Monte Canfield's Open Salon Blog

Remembering JFK: It Only Takes One: Inviting Violence

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:11:30 -0500

I wanted to post this yesterday, but was unable to do so. This is a repost of my first OS post, October 21, 2008. Almost nobody read it.

But the fear that I experienced as a very young man working in the Executive Office of the President on that November 22, 1963, the fear I felt for the then candidate and now President Obama last October is only intensified as the loonies are on the loose and few are calling them out on their vile propaganda.

People are legally carrying assult rifles to Presidential rallies, promoting and making thinly veiled death threats; and not subtle metaphors for the death of this President are the norm in the ranks of the fringe right. We are not, as a nation, safer than a year ago. And the President is not safer either.

What follows is a true account of one young, naive and grief stricken person's experience on the day President Kennedy was killed.

OCTOBER 21, 2008 10:12PM

I moved to Washington DC in July, 1963. A bright eyed and anxious 23 year old, I was nearly overcome by my good fortune to be invited to work in the Executive Office of the President, Bureau of the Budget.

I was the low guy on the totem pole and often got the duty of covering the phones when others went out to eat, or to work at the agencies we reviewed for budget and legislative consistency with the President's goals.

One day in late November I was half listening to some elevator music playing on the radio when an announcement interrupted to say, "The President has been shot!" I was of course stunned, and decided that I had to tell someone so I ran down to the Division Director's Office. He wasn't there, so I ran down the long hall in the Old Executive Office Building, up the stairs and barged into the Office of the Director of the Budget Bureau.

There was a meeting going on in the conference room and I, out of breath and likely hyperventilating, shouted, "The President has been shot!"

Two of the White House political staff were there as was the Budget Director, the Deputy and several Division Directors. The Deputy Director, Elmer Staats, who knew me, looked at me with disgust and said, "Monte, that is not funny. How could you even think to say something like that?"

While that was going on, someone turned on a TV that was in the room and the fact was confirmed. About the same time the two White House staffers were calling across the alley to the West Wing to confirm.

There are certain times when the world turns inside out; times when we will remember where we were and what we were doing when a major event happens. For much younger people than me, and most are, a day that is sealed in their memories, and mine, is September 11, 2001.

Unfortunately, by the time the '60s were over those of us who lived through those years would add the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the June 5, 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Those years were years of great political division in this nation, and until now, we have seen nothing like the kind of bitter, hateful rant that fueled the hatred then, and fanned the flames of intolerance.

We would all like to think that we have, as a nation, gotten past all of that. And, had we not been witnessing the fanning of the flames, the desperate acts of spinning a great lie about Barack Obama; a lie about his "otherness," "Un-American," "Socialist," and, today, "Communist" leanings.

These purveyors of hate continue to foment the unrest and play to the prejudices of race and class warfare. The litany of false descriptors piles up, lie upon lie: "Palling around with Terrorists," "Terrorist," and "Traitor."

Mainstream media, even the so-called liberal left media, allow such words to go unchallenged saying such things as, "Well. Its all that McCain has left to do." As if that makes it OK to scream "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

We have succumbed to something we would tell ourselves to our dying day that we do not believe: "that the end justifies the means." In a stupefying attempt to be "fair" we have turned our heads and allowed the intolerant rants of hate to be "tolerated."

If I had not lived through the short few years when three leaders of my hope for our nation were destroyed, when I, and the rest of the nation, had to grow up and realize that there is evil in this world, perhaps I would not feel so uneasy, and could just let it go as "Well, its just the politics of desperation."

Unfortunately, it only takes one nut, one crazy who is sent over the edge by the talk of terrorists, traitors, socialists, communists and the questioning of patriotism, to destroy the best hopes of us all.

It only takes one.

120 page views as of 11 23 2009

The Decalogue: #4 Remember the Sabbath & Keep it Holy

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:11:50 -0500

This is the 10th of a series of essays that cover the origin of the Israelite nation and conclude with a discussion of the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments. This and all remaining essays will deal with the Decalogue. Links to the prior essays can be found in the left hand column of this post under My Links: "Essays on the Exodus and the Ten Commandments."

To make it easier to understand this essay and to reference the relevant Biblical passages I am including here the passage that most closely relates to this essay.

From Exodus 20

8 Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 10 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. (NRSV)

Commandment #4, "Remember the Sabbath," forms the bridge between the first three Commandments relating to God, and the last six Commandments, which are about relating to one another. The 4th Commandment is often viewed as the last of the four Commandments about how we relate to God. And it is. But it also involves how we relate to one another because believers are to keep the Commandment together in obedience to his instruction.

Let's start with a technical detail that has, through the centuries, caused a lot of heartburn for some Christians, including some of the members of churches I have served in the past.

