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A Homily for Quinquagesima Morning Prayer
Deuteronomy 10:12-11:1
I currently use a Franklin Planner with pages that have a little cartoon at the bottom to keep up with my schedule. On one of the pages is a cartoon entitled, “Corporate Compassion in a Recession”. It depicts a frazzled looking character outside an office building window on a sizable ledge, toes over the edge, tie loosened, shirt unbuttoned, hair tussled, obviously considering a jump. The other character in the picture is a man in a suit and tie properly done up leaning out of a window holding out a sheaf of documents to the man who is about to jump asking, “Would you mind filling out these liability disclaimers and dropping them off at personnel on the eighth floor?”
Obviously, the suited character suffers from a distinct lack of love for his fellow. Unfortunately, although the norm in our culture is not this extreme, I am afraid in many cases it is not too far off. Think not? Consider this …
We have executed tens of millions of our children at the altar of convenience since 1973 with one author even going so far as referring to abortion as a “sacrament” a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis or Diana whose followers we meet in Acts 19 as they try to kill the Apostle Paul. Others have picked up the strain and this terminology is becoming more popular.
As the discussion of nationalized healthcare moves forward I have already read the words of so-called progressives discussing the elderly persons “duty to die” and have been struck to the heart to hear the revision of the term “useless eaters” once championed by the Nazi’s and their eugenics project brethren who felt that the poor and minorities were mere “weeds of society” in need of clearing. These folk are denying, in their attempt to deny God, the image of God in every man. What these actions really betray is an attempted attack on God by attacking His image bearers. Yes indeed, the seed of the serpent is alive and well and as busy as ever.
Our passages today, the collect, the first lesson, and the second run directly counter to these things for they preach the gospel of love as it is meant to be preached. Not of self, but of our Lord and our neighbors as bearers of His image.
Although we will be touching on all the passages and the collect, we will this morning be concentrating on the First Lesson taken from Deuteronomy.
In context, we find our First Lesson coming but a short time after a recitation of the Law in Deuteronomy 5, after the great commandment to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, and might, and after God has written on the second set of stone tablets. This pronouncement by Moses is, in fact, immediately upon his descent from that 40 day mountaintop experience with God. He is addressing the people of Israel, and giving them the Law. This particular passage summarizes the two tables of the Law in much same fashion as the words of our Lord that we hear in each communion service when our priest says:
Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith. THOU shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
All the Law and the Prophets, and the Gospel too, I might add. This passage and the great commandment in Deuteronomy 6 is part of why John can truly say in our second reading:
Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard.
Thus in our second reading we hear the echoes of the first. John starts with loving God and obeying His commandments and then moves to our relationship with others as evidence of the condition of our relationship with the Lord following the pattern of Deuteronomy and following the pattern of the two stone tablets writ upon by the finger of God that Moses brought down the mountain.
Are these tablets given in Sinai the first evidence of these principles at work? No. We can go back further and see the example of Cain who demonstrates rather clearly that a faulty relationship with God will be reflected in our relations with others. This pattern flows through Scripture. We see it in Genesis, we see it here in the wilderness, in the prophets, in the gospels, in the epistles, and finally in the Revelation. The vertical and horizontal, our relationship to God and our brothers, these cannot be separated nor can they be compartmentalized.
So, we see the context of the passage, how it fits in the flow of Scripture, and by extension into our liturgy.
So what?
We can see all of this and intellectually understand the intricacies of the text and yet still miss the most important context of the passage; that blessed framework in which it is placed. It is a context that the Jews missed and that is why they developed so legalistically. It is a context that many Churches proclaiming the name of Christ have missed and goes a long way to explaining how they operate as well. It is a context that we cannot afford to miss. It is the context of a righteous and holy love – real love. A love that begins in a true love of God and extends itself from Him to those he has blessed with the bearing of His image. Paul got it. That is why he could say in I Corinthians 13:
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 NKJ ¶ Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
Given our popular culture’s history with the wrong kinds of love and it’s gross misunderstanding of what love really is, we may find ourselves reluctant to say that “all we need is love”, but it is we of all people who truly can say that. For we have echoed through our Scripture time and time again the true nature of love. The world does not understand love, not really, and this world’s confusion about love results in confusion about God.
