even lead to the fall of the institution and that even more than that will fall apart.
The passage in Zechariah does teach us that there are times when you can accomplish a lot with an “if you build it, they will come” approach. It is a necessary approach when you are living in times, like Zechariah was, when the basic cultural infrastructure of a society has been taken apart. But Jesus was not living in such a time. The issue in his day was that abuse and hypocrisy had called the institutions themselves into question. This was something that Jesus specialized in pointing out. In such times, people will not come just because you build it.
I believe that we are living in such times today. Certainly many people have the same reaction to institutions as Jesus did. When they begin to lose their relevance and luster, the impulse is to leave and to predict that the stones will not stand for long one on top of the other. One thing that that means for the church of the present and the near future is that we cannot count on people coming just because we build it, which is a problem for the church because that seems to be our biggest growth strategy.
Jesus didn’t grow the movement around him by building anything. Did you ever think about that? He built no buildings and didn’t even establish any sort of formalized structure. He didn’t even establish any rituals or worship liturgies apart from the two very simple sacraments (the Lord’s Supper and baptism) and one prayer. He established some leaders but no power structures. All of those trappings of institutionalism came later as the church struggled to create institutions out of what Jesus had begun.
But, while Jesus didn’t have any real “building project,” he still managed to get people excited about being part of what he was doing and involved in working towards changing the world. That is why I do not think that we ought to be worried about the future of the church. Yes, it is true that people will not come to the church these days just because we have built it, but that does not mean that they won’t come. We need to approach the invitation more like Jesus did.
We will look deeper into the approach that Jesus took next week, but the basic idea is pretty simple. Jesus could have waited for people to come to him, but he just didn’t. Do you remember the time when Jesus made a big splash in Capernaum. He healed a woman in the synagogue, cast out a few demons and by the end of the day people were lining up at the door of Simon Peter’s house where Jesus was staying to see him. He could have stayed there and waited for people from all over Galilee to come to him. Peter’s house could have become the church that he built. That was even what Peter was expecting him to do and when Jesus disappeared the next morning he hunted Jesus down and angrily demanded that he come back and stay.
But Jesus said no. Jesus said he had to go out to where the people were, he and all of his disciples. He had to take the kingdom of God to where they were and not wait for them to come to where he had built some institution of the kingdom of God. He had to invite them to come and see.
I know that the other approach sounds so much easier to us. If we could just build it – you know, maintain this beautiful building and our amazing programs and activities and people would just come. We wouldn’t have to engage them. We wouldn’t have to tell people where were were and what we did on Sunday mornings, those who were so inclined would just come on their own. But we are not living in a time when it works like that. We are living in an age when some churches grow but none of them grow just by virtue of being there. We are living in the age where it falls to all believers to let others know that they can come and see.
#140CharacterSermon “If you build it, they will come.” Not how church growth works in an age when people view institutions with suspicion.
have spent some time over these summer months looking at some of the key commandments of the Old Testament and asking how, if at all, they apply to the lives that we live today in a very different world from the one that first received the commandments.
I have saved what I think is the most essential commandment – the one that might just lie at the heart of all of the rest – until the end. The commandment that prohibits the worship of idols is actually quite simple and straightforward, but its very simplicity is what has made it hard for people to follow it. The command says simply this in the best known King James Version: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”
It is specifically a prohibition against making representative art by carving something out of metal, wood or stone. If you wanted to be very literal minded, you could argue that making images by melting and molding or by drawing on pieces of paper or other media are okay and that the commandment only prohibits engraved images. But that doesn’t seem to be the spirit of the commandment. The idea seems to be that any sort of representational art is simply not acceptable.
All of those people who have taken this commandment as part of their heritage – that includes Jews, Muslims and Christians – have had their own ideas about how to observe this commandment. Conservative Jews have tended to look with suspicion on any sort of artwork that represents something that you could recognize. Muslims have even more strongly rejected such art, to such a degree that the only acceptable art in strict Islamic culture is calligraphy – that is, beautifully written texts, ideally of the Koran.
Christians, as in many things, have taken their own approach. They have often ended up arguing and disagreeing over this commandment and what it allows more than any other group. Some of the earliest Christian traditions that fed into what we call today the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches strongly embraced the use of art work as a way of promoting their faith and as a teaching tool for the faithful. That is why the churches of those traditions are often full of beautiful works of art that depict various heroes of the faith and stories from the Bible and from Christian history.
When the Protestant Church came along, there was initially a big reaction against the use of art in churches. Some early Protestants banished all artwork from their churches. The Presbyterians were absolutely one such denomination and the earliest Presbyterian Churches were emptied of all sculptures and the walls were whitewashed. The windows might have colourful stained glass but did not represent anything.
And, as you can imagine, Presbyterians thought they were so much better than everyone else because they didn’t have any artwork while other groups, like the Roman Catholics, tended to see things the other way around and thought they were so much better because they used art work in good ways. That is what we often do with commandments, of course, use them as reasons to put other people down and lift ourselves up. And, honestly, if that’s all we get out of a commandment like this one, I am quite sure that we’ve missed the point.
