Month: October 2023

Micah 3.5-12, Matthew 24.1-14

The Fourth Sunday before Advent, 5 November 2023  

Eldroth, Clapham

Each Friday for the past thirty-five years, groups of Israeli women dressed in black stand at intersections and traffic lights and in central squares in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other towns and cities, carrying black signs with the image of a white hand and the lettering: Stop the Occupation. [1]

A mother, Nurit, and her young daughter, Smadar, were often among them, protesting what they considered to be serious violations of human rights by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian women: ordering mothers at gun-point to strip in front of their children; jailing young women without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses, separating them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers, barring their way to hospitals, blocking their way to education, confiscating their lands, uprooting their trees and preventing them from cultivating their fields. [2] 

One day Nurit and Smadar joined the protesting women in Paris Square in Jerusalem. Then nine years old, Smadar had no proper black shoes so she wore, instead, a pair of ballet slippers which she darkened with polish. She stood at the intersection, alongside Judy Blanc, an older activist. Together they held a sign aloft: End the Occupation. Some passers-by gave them abuse. They did not flinch when a car full of dark-hatted settlers threw a carton of popcorn at their feet. [3]

You may recognise the name Smadar, for I have spoken of her before, recently. In September 1997 when she was thirteen Smadar died, blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber on Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem, whilst out shopping with her friends for the new school year. [4]

Since then, on every Memorial Day, Israel’s day of remembrance, packages arrived at the home of Smadar’s parents, Nurit and Rami Elhanan.

The packages unhinged Rami and Nurit. Neatly wrapped in sky-blue paper with white ribbons, and sealed with a silver Star of David. They were left on the doorstep along with a note from the Minister of Defense: Dear Elhanan family.

A different item every year: a cut-glass bowl with names of the fallen engraved around the rim, a pewter vase with biblical quotes, a porcelain flag, a pair of silver Shabbat candlesticks.

The note – a special message to the bereaved – was florid. On this momentous Memorial Day we wish to honour Smadar’s memory and the special sacrifice you and your family have made for the eternal State of Israel.

Nurit was livid: it was not just the vulgarity of the gifts or the saccharine letters, but how they co-opted Smadar as their own, as if the child had been somehow complicit, as if she had stepped selflessly down Ben Yehuda Street into the arms of the bomb.

She and Rami took a hammer and a wedge to the glass bowl and smashed it to pieces, a small rubble of death and memory. They put the pieces in the box, re-ribboned it, and shipped it to Benjamin Netanyahu with her own note: Dearest Bibi, something is broken. [5]

Nurit explained her position this way:

For me, the other side, the enemy, is not the Palestinian people. For me the struggle is not between Palestinians and Israelis, nor between Jews and Arabs. The fight is between those who seek peace and those who seek war. My people are those who seek peace. My sisters are the bereaved mothers, Israeli and Palestinian, who live in Israel and in Gaza and in the refugee camps. My brothers are the fathers who try to defend their children from the cruel occupation, and are, as I was, unsuccessful in doing so. Although we were born into a different history and speak different tongues there is more that unites us than that which divides us. [6] 

What Nurit Peled-Elhanan says is clearly controversial in her place and time. She is a provocation to the Israeli powers-that-be. I think that she speaks in the spirit of Micah, a prophet of Israel in the eighth century BC who proclaimed himself to be ‘filled with power, with the spirit of the Lord, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin.’ 

The objects of Micah’s judgement were ‘the rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who,’ he said, ‘abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong.’

Amongst these were the prophets employed by the establishment who only said what their paymasters wanted to hear; they tried to silence Micah, for his criticisms were disgracing them. [7] But he stuck to his message of challenging the moral rot at the heart of society, calling the people to repent in the hope of God’s pardon and the coming of a time when Jerusalem would once again be the Lord’s house and when nation would not lift up sword against nation, neither would they learn war any more. [8]

Micah is well known for having written one of the most memorable summaries of Israel’s ancient law. His famous statement reduces the 613 laws of Moses to just three: ‘He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’ [9] 

We know of course that Jesus further reduced the law down to just two commandments: to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and to love your neighbour as yourself.’ [10] He meant acting lovingly towards one’s neighbour, one’s Samaritan or Palestinian neighbour, one’s Muslim or Jewish neighbour, one’s outcast, troubling neighbour.

