Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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You see them now and then in America, but all the time and everywhere in Israel: phylacteries, small leather boxes tied to the foreheads of Orthodox Jews by a leather strap. The box contains (although you cannot see them) tiny scrolls. Each phylactery will have one little scroll with words from Exodus 13, where Moses establishes the feast of Passover to make certain that the Jews would remember forever, and never forget, their miraculous rescue from Egypt. Make it "a memorial between your eyes," Moses said. So they did, and still do. And there will be another little scroll in the phylactery, this one from Deuteronomy, Chapter 11, where Moses admonishes the Jews to remember forever, and never forget, the Law (The Ten Commandments). "They shall be as frontlets between your eyes," he tells them. And there will be a third scroll containing part of this morning's scripture, the part that reminds the Jews to remember forever, and never forget, that God is ONE, and that we must love him with everything we have, for that is the essence of worship. Again, "frontlets between your eyes."

If you pushed me I would have to say that this is an example of taking the Bible too literally. (And sometimes taking scripture literally is a subterfuge for not taking it seriously -- paying attention to the words instead of to the meaning.) Surely, when Exodus and Deuteronomy say we should put God's Word between our eyes, and on our hands, and on our gates, and on the door posts of our homes, the main and serious meaning is that is that we should be constantly aware of His Word and never forget how our salvation came about. That these holy things must never be out of our sight or out of our minds.

But reminders never hurt. That's why we have phylacteries, and symbols, and holy days: so we don't forget. For that would be the worst ingratitude: that after all God had done to save us (bringing us up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, leading us through the Red Sea to freedom -- or, in the case of Christians, leading us through the waters of baptism, in which we do not drown but our enemy, the devil, does, and delivering us from sin and death, through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, our pashel lamb that was sacrificed, so he becomes our new Passover) -- the worst ingratitude would be that after God had saved us, we should forget. So we put markers in our lives to remind us. Phylacteries on our foreheads. Symbols to jog our memories. Certain days of the year for remembering to remember.

After the battle of Britain, an air battle in which England lost most of her planes and pilots and was almost brought to her knees by Hitler, Winston Churchill went on radio and said, "This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. This is the end of the beginning." And he was right. That's exactly what Moses was saying as he spoke to the Hebrew people that day: this is the end of the beginning. And he was right. All the preliminaries, the prologue to the history of Israel, lay behind them: the promises God made to Abraham, the descent into Egypt and the long years of slavery there, the miraculous escape across the desert and through the Red Sea, the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. All that was over. Now they were about to cross the Jordan River and conquer the land that God had promised their ancestors centuries before. And Moses, who would not be allowed to go with them, spoke to them one last time, and warned them of two dangers: first (as we have seen) that, in their comfort, they might forget what God had done, and second that they might succumb to the false religions and empty gods of the pagan peoples who would be living all around them in their new land. The Jews, of course, did both.

But we can't boast. For the same two dangers threaten us, and we're not doing so well with them. First, is the danger that we should forget and lose track of who we are. We were Pharaoh's slaves, and God delivered us. We were exiled in Babylon, and God brought us back. We were a handful of poor and powerless Christians lost in the great Roman Empire, and God destroyed Rome and made us great. We suffered under the tyranny of an English king, and God made us a new nation. We were indentured servants. We were African slaves. We were immigrants from the ghettos of Europe, and God brought us to the promised land. The worst disaster would be to forget, to develop amnesia about the wondrous workings of God. We have to study and remember.

I love to read history. I can't understand those who find it boring. When I read history I'm reading about me. (And I'm not boring!) I'm reading about where I came from, and how I came to be what I am, how I came to speak the language I speak, to eat the food I eat, and to dress as I dress. I'm learning about ideas and ideals that inspired my forebears, who were people like me. When I read, for example, that Antietum was the bloodiest battlefield for its size in the history of the world (thirty-two thousand killed and wounded in one day) -- when I hear that, I want to know why. Why would so many men march off to slaughter like that? What could have been so important? I wish I had something that important in my life, something to die for. We discover who we are, we discover and rediscover our values, in history.

But today it's not just ignorance of the historical facts. Today we've developed such a cynical attitude about history (about everything, for that matter.), that we believe nothing is ever as it appears, nothing is up front -- there must always be some selfish, ulterior motive, to be uncovered -- and that passes for wisdom. The Crusaders didn't really go to save the Holy Land, we are told. They went because they were bored at home in medieval Europe. The founding fathers didn't write the Constitution to make a better America for everyone, they wrote it to further their own financial interests. Andrew Carnage didn't build a thousand libraries to increase learning; he built them to avoid taxes. And on and on. It's no wonder we have no heroes. We have murdered them all with cynicism.

Whether by ignorance or cynicism we have managed to lose our history. Moses warned us about that. We have lost our salvation history, the sacred memories, passed on by believers, about how God has spoken to his people over the years. (That's why we have to keep studying the Bible and church history.) Who is our God, and how shall we see him except as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the burning bush -- the God of Jesus, the God of Pentecost? That's what we know about God, and all we know: what he has revealed about himself to us in human history. But the same cynical attitude I spoke of earlier, in regard to secular history, has invaded salvation history and robbed us of our spiritual heroes: Moses didn't really part the Red Sea and lead the people through, they say. (That's just an exaggerated, later Jewish remembrance, a legend to say what a special people the Jews were.) Jesus wasn't really born in Bethlehem, they tell us. (That was just put there to satisfy the prophecy.) He wasn't really dead on the cross (just in a coma). The Apostles were drunk at Pentecost. And so forth. What Moses feared has come about. We have forgotten, or become cynical about, the wondrous things God did for our ancestors, and for us, and so we are lost. We don't know where we came from, so we don't know where we are or where we're heading.

Which leads to Moses' second warning: that the Jews, when they moved into their "land of milk and honey" would be lured by the attractions of other religions, the religions of their neighbors, and not stay true to Yahweh. That, of course, follows from the first danger, because when we don't know our past, and have no spiritual roots, we are easy victims of every new and false idea. George Will said that the problem with the flower children of the 1960s was that they had forgotten to read the minutes of the last meeting. All the ideas which they thought were new: free love, communal living, pacifism, anarchy, were not. They had all been tried many times, and failed, but because the 60s generation didn't know that they were easily convinced that these ideas were there own, and wise. We, like the Jews, like the flower children, live in a land where many religions flourish, where many things are worshipped. And when we are not crystal clear about our heritage, we fall for every (spiritually speaking) -- for every pretty face. And let's be honest: compared to the gods our neighbors worship, this old curmudgeon God of ours, isn't much fun. It is very tempting to run with the crowd.

When the Jews were freed from the yoke of slavery, and when we are freed from the power of sin and death through Jesus, it did not mean, and does not mean, absolute and unrestricted freedom. It is real freedom, not license. The Jews got the Ten Commandments to keep them in line, Christians got the discipline of the church. The law is an important part of God's grace. It is a gift to know our boundaries. God rescues people, delivers people, liberates people, gives them new lives and new rules. Freedom is never so carefree as we think it will be, but it is far better than slavery. We were Pharaoh's slaves, and God rescued us with a mighty hand. We once were lost, but now are found, were blind but now we see.

We cross over the Jordan every day when we step out into the world. Before we take that step, we would do well to remember what Moses' told the Hebrew children: Don't forget who you are, and don't be tempted by your neighbors' charming, empty gods.

"Be not transformed by the world, but transform the world." We've done it before, we can do it again. And we can start right here, in this place, today.