Is this commandment really about banning artwork? Or is artwork just the surface of a deeper problem that it is trying to get us to deal with?
I have a hard time believing that art itself is the problem. When I think of all of the good that has come out of the ability of very talented human beings to beautifully render the world that they experience, I know that art is a blessing – a divine blessing given by God. This is true of both sacred and secular art.
I know that I would not have the same appreciation of God my creator if I had not spent time contemplating some of my favourite paintings by Monet, Van Gough and Da Vinci. I remember an afternoon spent in a university library in New Jersey where I contemplated a painting of a very angry Jesus that probably taught me more about my saviour than all the studies I have ever read of the Gospels. Art is able to speak to us about earthly things and divine things in ways that words cannot approach. The problem, I am certain, is not art itself. The problem has to do with what we do with the things that we create with our artistry.
Of course, when this commandment was first spoken, it was spoken to people living in a different world. It was a world where it was common to believe, not in one universal God, but in a great variety of gods. Even more important, people believed that, when they made statues and carvings and representations of these gods, it gave them a certain amount of power and influence over them. These idols could be easily manipulated by sacrifices, magic words or rituals with the statues.
The target of this commandment was not the statues and artistic representations themselves but the attitude that generally went with them. What God is saying with this commandment is that he is not a god like these other gods that the people have been used to. He will not be captured within a statue or carving. God will not be manipulated or forced to behave in ways that people may want.
So actually, if all you do with this commandment is read it literally and don’t allow people to make statues, carvings or other works of representational art, you have actually missed the point of it because it is quite possible to ban all of those things and yet still hold onto the attitude that you can use earthly things to try to manipulate God. Idols in the ancient world may have been exclusively made out of statues and carvings but human beings have been infinitely creative when it comes to creating idols.
So let us consider some of the idols that people do use today. What are those things that are made by human hands or minds, that may be good or beautiful in themselves but that people then take and think that they give them the power to say what God will do?
We are in this world surrounded by things and events that just happen and that have no apparant meaning in themselves. But we, as human beings have the ability to look at these seeming random events and find patterns and meaning in them. To take one simple example from recent newspaper headlines, let’s say that somebody invents a brand new item of swimwear for women – a suit that covers the entire body except for the face, feet and hands – and calls it a Burkini. This is, on one level, just a fairly random event. Someone creates a new product and starts selling it – something that happens every single day.
But people don’t just see it as a random event, do they? They see all kinds of meaning in it whether that meaning was intended or not. Some see it as a new symbol of freedom for women because it allows women who come from a culture of extreme modesty the freedom to go to the beach that they didn’t have before. Others, of course, see a symbol of the repression of women and the opposite of freedom. And, of course, there are certainly those who see the burkini as a symbol of much darker things such as terrorism. And so very quickly the idea of the burkini has become much bigger and more laden with meaning than the thing itself. This is something that we human beings do very well. And sometimes the idea of a thing becomes so large that the idea begins to define the thing. That is when we are in the territory of idolatry.
Take the idea of doctrine for example. Doctrine is just a fancy word that means a list of things that people of faith believe. It is, for example, a doctrine of our church that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Another doctrine: we believe that we are saved by grace through faith and not by our works. And doctrines are very good and beautiful. Good doctrine is also true.
But doctrine, no matter how good or true it is, can also become an idol. When you use it, for example, to feel superior to others who might believe differently from you, it becomes a graven image that serves your own desires rather than driving you to become a better person. And when your understanding of your doctrine begins to define God for you in a way that prevents God from acting outside of the box that you have made for him so that God can no longer surprise you or challange your view of the world, you have created an image of your God that is no less immovable than any ancient statue of stone or wood.
Here is another thought: if doctrine can become an idol, so can Scripture. Here, once again, the Bible is a good thing. It is a gift from God to us, given for our benefit and blessing. The Bible is both true and beautiful. And if you are using the Scriptures to teach and challenge yourself to go deeper into your knowledge of God and of yourself, you are using it well. But not everyone uses the Scriptures in that way.
As Christians, we believe that the Bible is authoritative and that it is inspired by God. But we often forget the connection between those two things. The Bible is authoritative because it is inspired by God. In other words, the Bible is not authoritative in itself but it derives that authority from God. God is the ultimate authority and the Scriptures only have authority because they point to that ulimate. The problem comes because the Bible is a defined, earthly thing that people can own and know and master. It is possible for a human being to memorize the whole of the Bible – to know every word of it because it is an earthly object. Not many people know it that well, of course. Few know it as well as they think they do, but it is at least theoretically possible to gain a mastery over this book.
The problem comes when people take their knowledge of this book (whether it is complete or not) and begin to act as if they know the Truth (with a capital T) because they know this book.
