Disciple Bible Study, 8-28-19, Book of Deuteronomy

Of right, reminder that that cycles throughout the year, so it's not on a steady date because our Jewish brothers and sisters have the lunar calendar.

We have a solar calendar, and um it unlike Islam, Islam is a strict lunar calendar, which means Ramadan can happen anytime during the year.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters are lunar, but the the Passover has to be in the spring, which means if Passover starts to get too late, they add a 13th lunar month, which pushes it backward.

So if you're wondering, that's it that's really why Easter changes.

We no longer do Easter based on Passover.

It's based on something different from that, which makes no sense to me.

But uh but that's sort of why.

So you'll see you'll see Tishaba Av move later and then back up and move later and back up.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

So please don't think that, oh look, we just did the whole thing.

There's more to it than that, but that would be part of the liturgy and the litany, and it reminds us that in that year uh 586, the temple was completely destroyed and burned.

And of course, that happens again in the year 70 of our common era.

We use A D for that.

Um Thanks for returning.

That's the name of our theme of our week.

Um I wanted to start out and see if again, it's a terrible question.

I'm gonna do this every time, but it always goes like this.

Do you have initial questions or reactions, or were you particularly touched or bothered by something from our reading this week?

I just kept thinking of the Holocaust and when people that would be catastrophically historical type people if they didn't go back to the things that were listening and and uh to to get to then be able to go forward.

But I just know I know I just I don't know.

That's what I just kept thinking.

I didn't have any questions I was surprised when I was reading the annotations.

Still seem to believe in God, yes, even though he's done all these horrible things to do.

Thank you.

So observation is in the middle of this sort of awfulness, there still appears to be some thread of hope.

Yes, yes.

But I I think that um apply it to my own life.

I think that survival for me anyway, was that I had to, and I went through something difficult, but you had to have the hope of greater, there was something bigger than this, and I will work my way to this and God will help me.

I I think that's a it seems like maybe a basic human human trade.

But also at the end of what he says, he also says God can say.

So I think that's the basis of the people like God, you know.

I don't know whether they're quite accepting or blame yet, but they know they are in distress, and God has something to do with it and love by God.

Something a priest told me once, and I don't know what's a surprise.

But he said what he said, be angry at God.

It's okay to be angry.

He said the ancient people would share their sister saying, I'm dear.

And he said that that can be very piece of healing.

And uh ancient people do that.

The question that I have is uh weren't there men in Jerusalem that contributed to the problem?

Yeah.

So why is imagery all in feminine?

Why is a feminine only huge?

Why are not uh men held accountable for what happened in Jerusalem as well, other than saying, you know, she's like a woman, she messed up.

And uh well I didn't have a great answer for you, but in most languages, cities are in the feminine gender.

I understand that, but you don't have to use a strictly feminine vocabulary, so either you can use both to incorporate the guild with the people.

Yeah, there's this interesting thing for us is that sometimes we we look at a, you know, like I I I um I don't do Spanish, but I do German and Hebrew and Greek.

And articles and nouns are gendered, but that doesn't mean they're gendered.

Yeah, right.

So cities aren't women, even though they're in the feminine gender.

Something sometimes gender is very arbitrary.

Um I I I think what you're seeing is fair, but sometimes we can push language too hard and make it do something it isn't doing.

Um but I think it's very fair.

I think part of the reason, if I can if my guess, and I don't want to pretend like I've got the answer, is that um the people who seem to suffer the most in war are women who are enslaved and sorry, raped.

Um that doesn't usually happen to men are killed, women are also killed, children are killed, and that we locate more of that stress on women who are primary caregivers and have given birth to them.

So that may be why.

Well, there's another effect of that kind of language, and I have a little short review here by a biblical scholar at the Jesuit School of Theology and Santa Clara University, and she said, in the opening chapters, a prevailing metaphor of Jerusalem as a woman on Messiah portrays a weeping widow, abandoned animal, whose sun becomes a target of blame for the downfall of the city and its inhabitants.

Vague sexual and propriety which craft the basis of her sentiments, seemingly to justify her immense suffering and punishment.

The dampening effect of such a metaphor finds company and subsequent accounts of women, young girls, and mothers are all victims of the destruction required there and so what she's saying here is that everything in the Bible that's feminine, where women are in bondage, and even with the interpretation of the story of an atom being written by a man, um doesn't really have a balance to you either.

Um the thing is this this is part of the concept, it's part of the problemation of women and culture is culture.

So anyway, I just uh I don't want to sidetrack us on that, but I think it's only fair that the men just want to do it.

Well, in in in order to in and to be fair, most of the blame goes to male monarchs, even though the sort of the punishment is described in feminine terms.

So I I do think it's really important to hold on to this tension.

The kings are all men, and they're going to get a sign that they're more wicked or righteous, etc.

And the whole, as we know, it's not really fair that a whole people is punished because of one ruler's choices.

However, it's extremely true, right?

I mean, all of the Soviet Union was punished because of what Joseph Stalin set out to do.

And all of Germany was punished because of what Adolf Hitler chose to do.

Now, certainly people followed along, but I do think it's really, really fair.

And of course, we usually get this image about widows, and part of the reason we get weeping widow is because um women who were widows had nothing.

Men who were widowers still had their land.

So I think in some ways the word is trying to be very descriptive and said in its own culture and reflects some plenty of gender differentiation in favor of men.

So thanks.

I have some things to come out of that.

Sure.

Not on that topic, but I see throughout these readings, there were several instances when they referred back to what we call the Ten Commandments in the beginning.

And in that, you know, I shall have no other gods before me.

And in honor thy father and mother three days.

And so I see this as it went on to say, if you don't do these things, and then there's pages and pages of what's going to happen to you.

And so I'm thinking, well, okay, what is this?

So you honor your father, you honor your father, okay, and and your father is a relationship, is comparable to your relationship to your father.

You honor this person and follow those instructions, or these things will happen to you.

So God is saying to you, uh, this is a deal.

I'm gonna tell you how you ought to do things, but you go ahead and do what you want.

Because then you'll find out that what you should have done, but I'm still with you.

You can either do it my way or you can do it the hard way.

And I'll be here for you when you're through trying to hold your head against the wall.

And I mean, but and if you read this and you take it seriously, you think, oh, there's no way I want this to happen.

