By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our strength and our redeemer. May I speak in the Name of the Living God. Amen.”
Moses came down from Mt. Sinai and said to the people, “I got good news and I got bad news. The good news is I got him down to 10. The bad news is adultery is still on the list.”
I did my seminary field work in a synagogue—with Kevin Coffey, a priest from the diocese some of you may know. That’s how we met. Our theology professor was very active in interfaith dialogue and wanted to pioneer a placement with his friend Rabbi Block at Brotherhood Synagogue. My bishop who was also very involved with the dialogue, leapt at the chance to have me participate. So just as Mary heads off to St. George’s on Sunday mornings...we headed off to shul on Friday nights.
Our first experience was, appropriately, a bris—a circumcision of a baby boy on the 8th day—whose grandfathers winced as they held his legs. The child made barely a sound and he seemed to enjoy sucking on the linen dipped in sacramental wine shared with him for the occasion. We cast our sins into the E. River on Tashlich on the first day of Rosh Hashona. We atoned on Yom Kippur. We remembered the dead. And we stood Friday after Friday at the opening words: Hear O Israel the Lord thy God, the Lord is One and learned not to write in shul—no matter how marvelous the rabbi’s sermon. (oops!) Later a Jewish seminary student began doing his field work at Episcopal Church. Each of us learning about the other’s liturgy and customs by living through them with the congregation. All in an effort to deepen interfaith understanding in students who would one day lead and influence congregations themselves.
It changed my life. Judaism came alive, not just as an historic tradition for which I already had an appreciation, but as a living one. I began to see the world through Jewish eyes. And the world certainly looked different. I noticed, for example, for the first time that Christmas—a Christian holiday—was also a federal holiday. I felt like a man at a women’s meeting—I’d never experienced myself as part of the power structure that way before. But perhaps the thing that changed most for me was my understanding of the “law.”
Christians have an almost snooty understanding of law. We like to think of ourselves as “spiritual,” and by contrast, paint the Jews as “legalistic.” We’re the “spirit of the law” they’re the “letter of the law.” Now it’s true that Jesus was highly critical of the legalistic Pharisees of his day. But we do a great disservice to the Jewish people to tar the whole for the abuses of the few. You want to see legalistic, try to change anything liturgical in the Episcopal Church. As the retired Bishop of Ohio once put it: contrary to popular Episcopal practice, Jesus’ 7 last words from the cross were not: We’ve never done it that way before. I confess I had this almost unconscious sense that in contrast to us, the Jews were locked into a literal “letter of the law,” a narrow, overly defined, legalistic minefield, hemmed in on every side. What I found was a literal delight in the law of the Lord far richer and more spirited than anything I’d ever known before or experienced since.
It came home to me on a lovely feast called “Simchat Torah” a festival of rejoicing over the giving of the law. It literally means: the joy of the Torah. It celebrates the completion and the beginning of the reading of the Torah—the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch, the Law of Moses. The night the day began (the Jewish day begins at sunset) the sacred scrolls were taken from the sanctuary--covered in different colored velvet vestments and silver--and carried in procession downstairs where a band was striking up the music. This was no stately Episcopal procession! We were dancing and singing and clapping on our way. I was stunned when the rabbi handed me the torah he was carrying wrapped in blue velvet as we danced together down the stairs. (Drop one of these and the congregation is in mourning for something like 40 years – “long time” – no pressure).
The centuries fell away as the Rabbi’s son made like a bull to charge the Torah and the Rabbi lifted it high. We were spinning and dancing to this wonderful eastern music. I could imagine the firelight, the earth underfoot – Jesus taking part in such a feast with great zest. It was ancient and marvelous, created during the exile 500 BC, and like nothing I’d been a part of before. Everyone took turns – young and old alike – whirling the Torahs across the dance floor like a bride, clapping and stomping our feet to the music, spinning and dancing getting hot and thirsty. The youngest and frailest circled by others lest the sacred Torah slip and fall to the floor.
I don’t know about you but I’ve never danced with Scripture before. And I haven’t since. Once you do you can certainly never look at it again as a burden. “The Law of the LORD is perfect and revives the soul,” sang the psalm this morning, (Ps 19:7a). Yes, indeed. “The statutes of the LORD are just and rejoice the heart”(19:8a). There was great rejoicing. “More to be desired are they than gold, more than much fine gold,* sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb” (19:10). It’s all true. The stained glass window across from me in the seminary chapel of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments never looked the same again.