We also know that Jesus warned those who tried to keep his commandments and stay faithful to the good news of God’s kingdom, that they would be ‘hated by all nations because of his name’, would be ‘tortured and put to death’. 

Doing justice is costly, loving kindness provokes opposition; walking humbly with your God raises criticism. Peacemaking with neighbours comes at a price.

Jesus saw, in his time, an ‘increase of lawlessness’ which caused ‘the love of many to grow cold’.  Does that sound to you rather like the times we are living in?

‘But anyone who endures to the end will be saved’, he said. Let us pray constantly that those working for peace will be strengthened in their task. Let us pray constantly that we may find ways of being among them. Let us pray always that our love – for God and all our neighbours – may never grow cold.

 

Notes

[1] Wikipedia: Women in Black; WomeninBlack.org: About Women in Black.

[2] Nurit Peled-Elhanan, A Really Remarkable Speech: Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s Address to the European Parliament, 4 August 2005. The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy – MIFTAH, March 05, 2007

[3] Colum McCann, Apeirogon. p.320, 322.

[4] John Davies, Is this your God, O Israel? Sermon preached 15 October 2023.

[5] Colum McCann, Apeirogon. p.362.

[6] Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Nurit’s words to Women in Black. JoanNestle.com, 14 June 2001.

[7] Micah 2.6

[8] Micah 4; John Bowker, The Book of Micah in The Complete Bible Handbook, An Illustrated Companion, p.234-5.

[9] Micah 6.6-8; John Bowker, The Book of Micah in The Complete Bible Handbook, An Illustrated Companion, p.235.

[10] Matthew 22.34-40

Deuteronomy 34.1-12⁠, ⁠Matthew 22.34-46

The Last Sunday after Trinity, 29 October 2023, Clapham

Moses died by the kiss of God. 

Where our bible tells us that ‘Moses died … at the Lord’s command’, Hebrew scholars teach that the literal translation is that ‘Moses died by the mouth of the Lord’. 

His last breath was drawn while being gently kissed by a loving God. It was a peaceful transition from life to death. The idea of death coming gently with a kiss even found its way into modern Hebrew. Mitat neshikah (‘death by kiss’)  refers to a person that has died a sudden and painless death at a ripe old age. [1] 

What a lovely way to go.

Unfortunately, not everyone can experience death as a kiss of God. Some of us will live long full lives, while others will die much too young. Some of us will die swiftly and with minimal pain. Others will languish, and death will come as a welcomed release from suffering. We cannot know how we will die. Death comes for everyone and we are powerless to stop it.

However, the way we live our lives until that final moment is up to us. We can spend our time being angry and resentful about the misfortunes of our lives, dwelling on our failures and missed opportunities. All too often, people make those choices. And in doing so they turn their faces away from God’s intended kiss. [2]

Like Moses, our lives are a complicated mix of joys and pains, of opportunities taken and missed, of loves gained and lost, of passions good, bad, fulfilled or spent.

If Moses had been listening in on the Israelites after his death he might have raised an eyebrow at the way they eulogised him: gushing with praise for all the signs and wonders he performed in the land of Egypt against Pharaoh, and all the terrifying displays of power he performed in the wilderness; forgetting all the times when they were hungry and they castigated Moses for not feeding them, when they were thirsty and they lambasted Moses for their lack of water, forgetting the times they turned their backs on him and their God to worship idols of their own making, their impatience frustrating Moses; their heretical ways angering him.

But rather than dwelling on these things, the scripture suggests that Moses tried to come to terms with his frustrations, and failures, and sought to find peace and wholeness at the end of his life.

Moses’ final moments were peaceful because he stopped fighting God’s judgement. He had to let go of his dream to lead the people into the Promised Land. He had to be reconciled to his own powerlessness. 