I learned something on this subject, but being a new Bible reader, um, I never realized that God doesn't give the land to them to Canaan because of their righteousness, but because of Canaan's wickedness.

And I've never came to that.

I always wondered how they got the land.

Because of what it's not because the people would deserve it, but because the people who occupied it didn't deserve it.

All the stuff in it.

Yeah, the land of milk and honey was was not given to them because of how wicked they were.

It was because of how wicked the people who were living there.

I'm curious about something I didn't get clear enough to change.

When you spoke about land, did the Levites own land?

Yeah.

What was the difference?

They were just but they had families.

Yes.

This is a great question, and we'll we'll we will answer that.

You want to answer it now?

I'm happy to do it.

So you know that Jacob has 12 children.

Eleven of them are boys, and one of them is a girl, that's Dinah.

There's this weird scene in which Dinah lays down with Shachem.

Hard to know if it's consensual or not.

We really don't know.

But at that point, Dinah is sort of compromised because they were not married.

Which is a man, which is a woman?

Dinah is the woman.

This is the word Dinah that we get in English.

And uh Shachem is a Canaanite.

And what happens is two of the boys feel like their sister has been scandalized.

The boys are Levi and Shimon, Levi and Simeon.

So what they do is say, hey, if you want to be part of the family, you have to be circumcised.

And the Canaanites sort of say, the Shechemites, that's what they're called, because Shechem is the prince, hey, all we gotta do is endure a couple days of pain, and then we get all this stuff because we're in the family.

So they do this.

Shimon and Levi circumcise all the men.

The next day, by the way, there's no anesthesic, anesthetic, there's no stainless steel, they're using flint knives.

The next day, while all the men are learning in pain, Shimon and Levi kill them all to get revenge.

And instead of the Shechemites taking the stuff from Jacob's family by assimilation, Shimon and Levi plunder them.

Jacob says to his two boys, You made us look really bad.

And then nothing happens until Jacob's on his deathbed.

Now, Jacob is a terrible father, and I want you to know this.

Like he's the prototypical bad dad.

On his deathbed, he goes to bless his children.

That's what you do.

When it gets to Shimon and Levi, he says, Curse you and curse you.

He didn't deal with it when he was alive, he dealt with this on his deathbed.

This is interesting because the Levites and the Shemonites, those become the clergy.

They are the butchers, and this is in general what Levites do.

They butcher animals.

So when we read through in Deuteronomy, all the tribes are given an allotment of land except for the Levites and the Shemonites.

Those people are the butchers in each locale.

So instead of them occupying, let's pretend, um Brazoria County, there are some in Brazoria and some in Harris and some in Galveston County, and they are the butcher shops.

And that's what priests did.

By and large, the priest is the one who you brought your animals to.

They blessed them, slaughtered them, and then to take care of the priest, you gave a tithe.

You didn't give it to God in money, you didn't give it to the church in money.

It's a pre-monetary economy.

The reason for the tithe was to take care of the clergy.

Now you read in Deuteronomy, if there's no butchers around you, you can butcher your own animal.

However, you still have to support these Levites, even if you don't have any around you.

So at least every third year, you have to give a true 10% of your produce, not to the church, but to the clergy.

Because there's no churches.

By the way, there's also no synagogues.

There's the tent that travels around.

That's the worship center.

It's a it's a the temple on wheels, when Deuteronomy is written.

And then there's some local shrines.

When you're thinking shrine, you're really thinking somebody who says, God, you said not to kill, I'm going to kill this sheep and give you its blood, and then we're going to eat the meat, okay?

That's how it goes.

You may be thinking, well, if Dina, Dinah, doesn't get the inheritance, well, that's only 11 tribes.

But remember, there's no tribe of Joseph.

Joseph has two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh.

So instead of one Joseph, his two kids bump up, and that's where you get twelve.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

No tribe of Joseph, tribe of Ephraim, tribe of Manasseh.

Clergy, do not, you don't go to the temple to do much praying.

You go to the temple to do what we'd call cultic practices.

Cultic.

That is, it has to do with pleasing God through sacrifice, through offerings.

Priests were also like public health monitors, right?

So if you've got a skin condition, the priest will say, that's bad, get out of the camp until it goes away, or not.

Priests also serve like judges, right?

Like, hey, um, Kathy killed somebody in a fight.

I would decide if it was self-defense or not, as an appeal judge.

So normally it's the elders in the town, but if the elders can't make a decision, they appeal to the clergy.

Does this make sense what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Priesthood totally different than what you're thinking.

That's why it's really important.

Priests are not like we are today.

They're butchers, they're public health people, and they do the rituals on behalf of the people, not usually with the people.

So we make atonement for you, we don't do it with you.

That's changed.

So was Solomon a judge?

He wouldn't have been a Levite, he couldn't have only Solomon the king?

Yeah.

No, no, he's from the tribe of Judah.

But he made judgments.

Solomon judged.

The king is above all of the priests.

And we get that in Deuteronomy.

Notice Deuteronomy gives you permission to have a king.

I'll tell you about that in a second.

Yeah.

Can can they read?

Probably they're the only ones who can read.

Now, not all Levites can.

So think think through this a little bit.

Levites are butchers.

Some Levites are descendants of Aaron.

Interestingly, that in Hebrew your name is who you are.

Aaron in Hebrew is Alron, and that's the name of the Ark.

So Ahron is the Ark.

He's the mediator of the Ark.

I mean, like the one that gets the tablets, right?

So the Ahronites are the ones who deal with the Ark.

That is, they're the ones who mediate God's presence.

Most likely they're the literate ones.

If I had to create a comparable analogy, the Aaronites are Middle Ages bishops, Levites are priests.

Lots of priests in the Middle Ages are illiterate.

Lots of them.

It's part of the reason we had the Reformation.

Most bishops are illiterate because they were the secondborn sons of wealthy families.

His brother Arthur was meant to be the heir of Henry, uh Henry Tudor, right?

Arthur died.

Henry VIII had gone to seminary to be a bishop.

So he actually was theologically trained.

He was brilliant.

Yeah, he never left the piety.

He should have been.

He should have been.

He had all kinds of money.

Yeah.

And he never left the church.

Yeah.

Yeah, he never left the church.