Because most Christians take our Sabbath rest on Sunday, instead of Saturday, does that mean that we Christians do not obey this Commandment? The short answer to that question is "No". However, some Christians do make a big deal of which day the Sabbath should be observed.

One the one hand, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Seventh Day Baptists, and a few other smaller Christian denominations and sects insist that the Jewish Sabbath, which is celebrated on the "Seventh Day," which we call "Saturday," is the proper day of worship for Christians.

On the other hand, the vast majority of Christian denominations set aside Sunday, the "First Day" of the week, as the proper day of Christian worship because it is said to represent the the day on which Christ was raised.

Who is "right?" Well, its not clear cut. If you want to say that the traditional Jewish understanding of the last day of the week is correct, then the "Sabbath" is from Friday at sundown until Saturday at sundown. For them, that is the "Seventh Day." So, if you want to worship on the "Sabbath" then you should have your weekly worship service during that period, like the Jews and the Adventists do.

Or, if you want to worship on a day that is particularly symbolic for the Christian faith, there is no better day to worship than on the day when Christ was raised from the grave. Most Christians do just that. But, by worshiping on Sunday do those Christians violate the 4th Commandment?

Two points need to be considered before we decide that worshiping on Sunday is a violation of the Sabbath. First, the Sabbath Commandment relates to rest, and says nothing about worship. Certainly worship would be appropriate on the holy Sabbath Day, but worship is not in any way part of the Sabbath Commandment.

Tradition added worship to the Sabbath, and that is reasonable. But it is not a commandment of God that the day of rest be combined with a special day of worship. There is certainly nothing wrong with worshiping God on Saturday, but there is also nothing wrong with worshiping God any day of the week.

Second, the Sabbath day rest is based on the story of the Creation as recorded in Genesis, which says nothing at all about how to set up a calendar. Calendars were a hodge-podge of differing lengths of time, ways to divide the year into months, etc., right up through the time of Christ.

For example, the Jewish Calendar at the time most of the Old Testament was written consisted of ten months, not twelve. Weeks, however, from the time of Moses were seven days to honor the story of creation in Genesis. But, from God's point of view, who is to say that the day we later chose to call Saturday was in fact the seventh, last, day of creation?

What if the later calendar makers, who named some days of the week in English after pagan gods, had decided that the first day in the week was Thursday?

Luckily for both Jewish and Christian tradition Constantine converted to Christianity and decided that the calendar would be set up with traditional Jewish seven day weeks with the Sabbath day being the last day of the seven.

But there have been both longer and shorter weeks in other cultures. Some of those line up more closely with either the Lunar or Solar cycles. As recently as the last century at least one major nation recognized 5 and 6 day weeks. And historically weeks have varied in different cultures from 5 to 20 days.

The point is that what God was trying to tell us is that he rested on the seventh day of the week of creation - whatever day that may be: and so should we. We should rest one day out of seven, whatever that day may be in our modern calendar. Whether or not that is also our day of worship is something that he left up to us.

The issue of the Sabbath is not about what day of the week it falls on, but that we remember it. And do not think that "remember" means "think about it." The Hebrew word for remember means "to observe" it; i.e.: do something about it!

For example, a husband should "remember" his wife's birthday and their wedding anniversary. Visualize this conversation. You come home from work, spend the evening in front of the TV watching Monday Night Football, and, as she storms off to bed at the end of the first half, your wife says in tears: "You don't even remember what day this is!" And you reply, "Sure, I remember, its our 20th wedding anniversary!" How well do you think that would go over? She expected you to do something about your anniversary, not just "remember" it! Just so, God expects us to do something about the Sabbath, not just "remember" that it exists!

What is that something we are to do? The answer, in this so-called "positive" Commandment is negative: we are not supposed to work!

Verse 10: 10 But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.

Notice too that it applies to the entire household, to servants and foreigners who reside in your country. Basically it applies to everyone. You are not to go off to play golf and leave the wife and kids home to do the wash and yard work! It applies to every creature that works, including servants, alien residents, even animals!

What God is saying is that he built into the very Creation a divine rhythm of work and rest. And when his creatures honor that rhythm within the created order that is how it is supposed to be. When we honor the Sabbath rest we honor God by imitating his actions at the beginning of Creation.

I do not want to get into some Pharasic argument about what specific things we can and cannot do on our day of rest. That depends, it seems to me, on how each individual defines "rest" and "recreation."

I do not think, for example, that riding around on my lawn tractor on a Sunday afternoon mowing the lawn is "work." I enjoy it. But I can remember a number of irritated parishioners of churches I have served, those who were self-appointed guardians of my moral conduct, who thought that to ride a lawn tractor on Sunday was a terrible sin! That is one of the joys of living in parsonages. An amazing number of church members think that they should tell you how to behave.