Moses died by the kiss of God: meaning that he came to accept that he would find peace, with the knowledge that he had finished his life’s work and that others would continue what he started. [3]

We can only speculate on what happens to us after we die, of course, but if you’ve ever heard the testimonies of people who have died, maybe in an operating theatre, and then been resuscitated, when they talk of what happened in those first moments of death, so many of them speak of having felt peace and calm. One person whose heart stopped for eight seconds following a seizure remembers an indescribable feeling that the weight of the world lifted off their shoulders, as if everything they cared and worried about was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. [4] 

I believe that our loving God extends his gentle kiss to all who face the end of their lives. 

And this week I pray for Bill Kenwright to know the gentle kiss of our loving God after a tremendously successful life in theatre, who has died before being able to realise his dream of leading his beloved football club, Everton, into a successful era in a new stadium which he initiated but will never see completed. [5]

Sir Bobby Charlton never claimed any kind of religious motivation for the dignified, dedicated life he lived. But he did often express the guilt he felt at surviving the Munich air crash in 1958 when so many of his teammates died; and of how he translated that emotion into a firm desire to provide good leadership in football and in life. Tributes to him this week have spoken of his brilliance as a leader on the pitch and ‘his modesty and quiet nobility off it … a man of gentle and distinct charm’. [6]

I believe that our loving God extends his gentle kiss to all who face the end of their lives. And I also believe that we can know the gentle kiss of our loving God as we face the end of our lives, his presence and guidance in prayer and reflection helping us to make peace with ourselves, with others and with God.

In this season of All Saints and All Souls our hearts go out lovingly to those who have gone before us; and as our spirits turn to embrace the realities of our own mortality, may we know ourselves to be held and supported in the loving embrace of God as we live our lives, each day until that final moment.

 

Notes

[1] Kevin Peters, The Serene Kiss Of Death. Sefaria, a Living Library of Torah. Edited. 

[2] Kevin Peters, The Serene Kiss Of Death. Sefaria, a Living Library of Torah. Edited.

[3] Kevin Peters, The Serene Kiss Of Death. Sefaria, a Living Library of Torah. Edited.

[4] Victoria Vouloumanos, People Who’ve Clinically Died And Been Resuscitated Are Revealing What They Felt And Saw Moments After Their “Death”. Buzzfeed, 20 April 2022.

[5] Will Rooney, Bill Kenwright’s stunning plans how to open Everton’s new Bramley-Moore Dock stadium. Yahoo, 26 October 2023.

[6] Sam Pilger, Sir Bobby Charlton: England’s Greatest-Ever Footballer. Forbes, 22 October 2023.

Exodus 33.12-23, Matthew 22.15-22

The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 22 October 2023, Austwick, Clapham

The Book of Exodus is, on the one hand, the story of the release of a captive people, their journey to a land of safety and security; it also describes the shaping of a toxic nationalism, of how a people came to see themselves chosen above all others to inhabit a particular piece of land in an occupied  area. It is at times about God’s guidance and provision. And, as in today’s strange dialogue between him and Moses, it is also about the elusiveness of God, his seeming absence at times of crisis. 

We are reading Exodus at a time of elevated crisis in the Middle East; and in a conflict driven by religious ideologies of different kinds – Zionism and Islamism clashing – all these themes of Exodus are right there on the surface: Can the scared and suffering ones make it over the border? Which of the warring factions will win control of the land? And where is God to be found in this struggle? 

It is all taking place a long way from here; but in another sense it couldn’t be closer; for the Christian Church is the ‘Israel of God’; [1] we identify with Her closely; on some meaningful level the actions and the fate of the people of Israel are inseparable from our own. Though troubled and concerned, we may feel powerless to do anything about what’s happening in the Middle East. But how we respond to it, and how we choose to live towards our neighbours in our place, in our time, we trust is part of the kingdom of God which embraces us all.

Last week I briefly described a man called Rami Elhanan. Today let me tell you more of his story. [2] Now seventy-three years old, a professional man, the seventh generation of a Jerusalem family, in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Rami, a young reserve soldier, one day set out in a company with 11 tanks which returned with only 3 tanks. “There, in the Sinai sands, I lost some of my very best friends,” he says. “I came out of this war an angry and embittered, cynical and furious young man. Determined to cut myself off from any sort of involvement, I built me a life: studies, family, career.”