Although, if you want to know, Henry VIII got in a wrestling match with uh Francis I, King of France, and Francis whooped his butt.

So this is this is accurate in front of both nations.

Okay.

That didn't mean one was stronger than the other.

Wrestling's all about leverage, you know.

Okay, I want to tell you one other thing while we're talking about priests, because this is something most, frankly, Christian people don't know, and I think it's one of the most important things to our practice and worship and piety is blood.

So it's very clear whether you kill an animal because there's no butcher, or the Levites kill the animal, the blood you cannot have.

The scriptures are very clear the blood is the life of the animal.

No, we We know, and I was talking to our fifth graders about this the other day when we think about why we take the Eucharist.

You need more than blood to be alive.

I mean, you've got to have oxygen, you've got to have your heart pushing the oxygen, you've got to have your brain, and and boy, we could say those are the most important things, but if you've got renal failure, you're going to die too, right?

So which organs most important?

Normally we would say like it's our heart and it's our brain, but you've got to have your lungs and you've got to have, well, your kidneys and your liver.

You know, I mean, just to be alive.

We measure death in things like heartbeats and brain waves, right?

You can be brain dead and still quasi-alive if your heart beats, right?

You can be, heart can be silent for more than 10 minutes and your life can be restored.

Right?

But ancient people, they weren't dummies, but what they realized is that when you don't have enough blood, when your blood quits flowing, you're gone.

So what they located your life force in, life force, like your chi, your your chakra, was in your blood.

And this is going to sound crazy to you, but this is still a practice in the world that some people eat particular animals or parts of animals so that they can seize the powers of the animal.

So if you want to know why it is that tiger penises are eaten by people, it's because it's a symbol of virility, and they think that if they eat the tiger penis, they'll have tiger virility.

Who does that?

People in Asia.

I had a Chinese student that said there was a practice in China still today that you would put a monkey under the table and cut its skull and eat its brains because you would get the monkey's powers.

You may say that's crazy, no one believes that.

Lots of people still believe it.

That's why there's rhino horn like um tonics and stuff, because geez, like you can have like the power of the rhino.

Hispanics, I'm South Sex is not, I don't say Hispanics, but I'm thinking of a Mexican of descent, but they came from Spain.

Blood.

We slaughtered a goat, and I think they still do that.

You save the blood, and it's because I was a little kid and I think that happened.

And you save the blood, but it came out because it was used to make arita salad.

It was a uh a stew, and it was the best part of the garito.

And it was, yeah, and the and the blood was used as a base for it's extremely nourishing.

Yeah, but rather than tomato sauce or whatever, it was it was the blood or cutting.

The reason we're averse to blood is because of our Judean heritage.

That's really it.

I mean, I would tell you the Maasai in Africa believe they own all the cattle on the earth.

And and they're very, very rarely kill a bull.

Instead, what they do is cut it and they and they drink the blood and then they cover the wound up so that it can produce more blood.

Right?

Again, there's a lot of nourishment in the blood.

Deuteronomy says though, the life force of the animal is in the blood, and you can't have it, because no life belongs to you.

All life belongs to God.

Now, this may sound crazy.

The reason you pour the blood into the ground is in recognition the life is not mine.

When we hear this prohibition, thou shalt not kill, you can decide whether you think that means murder or not.

The rabbis believe it means don't kill, period.

Which is why the Levite has to say, God, we know we're killing, and we're asking your blessing on the animal.

And so there is this recognition that there is taking life against what they're meant to be doing, and then the blood is poured out upon the ground.

Curiously enough, whether you are uh Jewish or not, there is a strong argument that kosher meats are the most humanely slaughtered because they're slaughtered by a human being and not a machine.

Throats are slit, by the way.

Is it similar for halal?

No.

Halal is completely different from kosher.

I want to say halal is a step towards kosher, but the prohibition, I mean the process is a little different, right?

So if you buy glot kosher, that's the highest, not not there's there's 19 million different kinds of kosher certification.

But if you buy glot kosher, a rabbi, not a meat packer, has killed that animal with it's called a humor.

It's like it's kind of like a samurai sword.

Like you could you could throw a scarf up and it would cut itself in half, and they do throw that they don't stun the animal, they just slit its throat and then they hang it up to bleed it out.

The reason I'm telling you this bit about life is when Jesus takes the cup, he says, This is my blood.

Remember me every time you eat and drink.

Well, that's patently offensive if you think about you're not allowed to drink blood, and here you're saying this is my blood.

But if you think, hey, every time you drink wine, be full of my life force, it's very different.

It's like a poem or an analogy.

Instead of a one-to-one, this wine becomes my blood.

So our choices are: do we try to own Jesus' powers or do we try to be nourished by the way he lived his life?

I believe in the second.

But see, most of us don't get that.

So we find the words to be kind of strange and somewhat offensive.

And I'm not throwing dirt here, but our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters believe that the wine does become the blood of Jesus.

It doesn't taste like blood.

So it's not, it doesn't become the blood of Jesus in its accidents.

This is how Aristotle said.

Everything has two levels of reality, the expression and the form.

The chemical compound becomes Jesus' blood even though it doesn't look or taste like it.

That's the Catholic doctrine, right?

In the Episcopal Church, you can believe that.

The whole question is, what is it for, right?

And this comes back to here.

Is it the blood of Jesus to cover your sins, or is it the life force of Jesus to nourish you for your journey?

As a Catholic, it was like to me, I was taught that it was the life force of Jesus.

I'm glad to hear it, but I do want you to know, official doctrine, Gaudium Ex Bas, is that it is the blood of Jesus.

Which is why you can't spill it and things like that.

And honestly, that's why until very recently only the altar party got the wine.

Yes.

It used to be that way.

Still depends on the church you go to.

You may not get it.

You may just get the bread, right?

Still, part of the reason why many of our Catholic brothers and sisters do this at communion for the wafer, and if they get the wine, they don't touch it either, because the idea is this is so important, you're not worthy to touch it.

It has to go right in your mouth.

You're lucky.

You are lucky, and I think it's changing.

I do think it's changing, but I have parishioners here, I only have one or two who come to the rail with their hands behind their back and they go like that.

And um, boy, I I'll I'll do it.

