THE EVERLASTING ARMS
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 17, 2016
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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The story just read in the scripture lesson (Genesis 18:1-15) is the beginning of a major theme throughout the scriptures. And not only in the Hebrew or the Christian scriptures but in the world scriptures as well. Is anything too hard for God? I will be getting into this a bit later.
First, a Story About the 1965 World Series
The Los Angeles Dodgers versus the Minnesota Twins. The Dodgers ended up winning in seven games,so they won four games to three.
There was a problem, however, in that the
Series took place in October. Game One was scheduled for October 6th, which happened to be Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and Sandy Koufax was slated to pitch. He’s Jewish. Actually, Jew-ish because he was sort of nonobservant.
However, tons of pressure were loaded on the poor guy. Do you go ahead and pitch on Yom Kippur, even if you’re not observant? In recognition of the pressure that was brought to bear on him and the societal expectations, Koufax, following his own heart, decided
not to pitch, even though he was the starter for the Dodgers. He was their number-one pitcher.
Don Drysdale was their number-two pitcher, so he was slated to pitch in Game One. He allowed seven runs in the first three innings, when the manager finally pulled him. As hereturned to the dugout, Drysdale uttered to the manager, Walter Alston, a line that became famous,“I bet right now you wish I was Jewish too.”
Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy
Jane Leavy wrote this book,in which she remarked about the incident:
“By refusing to pitch that day, Koufax became inextricably linked with the American Jewish experience. He was the New Patriarch: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Sandy. A moral exemplar, and single too! (Such a catch!)”
Koufax, who wasn’t particularly observant, had no clue that his decision would carry so much weight — then or now.
“I believe he was thinking, ‘I’m going to pitch the next day. What’s the big deal? We have [star pitcher] Don Drysdale starting,’ ” Leavy said in a Q&A with Sports Illustrated in 2002. “And in a way, that makes it even sweeter. Yom Kippur is a day of sacrifice. . . . And here’s Koufax, who’s doing this reflexively, not out of his own great belief but really more in deference to others. So it was a much-greater sacrifice on his part. For a more religious man, it might have been a no-brainer. For Koufax, it was the right thing to do.”
My sermon this morning is steeped in Hebrew theology. It’s not non-Christian. It’s as much Christian as virtually anything else,
really, but it is steeped in the heart of the Jewish experience of Hebrew theology.
The sermon actually has a simple point. It’s more Bible-study-ish in that I’m going to be looking at two chapters of Deuteronomy, 32 and 33, at the very end of the Torah, the end of the first five books of the Bible.
The Context Here Is One of Endings
It’s the ending of the Torah. It’s also the ending of Moses’ life. Moses had taken his people all the way through the Exodus, during the forty years of wandering throughout the wilderness. He’s in sight of the Promised Land but dies before getting there, within sight of it,yet never entering it himself. Joshua would take them into the Promised Land in a roundabout way via Jericho and
the Walls, and so forth. This is also the end of Israel’s wanderings through the wilderness of Egypt.
One of the scholars whosework I read on this subjectsaid something I thought was important. He remarked that being a slave, especially for centuries, erodes one’s sense as a people. It erodes much cultural identity. And so, after 400 years in Egypt, most of that as slaves, they really weren’t a people anymore. Any sense of who they were as a nation had eroded away, and it was those forty years in the wilderness that brought back the cultural identity of the wanderers.
Suddenly, here they were, a group of people who are Israelites, the children of Israel. They had no government while they were in Egypt, but finally they could act in a way that was cohesive in the Promised Land.
So those forty years weren’t just wander-
ing around because there was nobody from whom to ask directions. Instead,the years of wandering helped to coalesce them into a people,something that needed to happen
before they could succeed in the Promised Land.
Three Points of Moses’ Final Speech
While the context is one of endings, it is also one of beginningsin the new life after slavery. Chapter 32 is Moses’ impassioned speech at the end of his life. He had done his job for the people and for God. And so the whole chapter consists of this impassioned speech,which has three main points:
- The people’s dependence upon God. Remember that this is part of a very long history. Four hundred years earlier was when they had first gone into Egypt to escape drought, only to become enslaved.
The Civil War for us was 150 years ago,and our Revolutionary War was 250 years ago. Just to give yourself a feeling for what it must have felt like for them to think back 400 years,this notion of dependence on God is not at all surprising.
- Their inconsistent loyalty to God, and I’m being kind here.
- God’s frustration and yet commitment to the people.
Following the end-of-life speech by Moses, we come closer to the point of what this sermon is about. That is, there was a series of blessings. Because there were twelve tribes of Israel, a unique blessinghad to be given to eachone of them. Some of these are pretty odd, but I won’t go into that. These separate blessingsfor each of the twelve tribes were then followed by one all-encompassing blessing that is for all the people.
The blessings for the twelve tribes of Israel now bring me to the two main themesof the whole story:
The 1stTheme Is “Teshuva”
“Teshuva” is a Hebrew term usually translated as “repentance.” “Repentance” is not wrong, but it’s only a footstep in the sand of a dune to describe what the word is really about. “Teshuva” has much more the sense of “returning home.” You’ve been in a foreign land, things have not gone well, and you are returning back home.
The story of the Prodigal Son is teshuva. Pure and simple, the whole thing is teshuva. You’ve been in a foreign land, you’re feeding pigs, it’s not good, you’re poor, things are
really lousy for you. Finally, you change your mind, and you head back home.
Bear in mind, these Israelites are
returning to a homeland they have never seen. They’ve only heard about it from their ancestors, and it’s 400 years back in memory.
Can you imagine if we heard a story from people at the time of the Revolutionary War? A story about a great place that we will never see, our children will never see, our grandchildren will never see, but maybe our great-grandchildren will see it.