The Ten Commandments we heard this morning are a succinct statement from our talkative God about how we should live as God’s people. They’re called the 10 words and are shorthand for the entire Torah. They tell us what God values, what matters to this righteous God who delivered the people of Israel simply because he “heard their cry.” And who would not then leave them flailing about in the dark. “The testimony of the LORD is sure and gives wisdom to the innocent” (Ps 19:7b). “The commandment of the LORD is clear and gives light to the eyes” (19:8b). “In keeping them there is great reward”(19:11b). The Jews received the testimony of the LORD in the spirit in which it was given—with gratitude and rejoicing, as God’s gift to God’s people for the right ordering of their lives; their duty to God and their neighbor.
The Ten Commandments did not come about as an abstract set of rules upon which all reasonable people ought to agree. They were not formulated to make society flow more smoothly. They are part of the story of Israel’s deliverance, given to the people of Israel as their response to what God has done. They’re the ethical demands God places on the people God has saved. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” Because I delivered you; therefore you are mine. As a sign of being mine you will live in this way. When the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD and animal sacrifice stopped the 10 Commandments remained setting the people of God apart and ordering their way of life.
But everyone didn’t live happily ever after. The problem is what it always was. These commandments — while so clear — are hard to obey. In fact, in much of the New Testament the law serves to show just how far short of the will of God we fall, underscoring the need we have for Jesus. We want to remain faithful to God in this covenant relationship but we can’t. The sacred space between us needs to be cleansed from the accumulated debris of sin and broken promises. When we cannot do it, God does it himself in Jesus Christ.
The cleansing of the temple we see today in the gospel is the visceral enactment of the “jealous” love of God for God’s people — a love that seeks to overturn and drive out all that rivals the place of God in our worship, our work, our community and our hearts. It’s not just the so-called religious arena that God claims. The Temple was the physical icon of the legal, social, and religious infrastructure of the people. When Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers he laid claim to all that seeks to get in the way in every area of our lives, every area, though it’s true we often have particular difficulty where money is concerned. That’s why we write on our money: In God we trust because around money we have such a hard time doing just that.
We’re in the midst of a huge economic downturn. Leaders are caught in the terrible quandary of facing laying people off to keep businesses afloat. It’s agonizing. We write: In God we Trust on our money. But I wonder. Any self-respecting space alien landing here looking for our god would bypass our little churches and head straight for the Short Hills Mall. Who is this god whose devotees require acres and acres of parking? “In God we trust,” we write. Is it true? Or only what we wish were true? Money cannot bear the weight of our lives. It cannot give us meaning, self-worth or, finally, security. But God CAN, God DOES. In GOD we trust. We come here to remember that, to remind ourselves, to remind each other.
Imagine what our lives might be like if this “information” became “revelation” Imagine what it would be like to live our lives trusting God, obeying God. For one thing we’d discover that our circumstances don’t determine our attitude. The economy is uncertain, getting and keeping a job is in jeopardy, so is our ability to pay for college, to fund our retirement. But God is not uncertain. God is not in jeopardy. Our collective circumstances may not look so good — unless we compare them to most of the world’s population — but we believe in God who, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “can make a way out of no way.” We need trust in the miracle of God’s abundance. This is the God of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. This is the God of Easter. We need to do what we can and trust God for the rest. We need to take responsibility where we can—and cast our worry, our care on God. We often do the reverse. We cast our responsibility and keep our care. We need to do what we can and cast our care on God.
Each of us has sphere of influence—whether it’s the home, the classroom, the board room, at the store or on the street. We have good news to bring to these troubled times. We can begin by putting our mouths where our money is: In God we trust. There IS no distinction between secular and sacred, between religion and politics, between Wall Street and Main Street, between you and me, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, rich and poor. We are called to be good stewards of our money, our allegiances and our lives because they all belong to God. It’s God’s world and in God’s eyes it doesn’t look the way it does on our maps with lines dividing “us” from “them” around the globe. As Margaret Mead said, “We have searched the whole world and found only one human race.” You and I are called to witness to that reality in as many ways as there are people here in all the dimensions of our lives. Let’s put our mouths and our lives where our money is: In God we trust.
Lent is about coming to terms with a God who will brook no rivals, “whether in the form of anything that is in the heaven above or in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth,” a God willing to be crucified to set us free, to make us new, to make us His. Doesn’t that make you want to dance for joy?
© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven
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