I'll put the cup in their mouth, but that's a risk because you might be getting more of the life force of Jesus than you reckoned on.

You know?

Now, doesn't the Lutheran church have a little bit different?

Everyone does this differently, to be honest, right?

And just to be clear on communion, Martin Luther did not believe in transubstantiation.

He believed in consubstantiation, but he actually kind of believed the same bit, which is that it has the real presence of Jesus.

So even though you can't see it, it's still there.

Now, we as Episcopalians, we don't even use words like consubstantiation, transubstantiation.

We say real presence.

But that's mysterious.

I mean, you decide what that means.

But what I want to unpack for you is this primary symbol of blood is all about life.

It's all about life force.

And the question is, do we smuggle Jesus' powers?

Is it blood blood, or is it his life force that's meant to nourish us, not just for our own sake, but so that we can be nourishing to other folk, right?

I mean that this is a primary symbol for the Eucharist that we're already seeing.

I think blood is a life force.

I mean, I would think we are.

We all kind of think that.

Yeah.

But we've complicated a bit because we also know more about organs and bits like that.

And it is helpful to know because we got to hear this too, and I and I've said this before, and I'm sorry to repeat myself, but we um we usually say, love the Lord with all your heart.

Oh, that's the center of your being.

And I want to unpack that.

In the Bible, when you hear the word heart, that's actually the center of your will.

And I think my will lives here, not here.

It is funny in sports, right?

Somebody could be like smaller or weaker, and you say they've got a lot of heart, meaning like determination, perseverance.

And that's a very biblical idea.

Perseverance in your heart.

In general, I think my will lives in my brain, right?

So in the Bible, that's that.

Um your feelings are centered in your bowels, like in your stomach.

So again, we usually say our feelings and I love you with all my heart means this feeling center.

It could mean our will too, I don't know, but but know that it's bowels.

And then your soul, we also like to put in our heart, like accept Jesus into your heart, and and that's poppycock.

In the Bible, it is, sorry.

Your your soul, a couple of words about that.

Number one, it lives in your neck.

In fact, if you want to write right where it is, it lives right here.

Um, and your soul isn't something you possess.

So in the Hebrew Bible, your soul is the amalgamation of everything you are.

So you don't have a soul, you are a soul.

That is, your mind and your feelings and your determination and your spirit makes you a soul.

And we've held on to this Greek idea that we have a body and we have a soul, and those are different things.

When we read Deuteronomy, we know no, the soul is everything you are, and again, it lives here because you can hear your soul.

That's it.

That's your soul.

Your breath is your soul.

Uh so when you hear the commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart.

That means with your entire will, with all your soul, that means everything you are.

And in Hebrew it says not with your strength.

That's silly, we've already covered that.

In Hebrew it says with all your exceedingness.

Love the Lord your God with all your will, everything you are, and if there were anything left over, after all you are, love God with that too.

That's that's a literal translation.

We got to read that, of course, in Deuteronomy chapter 6, which is called the Shema, because in Hebrew it says, Shema Yisraelnail, Henu Eunaiach.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

And it means here, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one, and you'll love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your exceedingness.

And you will remember these words when you get up and when you lay down, when you leave your house, when you come back in, you will teach them to your children, you'll bind them on your foreheads, you'll wrap them around your wrists.

So, that little thing that goes outside a Jewish home by the door, it's called a mezuzah, and inside it is a little paper rolled up that says, Shema Yisrael Ninerhead and Arab.

And every time you come in and out of the house, you touch it and you kiss it.

To remind you to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and exceedingness.

And sometimes you've seen these things are called phylacteries.

It's like a box on your head or your boxes around your wrist.

People don't walk around with those.

They might wear them at their bar mitzvah.

Some Orthodox people wear it in the synagogue.

Reformed people don't really ever wear those.

And in the little box is a roundup little piece of paper that says, Shema Yisrael Nail Hainu Little Naya.

Right?

I mean, that's that's sort of it.

This is the John 3.16 of Judaism, and and here's why we have that stuff.

If they read the rest of the chapter, they would do that.

That had to be frightening.

Well, and follow these laws.

This is so great that you said that, because I think that takes us to a next really, really big theme about this.

Now you may be wondering, hey, we're supposed to be reading about the prophets, so why are we reading Deuteronomy?

Well, remember a prophet is somebody who gives a message to others representing God.

Who's the prophet of Deuteronomy?

Moses.

In fact, Moses is the most voluminous and important prophet there is.

Really.

His whole thing is revealing this way.

Now, just to give you a really good history of this book, look, Moses is way back here, and we didn't think the book of Deuteronomy shows up until somewhere like around there.

That is to say, Exodus is much older than Deuteronomy.

How do we know that?

Exodus uses this word for God's name, and Deuteronomy uses that one.

So much older.

In fact, if you will get to read this coming week about when they found Deuteronomy.

Once upon a time, the temple, like St.

Thomas four years ago, was in extreme disrepair, deferred maintenance, no one had been taking care of the roof.

There were leaks and pots and pans.

They decided they would fix it.

And in the fixing, they cleaned down a storage room and found an old scroll.

And we think that was Deuteronomy.

Now, where it was from, how long it had been there, who knows?

But when Josiah found the scroll, he said, whoa, we gotta change a lot of stuff.

We have not been doing what we're supposed to do because here's the word of the Lord through Moses.

One other thing that's really important is Deuteronomy literally means Deuterone means second.

So what do you know?

It's the second law.

And sure enough, it's very similar to Exodus and Leviticus, slightly different.

Because it's a second telling.

One other thing many of us don't know is that when Moshe went up on top of the mountain in Exodus, it's called Sinai.

In Deuteronomy, it's not.

It's called Mount Hored.

Oh, well, it must be the same thing.

But see, don't you see this is another thing?

We realize they're different.

Exodus uses Sinai, Deuteronomy uses Horeb.

When Moshe goes up there, he spends all this time talking to God, right?

Face to face, and he doesn't eat and drink for 40 nights.

That's in the book.

And then he comes down and he tells them the ten bits and they make the things, and then we end up with these scrolls later.

But our Jewish brothers and sisters are very clear that what Moshe got was given in two forms.

The written ones, which we have in our Bible, and then the oral one, which Moshe did not write down.

He passed it down orally from rabbi to rabbi.