More to the point is that we may think that our busy-ness is not chaotic, but we actually know better. We may try to convince ourselves that the rat race we have gotten sucked into is "normal," but it is not normal to God. God did not create man or animals to work all the time.

Notice that the Sabbath rest is a great equalizer, applying to the rich and the poor, the oppressed and the oppressor. God is saying that he rested on the seventh day, and so should all of his Creation. God's argument to the believer is that the Sabbath rest is the way he designed things to be. So when believers violate that rest, we violate how God intends us to be, and how he intends the Creation to be!

So, here's the question for those who choose to obey the commandments in faithful response to God. Do some believers violate the Sabbath because we worship on Sunday and not Saturday, or do we violate the Sabbath because we are caught up in the web of constant work; of striving for success?

We are taught from the cradle that everything of value in this life comes from hard work. Sadly we believe that we get our identities from our work: from what we do, not from who we are! That is, we are told, the American Way.

But it is not God's way. God's way says we, all of God's creatures, need to slow down once a week, take time to smell the roses, to refresh ourselves, to recreate. Think about that innocent little word "recreate." Break it down a little differently than we normally pronounce it: "RE-create." We are to take time to "Re-create" ourselves.

That is God's way. It may not put a smile on the face of your boss who believes he owns you body and soul, and that your time is his to do with as he pleases. But, if you are a faithful believer, at least for one day a week, your time belongs to God! And God wants you to rest on that day!

So, believers have to choose. Do we choose to live God's way, in accordance to the way God would have us live? Or do we choose to live the way that modern society says we must live to be "successful?"

God says, "Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy." He is telling us that the Sabbath day, whatever day of the week we choose to make it, is his day, not ours, and we are to act like the creatures that we are and to observe the Sabbath rest that is built into the ordering of the Creation.

Next: Commandment # 5: Honor thy father and mother.

God bless.

250 page views as of 11 23 2009

The Decalogue (Ten Commandments) -- Do They Apply To You?

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:11:13 -0500

This is the 9th of a series of essays that cover the origin of the Israelite nation and conclude with a discussion of the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments. This and all remaining essays will deal with the Decalogue. Links to the prior essays can be found in the left hand column of this post under My Links: "Essays on the Exodus and the Ten Commandments."

To make it easier to understand this essay and to reference the relevant Biblical passages as I did in the last essay I am including here those passages that most closely relate to this essay.

From Exodus 20
1 Then God spoke all these words:
2 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
3 you shall have no other gods before me.
4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,
6 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Jews and Christians, inheritors of the faith of the Israelites, are taught to keep the commandments of God. But it is for us in this generation to see how ancient instructions, written over 2500 years ago, apply in modern times. This is a difficult question whenever we look at the Bible. What portions of it were intended for application only to the time, people and place about which they were written or spoken? And what portions have more universal application, to all generations of the faithful?

In the case of the Ten Commandments most commentators, including the vast majority of Christian scholars, believe that the words of God that comprise the Decalogue have a timeless quality, and were intended for all generations. I agree with that assessment. I believe that they are applicable to this generation of believers.

But, notice carefully that I said "this generation of believers." I did not say that they apply to everyone in this generation. Both Judaism and Christianity have always said that the beliefs of those religions are freely open to others to use if they choose to use them.

Neither faith is a private cult that has argued that no one but the members can know the mysterious codes of the faithful. In fact, every time some group has tried to turn the faith into a mystery cult that group has been denounced as anathema to orthodox faith.

But the opposite of that, believing that they apply to all persons irrespective of their faith, has been abused far too often, mostly by Christians who think that what they believe is what everyone else should believe - even if it has to be forced upon others by governmental decree.

Even though far too many Christians try to apply the Decalogue to all people in this generation, it is abundantly clear that we should not do that. Yet some Christians think that it is a good idea to tack up the 10 Commandments in all sorts of public places, and to hold all people to its precepts. That is not even remotely good theology.

The Bible is clear that the 10 Commandments were never intended to be applied to all people, and certainly not against their will. They were, by definition, given as a gift to those who follow Yahweh. They were the instructions by which those people of faith were to live their lives together.

In other words, the most accurate thing that we can say about the Ten Commandments is that God was, and is, applying them to faithful Jews and Christians, and to nobody else. Unless you are a Jew or a Christian who is in a faithful relationship with God, they do not apply to you. I cannot think of any way to more clearly make this obvious, and obviously often ignored, point.

So, if, for example, your batty, unchurched Aunt Mabel's has declared herself to be a worshiper of frogs, and has set up an altar to the Frog God and prays to the Frog God, your telling her that she is breaking the First Commandment just isn't true. She may be crazy, and she may be a pagan. But she isn't breaking the First Commandment, because it doesn't apply to her.