I remember when I was much younger thinking in exactly this way – thinking that it was possible for me to always be right. I thought it was simple. All I needed to do was to know what the Bible said about every subject that mattered. If I could quote the Bible, I would always be in the right. It was a very childish and naive worldview of course. The truth can never be reduced down to a single quote and the Bible doesn’t always speak with one voice on all matters anyways, but that was how I thought it worked and many people still think that way today.
When we do that, when we take our mastery of this book and turn it into the mastery of the truth and of the God that it points to, we turn this good thing that is the Bible into a dangerous idol. Yes God inspired the Bible, but whatever that means (and the question of what inspiration is and how it works is a huge question) if God were ever to allow the Bible to define and limit God, at that moment, God would cease to be God. Anytime we take the Bible and think that it defines God and especially when we use our understanding of the Bible to exalt ourselves over others, we are making unto ourselves a graven image.
There is a reason for this commandment. It was given to a people who had a very simple and graphic idea what an idol was. We are not particularly tempted to make idols like they would have thought of them. But that does not mean that we don’t have ways of taking our creations – especially our ideas – and turning them into very powerful idols in their own way.
#140CharacterSermon We have this way of turning our ideas into idols that seek to confine and limit God. This is foolish and dangerous..
he Bible, especially the Old Testament, is just chock full of rules, laws and commandments. They speak to every sort of situation and moral decision but, I’ve got to admit, I have always had a soft spot for those particular commandments that get very specific about the situation. The commandment that we read this morning about not muzzling your ox is a great example, but there is an even better one a few verses after that one.
The commandment goes like this: “If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his...” Okay, I just remembered why we don’t usually talk about this commandment. Let’s just say that she grabs him in a very specific place and leave it at that. But my point isn’t about where she grabs him. It is about how very specific the law is. It is so specific, in fact, that it seems extremely likely that this law was actually written in response to an actual incident. I mean, at some point there were two actual men fighting and the wife of one of them did some specific grabbing and someone was trying to figure out what the specific and reasonable punishment for that action was.
This particular commandment probably represents an actual judgement that was made in a particular case and it got recorded in the scriptures. (And, just for the record, I don’t find the judgement that is made to be particularly reasonable, as the woman ends up losing her hand, but that, also, is a whole other discussion.)
My question is this: what is the application of a very specific commandment like this? I mean, you are fine if the exact same situation arises in exactly the same way again; then you know what to do. But what if the circumstances aren’t exactly the same. What if three men are fighting instead of two? Do we need a whole different commandment to deal with that situation? And what if the woman doesn’t intentionally grab? What if she just brushes something accidentally? Is that a different case entirely? These are the sort of questions that you are often left with when you write you commandments that apply too specifically to certain situations.
And I think that these sorts of questions become more important when we turn from fighting men to the commandment that comes a few verses before it that we read this morning: “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” This is a very specific commandment, but the situation that it speaks to was one that the people who first heard this commandment ran into a lot. You see, most of them were farmers and most of them grew grains like wheat or barley. And when you harvest grain, there are three key steps. You first cut the grain. Then you thresh it by beating the grain with something hard to loosen the chaff that covers the kernel. Then you winnow it or separate the kernels from the chaff, often by throwing it all into the air so that the wind can blow the chaff away while the kernels fall back to the ground.
But sometimes, with certain grains, it could take an awful lot of force to break the chaff away and so one of the best ways to accomplish that was by getting a big, heavy animal with hard hooves (like an ox) to step on it. This was called treading out the grain and it was a very common way to thresh your grain at harvest time.
So what we have in this commandment is a very specific regulation regarding how you ought to treat your ox while it was treading out your grain because, of course, there was an immediate problem whenever you did that. Oxen eat grain. They love it. So it is only natural for your ox to start snacking away at your crop while you are making it tread out your grain. You can see why you might want to prevent that by muzzling your ox while it is treading but this commandment says no, you cannot do that.
And I have absolutely no problem with this commandment. It seems all very reasonable to me that, if you are making your ox work that hard to harvest your crop, why not let him steal a few bites of good food along the way? My only problem is that it is so very specific. What happens, for example, if you don’t have an ox and use another animal to tread your grain: a horse, a cow or a bull? The command only says ox, so can you muzzle those other animals?
And, of course, since modern farmers don’t use animals to tread their grain at all but instead use a machine called a combine, that does all the cutting, threshing and winnowing at once, you could certainly argue that there is no modern application of the commandment. This commandment would therefore have no meaning or application for us today at all.
So is that correct? If we no longer do the specific thing that the commandment is talking about, we can just forget it? Does it simply not apply anymore? We’ll I don’t believe so. Yes, the world has changed and changed a great deal since the Bible was first written, and, while we may no longer live in the same way that the people in the Bible did, I will always believe that there are principles in these very specific commandments that still apply today.
On a very simple level, I am sure we would all agree that there is a principle at stake in this commandment concerning muzzling oxen that we can take and apply today. To not muzzle an ox while it is treading is to think about the needs of that ox. It is a way of being kind and not being cruel. So I don’t think that it would be an unreasonable application of this command to say that it teaches us that animal cruelty is wrong and that we should treat all animals who do anything for us with whatever kindness we can.