Love, as displayed in Holy Scripture, starts with God. It really does not matter where you go in Scripture, it’s really pretty inescapable. Our passage today is one of those particular places in Scripture where God has provided a help for those who can be a bit slow on the uptake like me. Here of all places, in the midst of the wilderness, in the middle of the Old Testament where the mean, cruel, nasty Old Testament God is (isn’t that what the world tells us?) here the nature of love is written large – and love begins with God.
Moses informs us of the requirements of our Lord. We are to fear Him, walk in His ways, to love him, to serve the Lord with all your heart and soul and to keep the commandments of our Lord. Long list, or is it? Is it actually only one item written out so that we can better understand what is entailed? We can try to separate walking with God and loving him, but walking with Him is essentially living His commandments, and what are those in summary, but to love God with heart, soul, and might and love our neighbor as ourselves. So walking in Him, it’s love. Obeying His commandments, surely that is not love, but servitude, but it was Christ who said in John 14:15, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” Obeying Him, that’s love too.
What about serving the Lord, which surely is servitude. Let’s consider service for a moment. Christ said:
Mark 10:43-45 43 … but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. 44 “And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all. 45 “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
Because of love, Christ served and His service was love. Still we say, how can God demand our service? This question often arises because of false assumption. That assumption, very popular in our modern world, is that man is truly free. But we are not. We are born with a need to worship, to give our service. Every man is born to it, the animals are not for they are not the imagebearers. This is why no matter how intelligent various tests might show that a parrot, a dolphin, an elephant, a pig, or an ape to be, we never see them building altars or engaging in worship. We, on the other hand, are designed for worship – it is our function. St. Benedict, one of the saints with a most profound effect upon Anglican life, once said that “to work is to pray”. We see this from the beginning when Adam was in the Garden of Eden, his very stewardship of the Garden was a service, a prayer to God, and it was done as such. Our lives are as such.
Oh yes, there are those who profess to be free of a need to worship, free of such ignorant and backwards notions such as God. These have no need for the supposed crutch of religion for they are free. Are they? Look at their lives. Do they truly live outside of the creation mandate? If you look closely enough, you will find that they are not so free after all. They all serve something. They may be engaging in self-worship, worship of a cause, a suspect scientific theory, wanton sexuality, their own belly and appetites, or even the illusion of human sovereignty, but invariably some idolatrous thing is plugged into the place where God belongs and they serve it with a vengeance. Their lives revolve around it. So you see the real question is not, “Are you free?”, but rather as Joshua asked, “whom do you serve?” Service to Him, it’s love.
Basically, Moses might have distilled all these verses up to sixteen into two words, “love God”, but he didn’t. He didn’t because the people he was addressing were slow understand. He could have said then, “Love God, love Him again, love Him some more, do it even more, now do it always.” But Moses still would have been left with the same problem. He was addressing a people who did not know what loving God meant. Those are the people he was addressing. Those are the people his words address still. Even though the concept is simple, it is not easy for man. Why? Our next verse tells the tale. Deuteronomy 10:16 is a verse of great personal meaning for me. Paired with 2 Timothy 3:16, God used this verse to deliver a hammer blow to my life and that of my family.
The New American Standard reads:
NAS Deuteronomy 10:16 “Circumcise then your heart, and stiffen your neck no more.