A decade later, on Yom Kippur evening 1983, a sweet new baby girl was born in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem to Rami and his wife Nurit. They named her Smadar, from the Song of Solomon, meaning ‘The Grape of the Vine’. He said of her, “She was a very vivid, smiling, happy, full of life and active young girl who joined our calm, happy family.” 

That was until, on the 4th September 1997, Smadar and her friends went to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem to buy school books. There, they met their death, killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers who murdered five people that day, among them three little girls aged 14. Rami remembers “running crazily through the streets, going from one police station to the next, one hospital to the next, until eventually, much later in that long accursed night, you find yourself in the morgue and this terrible … sight that you will never, ever, be able to blot out.”

On the following Sunday the funeral was held in Kibbutz Nachshon, on a hill outside Jerusalem. Smadar was buried next to her late grandfather ‘Matti’ Peled, a well-known Israeli public figure who was, at various periods of his life, a Major General in the Israel Defence Forces, head of Arabic Language and Literature at Tel Aviv University, a respected member of the Knesset and a radical peace activist, a leading proponent of Israeli dialogue with the PLO and of complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. [3] “The enemies of peace murdered his granddaughter.” Rami said.

After the time of mourning, came a time of challenge for Rami. “Now,” he says, “you must marshal your strength, get up, face yourself in the mirror and decide: what … do you do with the rest of your life when suddenly you have become a completely different person, and all your previous priorities have dissipated in a trance and it’s as though they never existed?

“And really there are only two options to choose from, only one of two paths to tread: the first is the obvious one, the automatic, and the immediate. When someone murders your 14 year old little daughter, the one and only thing you have in your head is unlimited anger and an urge for revenge that is stronger than death. This is a natural feeling, it’s only human. Most people feel that way, it’s understandable, it’s clear and predictable. However, we are human beings and not animals. We have a head on our shoulders and inside that head we have a brain and when the first madness of anger passes, you begin to ask yourself penetrating questions: if I kill someone in revenge, will that bring my baby back to me? And if I cause someone pain, will that ease my own pain? And the answer is absolutely “No”. Then, during a long and slow, difficult and painful process you gradually reach the other road, and you try to understand: what occurred here? What can drive someone to such anger and despair as to be willing to blow himself up together with little girls? And most important: what can you, personally, do to prevent this intolerable suffering from others…”

Almost a year later Rami met a man called Yitzchak Frankenthal. He told Rami about his son Arik, kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994, and that he had established an organisation of people who lost children in the conflict but nevertheless want peace. Rami became angry with him. He asked: “How dare you enter the home of people who have just lost a child and talk to them about peace?” Frankenthal, not offended, but “with great calm and patience”, invited Rami to attend a meeting to see for himself. And, partly from politeness and partly from curiosity, Rami agreed.

When he arrived at that first meeting he saw holocaust survivors, bereaved Jewish parents, and also what he calls “an amazing spectacle”, something completely new to him. He saw bereaved Palestinian families: Arab men, women and children, coming towards him, greeting him for peace, hugging him and crying with him. He says, “I distinctly remember a respectable elderly woman dressed entirely in black and on her breast a locket with a picture of a kid, about six years old…”

“I am not religious – quite the opposite,” Rami says, “and so I am at a loss to explain the change I underwent at that moment. But one thing became as clear to me as the sun at noon: from that day on in 1998, I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Since that day on I have dedicated my life to one thing only: to shout in a loud voice, to all who are prepared to listen, and also to those whose ears are blocked: This is not our destiny! It is not a decree of fate that cannot be changed! Nowhere is it written that we must continue dying and sacrificing our children forever and forever in this difficult horrible holy land. We can – and once and for all must – stop this crazy vicious circle of violence, murder and retaliation, revenge and punishment. This never-ending cycle, with no purpose. With no winners and only with losers.”

