Forty some years ago I spent a summer in San Francisco—10
weeks working in the housing projects and on skid row during the “summer of
love”, 1969. “The Age of Aquarius” was a popular song on the radio: “When the
moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars,/ Then peace will
guide the planets and love will steer the stars./ This is the dawning of the
age of Aquarius …/ Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding./ No
more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions, mystic crystal
revelation and the mind’s true liberation. …” Well, it wasn’t. Violence and
mistrust abound today. It seems that the age of Aquarius was really short.
Another song written that year made the charts the following
summer. Lois spent a month that summer in Brooklyn at a Brethren in Christ VS Unit there and recalls
hearing it play over and over again: “I said, war, good god, now, what is it
good for? Absolutely, nothing./ Say it again, war, what is it good for?
Absolutely, nothing, listen to me./ War, it ain’t nothing but a heart breaker,
War, friend only to the undertaker …”
Protests against the War in Vietnam were on the rise, and
the song resonated with many people around the world. It could almost be a Mennonite
anthem.
And then we turn to Deuteronomy, and run into trouble.
Text (Deut 7: 1-10)
7 When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are
entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the
Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven
nations larger and stronger than you— 2 and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you
have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them
no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with
them. Do not give your daughters to their sons
or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your
children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.5 This
is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred
stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in
the fire. 6 For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the
peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.
7 The Lord did not set his affection on you and
choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for
you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he
swore to your ancestors that he brought you out
with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of
slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 9 Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of
love to a thousand generations of those who love him and
keep his commandments. 10 But those who hate him he
will repay to their face by destruction; he will not be slow to repay to their
face those who hate him.
Comments
We struggle with these verses because we hear them as a call
to genocide. Placed alongside a passage such as Deuteronomy 3 (the total
destruction of Og of Bashan) and 1 Samuel 15 (God’s command through Samuel to
Saul to destroy the Amalekites completely, combined with God’s judgment on Saul
for not doing so), this language grates harshly in our ears.
We want to sing that song from 1970—war is good for
nothing—and embrace the age of peace and harmony that we sang about in the
1960s. Our question this morning is: What’s going on here? Do we do best by not
reading Deuteronomy? Is there something here for us? The following comments are
my beginning efforts to make sense of the passage and apply it to our lives. So
here are some thoughts.
1) The Tension
Remains: I do not say that we have no tension with this language. We face
clearly the truth that God’s people used violence in the OT. That fact actually
gives me hope. It is clear from the NT and from the teachings and example of
Jesus that we are to embrace peace, and yet God was willing and able to work
with people whose culture was steeped in violence. God moved them gently over
centuries of interaction to the point where they (and we) could receive the way
of peace as the way for God’s people.
Clues pointing in this direction are present in the OT from
the earliest days. Abraham is sent to a far-away land, but not as a soldier.
Abraham and Sarah travel in peace and avoid fighting whenever possible; they
depend on God’s care. When their descendants do turn to fighting in the Exodus,
God fights for them and they do nothing themselves against the Egyptians. In
fact, their name (“Children of Israel”) means, “the people for whom God
fights”. As Millard Lind says in the title of a book in which he explores the
war texts of the OT, “Yahweh is a warrior.” The people’s future depends on
God’s providential care, not on their military might. “Some trust in chariots,
some trust in horses. We trust in the Lord.”
2) But the passage
does not teach genocide: The tension (that they did fight) remains, but the
further problem of a call to genocide does not. The verses do not call for
genocide. We must take language for what Moses (in this case) intends to say,
not for what we think the words must mean. The language of total destruction
was part of the way that nations of that time normally spoke to say that they
would defeat (or had defeated) the enemy.
Several considerations make it clear that “total
destruction” does not mean genocide. In the verses we read, Moses tells the people
not to intermarry with the inhabitants of the land who remain. Nor are they to
adopt their religious practices. If they are all dead, how could the Children
of Israel intermarry with them or worship their gods?
This thought is reinforced by laws in chapter 24 that tell
how to make sure that “aliens” [gerim] are cared for through laws of gleaning.
