In his introduction to Exodus 19-24 (The Five Books of Moses, Schocken Bible, Vol. 1, p. 361-2), Everett Fox suggests that the primary purpose of the Torah's legal texts is not regulatory, but didactic. Western culture has tended towards a view of law as regulation—keeping things in order, so to speak. Fox suggests that the Torah's purpose is more to present a worldview.

On this coming Sunday, the Hebrew Bible text is the Ten Commandments, viewed by many as the headwaters of our legal system, with all its regulatory and punitive aspects. If we put them in context as the headwaters of the Torah, things start to look a bit different, and so I find myself wondering if our law-bound society hasn't gone off the rails sometime since Moses, turning God's teaching to the purpose of regulation.

So my question for the week:
What would life be like if God were truly in charge?

The homily below should have appeared last Saturday night at 6 PM CDT. I accidentally clicked on the wrong date when I published it. My apologies to those who might have been looking for a Holy Cross sermon earlier than this.

St. Matthew's will be observing the feast day of our patron on this coming Sunday. It is also one year since Archbishop Fred Hiltz preached here as observed the parish's 125th anniversary. (+Fred's sermon is attached.) My thoughts are currently running to a "125 + 1" theme: where are we as a parish one year after our big party? Where is God leading us?

Commenting on Romans 13:8-14,  David Schnasa Jacobsen has observed the peculiarity of the phrase, "fulfilling the law," as opposed to our usual sense of breaking or keeping it. He further suggests that the reason for fulfilling the law (by loving the neighbour) is not found in the past (God told us so), but in the eschatological reality of the inbreaking of salvation. The sense of urgency in the passage is heightened by examining Leviticus 19:17-18, which relates love of neighbour to not harbouring hatred. In other words, "Don't wait for the right time to love others. That time is now!"

We hear the same kind of urgency in a very different setting in Sunday's OT lesson, the institution of the Passover in Exodus 12:1-14—eat the meal on your feet, ready to go. The time is now!

It is very easy for contemporary Christians to become complacent about the Gospel, losing the sense of urgency found in these texts.

We see here an understanding of God that senses the incoherence between  speaking of love and grace in the present and speaking of permanent rejection (and punishment) in the future. Christians have mostly lived with this incoherence and it helps explain the incoherence of much that Christians have done throughout history: espousing love and espousing hate simultaneously, even making it the basis for evangelism through threat and for atonement through seeing Jesus' death as the buying off of God's unrelenting hate (or rejection) by having it imposed only on Jesus. These are crude notions which have the effect of legitimising hate. Paul prises open new possibilities by suggesting God continues to be characterised by grace even into the future and so cannot abandon Israel, any more than a good parent would abandon a child.

Following up on my initial musings about Matthias, here is the outline for the ex tempore homily I preached on ...   more »