What Is Commanded (10.6.19)

What is Commanded
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
Sunday, October 6, 2019
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott

Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the ordinances—that the Lordyour God charged me to teach you to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, 2 so that you and your children and your children’s children may fear the Lord your God all the days of your life, and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I am commanding you, so that your days may be long. 3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you.

4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5 You shall love the Lordyour God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Deuteronomy 6.1-9

We’re winding our way through the Torah in record time—from creation to the birth of Moses in just six Sundays. Now we reach the point at which Moses has called to Pharaoh for the freedom of his people, marched them through the Red Sea, and taken them into a wandering time. In this wandering time and wandering place, many of them free people for the first time in their lives, they look to Moses and ask, “How are we supposed to live together out here? What are the guidelines? What are the rules? What are the boundaries? What’s the plan for this thing we are doing now?”

This movement began with hearing the cries of a people who were being oppressed. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who created humankind in the divine image, the God of compassion and love hears the cries of a people and sends for them. This movement rooted in compassion and freedom and holy love has led a people to a wandering place, and now they ask each other and Moses what they are supposed to do in that place. 

Out of compassion, out of hearing their cries, out of affection and story and deep love, God gives Moses these guidelines, these rules, these boundaries for their new life together. It’s wild to me that so many 21st century people want to prove their fidelity to God in general, and Jesus in particular, by holding onto these guidelines, rules, boundaries called the Ten Commandments by placing them in courthouses and on lawns and in all kinds of public spaces. Because the companion to Deuteronomy 5 is Deuteronomy 6.

Moses has these carved guidelines on tablets but then explains them to the people he has walked to freedom. The people whose cries were heard from the heart of God now stand before Moses and receive these guidelines and rules and boundaries for their life together. Moses summarizes and explains the essence of the law he is teaching them, saying:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

This is not an instruction to chisel these words onto stone, print them on plywood, mount them on the walls of courtrooms, plaster them on the public square so that other people over there can see what the law is. No, this is a deeply internal word to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words in your heart. Teach them to your children, live them out in your home, bind them to you when you are asleep and awake, write them on your home because you will need reminders everywhere you go if there is any hope ever of you embodying this. 

The concept of loving our neighbors is easy until we begin living it out. The ten commandments name some big, obvious, and personal examples of the ways we might fail at being neighbors. This word is given not to folks asking how to engage the strangers they might encounter in the wilderness, this word is given to people who are living in intimate community and wholly unsure of what comes next. These words of God apply to our most intimate relationships, then the larger communities of faith community, civic organizations, physical neighborhoods, city at large, nation, world. When we are writing these words on our hearts, we must ask: What kind of neighbors are we? How do we love? 

Loving starts in the mundane; practicing kindness, patience, gentleness; loving the people around us in ways that carry us beyond ourselves. Henri Nouwen famously wrote of church as “a school of love” because our eternal path is one of practice and not immediate perfection. We are learning to be neighbors. We are learning that the very act of loving points back to God’s nature. We are learning that Love and the Divine are so intimately connected that they are one. We are learning that when we are swept up into the Way of Love, we are swept up into the Way of God. Live this out in your home. Write it on your heart just as you write it on your doorpost. Make yourself a student of love for your whole life long. This is what God has commanded.

This way of Love won’t be easy. You’ll have to work to remember this. You need to teach Love to your kids and carry these Love lessons back home with you and on the road with you. Before you go to bed at night and when you wake up in the morning, you recite the words of Love again. Mark your body with Love, mark your home with love, draw a circle of love around the spaces where you live and work and worship. Take care that you do not forget because this instruction is the most important one.

How we love is what matters to God. Are we loving with everything we have—heart, soul, mind, strength? Are we loving our neighbors? Are we loving ourselves? Everything else is built on this foundation of Love. On this world communion Sunday, we are mindful of people of faith gathering at tables all over our globe: public tables and private ones, sanctioned tables and secret ones, decadent tables and sparse ones. This command on our hearts requires we declare love for all who are in harm’s way, declare love even for our opponents, and declare love for ourselves. Write it down somewhere to be sure, but for the purpose of reminding yourselves over and over again to embody this thing: live it out, be God’s people, walk in the ways of love.

And so it is to the command of love that we must commit ourselves anew. Over and over again, write it on our hands and heads and doorposts and gates. Recite this commitment to love with your friends and in your home and here in worship. Commit yourself to Love, do not give up, and do not forget. 

Like the scholar who came to Jesus asking about the kingdom of heaven, we are learning that the stuff of our faith is not limited to the hour or two or three that we spend in this beautiful facility together. Loving and welcoming aren’t limited to our physical presence at St. Charles and Broadway, but we start the conversation and the practice here and then carry it out into our lives and homes and traffic jams and weekly chores. We carry our practice out and then come back here and practice more. We call each other to be people who notice, who really see the world around us, who step into difficult conversations and hard situations, who sit alongside friends and strangers in their fear and grief, who bandage wounds, lift up, provide for, and take care. 

We fail. A lot. We disappoint. Often. We try again. Every time. Keep reading the story of Exodus on your own. The people who cried out to God to be free will begin to complain to Moses and murmur about him behind his back because they don’t trust the wilderness. They don’t trust the process of making their way to a promised land. Some of them even long for the enslavement of Egypt because at least they they knew what to expect every day and could anticipate some food on a regular schedule. Loving our neighbors takes practice.

In just a moment, I will invite you all to join me at the table of remembrance as we break bread together. With that meal in mind, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, [Jesus] did not give them something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do—specific ways of being together in their bodies—that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself…’Do this’, he said—not believe this but do this—‘in remembrance of me.’”

Write this on your hearts and on your doorposts. Talk about this with your children. Live this out in your waking and even in our sleeping. The way of love is commanded, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have to be learned. It will need to be practiced and lived out together for our entire lives. 

At St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church, we aspire to honor God by loving each other well. We commit ourselves to this school of love. We discover here that the Way of Love is the Way of God. And at this table we give ourselves to this Way of loving God and loving neighbors through our very bodies and our daily lives. 

Friends, we remember the Love of God today. We write it on our hearts. We recite Love with our children. We enact a ritual of Love at this table remembering Jesus the Christ who led a love revolution to the cross, through the grave, and into the mystery of resurrection as his Love is now spread like light through a prism as each of us lives out that Love in our lives. If you give yourself to this Way, if you long to remember and recommit to that Love, if you need to be nourished and strengthened by it that you might possibly love God, love your neighbors, and love yourself, then I invite you to this Love feast set before you at the table today. How we love matters, my friends. Let us be remember and recommit in this meal today. Amen.