So, I'll just give you an example.

This is called, in in this is called the Oral Torah.

We have the written Torah.

God also gave Moshe the Oral Torah.

Had to be a rabbi to get the oral Torah.

These are experts because they've had the story pants down, and you can't have it because you're not rabbis.

There's an example of this.

There's this commandment that says, you cannot boil a kid in its mother's milk.

Alright, now in Hebrew, the word milk is this word here, the word half.

Okay.

Hebrew has no vowels, none.

It's just consonants.

So here's how this looks.

You can't boil a kid and its mother's milk.

Most scholars are real suspicious of this because it turns out if I take the same consonants and put those vowels there, I get the word fat.

Now you would think, that makes even less sense.

Well, remember throughout the kosher food laws that we hear, if you encounter a mother bird sitting on eggs, or a mother bird on baby birds, you can pick.

You can eat mom and leave the eggs, or you can eat the eggs and leave mom.

If you eat them both, you're not going to have birds for long.

If you kill two generations at one time, it's not sustainable.

That makes a lot of sense in animal husbandry, right?

If you boil a kid and its mother's fat, it means you have killed the mother and the baby.

Milk, as we know, is a renewable resource.

So most biblical scholars, Christian or Jewish, are pretty sure it should say, don't boil a kid in its mother's fat.

The rabbis, though, say, nope, God told us it should be milk in the Oral Torah.

So that's why it's that.

So there you go.

I think the white is good.

Well, it protects the species.

I mean, actually, there's really no health impairment from having dairy and meat at the same time.

It's not any better for you than not doing it.

Well, I have seriously wondered about this.

I'm not I'm not joking.

It doesn't make any sense.

I just don't know.

Just know I thought somebody knows and they'll tell you.

See, the thing is, and the and the rabbis are really clear about this, this is not a bet there's not a reason for this.

You do it because God told you to do it.

It doesn't have to be reasonable.

Now where did the oral work come from?

Came from God on Mount Horeb to Moses.

Moses wrote down part and he passed down orally the other part.

I mean, 40 days talking is a lot of time.

The kid and the the uh milk came from the oral things he's supposed to be.

Yes, the reason the reason we we we call it milk and not fat is an oral reason, not a written reason.

But it's in the it's in it shows up in the text, but in the text it could be one or the other depending on the vowels you add.

We know to that it we're supposed to read it milk because that's what God said orally.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

It's just a mystery.

Again, it's the same, it's the same letters, K.

So if you didn't know which vowels to put, you've got ambiguity.

It could be one or the other.

We know it's supposed to be milk because that was orally passed down.

Okay, so the translation is when they got checked.

Your tr your text, I guarantee you, says don't boil a kid in its mother's milk.

But it is equally linguistically translable and I think makes more sense fat.

The reason the translator has done the other is because there's this long standing Jewish tradition that the rabbis claim goes back to Moses himself.

So who decided to put the fat or a translation?

No one decided it.

You won't see it in a translation.

But I mean, so where is it?

Oh here's what I here's what I should say, right?

If I told you this word orally, if I said Um, don't boil a kid in its mother's Halev, Halev, or Halov.

It depends which way I say it.

Tomato, tomato.

But if I wrote it, it could be either thing.

But see, since it's orally been passed down, you know which way to say it, which means you know it's milk and not fat, because you heard it.

Because in writing a commutative thing.

Does that maybe make more sense?

But we don't have words passed down without.

Yeah.

Can't even get around our table.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So we don't have to be.

This is what one of the things about being an Episcopalian that I like, is that we don't just use tradition or scripture, we also apply reason.

So it becomes this question: is that reasonable?

Now, that calls another theme of Deuteronomy into mind.

So actually, a lot of scholars will tell you that there is something called, you'll read this in Kings too, it's called the Deuteronomistic history.

Like history according to the second law.

Here's how it goes, right?

You obey God, you get a blessing, you disobey, you get a curse.

You're cursed, so you go back to obeying and you get a blessing, and then you disobey and you're curse.

And it goes round and round and round again.

I mean, the second time around you might call this repent, but repent really means I start to obey, right?

In the Deuteronomistic history, you get what you pay for.

I mean, let's just be honest.

I'm going to put another word on here.

Karma.

It's karma.

Or dharma.

So or dharma.

Or dharma.

Do your duty, right?

This makes a lot of sense.

We raise our children to believe the world is a linear place.

By and large, we teach our kids.

You work hard, you do what you're supposed to do, and things will work out for you.

You get good grades, right?

You do extracurriculars, you get into a good college, you do that, you have a chance of getting a good job, you do that, you can be economically self-sufficient and raise children to behave just like you.

There is a funny thing that happens though, which is sometimes bad things happen to good people.

And there is really not any room for that in Deuteronomy.

Well, you say maybe there is, because maybe someone in your family does something wrong and you're reaping the consequences of them.

By the way, that's in Hinduism too.

It's in here.

It's in here too.

Sometimes the king does something bad.

You all reap the negatives.

Well, I want to push back against Deuteronomy because I don't believe the world is such a linear place.

Elsewhere, we'll read in scripture that God causes the rain to fall on the good and the bad.

Right?

Just because you're wealthy doesn't mean you're righteous.

And it's particularly in the person of Jesus, there's a challenge to this, right?

Which is righteousness, no deed goes, no good deed goes unpunished, right?

I mean, that's a counter narrative.

And part of this that we see in the Lament, Jerusalem is destroyed because many people were bad.

Lament shows up again in 1945, after the Holocaust.

And after the Holocaust, our Jewish brothers and sisters really tried to figure out how could God allow this to happen.

They came up with a couple of different ideas, just like this.

God was punishing all the Jewish people because some Jewish people had become too liberal and forgotten their ways.

That was primarily an Orthodox understanding.

Because we get what we deserve.

Some people decided God is dead.

Some people decided God is not all-powerful and God couldn't stop it.

Some people decided, this is really strange, that God is an abusive parent, sometimes loving and sometimes crazy mad.

Judaism has a lot of different ideas.

Now, what we read in Lamentations is very Deuteronomistic.

Jerusalem was punished because God actually planned it, it came from God.

It was so we would repent, and then we can be restored.

We earned it, we deserved it.

You've got to think, when you believe God lives in a particular building and that building is destroyed, that's a faith crisis.