Just so the 10 Commandments do not apply to non-practicing, non-Christians or non-Jews who would come before a judge in a civil court room where you have just insisted the 10 Commandments be tacked up on the wall.

If Christians feel such a great need to tack them on some wall, we would be much better served if we tacked them to the walls of our own houses, and actually sought to practice them ourselves. We would find that doing that was hard enough without trying to impose them on others and judging others by their failure to comply with our beliefs.

But they do apply to those of us, Jews and Christians, who practice our faith. When God says "You shall have no other gods before me," he means you and me, if we practice the faith. And when He says, "You shall not make for yourself an idol," and when He says, "you shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God," well, God does mean all of those things.

When we believers accept that they do apply to us, a question still remains. How do the apply to us? Or, put another way, What do they mean for us today, in this generation? Let's look at that more closely.

When God says "You shall have no other gods before me," as I told you in the last essay, he was speaking to a people who believed that there were, literally, many gods. Today, of course, Christians and Jews believe no such thing. So, since believing Jews and Christians don't believe that there are other gods, does that mean that this 1st Commandment is not applicable to us? Or that we automatically meet its requirements?

Not at all. I wish it were that easy. But it is not because, while we may not literally worship other entities that we believe are gods, we can, and often do, worship other things as more important than Yahweh, the God of Israel. We may not intend to, but it is easy to worship the god known as money, or sex, or power, or even "our own time;" things and activities which keep us from worship, prayer and Bible study.

Now, when we take the time we should be focusing on God, and use that time on some thing or activity, we effectively substitute that thing or activity for worshiping Yahweh, our God. Whether or not this breaks the 1st Commandment, against worshiping other gods, or the 2nd, against worshiping an idol, is a mere technicality. Whether money or power, say, is a "god" to you, or is merely an "idol" that you worship is irrelevant.

The whole point is that when a thing, person or activity becomes more important to you than God then you break one or both of the first two Commandments. Any activity, thing or person that you "idolize" can become every bit as much an "idol" as is a physical object. The minute that any thing, person or activity actually influences our lives more than God influences our lives, we have given our faith to that thing and taken it from God.

The 2nd Commandment also applies to not making an idol or an image of God himself. Many of us do not realize that; but the Bible is clear on it. When the people, later in Exodus, made an idol in the form of a Golden Calf, they thought that they were making an idol of Yahweh. And God was furious. God forbids idols of himself! The reason is simple. God has no intention of being confused with anything that is man-made. He has no intention with being confined within any object.

So, if Christians have pictures of Jesus (most of which probably are totally off base, because we have no clue what Jesus looked like) or perhaps a crucifix, or any other representation of Christ or God, the Father, or of the Holy Spirit, for that matter, we need to avoid falling into a pattern of "worshiping" those things.

If you find, for instance, that you can only pray when you are before a picture, a crucifix or a statue of Jesus, ask yourself if you are praying to Jesus or to a representation of him. Don't let yourself get trapped into thinking that there is some special power present in pictures, symbols, or statues. There isn't. Jesus is not in a statue or picture or crucifix -- and you can't put him there.

Likewise, don't get trapped into worshiping the Bible. That sin even has a name: Bibliolatry. The Bible is the witness to the Word of God, who Christians believe is Jesus Christ. Christians, especially conservative Christians, often use a kind of short-hand and say that the Bible is the "word of God." But the Bible tells us that it contains the revealed word of God. It tells us that it is good for instruction in the ways of God. But it never claims to be God. And it is not. Do not fall into the trap of worshiping a book, a thing. Worship instead the One that it reveals!

The third commandment, "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God," is a rather straightforward commandment that we have somehow tended to narrow its meaning to its least important aspects. Mostly we connect it with not swearing. Sometimes we connect it with not invoking God's name in magic or divination, like Simon the Magician did, and occasionally we think it applies to not swearing falsely in God's name.

Now, it does apply to those things, so we are not wrong when we think that. But something far more important is at stake here, and that is maintaining the integrity of God's name. What this Commandment intends to do is to protect the name of God from being used to further our own agendas, draping them in the name of God.

Walter Harrelson suggests that this Commandment's intent is to keep us from using God's name "for mischief." I love that phrase, because it is so easy to invoke the power of God to get what we want, and not necessarily what God wants. And that certainly is using God's name for mischief! We may try to convince ourselves that they are the same thing, all the while knowing that they are not.

Some pastors and many televangelists are notorious for invoking the name of God in order to get what they want and often not necessarily what God would ever want. Beware of so-called Christians leaders who tell you that God told them to tell you to do this or that: like give them your money!

In other words, beware of those who invoke the name of God in the service of some purpose or cause other than God's. The last half of the Commandment makes it clear that God takes this quite seriously, telling us that God "will not acquit anyone who misuses His name."

