Here's a shorter version of
my original blog about this book.
• Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances; and all the people answered with one voice, and said, "All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do." —Exodus 24:3
• Now behold, one came and said to Jesus, "Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?" So Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments." —Matthew 19:16-17
• The way we know we've been transferred from death to life is that we love our brothers and sisters. Anyone who doesn't love is as good as dead. —1 John 3:14
• Blessed are those who do his commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city. Revelation 22:14
from the baptismal liturgy:
"In Christian love you have presented these children for Holy Baptism. You should, therefore, faithfully bring them to the services of God's house, and teach them the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. As they grow in years, you should place in their hand the Holy Scriptures…"
Serendipitously I happened to buy a book by former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges; it's
Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America.
In the author's story I recognize major parts of my own journey. At the beginning, the author explains God gave us the Sinai Covenant, the ten words – decalogue or commandments – to enable and sustain community—:
"They [the commandments] were for the ancients, and are for us, the rules that, when honored, hold us together and when dishonored lead to alienation, discord and violence."
Chris Hedges opens the first chapter,
Mystery, with his experience as a young seminarian serving a people and a church in the inner-city Boston neighborhood of Roxbury. Its normative violence and human degradation, crumpling, decaying physical infrastructure, pervasive aura of wastedness and death amounted to a setting he'd not previously known (and probably hadn't imagined).
On page 18 Hedges, son of a pastor, admits in words identical to what I've said and written dozens of times over the past few years, "The church was part of my daily rhythm. I look at the world through the eyes it gave me." Also parallel to my experience he says, "But I also knew the church's dark side, its self-righteous smugness, its crushing piety, the way it used religion to exalt itself and how it often masked human cruelty behind the quest for virtue and piety." [page 19] To that I'll add the petty viciousness, self-centeredness, and destructiveness of both local and judicatorial church politics.
I relate to the author's anger as he chronicles [page 11] smashing a glass bottle against the front door of the church building as "…an ending, a final conclusion to a life spent in the powerful and claustrophobic embrace of the church. It is meant to be a break from God. But you trade one god for another. This is how life works. We all have gods."
For myself, the unanticipated separation from full participation in the church to which I'd devoted years of my life and that had played a central role in shaping my goals, lifestyle, and worldview is like experiencing my own death.
On page 11 Hedges says we circle back to the origins of our lives, "if not to embrace it, then to understand how it shaped us, to examine with less heat and anger our marks and scars."
I'm still examining the mosaic in order to find my place, just as I try to discern ways I've helped create it as it has created and recreated me.
On page 175 the author wisely reminds us "They [the commandments] do not call us to practice total self-abnegation, empowering others, as I did at first in Roxbury, to abuse us. They call us rather toward mutual respect and mutual self-sacrifice." In words from a pastor with whom I worked alongside, "God calls us to serve, but not to be walked all over."
To illustrate his advice of setting (physical, in this case) boundaries so you won't be broken and violated, Hedges gives the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. walking from Montgomery to Memphis with a detachment from the National Guard. [pages 29-30]
From the Holy Communion liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer:
God spake these words, and said:
I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have none other gods but me.
Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.
Examine your lives and conduct by the rule of God's commandments, that you may perceive wherein you have offended in what you have done or left undone, whether in thought, word, or deed. …
Like Israel formed in the searing heat and God's minimal yet faithful supply of the exodus desert, we are a people, a nation. In Lord's Day worship we retell, re-enact in baptism and the Eucharist the meta-narrative of our deliverance from death into life, of Jesus' death and resurrection. Although sometimes I think I loved the Church more than I loved Jesus, after beginning really to hear my story, someone asked me why on earth I'd remained in the church at all and I replied, "This is where I find the sacraments!"
In the
Love chapter: "But by giving up parts of ourselves for others, by accepting that we must be willing to lose life to create and preserve life, we honor the core of the commandments. The commandments hold out to us the possibility of love." [page 173] Chris Hedges [page 174]: "The covenant offered by the commandments, the covenant of life, is the covenant of love. It is a covenant that recognizes that all life is sacred and love is the force that makes life together possible. … But it is never too late to turn back. Atonement permits a new way of being. It calls us to life." [pages 173-175]
We people of Maundy Thursday have received Jesus' New Commandment, the mandate of love faithful unto death; by faith and in the Spirit we have infinite access to Jesus Christ's atonement for the buying back, the redemption, for the life of all creation.
Then Moses took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient." —Exodus 24:7
Here we will take the wine and the water;
here we will take the bread of new birth,
here you shall call your sons and your daughters,
call us anew to be salt for the earth.
Give us to drink the wine of compassion;
give us to eat the bread that is you;
nourish us well, and teach us to fashion
lives that are holy and hearts that are true.
Marty Haugen, Here in This Place/Gather Us In, © 1982 GIA Publications, Inc.
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my Amazon review: law that binds; commands that free