Was God not powerful enough to protect God's house?

Lamentation says God left the house.

God moved out because of the way you were treating the grounds.

This is sort of the deal.

Treat the grounds right, God will move back in.

But that's not the only way to view it.

And we'll see a couple of other threads as we read through the scriptures.

But this is very characteristic of Deuteronomy.

I mean, quite honestly, think through the bad things that happen in our list.

You'll be engaged to a woman, and she'll commit infidelity with your best friend.

That's a curse.

God will give you if you're not a bank.

So think about when something bad happens to somebody you know.

They deserve that.

By the way, we've internalized some of that.

Sometimes something bad happens, like you get a speeding ticket and you think it's because it's because I we don't think, it's because I was speeding.

We think, you know, it's because I was short with my husband and God is getting me back.

It's a deuteronomistic understanding of the world.

Now listen, sometimes it's true.

Sometimes we get consequences we earn deserve.

Sometimes, I hope you'll agree with me.

We receive consequences we neither earn nor deserve.

And this I think is why the Bible becomes a really great conversation starter instead of a conversation ender.

Is that helpful?

Yeah.

I know I'm doing big picture at a lot of little things.

The beginning we said something about lament.

Hey, there's this theme of hope.

Actually, that's part of the genre.

So we've got genres in the Psalms.

There's like Psalms of praise and Psalms for when the king is crowned, and there's a genre called Lament.

Which is usually where you say, like, what the hell's going on?

I didn't earn or deserve this.

My enemies are really bad.

But I know you can do something about it, therefore I'll praise you.

It always ends that way.

Here's my problem.

God, you're able to do something about it, and I expect you to, therefore, I'm going to praise you in advance, and then you'll fix the problem.

That's sort of how the genre goes.

Just like in a haiku, it's a 575.

Right?

So that's part of the genre.

When we call something a lament, it's not just, oh, it's sad.

It actually follows a particular form.

There's a problem, God's been faithful in the past, we rely on God to be faithful in the future.

Interestingly enough, Lamentations supplies us with one of the most regular readings at a burial.

Steadfast of the Lord endures forever.

The Lord was my portion, says my soul, Great is Thy Faithfulness.

Hopefully you've heard those words before.

There's a great non-Episcopalian hymn called Great Is Thy Faithfulness.

It's lovely.

I love that song.

It's really nice.

Well, in the context of what this lesson is, and we can't read about how bad things were before the lives, and the fact that God had said that you know basically like if you don't know what we're thinking about.

Okay, so here we have a group of people who really have gotten off track.

And so based on what you have just been saying, I'm rather confused right now as to whether God wasn't punishing them or they're punishing themselves.

Because I know that when we walk with God, that doesn't mean we don't have God.

But if you ignore God and don't keep God's law on the rule, there are consequences to that, regardless of whether God's gonna get you or whether you're just gonna be good.

So I don't know.

And I look at and I look at our conditions today, you know, this is how the American I did years ago.

And we have you know, we have things that we have to dealt with.

And so is that because we really are not listening to God anymore?

And so is I think of it like, okay, God says I told you the right way to go, and you go on it to have it your way.

You know, I I I I totally appreciate that perspective, and and I'm going to caricaturize that with something called the prosperity gospel, which you can watch on television on Sunday morning.

Here's how the prosperity gospel goes.

If you love God, you'll get more money.

The more money you give to the church, the more money God will give you.

And listen, I really want to believe that message because everything makes sense.

You get what you deserve.

Always.

But I'm convinced it's poppycock.

Right.

I believe it.

And I think do you want to say that's a like the destruction of chaos.

But in that chaos, so I'm gonna give you a math thing.

Alright?

I used to teach AP statistics, and in AP statistics we talk a lot about R values, which is correlation between two events, are things correlated.

Right?

Like, like, in general, if I eat fewer calories and exercise longer, I will carry less fat on my body.

Now, that is not true for everybody.

It is not.

However, the correlation is very strong in the negative.

The more I exercise and the fewer calories I eat, the more weight I will lose.

I feel very safe saying there is a strong correlation between those.

Now, I'm using the word correlation because in statistics we can never have causation.

Even if the correlation is 100% between two variables, no statistician should ever say one caused the other.

Statistics cannot do that.

So, while that may sound really annoying because we all know that there's causation behind things, I want to suggest Deuteronomy is laying out some strong correlations and not causations.

In general, if you do these things, in general, these are the things that happen.

But we know within the Bible itself there are people like, well, Job and Jesus, who defy that correlation.

And we know that there are folks in our own world or moments in our own lives, I think if we're thoughtful about it, where causation does not happen, correlation can sometimes break down.

I think we have another decision to make.

In the Hebrew Bible, everything came from God.

Everything.

Because there was no devil, there was no adversary.

So if something good happened to you, God caused it to happen directly.

If something bad happened to you, God did that to you directly.

I'm going to tell you I didn't believe in that myself.

No, you don't have to have my faith.

You don't have to.

But I would guarantee you that there are wealthy folks in this world who have gotten that way by cheating and lying, and they don't they don't acknowledge God in any way that I think is healthy.

And my my my church taught me well, they must really be unhappy.

No way!

No way must they be unhappy.

How can you judge somebody's happiness because they don't have your faith?

And this I think is part of where I feel like I've got to go personally, and again, you don't have to follow me here, but it's a different perspective.

Um, I don't have faith in God because I believe God will reward me.

I think faith is its own reward, not something you cash in later.

Sometimes, to be honest, there's moments in my life where I would have been much happier if I hadn't had any faith.

Long term, I don't think that's right.

And part of it has to do with what faith I have in God.

What faith I have, what's the quality of my faith?

And this I think is really important also is what are the ten things we're supposed to do?

They're the ten commandments.

The ten commandments, and that word is not in the Bible ever.

They're never called the dag on ten commandments.

They're called the ten words because in Hebrew they literally are ten words.

Moses even says this.

The people have come from a slave mentality, and they don't want to talk to God directly.

They send Moses to be their supervising slave.

What they hear are ten words, and they say, Your wish is my command.

The question is, does God want us to live with commands, or are these essentially meant to be ten words to start the conversation about what it means to live more fully as a community into the lives God imagines for us?

