On Deuteronomy

Sermon 2023.02.12

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

The reading from Deuteronomy 30 sounds very nice on the surface, but we should really pause and think about it. Because it appears to promise that the person and people who follow God’s laws will prosper and live long full lives. By this logic anyone who is materially prosperous and reasonably comfortable, must be a good person who does the right thing in the eyes of God.

But what about the over 20,000 people who have died in the earthquakes this year in Syria and Turkey? Certainly they were not all guilty of breaking God’s laws any more than you and I? In fact it is very likely that many of these people were far more virtuous than us, and yet they have suffered and been traumatized.

The book Deuteronomy in the Bible is the second giving of the law by God through Moses to the Hebrew people right before they enter into what is called the promised land, the land of Canaan, or Palestine. What follows after the book of Deuteronomy is the book of Joshua. Joshua is basically a story of military conquest and near genocide. 

So this passage form Deuteronomy is taken to mean that the people better not accomodate any of the local religions, peoples, or cultural practicies that may tempt them away from their fidelity to worshipping the one true God. You might remember the battle of Jericho as one such example of the conquest that is told in the Bible following Deuteronomy.

There’s a problem, however, with thinking that God gave the land of Palestine and Canaa through military conquest to the Hebrew people. The problem, is that there isn’t very good archeological evidence at all to support this. There is no physical evidence that has been unearthed in what we call the Holy Land to suggest that a wandering nation emerged out of the desert and conquered the land rebuilding a nation from the ground up. It probably never happened like that. 

You might be shocked to hear this. I remember being shocked hearing this when I was in seminary. But that is what I learned from my professor of the Hebrew Bible, Dr. Marvin Sweeney a conservative practicing Jew. Dr. Sweeney taught us that what archeology supports and what a broad consensus of scholars believe is that the emergence of the Jewish religion and nation emerged from within Canaa. The original Jewish people are Canaanites. So the stories of Joshua are not to be read as historical fact, at all, but a kind of propaganda, a constructed version of reality with a specific ideological purpose. That purpose was to consolidate power around the religious and political rulers of Jerusalem. 

In order to consolidate political power seated in Jerusalem it was convenient to teach that the only true and viable form of worship was to the God called Yahweh at a specific place: the temple in Jerusalem. Any infidelity to this scheme would result in divine punishment. Things were destroyed, and it we believed that God had punished. 

Later, when Rome was sacked and it’s empire was deemed to have fallen many thinkers of it’s day blamed it on the Christians, because they had tricked the people into not worshiping the old local gods of Rome, so they abandoned Rome and it lost it’s divine protection.

What about today? Today many called Christians in the United States threaten that if this is no longer a Christian Nation, then it too will lose it’s divine favor. All of this is what we call, “works righteousness,” or “Might makes right.”

The alternative to this way of thinking is what we call grace. Grace is the view that we don’t get what we deserve. We might get better, we might get worse, and through statistical variance a small minority might even get what they deserve. You can think of it like the due date of a baby. 

When a person is pregnant, there are ways of calculating the due date. I remember that as soon as the doctor told us the due date for our first child he immediatly said, “You can be almost 95% sure that the baby will be born not on that day. It’s ironic and kind of funny. A due date is kind of an artifical point in time with a cloud of probability around it. That is like God’s grace. You can be at least 95% sure that you will not get what you deserve. You might get far better, and some people seem to get far worse. Like those people suffering from the earthquakes in Syria and Turkey.

We really have our backs against the wall. Because the thing is, if you do break God’s laws you probably will suffer for doing that too. Have you ever noticed that many of God’s laws are common sense? As in the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” So there is truth in Deuteronomy. There are consequences for our actions. 

So in the case of natural disasters we don’t choose whether or not to be in one, but we do have some choice as to how we prepare and respond. An earthquake could happen here; and it will happen here. It could happen sooner than we think. If I have faith that an earthquake will happen then that faith will translate into actions. 

I recently read a modern history of Nicaragua. It was pummeled by two hurricanes with about a decade in between. During the first one the people were very organized. There was a lot of participation in civil society. People talked to each other and had neighborhood associations. A decade later people were isolated and the government ineffective, so there was far more suffering. The people were living under a dictator, and not given freedom for self-determination.

What was the difference? The difference is whether or not we care for each other. In Matthew Jesus says that if you are going to make a religious offering to God, it would be better to first make sure that you pay down any outstanding debts. If you have wronged someone, go and make it right. 

In other words if you believe in God; and want to give God something, you should consider actual living human beings as worthy as God. This is the supreme ethical mandate; this is faith.

So this is what we will do today. We will take an offering for disaster response. We will call this a love offerings, and we will offer it during Holy Communion.