4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your strength. 6 These
commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them
when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and
when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols
on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write
them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Newberry Award-winning children’s author Katherine Paterson, who wrote Bridge to Terabithia, tells of growing up in China as the daughter of missionaries. She once remarked that her parents read and re-read the stories of the Bible to her and her siblings “not to make us good,” she says; “but to tell us who we were.” Paterson’s remarks expose a problem in much of what passes for spiritual formation. That we read the Bible or go to church in order to be good citizens or good people and that somehow being a Christian is about doing the right thing in order to earn God’s favor. This view has been dubbed by Christian sociologists as “moralistic therapeutic deism” – that God is a distant, moral policeman who aims to make us a success if only we obey. But is that what God wants? Today’s text from Deuteronomy 6, referred to as the Shema and prayed twice daily by observant Jews, however, reorients the entire project of spiritual formation. It seeks to remind us a loving story of a gracious God. It seeks to tell us “who we are.” It tells us . . .
1.
We
are ones that God wants.
“What does God want?,” many people wonder. And our text
begins with an important command: “Listen!” – God demands – “and I will tell
you for I am the only God. I am the only one who can tell you who you are, what
you were made to be. You were made to love me and love others. You were made as
part of a story of love that engages all of you, everything, every part of you.”
And the amazing thing is that God wants us in a loving relationship. Love is
the center out of which everything emerges. God doesn’t necessarily want our
labor, our sacrifices, our unquestioned obedience. God wants our love which
means that we are desirable and worth something before we do anything. But many
of us want to substitute other good things, like obedience or faithfulness. So
the great creed of Judaism should give us pause coming as it does from the book
of Deuteronomy which literally means “second law.” This is what God says, “the great desire of
my heart is not law, it’s love; not obedience but relationship.” More than
anything, we need to tell the younger generation, our neighbors, our enemies,
that God wants to be loved by them, which means that they are wanted by God.
Do you know what word appears more times than the word “obey”
in the book of Deuteronomy? The word “remember.” And that remembering has less to do with the
commandments and is more connected with the story of God and God’s people. The
Pentateuch more than a list of dos and don’ts is a story of God pursuing a
messed up, abused, and broken people. The story of God’s ever-faithful and
pursuing love is what grounds the whole project. “Remember that you were once slaves in the
land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you! That is why I am giving you
this command.” (Deuteronomy 15:15)
Make no mistake, a story of love has rules – rules that
protect and provide. We create rules for our children BECAUSE we love them. A
story of laws, however, has no real need for love. You will obey someone you
love and someone who loves you. You will not necessarily love someone that you
must simply obey. Time and time again, we are told that the very reason behind
what God does is to love and care for us. 8 But
it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he
swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed
you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” ~
Deuteronomy 7:7-8
A number of years ago my oldest daughter and I were arguing
over a particular issue and she chose not to listen to me. This pained me and I
tried repeatedly to talk to her about it but the more I brought it up the more
it seemed to push her away, to drive a wedge between us. I spoke to my lead
pastor at the time who listened patiently as I argued my view and the pain of
my daughter’s refusal to listen. He then wisely responded with a statement that
has fundamentally altered the way I parent and the way I view God. He asked,
“Jon, do want to be right or do you want to have a relationship? That, my
friends, is the very grounding of this passage. Never imagine that the rules
are the essence of the relationship. If relationship is the very core of our
story, the very essence of who God made us to be, then it’s love and not law
that should define our lives with God. It means simply that God wants us.
2.
Impress
upon the younger generation your failures and God’s faithfulness.
The word “impress” that the NIV uses in vs. 7 is a repeated
action, “Impress them upon your children” means to “imprint” or “stamp.” We
must remember that our job is not to stamp them with the phrase “be good” but
the possessive “God’s. How do we do that? How do we stamp them without falling
into stern moralism, on the one hand, or an anything goes mentality, on the
other hand?
One of my climbing partners is a former youth pastor. He
told me about a time when he was dealing with some high schoolers to help them
own their faith by helping them construct a rule of life. He started by asking
them four questions: 1. What does the world say? 2. What does scripture say? 3.
How will you behave? So far all these questions made sense to me and I saw
where he was going as he tried to help the students chart a path for themselves
and make critical decisions before they were faced with challenging choices. But
it was the fourth question that, in my opinion, turned this project away from
merely being good to one which had students engage the living God. The fourth
question was: “What will you do when you break your rule? What will you do when
you fail?”
If we only focus on telling our kids how to follow God and
fail to tell them, to impress upon them, what happens when they fail – then we
will create an environment where sin truly abounds because sin isn’t simply
about a broken rule but a broken story which wants people to hide from God, to
believe that God doesn’t love them, doesn’t long to heal them. If we are to
understand these stories as defining who God is and who we are then we need to name
what the stories of the Pentateuch declare loudly and often: that we fail God
time and time again, these failures are painful and destructive, but that God
is faithful, forgiving and merciful.
Moses will announce to all of Israel: “After the Lord your
God has done this for you [subdue Israel’s enemies], don’t say in your hearts,
‘The Lord has given us this land because we are such good people . . . You must
recognize that the Lord your God is not giving you this good land because you
are good, for you are not – you are a stubborn people” (Deuteronomy 9:4, 6). If
we are going to impress the younger generation, if we want to have something to
talk about at home or on the road, when we lie down or when we get up, then we
are going to have to share about our failures and God’s love amidst failures,
God’s faithfulness when we are faithless. We must imagine that we are allowing
God’s love and word to shape them. We “impress” upon our children when we tell God’s
story of love, love that exists even when we fail to follow the law
3.
Graffiti
your house with God’s love.
We need to add such rituals and objects which make faith a
matter of bodily practice rather than mere intellectual assent. We need ways of
shaping our bodies so that we habitualize God’s great mercy and God’s story of
who we are. I’ve talked before about how I created a bathing ritual for my
daughter to remind her that God made her and that her body was a source of
delight and wonder. The fact of the matter is that the story of God’s love is
too important to be left to mere words but must be something that we also bind
our bodies with and graffiti our houses over. So we are going to make mezuzahs
today after worship.
I would like to highlight the power of binding and tying by
telling a different story. It comes from one of my favorite books, Honoring the
Body, by the theologian Stephanie Paulsell. In that book, she names a number of
daily things that we do with our bodies that can be expressions of Christian
faith. She asks, for example, Can our clothing bear witness to our commitment
to follow God? She goes on to tell a story that dramatically captures why God
would want us to “tie” and “bind” this story and these commands to ourselves.
She speaks of the terribly painful experience of having a miscarriage the day
after Christmas leaving her, she says, “screwed to my bed with depression,
unable to work, read, or pray.” She was, however, able to talk to friends and
she poured out her heart and her pain. She cried to her friend, “I am so
depressed that I can’t even pray. I try to pray, but I can’t.” A few days
later, a package arrived from her that contained a simple beige jumper and a
note that read, “I have prayed in this dress every day for a year. You don’t
have to pray. Just wear it. It is full of prayers.” “I was naked in my grief,”
Paulsell writes, “and my friend clothed me.” Friends, we need to bring that
sort of imagination to this project of spiritual formation and following God.
We need to not simply imagine that we are brains without bodies but embodied
beings whom God loves and calls.
What if we were reminded every day when we leave the house
or when we return that God wants our love? What if every time we entered our
home the story of God’s love amidst failure greeted us at the door? What if our
very doorways became entrances to a story of grace?
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