Grafting God’s Precepts onto our Hearts
It can be so easy to focus on our circumstances instead of our attitudes and personal actions in the face of those circumstances. In today’s readings from Deuteronomy and the Gospel of Mark, we are reminded that grafting God’s precepts onto our hearts is the only way that we can steer clear of our own feet!
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Transcript
“But 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.”
The wisdom of God that underscores Moses giving God’s ten precepts to the people is a many-faceted gem whose brilliance stuns us to the point of blinding at times, overshadowing the source of its fire and the traces of its cuts. Today’s first reading from Deuteronomy shades our vision a bit and allows us to trace one of those cuts. That is, today we look at the role that memory and legacy play in confirming the wisdom of the ten divine precepts.
There are two parts to this. The first part has to do with holding on to the memory of how we acquired wisdom; what was the context in which we first received the precepts of God. What were the circumstances that helped us see our own helplessness. How did we encounter the Spirit? What were the costs of changing our attitudes and our actions? What practices did we put in place and normalize so that we did not backslide into old and unhealthy patterns again? This sort of remembering is called a “true to being” memory. It is authentic in its summary of what was actually happening. Which is more than just recalling details. Because details can be slippery things.
This practice of holy recall is humble, honest, true. It is learning to see ourselves as God sees us, no pretense, no defense. Just Adam, buck naked in Eden at the moment he realized it was no use trying to hide from God. Psychic pain, in this case, offers us an enormous benefit as a super-glue to hold fast to the wisdom of God poured out onto us in grace, offering us a life preserver tethered to God’s anchored lifeboat, saving us even as we were going under for the third time.
Allowing the pain of certain memories to remain in order to hold fast to the cure, is not the same thing as rehearsing old sins that God has forgiven and for which we are absolved. We are not constantly refreshing shame through remembering what happened.
Instead, we are enjoying one of the true benefits of being reconciled to God by allowing the wisdom of God to eclipse the enormity of the event onto which that wisdom now attaches.
In time, the wisdom will stand on its own and the events that invited that wisdom will fossilize into mere historical artifacts from the story of our faith journey.
The second part of this wisdom making and keeping is the legacy piece; that is, how to pass along the substance of the true to being memory to those whose lives we directly influence, whether our children, grandchildren, students, scouts. This doesn’t mean a tired repetition of “Let me tell you about when I was your age”, which is rarely effective. It is also an unhelpful trope that encourages obfuscation and victimization, carefully edited versions that barely resemble what happened or our true role in those events.
Rather, the remembrance of wisdom’s arrival is a special kind of story that we share. It is a particular way of bearing witness to the glory of God, to God’s grace and mercy, and to God’s power to redeem even the worst situations. The secret to this kind of legacy lies in keeping the focus on what was going on inside of us, not on the circumstances outside our control.
Jesus comes at this another way in today’s gospel reading, not allowing the emphasis of righteousness to rest on superficial acts like whether or when one ritually cleans one’s hands before eating. Instead, he insists that they focus on the contamination that comes from within themselves, acts of their own choosing.
We don’t have any control over foreign enemies who come against us, storms, financial crises, all sorts of macro level adversities. Like Elijah in the cave hiding from the evil queen Jezebel, we eventually learn that God is not in the fires, the hurricanes, the earthquakes. God is in the sheer silence of our hearts, asking us as God asked Elijah: “What are you doing here?”
And, like Elijah, we are prone through habit to explain to God how bad things are, how everything is going wrong, how nothing is working, how none of this is our fault. And when we have finished reciting this pitiful nonsense God repeats the question: “What are you doing here?”
Answering that question is the unfolding work of a lifetime. With age, with experience, through prayer and reflection, sometimes through lots of therapy, we see more and more clearly what we are doing here, what’s going on inside of us. We come to finally understand that the only thing we can control is our attitude, our response. When we, by the grace of God, by the grafting of God’s precepts onto our souls, become masters of ourselves, then we see that, as Jesus said, there is nothing outside of us that has the power to separate us from the love of God or the peace of God.
Grounding ourselves in this understanding builds resilience so that when the rains come, when the waters rise, when the winds beat on us, we will not be moved. Churchill said, “Adversity introduces man to himself.”
The good news of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is that we have an advocate who knows exactly what it is like to meet oneself, and which advocate remains steadfast in helping us to become our best selves, to the glory of God, and to our own peace.
Amen.