The Apostle Paul, was not a farmer who used oxen to tread his grain, but he read this commandment some fifteen hundred years after the time of Moses and clearly saw that it still had applications to his life. In fact, Paul read it and asked the question, “Is it for oxen that God is concerned?”
He was asking a rhetorical question. He was assuming that his readers would respond by saying, “No, Paul, of course God doesn’t really care about oxen.”
I am not so sure about that. I happen to believe that God’s compassion is not limited by anything and that God is just as capable of being concerned for oxen as God is for human beings. But Paul’s rhetorical question isn’t really about the welfare of oxen, it is a way of opening up the application of the commandment beyond oxen.
Paul suggests that the commandment applies to a situation he has been struggling with. He says that it applies to how sometimes people in his position, people who are preaching the gospel and offering leadership in the church, need support from the church to be able to continue to do what they do. Here they are, working hard, treading out the grain as it were, and are you going to deny them the opportunity to benefit from that work by eating some of the grain that they are threshing? Of course not.
And, of course, Paul’s application of this commandment is legitimate. It is okay to make the connection that, since God seems to care about oxen getting some benefit from their labour, God must also care about people who are working for the sake of the kingdom of God getting some benefit from their labour.
But you need to realize that Paul’s application of this commandment to the situation of people who work for the church also opens a can of worms. Do you realize that we are living today in a world where the very notion that people ought to be able to benefit from the fruit of their labour has become something of a controversial idea? Now, it shouldn’t be. It should be obvious that, when people work hard for anything worthwhile, they ought to be the first ones who get the benefit. But the world doesn’t always seem to work that way.
In fact, increasingly our world is set up according to a system where we are very careful to make sure that certain people get the benefit of the labour that is done, but those people are not necessarily the people who do the labouring. We have actually entered a time where we give priority, not to labour, but to investment. Much of the business and political world is oriented towards making sure of one thing above all: that those who invest money in various enterprises are the first to be able to profit from it.
It is actually amazing to think that we are living in an age when it is possible for someone to work at a full time job (or several part-time jobs) and be working 30, 40, 50 hours a week and not be earning enough to pay their rent and cover their expenses. Meanwhile, it is taken as a given that people who invest lots of money in things can get very rich without doing any labour at all – profiting, over all, from the labour of other people who may very well be underpaid.
And I realize, of course, that economic matters can be very complicated and if investors didn’t get good returns on their investments, they wouldn’t put money into them in the first place and then there wouldn’t even be jobs for people to work at and be underpaid. We do need people who are willing to invest in new enterprises and these investments do create a lot of good.
But I do think that we have a problem when you create situations where people are working hard and are still not getting enough benefit from their labours to make ends meet. I think that some of the balance between the needs of the labourers and the needs of the investors is off in our world today and that it may be time reset that balance.
Who are the oxen in our world today who are being muzzled, who are not receiving the benefit from their own labour that they deserve. In some cases, it may be the women who do the same job as men and who work just as hard at it (or maybe harder) and, according to statistics in Ontario are paid 31.5% less than their male counterparts.
In some cases the muzzled oxen may be the temporary foreign workers – agricultural workers for example – who everyone agrees work harder than Canadians usually doing jobs that Canadians won’t do. They are paid, of course, and usually better paid than they would be in their country of origin, but there are often other issues we shouldn’t ignore, especially when they do not enjoy the protections and security that they need.
Undoubtedly, the muzzled oxen in our world today may include the people in developing countries who make our clothing and shoes and assemble our electronics in conditions that are not safe for wages that keep them virtual indentured servants. Somebody is profiting from their labour, profiting very handsomely, but it is not the people who are doing the hard work.
These are but a few examples but I think they are important ones and they are a reminder to us that this ancient law constructed for a situation that simply does not arise in modern life still may have important things to say to us today.
#140CharacterSermon Don't muzzle your ox while it's treading grain! Specific commands like that may still say important things to say to us
Exodus 20:8-11, Deuteronomy 5:12-15, Luke 13:10-17, Genesis 1:27-2:3
“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” That has got to be the biblical commandment that, over my time working with the church, I have heard about the most. People bring this one up just out of the blue all the time.
“There was a time,” they will say, “when Sunday actually meant something. Everything would stop for one day. All the stores would be closed. The sports arenas were empty and everybody was so bloody bored that church looked downright exciting. <Sigh> Those were the days when, for those few golden hours, the church was definitely the least boring game in town.
“But these days,” people will go on, “Sunday is just another day. Everybody is working or, if they’re not working, they’re at the arena or the sports field or shopping. Everybody is so busy doing things that are interesting and even exciting. Is it any wonder that the church is having such a hard time?”
I mean, I may be exaggerating the position a little bit there, but I am not so sure that it is that far removed from how I have heard people talking about it. And there are some things behind those statements that we don’t usually examine and that I think we should.