Next: we'll look at the 4th commandment about keeping the Sabbath - which "technically" most Christians do not do.

God bless.

423 page views as of 11 19 2009

The Decalogue: The Ten Commandments

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:11:33 -0500

This is the 8th of a series of essays that cover the origin of the Israelite nation and conclude with a discussion of the Ten Commandments. This and all remaining essays will deal with what we call The Decalogue or Ten Commandments. Links to the prior essays can be found in the left hand column of this post under My Links: "Essays on the Exodus and the Ten Commandments."

To make it easier to understand this essay and to reference the relevant Biblical passages I am including here at the beginning those passages that most closely relate to this essay.

From Exodus 20

1 Then God spoke all these words:
2 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
3 you shall have no other gods before me.
4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,
6 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

One of the first things you notice is that modern Bibles break the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, into 17 verses. The breakout is not entirely arbitrary, but it is not well thought out either. And it came about centuries ago, when it was decided that the Bible would be easier to read if it were broken into books, chapters and verses. Sometimes it is easier. But other times it is just more confusing. And here, at the Decalogue, it is confusing.

Since we often see the Ten Commandments on statements, brochures, signs and elsewhere there is an assumption that we know what each commandment is, what its number is, and which verse contains it in the Bible. But that is not quite so.

The vast majority of the signs we see of the Decalogue are shorthand phrases of longer phrases in the Bible. It can get pretty confusing trying to walk through that maze. So I am going to walk us through a bit of that fog today. So just hang on, and we will make it to the other side unscathed.

Here is the first important thing to know in order to help you understand how the Decalogue is arranged. The first FOUR commandments are about our relationship with God, with the 4th commandment acting as a bridge to the remainder of the commandments. The SIX remaining commandments deal with how we relate to one another. Thus, ALL of the commandments deal with relationships: God with us and we with one another.

Now for a bit of maze walking. What is the first commandment?

It clearly is not verse 1: "Then God spoke all these words:"

But is it verse 2? "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;"

Or is it verse 3? "You shall have no other gods before me."

Well, Jewish tradition says verse 2 is the first commandment. But Christians say verse 3 is the first commandment, with verse two being just a preamble.

However, verse two is far more than a preamble. It is the basis of the "Shema," the holiest of Jewish prayers. Many of you know it, if not by that name. The Shema says, "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."

Christians may remember that Jesus assumed that everyone knew the first sentence of the Shema and recited only the second, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." And then he said that the "second" commandment was "like it," saying, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." He then said that on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. In other words everything else in the Bible rests on keeping these two "commandments."

Now, clearly, neither of these two great religious statements, which Jesus called "commandments" is one of what we think of as the Ten Commandments. But both the Shema and the first and greatest commandment which Jesus recites derive from the proclamation of Yahweh the he and he alone is "the Lord your God." So Jewish tradition should make sense to both Jews and Christians. I will come back to that in a bit.

But, first, I want to show a bit more of the complication here before we move on. If you are a Roman Catholic or a Lutheran chances are that you have been taught that the first commandment is ALL of verses 3 through 6, which have to do with "having no other gods." In other words, verse four which says not to make idols, and verse 5, which says not to worship such idols, are seen as elaborations, details explaining verse 3.

So, in order to come up with TEN commandments you have to split verse 17, which deals with not coveting, into commandments which deal with different aspects of "coveting."

Most Protestant Christians say that verse 3 is the First Commandment, that verses 4 through 6 is the 2nd Commandment, and verse 7 is the 3rd Commandment. That way you can come up with a total of ten commandments without splitting verse 17.

I have actually seen it proposed that one could logically keep verse 2 as the first commandment as Jewish tradition does, split verse 5 into 2 parts, split verse 17 into 7 parts and so forth and come up with from 11 to 19 Commandments, depending on how you separate phrases.

And, that would be just as logical as saying there are ten commandments. In fact, ten is not a particularly "holy" number and numerologists would no doubt rather have the Twelve Commandments, given the twelve tribes of Israel and the holiness thought by some to be attached to that number.

My guess is that about now God is shaking his head and laughing at the absurdity of worrying about this, let alone fighting to have the Ten Commandments put up in public places, where they have no business being, but that discussion comes later in the series so I will not belabor it here.

My own feeling is that God is a whole lot less concerned with how we count than God is with what we do about obeying or living by the spirit of those commandments. If we must have 10 rather than 19 that is fine with me. But we are clearly not going to agree on how to split up the text to arrive at ten.

Keep in mind that this is no more problematic than trying to figure out the exact names of the original disciples of Jesus or trying to figure out who exactly were the twelve disciples, and coming to the conclusion that there were no more than twelve tribes of Israel. We can not be certain about those figures either.

