Laying Down the Law

Readings: 16th Sunday after Pentecost

As Christ's Resurrection is the defining event of the New Testament, so God's Theophany at Sinai is the defining event of the Old Testament. Our first reading takes us to the third day, when God speaks to all Israel assembled in fear and trembling at the foot of the mountain. God begins with the aseret hadevarim, Hebrew for the "ten words." We call them the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments.

Truly, this was the beginning of God's Covenant with the Hebrews, also known as the people of Israel, or today, the Jews — from Judea (the land of Judah), the name of their longest surviving kingdom. From this day forward, the Jews agreed to keep God's commandments, and God promised to keep them as a distinctive people, a priestly people, in that they were to be the people who lived according to God's commandments.

It was also only the beginning. In the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible) God gives a total of 613 mitzvoth, or commandments, and the Jews would be bound to uphold them all. During the period in which the Hebrew Bible was revealed, keeping the commandments proved difficult. The archaeological record indicates that many Jews kept figurines of gods belonging to religions other than their own until the Babylonian Exile. After that, they appear to have become strict monotheists.

Then the Romans occupied the Judea and re-named it Palestine, in order to break the identification of the Jews (Judeans) with their land. Not only did keeping the commandments become more difficult — after the destruction of the Second Temple and the subsequent Roman Exile, it became impossible to keep them literally. For the next several hundred years, Jewish scholars debated how to re-interpret the commandments under such circumstances, and wrote their opinions in the Talmud.

Thus, with some modifications, Jews are still liable for all 613 commandments. If you are Christian, then so are you. Jesus quoted the Hebrew Bible, and taught its commandments. To reject them is to reject Him.

I know the usual claptrap that passes for Christian Biblical interpretation claims that, because Jesus has "fulfilled" the commandments, you are excused from your obligation to obey most of them. But you are not excused. You are forgiven.

The difference is that to be excused means to be given a free pass. God gives a nod and a wink, and you are free to direct your attention elsewhere. Being forgiven means that you are the beneficiary of the Forgiveness that was planted in this world by Christ's blood and agony on the Cross. The commandments still stand, and you are still convicted when you neglect or disobey them, particularly those first Ten. But, thank God, you are forgiven.

And yet, our Psalm tells us that keeping the commandments is sweet. It is a form of worship to perform the daily and weekly rituals of Jewish life, and to study the Torah. The various actions and restraints, large and small, create a heightened awareness of the sacred in everyday experience, and thus a heightened spiritual consciousness. It is both a joy, and as both our readings from Isaiah and Psalm 80 remind us, a serious obligation.

How serious? There were a number of competing varieties of Judaism during Jesus' earthly lifetime. Of them, only two survived the Roman occupation: one became the Judaism we know today, and the other became Christianity. After nearly 2000 years of exile and near-extermination, the former has returned to the land of its origin, while the latter has conquered the occupiers so completely that their Latin is maintained as a living language only in rituals of the Catholic Church. These two vines have survived.

It remains the Covenant obligation of Jews to uphold the commandments, to study Torah and Talmud. It remains the New Covenant obligation of Christians to go beyond the commandments. At first glance, we Christians seem to have the easier path — fewer details to learn, fewer rituals to remember. Until we remember that Jesus said (Matt 16:24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23), "Whoever will come after me, let him take up his cross, and follow me."

We console ourselves that our righteousness is not earned by obeying the commandments (aka the Law), because in truth, we cannot obey them perfectly. Instead, we claim a righteousness that has been given to us by God through Christ himself. All He asks is that we follow, wherever He may lead, through whatever hardship, even through death. And to go joyfully, passionately, straining forward toward the goal, as the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Phillipians.

Leia Mais…

Advent: The Christmas Truce of 1914

Readings: Any Sunday in Advent, Years A, B, and C
and "Christmas in the Trenches," John McCutcheon, 1984.



Advent, from the Latin adventus, means "The Coming," or "The Approach." Once recognized as a holy season of the Christian Church beginning four Sundays before Christmas, it was specifically about the coming of Christ — in our past as the baby Jesus, and in our future as Redemptor Mundi, the Redeemer of the World. Now it is submerged in the tide of holiday shopping that fills the void from Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving, when many retailers finally turn a profit for the year) to Christmas Day, the distribution of the loot.

Advent is anticipation, a building of hope and feeling as we prepare to celebrate Christmas, the anniversary season of Our Lord's Birth as one of us. The Twelve Days of Christmas. Twelve days of inspiration, generosity, gratitude , good will, familiar songs, and peace.

