Sunday, April 13, 2014

Mezuzot: Doorposts (Matthew 21:1-11; Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

During Lent 2014 I am again using chapters from Lauren Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath as a guide to exploring some of the practices and traditions of Judaism as a way of focusing on Jesus in an attempt to follow him more closely. This is the sermon I preached when I first did this three years ago:

During the season of Lent our church is studying some chapters from Lauren Winner's book Mudhouse Sabbath. The sermons during this time will also follow through on some of her writing, but the sermon author claims all mistakes and goofy ideas as his own.

On first glace, a commandment that seems to be an instruction on how to decorate your own home would make you wonder. "Really, Lord? Got all the big stuff taken care of, I guess." But when we look at the foundation of the custom of the mezuzot, we can see something bigger at work.

The scripture scrolls placed over the doorposts in Jewish homes aren't chosen at random. The verses from Deuteronomy represent the most basic understanding of the Hebrew people in their covenant with the Lord: That the Lord is their God, and no other, and that the Lord is the only God who is real. Every time they enter or leave a dwelling or even a bedroom within a dwelling, they can see that container and remind themselves of this basic belief. A mezuzot is the first thing they see when they enter a home and the last thing they see when they look back at the door after they leave. Ideally, a person will remember God's covenant and Lordship coming and going.

In her book Mudhouse Sabbath, Lauren Winner points out that a mezuzot might be different for different people. Children might have scroll boxes with cartoon themes, for example, and a box might represent a person's specific style. When people see the box they chose, they remember God's covenant was with the people as a whole and with each individual person.

We might do ourselves some good to include a mezuzot now and again in our homes too, I suppose, as a reminder that we may be the stewards of a particular place, but the place as well as everything in it actually belong to God. I know I could use that reminder quite often. Of course, we can't put scripture-boxes everywhere we are -- unless we own our own businesses, our workplaces have different people as their stewards in this point of view, and we're not entitled to impose our beliefs on someone else.

But remember what God said to the people through Jeremiah, about the coming day in which God will write his teaching upon the hearts of the people and not rely on inscriptions on stone or other materials. We can carry the theme of the mezuzot with us wherever we might go. That might be harder, though, because we have no physical reminder like a scripture-box to jog our memories. On the other hand, if we developed the habit we could find ourselves reminded of God's love and covenant with us all the time.

There's another side to understanding the custom of the mezuzot, and that's remembering that this is something Jesus knew as a regular part of his life. When he was a boy growing up, he would have seen the mezuzot on the front door of his house and Joseph and Mary would have explained it to him -- even though his divine nature would have known all about it, his human nature learned like any other human being learned.

When he stayed with his friends Lazarus, Mary and Martha in Bethany, he would have entered the house by walking underneath the mezuzot. When he stayed with Peter, there would be a mezuzot. When he ate dinner at the house of Simon the Pharisee, there would have been a mezuzot -- heck, even Zaccheus the tax collector probably had a mezuzot over his front door.

Why is that important? Well, a couple of reasons occur to me as I think about it. They may be right or off-base, but they interest me when I want to think about God. Remember that the mezuzot is a scroll of scripture that recites the Israelite's dedication to his or her God and reminds the reader of God's covenant with and love for the people. And remember too that Jesus said he was "the way, the truth and the life," pointing out more than once that he was the way to God, so to speak. He was the sign that the covenant God began by making with the Hebrew people was expanded to include allpeople. He had become a new doorway to God, if you like.

And on him were inscribed the signs of God's love for all people, the wounds of the nails and the spear. I don't believe that Jesus somehow had to keep the scars of those wounds when he was raised. If after his resurrection he could be unrecognizable to Mary Magdalene until he spoke her name, he could certainly have been raised without any marks at all. But he did keep them -- why? To remember what he had done and why? I'd say yes, except I don't know how he could forget even if he weren't fully divine.

Are they the mezuzim that remind us of God's love when we look at the new doorway to the Kingdom? Did he keep them for us, so that we could remember his great love for us and be shown yet another sign of that love? Well, I don't know if that's the reason he kept them, but it's certainly one effect of keeping them, isn't it?