So consider these just for a second, right?

I can follow the ten commands and never know my neighbor.

In fact, it will be easier if I don't know them.

If I don't see the car they're driving or the inside of their home, if I don't know that they're wack-adoo, then I will never say mean things about them or have reasons to want their goods.

However, I think God intends for more than me not doing bad stuff.

I think God would like me to be in communion with my neighbor.

Again, I can follow the law and miss the spirit.

So I think if we think about the ten words as starters, as minimums, I mean, listen, it's really hard to be friends with your neighbor when you're taking their stuff.

You may think they're a great friend, but that's not a mutual friendship, right?

There's another thing about the Ten Commandments, coming through what you said at the very beginning.

Um, adultery is about taking their female property.

Adultery doesn't go both ways.

A woman who sleeps with a man did not commit adultery with him.

He did it with her because she belonged to a different person.

Now, I sure think that adultery applies to my wife as much as it applies to me.

But that's not in the commands.

I want you to hear that.

That's because I believe the commands are not it.

I think they're minimums, and we're supposed to go forward.

Honor your father and mother, if that's a command.

Good God, good luck following that one, right?

I mean, what happens when your father and mother tell you don't marry the person you've chosen to marry?

I'll do whatever you say.

Is that honoring?

Ultimately, in my case, I married somebody they didn't want to marry, and I believe I was honoring them when I did it because I thought the I thought I tr I thought the way they taught me to think.

Well, so these people at this time had no responsibility for what happened to them, just as today for whatever is happening to us.

We have no responsibility for that, and God's not causing it.

Well, I think that's a caricature what I said.

I I think I said there's a strong correlation, but there's not a causation.

Well, I think what's missing here is that uh we still we would we have been taught to think in terms of law and rules and regulations and obedience and that's that's right, but is that really what God is inviting us to?

God wants us to do God created us because otherwise we were not and so if God is uh has given us emotions that we can feel and that we can relate with other people and so forth, but you know, God has also then there has to be some kind of feeling that can go with that.

But but I don't but the thing is this, so what I'm thinking is see, God is inviting us into relationships and as we get a personal relationship, and as we get to know God better and understand how God is working in our lives, and how God, you know, and we relate to God, and because we are loving God and God is loving us if we will do what is right, or do what God do the ten words.

Don't do the ten words necessarily because you want to go to God.

You do the ten words because you know that God and God loves you and you love God, and it's a personal thing.

It has some feeling to it.

And I've seen most people don't understand that because that's not how we get that.

But if God is God, then there has to be some way.

Some feeling of a hold, some feeling of giving and receiving.

I totally respect your position, and I'm gonna say there's places and people in my life that it didn't work for.

Yes, that's right.

A lot of people it does not work for.

But the point is this, I think it a lot of people don't it doesn't work for because they've never been taught that there is a way for that.

I I I don't actually know that I'm gonna sound I ostensibly I feel the difference because I didn't think love is about feelings.

I think love is about practices and commitments.

When they come, naturally they go together.

I don't think they always come together.

I would tell you there's people in my life I absolutely practice love for, and it's never felt good.

Never.

But I'm talking about in relationship to God.

Well, but that's what I want to say.

I'm not really sure God has feelings.

I think we have feelings and we map those on to God because we think God must be like us.

But I don't know.

I don't know if God, Tim brought this, he gave me this great book.

It's called I'm God, right?

And it's written from God's point of view.

And it starts out by saying, I don't think I'm God.

I don't need to think.

Y'all do that.

I know that's and actually when I hold up, I think that's that's really part of what I think you're really all about, is God is mysterious.

God's ways are really hard for us to detect.

But I will say this.

Um, when I got married, I promised to love my wife.

And if that was about how I felt, listen, we'd have been done.

We'd have been done, especially after year ten, right?

Year ten was the tough one.

But actually, year ten was tough from a feelings perspective.

We got through it because of commitment.

Now, sometimes the feelings come and go.

I'll tell you, sometimes they go, but it's the practice of love that keeps us together because we've chosen we're gonna do this.

I would tell you, we could amicably say, nope, we're not practicing love, we're just we're done.

And I think we could do that and still be friends.

I really do.

I believe we could do that okay, and I think I could commit myself to love another person.

The reason I'm not going to do that is because my vow is that I'm always going to try.

If I can't try anymore, I think we'll be done.

But we've promised we're going to always try, especially when we don't feel like it.

And again, in my life, there's people for whom the feelings never do come in spite of the trying.

They never come.

And um and that's why I think there's something greater than feeling.

I I think I I don't think I'm actually disagreeing with you.

I'm I'm trying to like expand the language a little bit, you know?

Yeah, well, you know, even with a relationship of God where you'd be pretty hopeful.

But it is a standfast promise that is there that a person can feel more openly to work with God, to love God, to serve God, to do what God wants, you know, because they are less likely to make mistakes.

Well, do they make mistakes?

I mean, that's just the way it is.

But the point is, God is the idea, regardless of where you are.

I could rather love is nothing.

But I also think as a parent, you have a certain kind of love for your children, and that is what God is doing.

And if that's not human, then it's pretty strong.

I think it's all about community.

Community.

Yeah, because you know, I don't go around thinking about it all day long.

I probably don't think about them at all.

Sometimes.

But I do think about community, I do think about relationships, and that's what I find God.

You know, I I think too about nature.

I just sometimes you're just walking along and you see something, a bird, a sense that you call it she.

You know, and so there's it's it's about the people, it's about the world we're in, it's it's uh it's just not very simple to describe some it's this or that.

It's and I think it changes everything.

Yes, and it can change.

I mean you're your relationship, you're relationship with your thoughts.

It can change everything.

You don't wake up and everything in the same way that you did yesterday.

And God is but a God is always there, you know, adjusting, helping to adjust or whatever.

Whatever.

Um something is really hard to put into language.

So I'm gonna give you a helpful, very old diagram, and then say one more word about Deuteronomy if I can, and then we'll get to continue to read it through next week.

Okay, there's a little bit of return to it.

Very old orthodox Christian diagram goes like this.

I mean, this is not a new idea.

Imagine this is an equilateral triangle, and here is sort of where you're centered at this moment.

The Orthodox Christian idea says this will always be an equilateral triangle, always.

