Monday, March 2

Scripture: These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. (Deuteronomy 6:6).

Observation: Yesterday was a Lenten feast day for no other reason than it was a Sunday, a blessed ordinary Sunday, and the Sundays in the Lenten season do not count toward the 40 days of Lent, so there was no devotional yesterday. However! Our Bible in Year reading plan at Faith marches on regardless of feast day, and the texted assigned for yesterday included one of the most important passages in Judaism: Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD alone.” This verse, called the Shema (pronounced “shma”) from the Hebrew word shma for “listen,” is a super-concentrated theology of the nature of the God of Israel. God is the LORD, which is the English translation of the sacred name of God, Yahweh, a Hebrew word meaning “I will be what I will be.” God’s “Hello my name is” nametag shows the name Yahweh. Yahweh is Israel’s God, and Yahweh is the only God Israel has. Yahweh is one: one in the sense of ultra purity such that Yahweh is composed of nothing else except Yahweh; and one in the sense of exclusive unity such that Yahweh is a singularity, not a plurality of gods, the one true God who created the heavens and earth and all being. Moses commands Israel to “love” God with all their heart, soul, and strength (Deuteronomy 6:5), and immediately after introduces the commandments that will comprise the remainder of Deuteronomy. The commandments are memorialized on the pages and digital footprint of the Bible all these thousands of years later, but before the commandments were written down and thrown on the Internet, the commandants were commanded to “be on your hearts.” Moses uses the same root verb for “be” as is behind the holy name Yahweh itself. The commandments were originally intended to “be.” Where, when, and how were the commandants supposed to be? Not on paper, scroll, tablet, or screen- at least that wasn’t the original desire. The commandments were intended to be on the human heart.

Observation: Not a gate built of words used for fencing people out of life with God, not an odd list of do’s and don’ts, not a legalism for trapping people in the fear of what might happen if the law is not followed to the strictest degree, none of that. The purpose of the commandants, the very reason God gave them in the first place, was for instruction in being a human being. The commandments were intended to be a way of being handed to us and for us from the Author of Being, a way that lives in the human heart for instruction in the way of being a truly human being. The commandments are God’s response to a fundamental question, not “What shall be do?” but “Who shall we be?” What sorts of beings are we? And how shall we be on earth as people who adore the Author of Being? Yes, the commandments in the Bible can be confusing and exhausting to read, and when taken the extreme, as Paul grieved, the law can trap a person of faith in a suffocating cage of do’s and don’ts. But the intent of the commandments is that of a parent teaching their children who they shall be in the world, a world that will endlessly barrage them with examples of how not to be, and for this reason the people of Israel still today understand the commandments to be no less than God’s grace.

Prayer:

Because You are my parent stamping on my heart the way I shall be in the world and Your love and wisdom and character are the ink, You have my praise. You know I lean toward the doing and relish the doing and hold myself and others guilty for not doing the right kind of doing, probably because the doing of life yields easy measures of what makes for a good life: check off these higher education boxes, squeeze into this size and type of clothes, accomplish this heap of work regardless of whether it is meaningful or useful, satisfy a self-imposed drill sergeant who is not You but in my weakness sounds like You ordering me to demonstrate to the world and to myself my worthiness of arbitrary approval. Measuring the unrepeatable beauty of a human being according to the doing of the being is so easy a child could do it, so in our collective foolishness, we teach them how to do it. Yet You are not doing. You are the Being behind all being and You show me how I am to be, best of all in the Being made flesh and bone, Jesus. Make deeper and more vivid the stamp of your Being on my heart, that I might look to You for a way of being, not a list of doing, and delight in being the being that the Being behind all being thought should be. Onward we go: amen.