Because I am a liberal Protestant theologian and am comfortable with what I was taught early on, I will go by the majority of Protestant positions on the Decalogue. This is not because it is better or "more right" than the other ways the Decalogue can be split up, but it is the way I can talk about it comfortably.

Accordingly, and no drum roll please, the FIRST commandment is Verse 3: "You shall have no other gods before me."

The SECOND commandment is Verses 4 through 6 with Verses 5 and 6 elaborations on verse 4. "You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments." The shorthand version of commandment #2 is simply, "You shall not make for yourself an idol."

The THIRD commandment in this counting scheme is Verse 7. "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name." Again, the shorthand version of the third commandment is the first phrase of the commandment, "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God."

Now, having settled that to no ones satisfaction except a few uptight Protestants who really care about these things for reasons that elude me, I want to come back, as I said I would, to Verse 2 and explain why the Jews are in the most fundamental theological sense right.

Their tradition says that the 1st commandment should be the statement of who Yahweh is, "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." This bothers those who are literalistic in their understanding of English since it is a statement of "fact," and not strictly a command to do something when viewed literally in English.

But, if it is a "fact" it is a fact that almost no one else knew at the time the Decalogue was spoken, and one that you know, simply from reading this series, the Israelites themselves challenged more than once.

But here, in stark clarity, Yahweh tells the people the He and He alone is the only God that they need, and they must remember that he is bound to this people by holy covenant. Keep in mind that in those days most people believed in many gods. Many of the Israelites believed that there were more than one god and to be safe several should be prayed to and appeased. Here Yahweh does not try to disabuse them of that belief. Remember that Yahweh has just proven that he could defeat the "gods of the Egyptians." Rather, here Yahweh makes the simple point that this Yahweh is the God who saves THEM.

It will only be much later in the development of the theology of Israel when Israel will come to believe that there are no other gods, period. That is, they will come to believe that no other gods even EXIST.

For now it is only necessary that the Israelites believe that Yahweh is the one with the proven track record: This Yahweh is the God who saves, delivers and redeems them from the dreaded 400 year captivity within Egypt. It is this special and specific God who has chosen this special and specific people to be the ones he loves, holds close and protects. And it is this God that the people must learn to worship and obey in gratitude for that love and protection.

If what comes next sounds familiar it is because I have walked you by this point before. But it cannot be overstated if you are to understand the place of the Decalogue within the context of salvation history. The conditions of the covenant, the details of the Torah, and all the minor and detailed laws that spring from interpretations of it, are the result first of God's deliverance of the people, saving them from bondage in Egypt.

He can make the demands he makes of the people in following the commandments of the Decalogue precisely because of the GRACE that he has ALREADY given to them. This Torah, this instruction for living, is not to be seen as another form of bondage, but as the GIFT of a redeeming God, the GIFT of the instruction as to how to live a full and holy life under this one God, Yahweh.

If we cannot see the so-called "Law" of the Ten Commandments in this light then we miss the entire ebb and flow of our relationship with God. For God always provides the pure grace of deliverance, redemption and salvation before any guidelines for living are promulgated. And by so doing we can respond to the Instruction for Living, the Torah, in gratitude. If we miss this point we might conceive of Torah as another form of servitude, something not even remotely true theologically.

Think of it this way. The "Law" is not given to them so that, IF they obey it they will be God's people. The Israelites are already God's people. Thus the Law or Torah can never been seen as a means of salvation. God saves, delivers, heals and redeems because he loves us, not because we follow some set of instructions, as important as those instructions may be.

Thoughtful Jews never consider Torah as a unique vessel for salvation. They know that they were saved from bondage in Egypt before the Torah came alone. Rather they see the Torah, what Christians too often call narrowly as "Law," as teaching or instruction regarding how to live a redeemed life day to day under the guidance of the LORD.

Here in the beginning of the Decalogue God is affirming WHO HE IS and he does that on moral grounds. This God of Israel, our God, is defined not in vague philosophical or theological propositions, but is defined by the very nature of the moral imperatives He will place upon the people. He is a HOLY GOD and he will insist that HIS PEOPLE BE HOLY.

It is no accident that Jewish tradition sees verse two as the First Commandment. Verse 2 defines "who they are" by telling them WHO THEIR GOD IS. Logically, it would be of little help to tell them that they should "have no other gods before me," if the people had little or no idea who the God that they were to honor in that way was and is. They could have no respect for such a God because that God would have shown no love, care and protection to them. Yahweh did and still does show that today.

Speaking of now, how much respect do we have for God? Do we really know who God is? Does each of us, individually, have a concrete idea, a firm belief, that in some way relevant to our individual lives the God we worship is the one who redeems, delivers, heals and saves us?