Sometimes we think, oh my god, I when I get really close to myself, look, I've gotten really far away from God and other people.

But actually, the Orthodox idea is that this telescopes essentially said the closer I get to myself, the more I love myself, the closer and the more I love you.

And the more and closer I get to God.

Which means the more I love my neighbor, the more I love God.

And the more I love myself.

And it's predicated on the idea that if I don't love myself, I cannot love my neighbor who is different and similar to me, nor can I love the God who has given us everything we are.

So I think it's one of those interesting bits.

When you put other, you might put the world there too.

The closer and more present and grateful I feel in the world, that should put me closer and more grateful and present with God and myself.

Not in a selfish way, not in our narcissistic way, but embracing the person God made me to be.

So one other word on that.

If I'm not grateful for the gifts I have, when I see yours, I'll be jealous.

No, in psychology, when you do when the counsel, go to counseling, um, that's what our counselor is going to help you with.

You're gonna you've gotta love yourself.

You've gotta get to that first.

And what it is so you talk about the things you don't like about whatever, but you you've got to get to that first.

And you can't embrace that yourself.

It's really hard to embrace anyone else really completely.

And and it's it's fluctuates, you know, it comes and goes, and yeah, but but it's it's very much a that's that's it.

So one more thought about Deuteronomy, because you've heard me disagree with it.

It's not a total disagreement because I want you to think that there's stages by which we develop as people in all arenas of our lives.

And if you've parented children, or if you've been around parenting children.

When my kid was in the first grade, he went to a public school and there was a kid in his classroom who was watching X-rated movies at home and coming to school and talking about it.

By the way, that's child abuse.

So we get that.

But he was talking about X-rated movies in the first grade.

Me as a parent, I did not want to have a conversation with my son about how he could maturely manage exposure to things he shouldn't be exposed to.

I wanted him out of the classroom.

Because I fundamentally trusted that my child at that point was unable to bear this divergence in values.

That is valid for every child.

Here, part of Deuteronomy.

These people have just come out of being enslaved in a polytheistic culture when everything they do is in reference to a different god, whether it's killing animals or eating or drinking or the way they wear clothes.

So there are some really strong rules about no.

Don't be like those people.

Be different from those people.

Wear different clothes.

Pour the blood on the ground.

Lady, you can't even eat certain animals like they did.

And it's written like they did.

Be different from them.

There's a stage in our development where being different from what we see is really necessary for us so that we can grow into this thought that, hey, we do things differently and my way isn't your way, right?

But there's a time in development where we quarantine children and teenagers from things we think they can't handle at that moment, right?

Whether you're Jewish or Christian, please hear.

This is exactly what I think Deuteronomy is telling us.

When your kid is five and they want to play in the street, don't go in the street.

Why?

The first thing is, I mean, I really believe this, because I told you you have to obey me first, whether you understand it or not.

And then we'll explain it later.

But your life is on the line with the street.

It's not something you can, well, if you got hit by a car, I told you that would happen, right?

You can't do that with children.

So you've got to have these hard, fast.

We need that as human beings.

At some level, we need you just do it.

And hopefully we grow into here's the why, or here's how I can navigate that.

Read that way, you see, Deuteronomy is actually really helpful for people who have no identity.

None.

It tells them, look, here's where your identity begins.

You're gonna do these things.

You're gonna be your own people, you're gonna treat each other this certain way.

You're not gonna collect interest from each other.

That's not being a good friend.

Right?

I mean, the answer is no.

Now, listen, we know in the economy we have that if there were no interest, no one would lend.

Because we we believe there's gotta be something in it for both of us.

I don't know that that's morally right or wrong, but it's a precept by which we operate.

It's not a bad precept as long as we have some agency, right?

When you become enslaved because you have no choice, that's not great.

See, look, there's rules about enslavement.

If I make you my slave, I have to let you go in seven years.

I can't keep you my slave forever.

That's actually pretty thoughtful.

You know, I mean, really, it's thoughtful.

Um again, when we when we if we'll if we'll receive this as, hey, this is maybe not the ending, this is the beginning.

Like the ten words.

Like, hey, um, we've got to figure out.

I mean, look, if this is the ending, go live in a monastery and don't talk to any Buddhist, Muslim, or or or frankly, low Protestant person because they've got different faith from yours.

We we sometimes do start there, though, so we've got our own faith basis of security with which we can then go interact with other people and appreciate who they are and what they do differently.

And in that sense, this is very developmentally appropriate.

This is like saying to your kids in our family, we do this.

And we say that we, you know, Emory came home and told me so-and-so in my class said the F-word, and I said, you know, of course, you will hear that.

In our house, we don't use that word.

And we don't use that word for a couple of reasons.

Mostly it's because of what other people will think of you when you say that.

And we don't want to invite judgment that is silly and shouldn't necessarily be the case, but we don't want to do that.

We also want to have more refinement in our words.

I mean, so whatever.

What she knows is don't say that word, and eventually she'll figure out there are consequences for when you say that word.

Sometimes we decide I can live with those consequences, right?

We do.

I decide that.

I didn't say them from the pulpit, but I do use particular words with particular friends, and I don't worry about it.

Yeah, I was a single mom.

I raised two daughters, and I was saying there's no friends.

But I but I I was very key in them being together, three of us, we were like against the world.

Some here we're in high school, some guy decided he was going to play one against the other.

And I brought it together at the kitchen table and I said, wait a minute, this guy will come and go.

There will be all kinds of guys, they do not come between you two.

You two are sisters, and they just looked at each other and they said, Okay.

I don't know what they did with this dude, but he never came around.

He never did that calling one and calling the other kind of thing.

But I'll never forget that because I thought this is our family, and this is who we are, and this is we stick together forever and ever.

Maybe it's an aside, a whole but different thing, but you're good.

You're good.

I I am super grateful for our conversation today.

This was good.

I love, if it's okay to say, I love that we have different ways we express this and interact with it.

My my hope is that we hear each other's different ways and appreciate them and expand our own.

Now that's that's what you're doing for me, so I'm really grateful for that.

Um, next week we will get to talk about um here, it's a reminder you're going to get to see this timeline, part of this timeline really play down in front of you from the idea when bad things happen to the people, it's because they weren't faithful.

Okay?

See you next week.

Thank you.