There is gold in this verse for us all and it is no coincidence that it appears smack in the middle of this passage between love of God and love of neighbor. Moses has just told the Israelites not only that they are to love God, but that God, the one who owns the heaven and the earth loved them first and set His heart in love toward them. Then this dual command is given which can only be properly considered in the context of the Israelites’ covenantal experience. When one thinks of circumcision the ceremony that occurred on the eighth day of a male child’s life comes to mind. A child obviously did not and could not circumcise himself. Someone else had to do it for him. We have inherent the image of circumcision as something that is done to us, as opposed to by us. Yet this verse says, “circumcise then your heart,” a clear command to the Israelites. But how can this be? To complicate things more just a few chapters later in Deuteronomy 30 verse 6 we are told:
ESV Deuteronomy 30:6 And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.
So how can God command his people to do what only He can do? The answer is that there are two actions going on working in conjunction to one end. God circumcises our heart making us able to do those things pleasing to Him, to be able to worship him with our hearts and with our lives. But, God does not force us to do what we are supposed to do. The answer to the quandary is related to the last portion of verse 16, the stiff-necked or stubborn part.
Note carefully that God did not pick out a particular group and call them stubborn, and God did not say that some were stubborn or stiff-necked. The implication is clearly that all the people He was talking to were.
Peter was an apostle and much loved of Jesus, yet Peter still denied Christ not once, but three times. Paul the apostle was fervent and brave in his preaching of the Word and endured much more than we are likely to for Christ and yet despite his great faith, despite the fact that if anyone had gotten the stubbornness literally beat out of him that it would have been Paul, but we still know that Paul struggled against a thorn in the flesh and that he was frustrated because he did not always do right.
We all face the same struggle, even as the apostles did. There is a relentless stubbornness that persists in the flesh of men. This stubbornness is sin and in Deuteronomy 10:16 we are asked to put it away, resist it. The circumcision of the Israelites which symbolized the promise of God and the circumcising of their hearts and our baptism which symbolizes God’s promises to us, these sacraments are God’s yet there is a sense in which we can make our baptism, our circumcision of heart ours as well.
How we take that thing which God has done and also faithfully execute His command regarding it is for us to truly lay claim it. God has wrought the tool and we are to wield our circumcised hearts for Him. What God has done in love, we are to do. We are to bear His image in us to others, and this is where Moses takes us next.
Moses continues by reiterating who God is - the God of gods, Lord of lords the great, the mighty, the awesome God. Functionally this sets up the words from the Lord he is about to deliver, but it also works as an encouragement for those who might still be staggered a bit by the last thing that was said. For those that take those words to heart, the words are sure to act as an encouragement and comfort, while for those who persist in stubbornness or in stubbornly denying that they are stubborn then those same words are bound to illicit another reaction entirely.
Instead of listing several ways that men can love their neighbor God highlights through Moses three examples of those who held the bottom rungs of the societal latter. The first two were often relatively unprotected members of society, dispossessed and often poor, the widow and the orphan. The third was even worse, the sojourner. The stranger in the land that often God had brought near for redemptive purposes was usually looked down upon regardless of financial status. He wasn’t ever truly “one of us” to the Jews. We see the same when studying the Jews of Jesus’s day when converts who were not actually of Jewish ethnicity were always seen as some sort of “second class Jew” they were never fully part of that “in” crowd. A faulty and wordly basis, not based in the righteousness of God, was used to exclude those who may have been great saints but unfortunately lacked the financial where with all or proper genetic structure to be acceptable. Sadly, we see many of the same attitudes in churches who profess Christ’s name today. Human nature is truly a constant.
By using these examples Moses does not need to go into an exhaustive listing of how to love your neighbor. These are, short of maybe the leper, the hardest people for the Israelites to love. It is these that are the most challenging. If an Israelite can get past his personal problems to love these people (the widow, orphan, and sojourner), then he would really be loving his neighbors. The Israelites are not allowed to skirt around this. This particular problem persisted into the Gospel era and necessitated Christ’s telling the story of the Good Samaritan to challenge the Jews of that day, much as the Words of God challenged the average Israelite in the day of Moses. His Words challenge us still.