Perhaps that sounds too easy. But it is not. It is precisely at times when we forget that the grace of God precedes anything we must do in thanksgiving for that grace that we chafe at God's rules, and often break them.

But, my friends, a strong argument can be made that if we really believed that God is God and that God has our well being first in his heart, we would not chafe at the rules for living and would instead obey and trust God in thanksgiving for his grace.

The Torah, both written and spoken, is at the heart of Jewish morality. And I know some Christians who would like to see it as not applying to us. But that is totally anathema to orthodox Christian teaching.

Besides that, if we Christians truly believe that God is God and we are grateful for our personal salvation as Christians the promulgation of rules for living is standard Christian instruction. You can pick up just about any book in the New Testament, say, the letters of Peter, Paul or John and you will be told over and over and over that believing Christians ARE saved, ARE holy, and ARE sanctified. In fact that we ARE God's own saints.

And yet, even while knowing that, every one of the great apostles shook his head not only at our inability to avoid sinning, but at their own. Even the greatest of the apostles could not meet the tests that they clearly say that we have ALREADY MET because of faith in Christ.

So, for Christians, the big question is how can we possibly be holy, sanctified, and saved if we sin all the time? And it is a good question.

The truth is that we cannot save ourselves. Writers like Peter, Paul, John and the writer of Hebrews stress heavily that we cannot save ourselves, that only Jesus can do that. Paul says it best. I will paraphrase. We are saved not by our merits, not by our good works, not even by our holiness, but because we believe in Jesus, the Christ. Once we believe in God's Son, God considers us ("reckons us") to be righteous for the sake of his Son, through the sacrifice he made for us on the Cross.

So, just as the Israelites were already saved from bondage in Egypt by the grace of Yahweh BEFORE they received the Torah, and were already God's chosen people bound by covenant to Yahweh even before he spoke the Ten Commandments, so too, Christians like me believe that they are saved by the grace of God through faith in Christ.

I believe that it is important to try to live up to the Torah and the instructions for living that apply to Christians and Jews. But if we cannot we have a remedy at hand within both faiths which is to admit our sin and be cleansed once more to be vicars of God. That is good news for Jews and Christians alike. In fact it is Amazing Grace!

God bless,

Monte

Next: Snares and pitfalls in applying the Decalogue. And just who do these commandments apply to anyway?

311 page views 2009 11 19

Preparing for God

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 17:11:20 -0500

This is the 7th of a series of essays that cover the origin of the Israelite nation and conclude with a discussion of the Ten Commandments. Links to the prior essays can be found in the left hand column of this post under My Links: "Essays on the Exodus and the Ten Commandments."

This essay is the final piece of the puzzle leading to the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. The next post will start to explore the Commandments themselves. This essay is about understanding just who this God, Yahweh, is who is going to give the Commandments to the people, the Israelites, who have agreed to live by them under the love, care and protection of Yahweh.

God is about to speak the Commandments directly to the people. We, mistakenly, might think that He will simply write them down for them. But that comes later. First, He speaks them to the people. Biblical imagery is full of allusions to the ability of God to accomplish God's desires by simply speaking them. Just as God spoke the world into existence in the beginning, by God's spoken word God will lay down for the Israelites the boundaries of the Covenant to which they have now all agreed.

We must not trivialize this time of the preparation of the people to hear this word from God. Anxious as we are to know what God wants from us, we must take our cues from God who expects that we will receive what he speaks with appropriate awe and respect. Almost all of Chapter 19, from the time when the people say, "Everything the Lord commands, we will do," deals with God's insistence that the people know who God is and treat him with appropriate respect.

This is a lesson that believers would do well to learn. Many Christians, whose last serious study of the Bible often ended by the time they were teenagers, seldom think about a strong and powerful, and at times angry God. Instead, the God we are most comfortable with in our own minds is often a warm, easy going God, a "friend," a "pal," a "buddy." But we are also to remember that God is also the Creator of the Universe.

For Christians the same warm and fuzzy Jesus we like to comfort ourselves with is also the awesome Judge of all Creation. And we tend to forget that. The compliant Jesus we Christians most comfortably imagine is surely one aspect of God's nature; and it is a very important one.

But the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses, our God, is also something else entirely: fearsome, awesome, and all-powerful. To paraphrase Anne Dillard who often sees what we intentionally avoid seeing: Christians are all too often like children playing in church with a chemistry set; unaware of the awesome power that they so casually fiddle with when they worship. Better", she says, "that we come to church in flak jackets and helmets, lest we awake the sleeping God that we invoke!"

The God we meet in the story of Exodus is well aware of the distance that separates him from mere mortals. Three times God warns Moses to have the people prepare to hear him: ritually cleansing themselves, consecrating themselves to make themselves holy, setting boundaries past which they may not step, making sure that they not break through to the Lord to look at him. Three full days of preparation were demanded by God before they were ready to hear the Ten Commandments. Three days! Modern day worshipers would never tolerate that. Most of us would give up and go home after three hours!