It is assumed, for one thing, that we know what the purpose of the Sabbath law is – that a law requiring people to stop working for one day a week was created in order to bolster the practice of religion. That is why we assume that the law is about taking Sunday, the first day of the week, off when it is actually quite clearly about taking Saturday, the seventh day. We think that 3500 years ago, God told Moses to tell us to shut everything down for one day a week in order to make sure that people had no real alternative but to go to church on Sundays.
But that is clearly not what this law is about in the Bible. There are two main versions of the Sabbath law in the Bible, one in Exodus and one in Deuteronomy. The commandments are identical in what they order the people to do. The difference between the two versions is that they each give a reason for the law, but that they give two different reasons. According to Exodus, God gave the Sabbath law because “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.” So, according to Exodus, the reason why we rest one day a week has to do with creation itself – almost as if the need for rest is built into the very fabric of the universe.
Deuteronomy gives a very different rationale for the law: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,” it says, “and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand.” The reason in Deuteronomy has to do with the Israelites’ past experience with slavery. Basically, because they had been slaves, they aren’t to treat themselves or anyone else like a slave by forcing people to work seven days a week.
So the Bible is actually quite clear when it comes to the reason for the Sabbath law: it is about respect for creation and about respect for human liberty. Nowhere in the scriptures do you find any suggestion that the Sabbath was there to protect and promote religious institutions and yet Christians today seem to assume, that that is really all that it is for.
There is one other thing about how we speak of this commandment that troubles me. The only people I have ever heard who complain about people who don’t observe the Sabbath are people who go to church at least most of the time. People use it to complain about the behaviour of others – people who are not like them.
And that is actually one of my pet peeves about how we deal with biblical commandments in general. Anytime we believers start making a big deal about how other people – people who don’t believe like us – are not following a commandment, I don’t think that we are reading the commandments properly. The Bible states that the Law was given to the people of Israel as a blessing – as something that would allow them to live long and prosper in the land that the Lord their God was giving them. The commandments are for us, folks, and we really don’t get anywhere by complaining about others not following them.
As in many things, Jesus is the one who grasps the real purpose of the sabbath. When faced with the possibility of healing a woman whose body has been enslaved by pain on a Sabbath day, and also with the judgment of the religious folks of his doing healing work on the Sabbath, Jesus says, “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”
Jesus really couldn’t have been much clearer than that. He was right there – right in the middle of a religious gathering called a synagogue on a Saturday and he declared that the reason for Sabbath had nothing to do with the needs of that local religious institution and everything to do with the needs of this woman. And yet we continue to act as if the commandment is all about the place of religion in society.
So, the question is, if the commandment is not about the promotion of religion, what is it about? We have already seen a part of the answer to the question in the passages that we have briefly touched on. According to Exodus, the sabbath law is about respecting creation. According to Deuteronomy, it is about liberty from slavery. According to Jesus it is about healing. Those may sound like three very different reasons for why you ought to observe a Sabbath but I think that, if you put them all together, it can actually begin to make a lot of sense.
Sabbath, first of all, is about creation. It is about how you were made and about how we, as created beings, fit in with the whole of God’s wonderful creation. I think that this is something that is extremely important to realize given the world in which we find ourselves today. This world was created with certain built in cycles of work and rest. Until very recently in human history, for example, there were only so many hours in a day when human beings had enough light to do meaningful work. When the sun went down, you really didn’t have much choice but to take a break. The seasons of the year also had their natural cycles when there were times of heavy labour, but also times of rest and celebration.
But we were not satisfied with that. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we have sought to take control over those natural cycles built into nature. We have filled our once darkened nights with artificial light. We have set up artificial environments where people can work long hours at all times of the year.
There was a time, not all that long ago, when people looked at all of the technological advances that were coming and predicted a future when most work would be automated and the biggest problem we would have was figuring out what to do with all our leisure time. The opposite seems to have happened with technology mostly being used to wring ever more and more productivity out of workers. Now, thanks to the cell phone and mobile computing you can take your office with you wherever you go and fill more and more of your life with work.
And I know that these technological advancements have brought many blessings with them and that none of us would be interested in going back to a pre-industrial age when everything stopped when the sun went down, but I think that it is important to recognize that while this technology has reshaped the world around us, the basic human software hasn’t changed. We are still essentially the same biological beings that were designed to thrive in a world a thousand years before the invention of the lightbulb.
If we don’t build into our lives ways to stop, to turn off the technology and to rest, our bodies will find ways to make that rest happen in spite of us. We see it all the time: health crises, mental health problems, breakdowns. You think that the modern epidemics of depression, addiction, breakdown and more came out of nowhere? When you deny your created nature and force your body to live without the rest it is designed to need, your body will find a way to rest that will likely be much worse for you. The need to rest is, first of all, about respecting who you were created to be.
It is, second of all, about respecting the created world around us. Human beings have always harvested and used the resources of the earth, of course, and there is nothing wrong with that. But there were always cycles of rest built into the exploitation of the earth. Fields were left fallow for a time, precious materials were dug out of the ground at a pace limited by human strength and endurance, trees were not cut down faster than more could grow. But here again, our technology has changed the balance and we are able take and take from the earth with no breaks to feed our profits. But the need for sabbath, we are told, is built into the very structure of the earth and if we do not find ways for the earth itself to rest, we may well find ourselves paying for that in ways we will not like.
