When We Forget

Sermon on Deuteronomy 4 and Mark 7. Proclaimed at Trinity Lutheran Church, Wernersville, PA.

The Conservative movement of Judaism is characterized by a willingness to live in the real modern world, but also a drive to take seriously the traditions and witnesses of Judaism’s history, like the Talmud and Midrash, and especially the Bible. So their seminary in New York City seemed like a sensible place to go in order to learn a bit about how Jews read the parts of the Bible that we share. I suspected the environment would be a bit different from what I was used to, but I didn’t know how true that would be.

Now, most of that difference was interesting and valuable, and I’d very much like to tell you about some of that, so you could get a sense of the beauty and depth of faith that Judaism can embody. But instead, I want to tell you a little bit about what it meant to live in the seminary’s apartment building for students. It meant that, in certain ways, I had to behave as if I were, in fact, Jewish, which isn’t all that easy, since I am clearly not. To begin with, just at sight, the apartment was visibly different from anywhere else I had lived. Looking at the doorway, before I even entered for the first time, the upper-right hand corner of the door frame was adorned with a mezuzah, a small, plastic tube inside which—though I couldn’t see it—was a little roll of paper containing verses from Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and strength,” and, “Lay these words on your heart and on your soul, and, bind these words as a sign upon your hand… and write them on your door-posts and on your gates,” among other things. The latter is a give-away about why they’re there. “Put them on your door-posts,” it says, so they put them on their door-posts.

I didn’t have to be Jewish, but my kitchen did. The tiny kitchen in my apartment was certified as a kosher space, which meant I had to keep kosher. Not the easiest thing when you’ve never done it before. And when I looked it up on the Internet, it told me that there were different ways of keeping kosher. No specific instructions from the seminary meant I had to talk to my roommate about what he needed. Ultimately, it wasn’t that hard; meat had to be slaughtered according to kosher laws, and meat and dairy had to be kept separate, including different sets of dishes for each. I could go out and have a cheeseburger if I wanted, but I couldn’t bring the leftovers back home. I was so proud of myself at first for managing to do this. I’d stand in the kitchen and assemble a sandwich. Usually I’d have had ham, but I was wise enough to skip that, since pork is forbidden, and so I had turkey, carefully chosen for the little kosher mark on the packaging, and I stacked it up on the meat plate I’d labeled, and used mustard instead of mayonnaise. Of course, mayonnaise doesn’t have any dairy in it, actually, so it wouldn’t have mattered. But the Swiss cheese I’d chosen did, something I didn’t notice until halfway through my third non-kosher lunch.

And I have to tell you, living in this way, having to adhere to all these crazy laws all the time, about where you can go and when, what you can eat and where, who can do what at what time—it’s a little bit crazy-making. I wanted very badly to be respectful of my neighbor’s faith and space, but there is some limit on the number of things you can be expected to remember all at once, particularly if they aren’t things you’ve grown up with. Here were are, in the campus synagogue, which is also our primary classroom, and it’s time for worship, and the leader is up front chanting the prayers, and somehow it’s perfectly acceptable to wander through the space, in front of everybody, practically interrupting the prayers, but not if you have a cup of coffee in your hands, because you can’t have food or drink in there. And my apartment! It’s my own home, but these are not even my rules!

Although, to be fair, in a way, they are. I mean, we do share the same Bible. And you heard yourself; the stuff about putting the words on your door-posts? I wonder why we don’t do that? All those food laws come from Leviticus, and they’re complicated, but they’re important. And yet we Christians have no problem munching on cheese-covered bacon-wrapped scallops as if that were perfectly acceptable to God. When there are several problems with that according to the Law. And for that matter, we pick and choose what parts of the Law we follow. We have no problem eating pork and wearing clothing of mixed fibers, but we absolutely oppose murder and stealing and adultery—and their place in the Ten Commandments is hardly reason enough to favor them over the others. God’s Law is God’s Law, right?

I mean, Moses is clear in today’s reading from Deuteronomy. “Give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe… You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the LORD your God with which I am charging you.” This is an important part of our religious tradition! So why do pay it such little heed?

I think it is important to notice that in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for their strict adherence to these kinds of laws, but he doesn’t tell them to stop. He quotes Isaiah, and says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” Jesus doesn’t say that the Pharisees are wrong for washing their hands before meals, for example. He says they are doing it for the wrong reasons. And the reason he says this is because he is, frankly, a good Jew, and a wise Rabbi. Jesus has read the Law, and he’s read it better than those Pharisees.

In Moses’s long sermon that we call Deuteronomy, he implores the people to keep God’s Law, yes, but he also tells them why they should do it. At the end of our reading, he says, “Take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.” Moses says that all these instructions he’s given the people of Israel? They aren’t things they should do because God said so. They aren’t because that’s how you honor God. They aren’t because we need to obey in order to get God’s favor. They are simply to make sure we don’t forget. To help us remember. To remind us who we are, and who we belong to. They aren’t things we do for God. They are things we do for us, to remind us what God has already done.

It’s funny, walking into my apartment past the little scroll on the door-post every day, going into that kitchen, making sure the groceries I put in the refrigerator are produced in ethical ways, having to stop to decide which plate to use, checking that my recipe doesn’t pair ingredients in the wrong way—they seemed like silly rules at first. But over the month that I spent there, I found that every single time I encountered one of those things, it reminded me that the study that I was doing, and the life that I was living, was being lived in the presence of God. I would see the mezuzah on the door, and remember to try to love God more. I would enter the synagogue and put away my water bottle, and be reminded of God delivering the Hebrews through the waters of the Red Sea, and delivering me through the waters of Baptism. I would stand at the grocery store and check packaging for meats that were produced correctly, and think about the flesh and blood of Jesus, the tangible proof of God’s presence offered to me week after week. As it turns out, these silly Laws that the Jews keep aren’t so silly after all. If they were kept for the sake of God, they would be. But as gifts from God to me, to help me remember who I belong to, whose salvation cannot be taken away from me no matter what I do, whose abundant life I live within every moment of my existence—they are most beautiful gift God could have given me that month.

Jesus reminds us that we defile ourselves when we forget how beloved we are before God. And in doing so, he reminds us also that it is God who takes away our defilement and makes us clean and holy and righteous, a holy people before God all our days. Following God’s Law in whatever way is right for us does not accomplish this. But it does remind us of what God has already done for us in the epic story of salvation and in Jesus Christ.