Yet listen to the language God uses with Moses to impress upon him the severity and importance of this time of preparation: "Any who touch the mountain shall be put to death." "Go down and warn the people not to break through to the Lord to look; otherwise many of them shall perish. Even the priests who approach the Lord must consecrate themselves, or the Lord will break out against them." "Do not let either the priests or the people break through to come up to the Lord; otherwise he will break out against them!" There is nothing warm and fuzzy in these words of God! Yet, God insists on all of these precautions to protect them!

And when God does condescend to, amazingly, "come down to them," try to get a picture of the terrible power that the people see and feel. All of nature bows to this Almighty Yahweh. Thunder and lightning begin, a thick cloud engulfs the top of the mountain, fire and smoke erupt out of the mountain, an a trumpet blasts so loud all the people tremble in fear. The entire mountain shakes, even as the trumpet blasts louder and louder and louder.

A skeptic would say, "Why, it is only a volcanic eruption." Which is no doubt true. But in this story the volcanic eruption happens because the holy God of Israel has descended to its peak, and even the mountain trembles in his presence. This metaphor's unstated question is, "Should his people do less?"

God has promised his presence with them. Yet now it seems to them like less of a good idea than before! But God protects them: they will only hear him, but will not be allowed to see him or even to touch the ground near him. Thus even his very presence will be shrouded in shadow and mystery: a proposition that moderns find very uncomfortable. We insist that we can know, describe, tame and control God to fit our image of God, to keep God on a leash and do our beckoning.

But this is a God that we cannot tame: a God whose power is so great words cannot begin to describe it. Yahweh insists that his holiness not be trivialized, or compromised in any way by what humans hope or prefer. God is not to be tamed to our images of him.

What we see clearly here is that this is not a spontaneous, joyous little meeting with Yahweh. There are no calls out for who wants coffee. And would you like a sweet roll. This is an intentionally orchestrated, carefully choreographed meeting with the God of the universe. There is nothing casual about it!

As Walter Bruggemann so aptly puts it, "Yahweh is an alien presence, a foreboding, threatening and de-stabilizing otherness. The narrator wants to take us up in awe and terror, in the presence of the Holy One who is beyond all portrayal....God comes...untamed and on the loose!"

Just so, the preparations that God demands from the Israelites in order for them to be able to safely come into his presence are ordered and severe; and they are quite different than our own preparations to be in the presence of the Holy One.

How often do we, in our preparation and worship, trivialize God's holiness? We want a God who is immediately available. We drop to our knees, or, more likely, slightly bow our heads, and we imagine that God has nothing better to do than to immediately give us his undivided attention. After all, on this Sabbath or Sunday did we not give up a picnic, or a ball game, or sleeping in, to be here. Shouldn't God at least thank us for such a great sacrifice?

The truth is that most of our worship takes place far, far short of the base of the mountain. We want to be in position to seize the initiative, to call the shots, beckoning God at our convenience. Were we to get close enough to feel and hear our God, would we be quite so complacent about our worship?

The meeting between God and the people described in our text is anything but a get together between "buddies." This text asserts that the God of our fathers will not come into the midst of our indifference. Some other God that we conjure in our imaginations might, some God of our own making, some God of our convenience. But not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Israel, the God of Jews and Christians alike.

We must ask ourselves what God it is we invoke when we gather together to worship. Do we worship an awesome God, a God beyond our very comprehension, a God who loves us but who also demands our love and loyalty? Can the modern mind even begin to wrap itself around the idea of such an awesome otherness? These are the questions that Chapter 19 demands we ponder; and it behooves us to spend some time meditating on these questions.

Walter Bruggemann argues that this God, our God, lives neither in easy, comfortable intimacy with us, his people, nor is he remote and impassable. In other words, Bruggemann argues that God fits no stereotypes that we are likely to conjure up when we try to get a grasp of who God is. Rather, in odd and unpredictable ways, God comes and goes, always seizing the initiative from us, and changing what we so comfortably think is reality.

What we have in the scenes described in Chapter 19 is the entry of heaven into earth. And that, my friends, is a hard idea to wrap our minds around. In this story God comes down to his chosen people: and nothing is ever the same again. The question for us is whether we can, or whether we even want to, capture some of the spell-binding sense of the power that is possible when we ask God to come into our lives.

An old mentor long ago told me that it is a frightening thing to be in close proximity to the God of the Universe. Yet if we have faith we must ask for that same God to be with us. May we have the courage to reach out in awe and adoration to the God of Israel, the God who changes everything.

Next: The first three commandments.

God bless.

347 page views on 11 15 2009