According to Deuteronomy, the reason for the Sabbath law is different, though. There it is about freedom from slavery. It may be historically about God giving freedom to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, but I think that it's pretty clear that that is not the only application. The Sabbath law reminds us that, when we make life all about work and productivity and making money off of your labour and the labour of others, we do begin to rob people of their liberty.
And finally, according to Jesus, the Sabbath law is all about healing: “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” And with those very words, we already see a connection with the whole idea of freedom from slavery. Jesus chose to speak of the woman’s infirmity as a kind of slavery – a slavery to pain, fear and weakness. She also was a former Hebrew slave set free by God just like the others and if her illness was preventing her from living out her freedom, then Sabbath was not only an acceptable time to heal her, it was indeed the most fitting time ever.
Even more important, healing was about the wholeness of the sick person – about restoring her to the person she was created to be. That is, therefore, where the Sabbath law comes to its completeness: a person who is living in wholeness, according to her creator’s plan for her and free from any and all bondage.
Sabbath is not some gimmick to prop up religious institutions and practices. It is about us becoming the best free people we can possibly be – the people that God created us to be.
What then does it mean to apply this law to modern life? Somehow, I think, it is going to have to be about more than establishing certain rules for what you can and cannot do on certain days of the week. Rules can be helpful, of course, but they don’t really get to the heart of the matter.
The reality is, for better or worse, that we live in a world that never stops – that is always moving and working 24/7. That’s not likely to change. And part of this reality is that we are never going to convince our society to go back to a practice of not working for one day of the week. It is just not going to happen. But what we can do – what we must do – is embrace those opportunities for rest that we can find and create. We must not feel guilty for resting from our labours. It is part of who we were created to be. We must embrace priorities other than work and production because we were made to be free. We must rest because it is a first step to healing and wholeness.
#140CharacterSermon Sabbath #Commandment isn't about propping up religion. It's about respecting creation, freedom from slavery and healing.
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?
Do you remember that kid, the one back in middle school who, every time the class was told to run a few laps of the track or to head out across country - that one kid who fell right to the back of the pack, who pulled up with a stitch in the side, who was panting like a dog?
That kid was me.
To this day, though I enjoy being active, I probably would not choose running as an enjoyable activity. I've heard of people who derive a great deal of pleasure from running. I have heard of what is called a "runner's high," but I can't say I have ever experienced it. Nevertheless, I am planning to run 10 km this fall.
Why am I running?
The Event
I am running because the Rev. Jeff Veenstra Memorial Walk-a-thon in support of Presbyterian World Service and Development (Better known as the Jeff-a-thon will be held on Sunday October 16, 2016 at Crieff Hills Community in Puslinch, ON,
The Man and his Passion for a Better World
I am running because this event is being held in memory of a really extraordinary man and (though I didn't know him for long) a good friend. There were many great things about Jeff Veenstra, but one of them was definitely the great passion he had to build a better world. He believed in the work of Presbyterian World Service and Development and was committed to their dream of a world where justice, sustainable development and hope could thrive. His passion for the work inspires me to do what I can to support it.
The Cause
The particular cause that the Jeff-a-thon will support is a Child and Maternal Health project in Malawi and Afghanistan.
I am very excited to be supporting such a project because it is with mothers and their children that the creation of a better world can begin, especially in such parts of the world where women, in particular, have so much going against them. This is a project that will demonstrably make a difference in tangible ways and help to build a much better future. What's more, the project is also supported by the Canadian Government which means that many donations will be matched by the government, effectively doubling our impact.
So here is what I'm going to do
I'm going to run.
I will run in the Jeff-a-thon on October 16. I have a lot of work to do before I can manage to run for 10 km. My body will have to learn a lot about strength and endurance. Maybe I'll even discover what a runner's high is between now and then. But I want to do it so I am going to work towards that goal.
And here is what (I hope) you're going to do
Well, first of all, you can run or walk too. Everyone is more than welcome to participate in the Jeff-a-thon. For information on how to sign up, look HERE.
Secondly, whether you participate yourself or not, you're going to sponsor my run, aren't you? You're going to sponsor it because chances to do so much good for the world so easily don't come around that often, do they? You're going to sponsor me because you want to find out if I can run 10 km too, don't you?
How are you going to do it?
Well, if I'm going to see you between now and next October, I'll have a sponsorship sheet with me and you can sign up with me when I see you. Donations of $20 or more will be receipted on request.
If I'm not going to see you face to face, though, you are not out of luck. Just follow this link:
Select "Jeff-a-thon: Scott McAndless" from the drop-down box, fill in your amount and credit card information and your are done. Canada Helps will take care of receipts and everything. It is so easy you could do it right now. In fact, why don't you just go ahead and do it. I'll wait.