Sunday, April 06, 2014

Tefillah: Prayer (Romans 8:26-29)

During Lent 2014 I am again using chapters from Lauren Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath as a guide to exploring some of the practices and traditions of Judaism as a way of focusing on Jesus in an attempt to follow him more closely. This is the sermon I preached when I first did this three years ago:

During the season of Lent our church is studying some chapters from Lauren Winner's book Mudhouse Sabbath. The sermons during this time will also follow through on some of her writing, but the sermon author claims all mistakes and goofy ideas as his own.

In many ways, our prayer lives and habits parallel our overall growth in thinking and understanding. As children, our prayers are almost completely petitionary and mostly one-sided. We memorize prayers that we say every night before we go to bed or that we say before meals. Most of the time we don't understand their content very well, but we learn that it's important to say "Thank you" to God and to remember we are blessed in many ways we might otherwise overlook.

When we get older and our communication and relationships take on new dimensions, we certainly hope our prayer does as well, although sometimes it doesn't. Rather than just asking God for things or calling out in time of need, we begin to realize that prayer is also about listening to God. As much as we may fascinate ourselves, God wants to play a part in the conversation as well.

At the same time our awareness of how we pray grows, though, so do some of our questions about it. If we pray for someone's healing and it happens, we rejoice. But if it doesn't, what does that say about prayer and about God? Or if the person we pray for recovers, but another person prayed for doesn't, what can we say to the people who prayed for that person?

And what can we pray for in situations we don't understand? Does anyone really know, for example, what needs to happen in the Middle East so that people there can have a chance to live like they want to without a dictator or some crazy rebel leader dropping bombs on them or shooting at them as they go about their business? We obviously pray for the people suffering in the fighting and oppressed by dictators, but what do we want to happen for them? How do we want their problems solved?

Pick just about any problem in the so-called "adult arena" that needs solving and you will have a hard time finding the solution. And so we may throw up our hands and say, "Lord, help 'em!" Although those are words, they're not very specific and you can see how they might be like what Paul says about prayer in Romans.

If we focus on prayer results rather than on prayer itself, we will confuse the pretty much everyone before very long. And we'll probably confuse ourselves as well. Lauren Winner suggests in her chapter on prayer that when we pray, we get to join in a conversation or a communion that's already going on among the three person of the Holy Trinity. Although it's not a perfect model, I think we can use it to help shape our prayer life.

For one, not every conversation has results. We Methodists, veterans of a hundred committee meetings or more, know this to be so. But even pleasant conversations aren't conducted with an eye towards their results. They happen because the people involved want to speak with each other. If they're related to each other by friendship or family ties or similar interests, they may be enjoying each other's company. Married people will probably tell you that asking each other how the day went is less about finding out how the day went than about talking with their spouses. A mom who's been by herself with a toddler all day long probably doesn't much care about the new staplers in her husband's office, but she does care about being able to talk in real grown-up words and share with her partner (we should stipulate, of course, that significant parts of the office day may not be very grown-up, despite the words used to describe it). The relationship matters far more than the content.

When we pray, the relationship we are building with God matters more than the content. When we give thanks for our blessings in a day, we're not really trying to itemize every good thing that happened to us so we offer the proper thank-yous for them all, the way we had to make sure a thank-you note accompanied every birthday gift, even the necktie from the strange cousin who thought it was a good gift for an eight-year-old boy. We are indeed thanking God, but we're also trying to build belief and acceptance that all we have comes from God, and that we owe thanks to God for it.

When we ask for God's presence or intervention in a crisis, whether it's geopolitical or personal or medical or whatever, we are in fact seeking that presence or protection for those we pray for. Otherwise we would just be making noise. But again, we're also building our faith, helping strengthen our belief that whatever good things may come in those situations come from God. For the praying Christian, healing at the hands of the skilled surgeon is no less a miracle than one unexplainable by science. Who gave the surgeon her skill? Who created the dedication to her work that kept her through med school and residency and through all the patients that didn't make it? We may or may not know who she credits, but we will credit God.

Conversations have pauses, of course. But the relationships that fuel them don't. It's the relationship that prompts the desire to resume the conversation if the people involved have been apart.

Our prayers may pause when we say "Amen." But our relationship with God does not, and so we find ourselves following every "Amen" with an "Again!" as we are called and drawn to return to our prayer with Him.