The Shema

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Despite a strong and timely offering from the reflection booklet (even mentioned Mark Twain!), I am again going to let tonight's Bible study reflection supersede the booklet.

I was very tired today and almost didn't go to Bible study, but I realized that I simply HAD to see what Jim Cavis was going to say about Samson and Delilah.  I have strong feelings, as my few long time readers know all too well, about the story of Samson and Delilah.  Cavis made the best case yet for a story -- even as a parable -- that seems to essentially have the moral "Don't trust women/outsiders!"

Cavis points out that the seven-fold story of Judges is of forgetting God's graces, not passing on God's promise and love.  Generational slip of the promise of Abraham.  Perhaps that's what really set the first three founders apart -- Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Maybe it was passing it on so strongly to the next generation such that they were all notable followers of God.

Again and again, the Israelites are drawn into the pagan world, corrupted slowly by the influences of others, and they bend their morals and principles and lose what was their strength -- God's favor and protection.  They fail to trust.  So they are bound (chained) and then, they pray in despair and God saves them.

I'll give them that moral.  My own interpretation is closer to the idea that the point of the story is not anything with Delilah.  She was just how Sampson was brought to a low place.  That not cutting the hair -- although a real religious custom -- was, in some ways, just as arbitrary as all the lies he told her based on magical superstitions of the time.  It was a sign and symbol of Sampson's bond with God -- not the real "source of his strength" like we think of super heroes with green lanterns or something.

The point was calling out to God even when it was hard.  When suddenly you weren't blessed with all of the strength and superiority.  When you weren't above the fray, in so many ways.  When the world came crashing in -- do you still know that you are loved and blessed by God?  Do you realize that His strength is still with you?  When it comes in difficulty, do you remember that it is still grace?

Which is a very New Testament interpretation.  As the women of the Bible study pointed out, we are in the Old Testament, which is a very different story.

We spent a lot of time trying to reconcile God's orders to destroy entire towns and kill unbelievers.  It seemed like everything that could go wrong with religion.  I found myself surprisingly reconciled to it -- in pieces.  It's a story with a religious moral, not an in-the-moment historical account.  It's not telling you all the circumstances, just framing what happened to teach a spiritual truth about not letting true worship of God become absorbed in the idols of the moment.  I'll give them that.

But the difference between the Testaments is something worth remembering. Because I still, for our world, prefer my interpretation of the story.  It's one of a compassionate, loving, forgiving God who is seeking us so desperately and constantly.  Especially when you believe that all religions are different Faces of God, it can be hard to take the Old Testament way.

But Joshua and Judges can be such a sharp reminder of just how hard and terrible and awful it was when God used us humans as his Morality Enforcers.  When He spoke to men and told them to fix the world, and we didn't have the stomach to do it.  We didn't have the taste for bathing in the blood of the sinners or burning their towns.  I wonder if it even felt sacrilegious to break their idols.

That's something I think a lot of people of faith would do well to remember.  We neither liked nor were good at being the Morality Enforcers.  When Jesus came, He set us free from that as well.  Now we extend forgiveness and compassion and gentle correction.  Now we share the Good News, not the blunt instrument.

That's where a very vocal minority of my religion is going so very wrong.  Don't you remember?  Don't you remember that we were terrible at that job?  Don't you remember how awful it was for everyone, including God?  Don't you remember that Jesus's promise was that this was no longer necessary?

This may sound, for a moment, like a digression, but another element of tonight's discussion was the Shema.  The Shema is a prayer that many Jewish people say in the morning and the evening, based on Deuteronomy 6:4-9.

"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.  And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."

It made me think about my cross and how I stopped wearing it every day and then practically at all.  It made me think about every so often I can really tell.  I can really tell that I am not wearing it -- or occasionally when I remember times that I knew it absolutely.  When it reminded people daily of my beliefs.  When it gave me the opportunity, every day, to present a loving, compassionate view of Christianity.

It was only later when I got home that I remembered the main reason I stopped.  It wasn't the bead falling off -- although that didn't help.  It's a reversible beaded cross so I could have worn the other side facing out.  No, I stopped because one too many people who saw the cross assumed that that meant that I shared their homophobic bigotry.  Because I never knew what to say to those people and always felt that telling them about my bisexuality would be just a weapon.  Because I couldn't take another tirade against my own sexuality delivered with a nod and a wink, as if expecting me to go along with it.

And tonight it made me remember how very, very weird I felt when I heard an NPR piece on the life and death of Paul Walker, the head of the Westboro Baptist Church.  Because before he became the man who pickets the funerals of fallen heroes or victims of great tragedies, he was on the frontline of the fight for civil rights.  And...it's always so complicated when people aren't simple.  When people are more than one thing.

But maybe it was the same thing that drove him.  Maybe he is just the extreme representation of the good and the bad side of trying to be the Moral Enforcer.  Like the Levites killing everyone who wouldn't turn away from the Golden Calf and being rewarded with the priesthood.  Or perhaps removed from the tribes?

He believed, in both cases, that he knew what was right.  And he set out to change the world until it was right, by any means necessary.

I'm not defending him -- mostly -- because his methods were abhorrent and his second message was filled with more hate than perhaps he had the self-awareness to comprehend.

But perhaps the real lesson of his life is to remember that we are not living in the world of the Old Testament anymore.  Even if you feel compelled to follow the role of Moral Enforcer -- which is Old Testament, not New -- then you must remember that we are no longer the religion of zero tolerance and salting the ground of the fallen city.  Everything you do in the service of God must be done with compassion and love for your fellow man.  We don't go around burning towns anymore.  Now we lay down our lives for our brothers and our enemies alike.

Now we love, not judge.