Long before the time of Jesus, it was not uncommon for people to use father language to talk about God and about various gods. Take the Romans, they loved to use father language to talk about their gods. The ruler of all the Roman gods was a fellow named Jupiter and his name actually meant “Father God” in primitive Latin. In addition, the Roman emperors were also worshipped as gods by the Romans because they were the so-called fathers of the nation.
But when the Romans spoke about their gods as being fathers, they had a very particular idea of fatherhood in mind. Fatherhood, in ancient Rome, meant one thing above all: authority. The Latin name for a male head of a family was paterfamilias: father of the family. And a paterfamiliaswas not just a warm and fuzzy dad figure sitting in a La-Z-Boy, wearing slippers and reading a newspaper. For the Romans, he was a man who had ultimate authority over every single person in his household.
And when I say ultimate, I mean ultimate. A paterfamilias could expect complete and utter obedience from everyone under his charge. If he didn’t get it, he was not just permitted but actually required to discipline family members with what we would call torture. He could do things like beat them, whip them, imprison and starve them and be praised for it. In fact, if he chose to kill them, that was considered to be his business. All of this makes me feel like maybe Father’s Day was not the really the fun lighthearted event in ancient Rome that it is for us. Rather than sending cards that said, “Happy Father’s Day to the world’s greatest dad,” they probably said, “Revered Patriarch, please don’t kill me today!”
So, when the ancient Romans and many other ancient peoples (including ancient Jews) spoke of God using the word Father, the word carried all of that baggage with it. When they addressed their Father God, they were speaking to a God who was a tyrant, a God who ruled over his people with an iron fist and who didn’t pull back from torturing and even smiting them. It was God as paterfamilias.
And when people address God as Father to this very day, the word may still carry a lot of the same baggage. I certainly do know some people who feel very uncomfortable with the idea of addressing God as Father. In some cases, of course, that may be because they have had some very negative experiences with the father figures in their own life. You can understand that, of course. If the only experience you have had with a father is abuse or violence or worse, you are not going to take any comfort from calling God your father. You’ll probably have a hard time believing that God is any better than the fathers you have known.
But that’s not the only problem that people have. You may have had nothing but the best experiences with your own father but you could still have some good reasons not to want to call God by that name just because of all the ways in which male dominance in society have kept women down and treated them like second class citizens. Addressing God as Father can certainly make him into the figurehead of that whole system of male dominance and so responsible for all of the ills that have come out of it.
Jesus used Father imagery all the time when he was talking about God. But there is good reason to think that, when he called God Father, he did not mean what most of the people of his age meant by the word. For one thing, Jesus didn’t use the normal word in his language for Father when talking about God. The usual word for father in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, was ab, and it had all the associations with authority and power that a word like paterfamilias had in Latin. But Jesus didn’t call God ab, he called him abba.
How do we know that? Of course, it is hard to be sure what word for father Jesus used because we don’t have his words in his original language. The Gospels were written in Greek and so most everything that Jesus said was translated into Greek. And most of the time, when Jesus says Father in the gospels, it is translated with the usual Greek word for father. But once, in the Gospel of Mark (when Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane) the word just isn’t translated. Jesus’ original Aramaic word, Abba, suddenly and unexpectedly appears in his prayer. There are very few Aramaic words that appear in the New Testament, so it is very significant that this word appears at this very moment when Jesus is at his most vulnerable and honest, praying to God.
There is another indication. Twice in his letters, the apostle Paul tells us about a prayer that was prayed by the early church, and the prayer went like this: “Abba, Father.” What he is telling us is that even after Christianity spread into areas where the only language was Greek – where nobody could even understand a word of Aramaic, the church continued to address God as Abba even though nobody knew what the word meant and so they appended the Greek word for Fatherso people would at least understand. Why would they do that, why would they continue to use an obscure Aramaic word unless it was something that had been passed down to them from Jesus himself. These are the things that tell me that Jesus was in the habit of calling God abba. I also believe that he was the first one ever to dare to use that title for God.
So, what is the significance of Jesus using that word. As I said, abba was not the usual word for father. It was the familiarword that you would use in your family when you were speaking to your father. You may have had people tell you that it was a word that only a small child would use for his or her father – the equivalent to the English “Daddy,” or “Papa” – but that is not quite right. Abba was not exclusively used by infants. Unlike “daddy,” it was commonly used by children of all ages (including adults) to speak to their fathers.
Sometimes (thinking that abba meant daddy) people have suggested that Jesus used the word abba in order to imply that our relationship with God is one of childlike dependence and intimacy. Although there is an intimacy to his use of the word, it is actually not meant to imply an infantile dependence.
So what did Jesus mean by the word? What I see is this: Jesus went out of his way to avoid using the common and general word for a father in his society when he was talking about God. I believe that he did that precisely because that word was closely associated with the patriarchal system of absolute authority and power vested in male figures. Jesus was convinced that God had no support for such systems. It was why, for example, he urged his followers to “call no one your father on earth.” (Matthew 23:9) So, by refusing to use the usual word for father that people usually used when talking about God, Jesus was making a strong statement that God had no part in such a system of dominance, authority and power.