Is there any prospect of a win-win solution to this, and every other, seemingly lose-lose situation in our conflicted world? Jesus absolutely thought so: Jesus championed the win-win solution when he said, ‘Give the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and God the things that are God’s’. [3]

New occasions teach new duties, [4] and it is our task, all of us, with Rami, his fellow activists for reconciliation, and all the bereaved, to work out, in this world of conflict, what our duties are.

 

Notes

[1] Galatians 6.16. As discussed in my previous sermon, Is this your God, O Israel?, 15 October 2023.

[2] The story of Rami Elhanan which follows is an edited version of Rami Elhanan, Replacing Pain with Hope, The Parents Circle Families Forum: Personal Stories, 1 January 2006. Previously included in my sermon, Even now in Palestine, imagine a debt-free world, Somerset, 17 September 2017.

[3] John Davies, A win-win answer to a lose-lose question. Somerset, 19 October 2014. Based on a sermon of the same title by Paul J. Nuechterlein, delivered at Our Savior’s Lutheran, Racine, WI, October 20, 2002.

[4] New occasions teach new duties: a line from The Present Crisis, a poem by James Russell Lowell. Quoted in Water Brueggemann, Chosen? Reading the Bible Amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Exodus 32.1-14, Matthew 22.1-14

The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, 15 October 2023, Austwick

If you want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like, Jesus says, then listen to the parable of the king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. But if you think that the king in the parable represents God, then you may struggle to understand. For this king is a tyrant, a despot despised by his people, who retaliates vengefully against those who don’t accept his invitation, and tortures  those who resist. [1] 

Doesn’t this make you want to ask Jesus, “How exactly can this be compared to the kingdom of heaven?” This story of an enraged king who burns down a whole city in anger: how can that be compared to the kingdom of heaven? Does this mean that God is vengeful and violent? [2]

We could easily reach that conclusion, reading the Exodus episode when the Israelites create the golden calf and God starts acting like an enraged king, violent and vengeful, when he realises that his people have rejected him for another, needing Moses to remind God of who he is: of the history he has with the people, and the promises he made them, so that in the end he relents. 

But, as I’ve said before, scripture holds many different views of God, sometimes in tension, [3] and in the story of the golden calf, God is first and foremost the rejected one, cast off by his people. 

In that story, the golden calf represents the same sort of worldly power as that which is wielded by the king in Jesus’ parable: a lavish, indulgent power which demands to be idolised. The golden calf is only created by the people’s own jewellery but it demands the people’s worship, just as the king in the parable demands the loyalty of the common people whose acquiescence enables his excesses. 

The people turn their backs on God and turn to an idol of their own making instead. God is powerless to stop them, and just like the man punished at the end of the parable of the wedding banquet, here God finds himself thrown into the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth.

Let us go back to the parable, to consider what happens if we compare (or contrast) the kingdom of God with the man who is not going along with the festivities, the man who is not wearing the wedding clothes, who is speechless in response to the king who then has him bound and thrown out into the darkness to suffer. What a big difference, to our understanding, this makes.

We should remember that in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is telling this parable when he is already in Jerusalem, just a few days before he will stand speechless before Pontius Pilate, the imperial power, and then he will be bound hand and foot to the cross, where he will weep and gnash his teeth.

So, if we want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like, Jesus is telling us, don’t look to the rage-filled, violent and vengeful king with an army at his side –  that is the kingdom of this world – there is nothing new there; instead look at the unarmed, speechless man who is bound and cast out into the darkness. In other words, Jesus is saying, “If you want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like – look at me. Learn from me.” [4]

These are the Gods we choose, say the people of Israel, and says the Church, the ‘Israel of God’. [5]

Is this your God, O Israel: the enraged king, violent and vengeful towards those who disobey him, who will burn down whole cities in his anger; or is it the one who is expelled with the outcasts, and who bears the punishment of the world with grace?

Is this your God, O Israel: the golden idol you create, expecting it to make you whole, who you trust to remove your suffering, who you think will give you the truth; or is it the one who embraces suffering with you, who helps you face up to your unknowing, and to fully accept the difficulties of existence? [6]

Now, we may not want to see Jesus as the bound outcast who is suffering and weeping and gnashing his teeth, but he wanted us to see him that way, the way he became on the cross.