So it was on Christmas Eve, 1914, in the trenches of World War I in France and Belgium. The men on both sides were waiting, mostly for another attack by the other side. Instead, an informal truce was struck by ordinary soldiers on both sides, beginning with the singing of Christmas carols. There was even a soccer game, until the ball got punctured on barbed wire. Instead of an attack, the men got a few days — a moment, in the scheme of things — of grace.

At first, the truce was welcomed by their officers as an opportunity to bury their dead. Some of them had lain rotting in the No Man's Land between the trenches for months. But as the British and German troops mingled and got friendly, the officers got frightened. This sort of thing could end the war. Orders were given against fraternizing with the enemy, with dishonorable discharge or death the penalty for disobedience. What ended was not the war, but the peace.

And the rest, they say, is history. World War I led to a defeated, broken and sullen Germany, which led Germany to fall prey to Hitler's ideology of National Socialism (Nazism), which led to World War II and the slaughter of 50 million people, including the systematic genocide of 6 million Jews, and the subsequent mass migration of the survivors who had nowhere else to go to what became the nation-state of Israel, which has endured almost continual war with its neighbors. Defeated along with its ally, Germany, in WW I, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned into many of the countries that form the Middle East today. Some like Iraq, were taken over by Baathism, which is little more than an Arabized Nazism, and many have made themselves enemies of Israel. Weakened by WW I, Russia was overtaken by Communism under which Stalin killed millions to force the collectivization of farming, which inspired many other such takeovers including China with its massacres under Mao Zedong, and provided the ideology that led to the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Killing Fields of Kampuchea under Pol Pot. The foundation of Israel combined with the loss of the Ottoman Caliphate became some of the principal grievances used by al-Qaeda to recruit the perpetrators of the 9/11 and other attacks. And of course, WW II was ended by the invention and use of nuclear weapons, which together with the Cold War led to "Weapons of Mass Destruction," becoming a common phrase.

Need I go on?

If we humans had had the Faith to trust in and sustain what happened on that Christmas Eve in 1914, we might have avoided most of the bloodshed of past century. In other words, what was at stake was not just World War I, but World War II and all the wars which followed from them.

We were not punished for our failure by a vengeful God. No, God offered us a way to build a better world, and we chose instead the familiarity of business as we usually do it. We have not endured a punishment — we have endured the world we were already making for ourselves.

To tell the truth however, the men involved didn't expect the Christmas Truce of 1914 to hold. They took it as a very much wanted, but unexpected opportunity for a few days relief from the drudgery and stress of slaughter. They would have liked more time, but it didn't occur to them that they could take it. Their common Christian heritage — the Gospel — offered them a moment of Grace, but they did not dare ask a lifetime of Grace for themselves, or a history of Grace for the world of us who would come after them.

The men knew the personal risks of war. Odds were that most of them would make it back home, unhurt, with honor. All you had to do was keep your head down. Poison gas was not yet in widespread use, and nobody expected the influenza of 1918. But the risk of peace — if everybody acted together you might be hailed as a hero or a saint, but if not, you might be branded a coward or a traitor. Or you might be taken prisoner. Or you might be shot — by the enemy troops or your own.

That's the thing about these moments of God's Grace. They catch us by surprise. And if we want them to last, we must have the crazy audacity to ask for more than we ever dreamed possible, and to commit ourselves completely, body and soul. Because God's Grace, the Gospel, offers us new selves to become, with new futures. Too often, as in 1914, we turn away, blinding ourselves to the possibilities, trudging our familiar path into the darkness. Because, ironically, it seems less scary to us. Or worse, as in Nazi movement of the 1930's, the Communist revolutions, or the present Bin Ladenist movements, we allow our capacity for that audacity and committment to be perverted to evil ends.

Advent. Waiting for the coming of God's most radical Grace. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. We are always waiting for moments of Grace, as each Advent we wait for Christmas, a season of Grace, mindful that the original Christmas was also a moment of hope and fear. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

Few moments of Grace in recent history have been so powerful, so pregnant with possibility as Christmas in the Trenches in 1914. But they do come. Let us be thankful for the triumph of Solidarity and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the non-violent collapse of Communism in 1991. Let us be thankful that India and Pakistan decided not to go to war in 2002 when Pakistan-based Islamic terrorists bombed the Indian Parliament building.

Now whenever our moments of Grace come, small or large, personal or international, may God give us the the audacity to ask for more abundant Grace than we have ever imagined, and the courage to commit ourselves to its path. Or to use more old-fashioned words, may God give us Hope, may God give us Faith.

This Advent may you approach Christmas in God's Grace.

Leia Mais…