God reminds us before these words concerning the widow, orphan and sojourner of His place, His power, but also of His impartiality and inability to be bribed. We cannot buy our way out of those commands of God by doing other things. We may vainly hope that He does not really care about that person as much as He does us, but God does not work that way.
So how do we apply this passage? Let’s start where God starts. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might. Sounds simple. But simple and easy are not always the same thing. We all have a war within us, even the greatest of saints had some sin that created in them a great struggle. But remember the struggle is not the sin. Temptation comes to all, resist the devil, flee from temptations.
Circumcise your heart, find those things in you that take you down the wrong path and deal with them. God circumcises the heart, but some of this life is up to you as well. When Christ addressed sin He said if your eye causes you to sin, you pluck it out. He does not say that God had already dealt with it at conversion so don’t bother. Embrace the promises of God, His support, His strength and His comfort and live, truly live – truly love.
If we love God as we should we will find that it is easier to love our brethren. The Pharisees did not love their neighbors, the Samaritans, and is it any wonder? Jesus said that the Pharisees were sons of their father the devil a liar from the beginning and a murderer. Who those Pharisees served impacted directly on their capacity for godly love. I’m not talking the love that makes us feed our kids such as supplied by the common grace of God, but love that springs from the circumcised heart, the soul in the deep grip of sanctification, the love that loves those considered unlovable. This is the love that loves those who are not “one of us”. Do we have it? We should examine ourselves honestly in this. How do we deal with those of our congregation in need? How do we deal with those who are brought near? How do we deal with the modern predicaments of widows and orphans in this culture?
If a woman in the Church lost her husband how would we deal with this? Do we comfort ourselves saying, “I’m sure that she has family that will care for her.” What if they don’t? Do we tell her she needs to go get a husband? How we care for them demonstrates how we love our neighbor. The same goes for the orphan. The early Church did these very, very well.
What about those who God brings near to us like the sojourner of old? Do we love them, those whom God has brought close? In church services how do we react to the dirty homeless man who shuffles in off the street. Do we think, “Of course he’s here because this place is (fill in the blank with appropriate excuse). “ Warm? Air Conditioned? Dry? Do we not realize that of all the places that particular person could be at that particular time that God has brought him here? Brought him to God’s people?
What of the gay man who shows up one day? He may have a nice car, and nice clothes the opposite of the homeless man. God has brought him near. Do we ignore him and hope he goes away? Or do we with all haste begin beating him about the head with a large Bible while screaming for him to repent? Or is love finding out why God brought him near and then showing him the way from there?
At the beginning of this homily I mentioned the unborn and the elderly. We have in our passage today specific reference to the widows and the orphans which I believe directly applies to them. It is at both ends of life that we are most vulnerable to both disease and marginalization. In the calculus of a materialistic society these are the groups that contribute little and therefore are worth less. History teaches us that it can be a frighteningly short step from worth less to worthless. Scripture would concur which is why there is such an emphasis on being imagebearers found in it. Our unborn that are sacrificed in the abortion clinics of this nation are orphans indeed. For they have been abandoned by their parents and given up as surely as those dropped at the orphanage. What of our elderly, many of which are widows? What will become of them in our society with the rhetoric that is currently being put forth? Our culture has already dehumanized our youngest and most vulnerable members and now tens of millions are dead. The language of dehumanization is already being applied to our older citizens. How many widows will join the orphans? The early Church did not have fancy facilities, members were often the lower classes and more so they were regularly persecuted and marginalized. Despite these apparent disadvantages which would often be excuses for doing nothing today, the church did astonishing works of charity on those hillsides of the empire. They brought life where once there was death. Our hillsides need combing as well. Are we up to the task? Can we love our neighbor like those early Christians did?
Our collect for today is a prayer for love, we could all use more of that –so it is a prayer I challenge you to keep close and use it often. It says:
O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever lives is counted dead before thee: Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.
Love God.
Go love your neighbor.
Truly live by truly loving.
It truly is all you need.
Amen
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