Something happens when we see Jesus in this parable as the person who dared to defy the tyrant and because of that was singled out, exposed, and abused. What happens is that we start to see the courageous people in our world who will call out the bully, and we start to see the people who are singled out, exposed and abused.

Because Jesus identified with them in this parable – and on the cross he became them – we cannot not see them anymore. We begin to notice outcasts, we begin to notice people who are singled out and mistreated for not wearing the right clothes or having the right skin or carrying the right papers, or saying the expected ‘right’ thing.

Our sympathies begin to shift: we find ourselves not so worried about the king’s wedding banquet and what to wear to it, and more worried about how we will tend to the man that was thrown out, to the woman who was abused, and to the child who was put to shame. [7] Less concerned to maintain our own position in life and more concerned to stand alongside them, where they are. 

The Booker Prize nominated ‘Apeirogon’, by Colum McCann, is not about the rights and wrongs of the Israeli/Palestine conflict. It is about the hurt and the loss of young lives, and about fathers who have to come to terms with that. It is about two men who forge their grief into a weapon for peace-making: two fathers, one Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, and the other Israeli, Rami Elhanan. 

Bassam’s ten year old daughter Abir was killed by a rubber bullet outside school, having just bought some sweets, “the lost expensive sweets in the world” said her grieving father. Rami’s fourteen year old daughter Smadar is blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber, whilst shopping for the new school year. 

Bassam and Rami find each other, two ordinary men whose accident of birth threw them into having to live through dehumanisation, injustice, inequality and the deep deep pain of the heart. Yet, Bassam is a Palestinian who studies the holocaust. Rami is an Israeli who is against Israeli occupation. They now spend their lives telling their stories in schools, monasteries and to groups worldwide. 

They are one, but they’re not the same. They get to carry each other. [8]

They say that “… it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy any more, he just can’t be.” [9]

And that can also be how the Word of God works on us, converting us to a new way of seeing and a new way of living – more courageous and more compassionate. There is a banquet for us (point to the altar) but it is not the banquet of the rage-full king; it is the banquet of the Good Shepherd; it is the banquet of Jesus who is gentle and humble in heart; it is the banquet of God who intends to wipe the tears from every face and swallow up death forever. God calls us to come to this banquet. To come as you are. And to expect your heart to grow in courage and compassion. [10]

 

Notes

[1] See my previous sermon, The Church is the party no-one wants to come to: a lament. 11  October 2020.

[2] Julie Morris, The Banquet. Church of the Epiphany, Oak Park, CA, 15 October 2017, referenced in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Proper 23a. (Available to view on the Church of the Epiphany YouTube channel). Adapted.

[3] See my previous sermon, Good: or only on our side? Questioning God at the Red Sea Crossing.  17 September 2023.

[4] Julie Morris,The Banquet. As above.

[5] Galatians 6.16.

[6] Peter Rollins, The Idolatry of God: Breaking the addiction to certainty and satisfaction.

[7] Julie Morris, The Banquet. As above.

[8] U2, One. Remembering Pip Wilson, whose funeral took place on the day this talk was composed, and for whom One was something of a theme tune, and an opportunity often taken for communal ‘human becoming’.

[9] Steve Stockman, Colum McCann, Apeirogon. Soul Surmise, 22 August 2020.

[10] Julie Morris, The Banquet As above.

Exodus 20.1-20, Matthew 21.33-46

The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 8 October 2023

Austwick, Keasden Harvest Festivals

 

Why read the Ten Commandments at Harvest-time? Perhaps because Harvest is a time for remembering; and the Ten Commandments are an act of remembering.

At Harvest-time we remember to give thanks for the food we eat, the soil in which it grows, the sun and the air and the waters which nurture that growth. At Harvest-time we remember to give thanks for the creatures and the plant life who share themselves and this good earth with us.

And the Ten Commandments are an act of remembering who we give thanks to – the Creator of all this vital life which is a gift from the heart of his divine love.

The Ten Commandments are often thought about as a simple list of rules for life: you shall not kill, commit adultery, steal, or lie against your neighbour. But that’s just four of them. 