That is the first thing that Jesus means by using this word abba, it was a way of saying who God was not. But there is also a positive meaning in Jesus’ choice to use this word. It was the word, as I said, that was commonly used by families within the household to refer to the father of the family. And I think that, as a household word, it may have been chosen to direct our attention towards a different role that a father had in that society.
Though it is true that ancient Jews, like most ancient Mediterranean people, tended to think of fathers primarily as those authority figures who had absolute power even over the lives of every person in their household, there was another side to the role of a father in Jewish tradition. Not only did he have authority over the household, he also bore the burden of the wellbeing of the entire household.
Families were very large and very complicated in Ancient Israel. A typical family was not made up of a simple nuclear family of mother, father, and children that we are familiar with. A family would often include many generations and many branches of an extended family all living under one roof. In addition, servants and any livestock were also considered to be members of the family. And the father of the family, the householder, was the one person who had care for all of those people.
It was the job of the householder to ensure that every person under his roof had what they needed to survive and thrive. Can you imagine how difficult a job that was? It wasn’t just a matter of equally sharing out the resources of the household because, of course, there are always those who have special needs and requirements if they are going to be their best. Being a father, therefore, was a heavy burden of care and hard decisions. And there was a strong tradition in Ancient Israel of speak of God as one who took that kind of care of all his people – the householder of a entire nation. As it says in the Psalm, “As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lordhas compassion for those who fear him.”
So, when Jesus chose to use the name Abba, the name used exclusively inside the household for God, I suspect that he was making a point of portraying God as that kind of householder – one who takes tender care of the needs of every person in his household. This is exactly how Jesus portrayed God at every opportunity – a God who provides for the needs of his people, who takes care of them and looks out in particular for those who are in special need: the poor, the sick, the disadvantaged. This is how he taught his disciples to trust in God as their Father: “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
So, while Jesus was very comfortable addressing God as Father, he seems to have gone out of his way to present an understanding of God as Father that was at odds with the patriarchal assumptions of the society around this. I’ve got to admit that I have some trouble with how some people promote the idea of God as Father – especially if they are using it as a way to impose male dominance in society. It is refreshing to know that, even in his day, Jesus resisted that idea.
#TodaysTweetableTruth Jesus called God Abba – a rejection of patriarchy and control, an embrace of the image of the caring householder.
As to the challenges of being a father today – of caring and giving support to the people under your care and charge, I find encouragement from Jesus’ use of the image. Fathers you aren’t alone, you have someone who understands your struggles to take care of the people under your charge. Fatherless, you aren’t fatherless – there is one who is looking after you. Those abused or kept down by systems of patriarchy or sexism, you are not neglected either. Whether or not you are comfortable thinking of God as father or not, there is a householder who truly cares about what you need.
If you were like me, you were appalled and distressed and maybe depressed when you heard about the terrible events that unfolded in Orlando, Florida one week ago. The largest mass shooting in American History not carried out by the military. And one of the worst things about it is that it seems as if the crime was specifically targeted at a sexual minority group which had specifically gathered in one of the few places where they felt safe in society – destroying any sense of that safety.
I’m wondering, what can Jesus’ teaching about God as “Abba” say to us about such a terrible tragedy? Let me suggest this: if our God were merely a father – a kind of heavenly paterfamilias – who was all about authority and power, all about right and wrong, then I would be particularly discouraged today because that would mean that our only response to such a tragedy would be judgment and punishment. Some, I know, would be inclined to judge the victims in their minority status. I cannot do that. I cannot see (especially right now) how Christian judgement of sexual minorities who do not harm or rape anybody has made the world a better place. Judgement in that case only seems to make things worse. Some would focus on judging the criminal assassin and the communities that he has been associated with. That is little better, perhaps, but it is not good enough and as far as I can see and judgement alone will not make anything better.
But if God is “Abba,” how can that change our response? If God is Abba, if God is the householder who is burdened with the wellbeing of everyone within his earthly household, then God’s first question when looking at each one of us is not, “What have you done wrong that I may punish you?” It is, “What do you need. What are the special challenges you are dealing with that keep you from thriving?” That is a very different question and provides a very different orientation to us as we seek to make a difference in our world, especially with groups that have been targeted because of who they are and what makes them different. If God is Abba, this is something that gives me hope for a better world.
This Sunday I will complete a series of sermons where I have been examining some of the strange and wonderful things that Jesus taught about God. I'm not sure how many have noticed this, but as a part of this series I have been writing a benediction for each service to be sung by the congregation. Each benediction has gone with the radical teaching of Jesus (or his disciples) that we have been talking about.
All of these have been sung to the tune of Sinclair's Hallelujah (#294 in the Presbyterian Book of Praise).
Here is a YouTube video of the music (though we sang it much faster than that!): Sinclair's Hallelujah
As the series now comes to an end, I would like to present all of the verses that I have written. I keep singing them, I hope you might too:
