Trick or Treat...

 

“Trick or Treat”

 

Deuteronomy 6:1-9

6:1 Now this is the commandment--the statutes and the ordinances--that the LORD your God charged me to teach you to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy,

6:2 so that you and your children and your children's children, may fear the LORD your God all the days of your life, and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I am commanding you, so that your days may be long.

6:3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of your ancestors, has promised you.

6:4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.

6:5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

6:6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.

6:7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.

6:8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead,

6:9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

 

 

Given that this is Reformation Sunday, I suppose you could say that the original door-knocking “Trick or Treater” was a monk by the name of Martin Luther. As we know, he was doing scholarly work in the Book of Romans, and had developed a real “thing” for salvation by faith ALONE, based on his understanding of “Sola Scriptura,” or biblical scripture as the most reliable source for defining and practicing our Christian beliefs. And, as an Augustinian friar, he was quite aware of the trappings of rules and church-made law that his Roman Catholic expression of faith was creating, almost as if they were trying to spin a “web” in which to entrap church members, making it essential for them to seek forgiveness through the church. This, in turn, gave more power to the church, especially over the lives of its people. So, Luther “summarized” his objections into “95 theses” (obviously his disdain had been brewing for some time) and knock-knock-knocked on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, as he—or as they say today—“nailed it.” Of course no one opened the door because they didn’t have “treats” for him. In fact, over the subsequent years, they had a few tricks of their own. Depending on how you look at it, Luther “won,” and a new expression of faith called “Protestantism” came into being. Exactly what we have been protesting has never been all that clear, and some might even say that what was born was a “contentiousness” into the Body of Christ that would fracture it into many, many smaller “pieces,” each claiming some truth of Christology, social justice, salvation, or church law and practice as their own, and in it, they would claim to be the solitary “right” ones. Even within my own United Methodist denomination, this fracturing is only too prevalent, with one half claiming “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus” and the other adopting “Let There be Peace on Earth” as its theme. If only dear Charles Wesley could have known that his “O For a Thousand Tongues” would someday wind up meaning those tongues were “wagging” and slandering each other, he might have held off writing it.

 

But today, we’ll look at one of the alternate Lectionary passages, and examine a different kind of “Trick or Treat.” The passage is the one above: Deuteronomy 6:1-9.

 

Both the left and the right side of the Bible are rife with “commands.” The ancient people of God—Israel—is commanded by God to exhibit certain behaviors, and eschew others. They are told to honor their parents, and not covet their neighbor’s stuff. In some of the old law code, they are told not to touch dead flesh, not to mix fabrics in their clothing, and not to eat red meat with dairy. But the text today includes much information about why Israel—and all believers in Yahweh—are to “obey” the commands of God, and builds a kind of theological bridge to Jesus in the New Testament, and how he appropriates the commands of God.

 

There are various threads throughout religious faith as to what God had commanded God’s people, and just as many different ways to understand why God’s people should follow these commands. Simplistically, following the commands of God become a kind of “Trick or Treat”—do what God says, and you get a TREAT; ignore or violate what God says to do or not do, and you get the TRICK—some kind of painful and/or eternal judgment. Obeying the commands of God is done, in this model, to keep GOD happy, and ourselves out of trouble. But like “Trick or Treating,” this is a “child’s game” understanding as to what is behind the commands. Let’s scratch a little deeper.

 

Why, do you think, God gives commands to God’s people? There are truly practical reasons. Why would God give the command about mixing fabrics in the primitive law code? Well, first of all, we must acknowledge that the law code is being filtered through the experience of the writers. (We’ll not argue in today’s message as to the “inspiration” of the writers, but look instead to the “whys” that may be behind the commands.) Let’s look at the one about mixing fabrics in a weave. Why would “God” say that two different fabrics shouldn’t be mixed in a single garment? While we don’t have a definitive answer to this. Even the great Rabbis don’t know, labeling this as a chok, which is a law passed by a king for his subjects, but that may have no “practical” reason. It may have to do with mixing the sacred with the profane. Some threads or fabrics have a royal history, while others, such as plant-based thread, is quite mundane. To wear clothing woven out of both “sacred” and “profane” thread may have been thought to be dishonoring to Yahweh. Another thought is that these two threads have very different origins and values, and mixing the two denigrates the worth of the cloth, and therefore the person wearing it. It also may have to do with Israel’s desire to keep their ancestral lineage pure, and possibly one type of thread, say, the plant-based, such as flax or cotton, is that of another culture, and sourcing them may encourage mixing cultural heritage. So, the “command” may have practical roots in history.

 

Here’s another: eating red meat and dairy products together. My dietitian/wife tells me that in more primitive cultures, where diets may be limited and absorption of necessary vitamins and minerals essential to the survival of pre-scientific peoples, if one eats red meat with dairy together, the body may not receive the iron from the red meat, and its nutritional value is much depleted, especially if this practice is widespread. 

 

These kinds of “commands,” while having their actual root in practical efficacy, are “sold” to God’s people as being things that are “pleasing” to God, as otherwise, people may not take them seriously, especially in their most primitive context. As children, our parents taught us that “NO” was meant to be yielded to, and no “reasons” were important. As we aged through adolescence, keeping our parents’ “commands,” we learned, made our parents “happy” and built trust with them. Hence, we “obeyed” their commands, because we liked the fringe benefits of their trust. As we continued to grow, though, we grew to question the reasons behind their “commands,” and if our parents never grew beyond the “because I said so” rationale, we rebelled. To a degree, the same thing happened to people of faith. If the reason for the commands didn’t get taught along with the commands themselves, God’s people may rebel.

 

I remember that as a teenager, I had forged a working relationship with my parents and their “commands,” because they explained that their rules were designed to help us “live in peace” together, and to protect me, especially because being so much younger and inexperienced, I may not yet fully understand how to protect myself, or to make the wisest decisions about my actions. Some of my preferred behaviors may be unnecessarily and prematurely threatening to my wellbeing. As I complied with their simple and fair rules, they invested more trust in me, and I found this trust to be a welcome commodity! I had a number of envious friends. A few of them had parents who appeared to be quite controlling and/or set rules that were way over the top, and other friends rebelled early, and sacrificed the trust of their parents. Either way, their privileges were often very limited, while I enjoyed many and varied ones. I remember that the weekend after I passed my driver’s test, my father offered me the keys and saying, “Would you like to take the car? We don’t need it tonight.” Their rules for using the family vehicle were reasonable, and I was happy with the freedom. For the ensuring years, I would never choose to betray their trust, as I enjoyed the privileges that came with it, as well as the peace it brought to the parent/child relationship.

 

These personal metaphors for how God was offering freedom and trust to Israel, as well as a mutual, blessed, and peaceful relationship. The “commands and rules” were designed to keep Israel safe, build trust between them and their creator, make an environment where community and harmony between neighbors, and even sojourners in the land, was possible.

 

Whether these “rules of engagement” between God, Israel, and others were revealed directly from God (such as is reported in the story of God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses), and/or were filtered through the human community and compiled by the human authors, can be debated, but it makes little difference in what the central reason for them appears to be. Too often, Israel (and we?) falsely believe that obedience to the commands placates Deity and fends off anger and judgment of same. This behavior is juvenile, like the child who wants the “treat” rather than the “trick,” and is “good” to get a pleasant reward, yet fearing the consequences for disobedience. The adult grows out of the more simplistic rules and parental commands, and then participates in formulating ones to help their community thrive and prosper, while maintaining harmony. Such was the case with Israel when she acted like an “adult.” The scriptures include many of these “childhood” rules in the ancient law code. When Paul talks about growing up and “putting away childish things” in I Corinthians 13, this may be exactly what he was talking about!

 

This weekend’s lection from Deuteronomy offers a scriptural challenge to see the “higher function” of the law. Verse 6:3 says, Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of your ancestors, has promised you. Following the law for the law’s (Gods?) sake is a dead end, but observing the laws, rules, and commands of God will build a bridge to the “Promised Land,” leading to prosperity. They are guidelines to cooperation, collaboration, and resource-sharing, and they give us wonderful insights into the heart of our Creator and the Creator’s goal for humanity and its relationships with the Deity and each other. God’s love is a love of and for community, is an “ordered” love, and is partly defined by the rules, laws, and commands that help create and maintain community. Grace is the grease of these intertwined relationships, and the energy that sustains them. Forgiveness and salvation are the mechanisms of healing offenses and restoring relationships when violations of the life-giving commands occur.

 

For Israel, the words of “salvation” and faith are summarized in verses 6:4 and 5: Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Verse four is the beginning of the great Hebrew Shema Yisrael, a central prayer of God’s people. For the Christian believer, it is significant that Jesus Christ begins his “adult” teachings with the Shema, and builds the Sermon on the Mount on this foundation, teaching his followers how to “grow up” into the fullness of God’s love and grace by passionately embracing God and these teachings “with all your heart, soul, and might.” And Jesus himself offers all of the salvation, forgiveness, and necessary “fixes” to offer a permanent relationship with the Creator, and to build and sustain a loving relationship with ALL of God’s people.

 

These verses in Deuteronomy are essential to life with God and life with God’s people. They are a balm to the individual soul, and a glue to link it to all other souls. They begin a “higher level” community that is further perfected and empowered in Jesus Christ, and extended through the present and into the future through the continued presence of God’s Spirit in the heart of the believer, in the world, and in the community of faith. It is time for the whole of human community to “grow up,” and eschew the “Trick or Treat” style of childishly “keeping the rules” or “following the law,” believing this will please God. This juvenile behavior has actually enabled the kinds of boundary-drawing and exclusion that divides the people of God. In this error, only the “good” get the treats; others get the “trick” of exile and judgment. In this season of Halloween, we enjoy seeing the little ones dressing up in costumes and going door to door collecting a bagful of goodies. It’s not “cute” if someone is still doing this when they are in the twenties. Such is too often the situation in the Body of Christ today when rule-following and tight interpretation of biblical laws serves to cut people off (the “trick”) rather than link them together into a loving community where the wounded are healed and the well-off hone their generosity and fully share their power. When Jesus gave “new” commands to “love one another” and “the last shall be first,” he was announcing that humanity was now being given the tools to “grow up into the fullness of God.” Amen!