Saturday, June 6, 2020

“No Trifling Matter” - June 7, 2020

Deuteronomy 2:46-47


            Today I am going to diverge from the lectionary, the set schedule of readings for worship that guide us through a three-year cycle.  I’m doing it because all kinds of schedules have been thrown off recently anyhow, but the guidance we get from the scriptures is constant.

            It comes from the book of Deuteronomy, the book that Jesus quotes most often in the gospels.  The book is written as a goodbye speech that is put into Moses’ mouth.  He has led the people of God out of Egypt and across the wilderness for forty years.  He will climb up on a mountain and see the Promised Land, and have the satisfaction of a job well-done, but his time is closing.  Just before Moses gets that news, he finishes his summary of the past forty years and a recitation of God’s laws for them in the new world ahead, then says this:


“Take to heart all the words that I am giving in witness against you today: give them as a command to your children, so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law.  This is no trifling matter for you, but rather your very life; through it you may live long in the land that you are crossing over Jordan to possess.”  [Deuteronomy 32:46-47]

I take that as a text for two reasons. 

One is that we want to recognize the new graduates among us today.  Let me call out their names:

Jack Thompson                       Alyssa Dobrischkin

Madison Readman                  Logan Davison

Jeremy Kohn                          Nathanael Bryant

Juliana Haas                            Rachel Arp

Tim Eisenhauer

Their experience this spring has been a little like that of the Israelites who were told, “Drop everything.  We’re leaving Egypt in the morning.”  For them it was, “Take what you need and can; you may or may not be back in the classroom again.”  Now, like the people about to cross the Jordan, they are headed into a world where God is leading them, and it’s both exciting and intimidating.

            The other reason is that we – First United Methodist Church – may be headed back to in-person worship shortly and it will require us to follow new rules and adopt new practices for our own safety and well-being.  That is just one aspect of picking things up again after about three months of sheltering.  Like the people of Israel, we may have learned things that we need to know or relearned things that we had lost track of while we were in that time of wandering.

            Moses told people as they headed into the new situation across the Jordan, never to forget what they had discovered and never to forget what God had taught them.  That is a message for us, too.  Slowing down, whether by choice or when forced by health or pandemic or job loss or anything that takes someone out of their routine, gives an opportunity to ask searching questions and to find serious answers.  Becoming well, starting a new job, restarting routines and so forth carries the danger of forgetting both those questions and those answers.

            We give our graduates a gift every year, and recently it has been a copy of a book by Bishop Reuben Job that is called Three Simple Rules.  It’s a short book and there’s nothing new in it.  What’s good about it is the way that it sets out or restates a way of living such as God set out long ago and that can easily be called to mind.  He begins with setting out some of the questions that I believe a lot of people have had time, once they slowed down, to ask:


“Do others look at us and see God at work in our life together?  Is our way of living life-giving rather than life-draining?  Is our way of living one that will enhance the quality of life for each of us for as long as we live?”[1] 

I hope and pray that a lot of the things that people were busy with before the shut-down will not return.  To be blunt, when I look at my own life as well as the lives of people around me, I see a lot of activity that does not bring a lot of life in return.  Instead of choosing one or two life-giving activities and realizing that they may be enough, there is the constant temptation to try to be in more than one place at once.  Have you never seen someone at a ballgame trying to read whatever is on their phone, or someone at a concert sneak out into the lobby to check the score of a ballgame?  What a gift, on the other hand, simply to be in the moment!  How good it is to go for a walk without a screen in front of my own nose!

            So, too, churches can get caught up in programs or activities and forget that they are meant to bring people closer to God and one another.  It has been a gift, a real gift, to hear people say how they have missed one another and how they have found ways to connect, and to know that it is the connections established over a cup of coffee or a plate of barbecue rather than the quality of the potato salad that really matter.

            There are times when, like Moses at the edge of the Promised Land, we are forced to try to summarize the wisdom that God has taught us, and the summary necessarily leaves out so much.  Bishop Job, however, does a pretty good job of it, taking off from a pattern that John Wesley had suggested, and in a short way that doesn’t take much to memorize:

 

1)      Do no harm.

2)      Do good.

3)      Stay in love with God.

 And, being a United Methodist, he turned it into a song – or at least a chorus.


“Do no harm by any word or deed;

do good wherever there is need.

Remain attentive to God’s word.

Stay in love with God,

stay in love with God.”

             A lot of us are hitting the reset button soon.  You might want to close a window or two.  You might want to open another.  Consider your criteria carefully.

 

“Take to heart all the words that I am giving in witness against you today: give them as a command to your children, so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law.  This is no trifling matter for you, but rather your very life; through it you may live long in the land that you are crossing over Jordan to possess.”  [Deuteronomy 32:46-47]

 

 



[1] Reuben Job, Three Simple Rules: A Wesleyan Way of Living (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 13.