The tenth commandment asks us to remember why we succumb to these things: we kill, commit adultery, steal, or lie when we misplace our desires: when we covet what our neighbour has, and do those things we ought not to, to claim those objects of our desires for ourselves. 

The first three Commandments focus our remembering who we give thanks to – the God whose name should be honoured; the God we should hold before all other idols in our lives, the God who we should put first in all things, because this is the God whose desire is to free his enslaved people to fulfil their lives of promise on this earth.

This God announces his presence in the same way as all the other ancient Gods: in thunder and lightning, trumpet sound and smoke; just like all the other Gods this God is jealous for the people’s attention, and will punish their unfaithfulness and iniquity. 

But these Commandments also ask the people to remember that this God, our God, has a different side. This is a God who loves: who promises his people that he will ‘show steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.’ 

This God wants us to remember him as we remember our parents. Honour your father and mother, he tells them: remember the gift of life they’ve given you, the way they’ve helped shape you; hold close to your heart the good values they’ve taught you. In this way you will learn how to also honour Me.

And remember to take the time to do this. Keep the Sabbath, God says. Yes, work hard and work well to shape the world as beautifully and lovingly as I do. But remember to keep space in your lives to celebrate and nurture that love we have between us. 

Right at the start of the Commandments God asks the people of Israel to remember that ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery’. Remember, in other words, how I have shown you how deeply I love you, by freeing you from harm and directing you to a place where you can live a fulfilled life together.

We read the Ten Commandments at Harvest-time because Harvest is a time for remembering; and the Ten Commandments are an act of remembering.

If we want to, we can disregard these Commandments, and the other laws of Moses which are detailed in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus, as a dry and dusty set of rules with little relevance to us today. Or we can embrace them as statements of purpose alive with vital guidance as to how we can live a life of love, in communion with this earth, in community with its people and its creatures.

You shall not kill, rather you can remember to be a creator of life, whether that means tending the earth to nurture food, trees, shrubs and beautiful flowers, or tending to your relationships on this earth to make them all life-affirming.

You shall not commit adultery, rather you can remember to be a faithful, loving one who learns how to be reconciled with those you are alienated from; and how to reconcile others who have fallen out or drifted apart.

You shall not steal, coveting what another has, but instead remember to direct your desires towards what God has gifted you, and remember to be a generous giver, even a self-sacrificial giver, for the building-up of others and the benefit of life on earth.

You shall not lie against your neighbour, rather you shall seek to know the truth about them which will unite you: remembering that each of you are beautiful in your imperfections, sharing a journey into wholeness, one step at a time, never reaching completion. [1]

Remembering that we are loved by a providential Creator God who requires that we love just as he does, is a radical act today. 

Read on in the book of Exodus and you’ll find these words: ‘You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’. Imagine a world whose leaders and people are minded to talk generously about the incomer, and act generously to the outsider. [2]

Read on into Leviticus to God saying, ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: for I am the Lord your God.’ [3] Imagine a world which works hard to find ways to farm and trade by God’s generous economic rules.

And read further in Leviticus where God asserts that ‘The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants… You shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.’ [4] Imagine a world where the accumulation of wealth and property by the few is replaced and enriched by a system which affirms and celebrates community for all.

The Commandments acknowledge that our world often leans towards the way things are in the parable of the tenants which Jesus told: a world whose resources are monetised and which is violently divided between haves and have nots. But The Commandments invite us to remember that this is God’s world, and that God has a different view of how life on earth can and should be lived and arranged.  

The Commandments invite us to remember where we are from; that we are in essence, all from Him… and to live in the knowledge that ‘The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, kindred spirits with all creatures with whom we share this earth. Rich in God. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties.’ [5]

 

Notes

[1] Pip Wilson, You are a beautiful human person but I accept that you do not feel that sometimes! – a lot of the time? pipwilson.com, 21 February 2016. 

[2] Exodus 22.21

[3] Leviticus 19.9-10

[4] Leviticus 25.23; Leviticus 25.10

[5] Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Altered.