And so we hold onto the story long enough that our great-grandchildren will possibly still cherish that hope. Yes, they return home after these 400 years.
The 2nd Theme Is Atonement
This theme of the whole story is what I would call “at-one-ment.” I’m pronouncing it a bit differently from the way it’s usually pronounced, “atonement,” but I’m respecting the etymology of the word.
The first two syllables of “atonement,”“at-one,” mean that something has been separated. There has been some argument. There have been some fights. Things have been split apart in one way or another, and the atonement is to bring them back together, to restore, to reconcile, to heal the split. This is the story of “at-one-ment.”
One of the difficulties with talking about oneness — and I experience this probably every other Sunday in my sermons — is that, when you talk about oneness, people have different kinds of things in mind.
For instance, there's the oneness ofrestoring togetherness. Say you’ve got a couple who had an argument, and then they kiss and make up. One of them says, “Are we okay now?” and the other replies, “Yes, we’re okay.” They were arguing, and now it’s over. A unity has been achieved. That’s pretty mild unity compared with severe discord.
If any of you watched the European soccer tournament that took place recently, there were times when you could see the players on a closely knit teamacting in harmony. You could see it, you could feel it,you could
detect it when they stopped being individual players, and they were all working together as one team.
We’ve seen this many times in team sports, when individuality is suppressed long enough to act seriously as one unit on a team. It’s really beautiful to behold such unity in sports.
There is the oneness of lovemaking. Physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritualfacets come together all in one towering emotion, something that humanity has venerated for all of its days.
And then finally there is mystical oneness. I know many of you have experienced this, when somehow or other somewhere in your soul you begin to feel and detect no separation between who you are and nature, the collection of humanity, and the ever-present divinity. All of those fun-
damental barriers somehow dissolve and break down and disappear
These levels of oneness, at-one-ment,are the work of God throughout the history of humanity,which is to bring about unity out of brokenness.
Our Responsibility; God’s Responsibility
In order to arrive at this state of at-one-ness, God does something, and we do something. What we do is to pay attention to the verbs at the very start of this story. When Moses begins his impassioned speech, he says, “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak.” That’s a nice way of saying, “Listen.” Listen, don’t ignore me, don’t tune me out. Please don’t multitask. Listen.
And then at the end of his speech, Moses has a second verb for people to act upon. It’s translated in this poetic way, “Lay to heart all the words which I will enjoin you upon this day.” In other words, Don’t just think about it, don’t intellectualize it, don’t file it away. Bring it down into the core of your being, this message that he has given to his people at the end of the Exodus, at the end of his life.
Listen, and listen well enough that you can take it from the brain down into your heart and make it part of who you are. That’s what we are to do.
God’s work on it, finally, is that last blessing. I have hinted at this passage multiple times in multiple sermons, but I have never given you the full story. That’s what I’m trying to do today. The final blessing that God gives to all the people at this signature time in their lives.
The Eternal God Is Your Dwelling Place
First of all, he refers to them with a very rare term. He calls them Jeshurun, a very uncommon designation for the people. It’s the equivalent, like the flip sideof when Jesus
refers to Abba Father The Abba is ultrafamiliar, used only within a family, so it’s the equivalent of saying daddy instead of God
the Father. A very formal kind of thing. When God refers to the people as my dear little children, my beloved kids,that’s what Jeshurun means.
And now, here’s the blessing. Here’s the whole thing I’ve been leading up to. This is the one addressed to all the children of Israel. In the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, it’s translated this way:
“The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
I first came across this text in doing a funeral. When a pastor begins a funeral, he or she often begins with a few sentences such as “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Things like that sort of get the service off and running. Here is another one on the list of those kinds of sentences. “The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
Well here’s what that means. “The eternal” in the sentence, the first phrase, is “olam,” and it’s a word worth memorizing. It means, in the ancient Hebrew mindset, Einsteinian space-time. All of time, all of space. Deep time backward, deep time forward. All of space. So it’s translated as infinite, eternal, everlasting, universal, cosmos, world, the whole shebang. The olam God “is thy” and then the literal word there is “house.” The olam God is your house, “and underneath are the everlasting arms.” “Underneath” is literally “foundation,” referring to the house. “Everlasting arms” is literally olam plus strength; therefore, the foundation of the house is the strength of the universe.
The Cosmic Divinity Is Where You Live
What this blessing is saying is sort of hidden behind the poetry. It is the olam God, the universal God, the God of the universe. The cosmic divinity is where you live. It’s your house, and the foundation under your house is the strength of the universe.
Moses is telling the children of Israel right before he dies that here is something for them to listen to and remember and lay it to heart. In the middle of his blessings, he pauses and enjoins them . . .
“. . . For it is no trifle for you, but it is your life, and thereby you shall live long in the land.” (Deuteronomy 32:47.)
The word “trifle” here is literally just “emptiness.” In other words, this is something important. These are Moses’ last words. This is not emptiness. This is not trivial talk:
“Listen. Lay it to heart.”
Remember: You Live in the House of God
This is the end of the sermon,sort of. Are there troubles in our world? I’m not going to waste your time elucidating them. I want to suggest to you that there's horrible sickness in our world, disease of the mind and of the heart and of the soul.
We’ve all felt this, week after week after week. A remedy I propose is to remember who you are. Remember that you live in the house of God and that you are deeply blessed with the strength of the universe, foundational to your life. Remember that, and I think it might lead in some measure to peace in our land.
The whole point of the scriptural text that Rob Hollander read at the beginning of the service is to show that nothing is impossible. There can be peace in our land. This is a way toward that end.
Amen.
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