In chapter 10 Moses says that they are to care for these same gerim, including
the inhabitants whom they have dispossessed, because they themselves had been aliens
(gerim) in Egypt. In fact, God say to love them, using the same word we heard
in the Shema for “Love God”. How could this mean to love the people you
exterminated? Most likely, Moses never meant: Kill them all!
3) Direct and
Indirect Communication: What then might he have meant? We need to
understand communication among people like Israelites. They had what we call a
“high context culture”. That is, the speaker means something slightly different
than the words mean on the surface—what we call “indirect communication”. We
come from a low context culture, in which people normally say what they
mean—what we call direct communication.
An example from Zimbabwe when I was doing research there on
the BIC churches in Bulawayo. I wanted to find Mlotshwa, a carpenter who had a
shop in the city and was one of the founding members of the BIC in Bulawayo. I
went (walking on foot) to the part of town where his shop was and asked someone
on the street if he knew where Mlotshwa the carpenter had his shop. He said, “Keep
going straight ahead. You will find it.” I walked for about two miles and
decided I had missed it. I asked another man I met if he knew where the shop
was. He directed me back to where I started and across the street. I was a
couple of hundred yards away, and the first man had sent me on a long walk, two
miles and back. What happened?
The Canadian in me says, “He lied to me.” But he was an
African, using his culture’s way of answering my question. What he meant was
something like this (in our low-context way of saying it): “No, I don’t know
where his shop is, but if you keep looking I’m sure you will find it.” He
intended to encourage me and not to deceive me, but I did not understand his
indirect form of communication. Something like that is going on here.
4) So what did he
mean? Gerald Gerbrandt suggests that we should read this language as a
metaphor, stating strongly the extent to which the Israelites were to reject
any other divine authority in their lives. Two chapters earlier, Moses reminds
them of the Ten Commandments, in which God begins with these words: “I am the
Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You
shall have no other gods before me.” Yahweh War in Deuteronomy 7, then, spells
out the full extent of what it means to say, “You shall have no other gods
before me.”
The NT uses similar images to indicate that we are in a war
with the power of evil. So Paul could say, “Put on the whole armour of God” and
then spell out some details of this war (Ephesians 6). We can read this passage
in Deuteronomy as a similarly strong statement, emphasizing the danger that the
Children of Israel faced as they encountered the worship of
Ishtar-Aphrodite-Venus on the on hand and the worship of Baal on the other. The
religious practices of the people in Canaan were interwoven into the fabric of
daily life so thoroughly that Moses commanded them to put it all to death.
Moses’ words, then, become a call to treat the surrounding
cultures as “dead to them”. We also, who have become dead to self (compare the
metaphor, “I am crucified with Christ”—Galatians 2:20) now treat the culture
around us as “dead to us”. We “devote it to destruction”.
Application
We live in modern Canada. What about our culture poses
danger to Christians today, like the Israelites on the border of the Promised
Land? I suggest that two particular idols are particularly prevalent and
powerful in our culture. One is the idol of sex: We have come to believe that sexual
expression is the one true measure of life fully lived. Another is the idol of
self: We have come to believe that personal fulfillment is our right, and that
lack of personal fulfillment is the greatest tragedy we can experience. Both of
these idols exaggerate biblical ideals for the Christian life. Both compete
with God to take first place in our lives. Moses would say to us: Destroy your
culture totally at precisely these points. Such “herem” requires the church to
study our context carefully, in light of our commitment to God, and identify the
idols of our lives.
One way that we can follow Christ and deny the idol of self
is to commit ourselves to Christ and to community. In a context where we are
tempted to be Christians whose spirituality is expressed individually, in
isolation from other believers, we commit ourselves to the flawed, hurting,
inescapable body of Christ. There we begin to live God’s reign together here on
earth.
This brings me to the rocks you are holding. As you came in,
you saw the table with rocks on it, and with the instruction to write your name
on a rock and bring it with you into the sanctuary. Here is what I want to do
with your names on the rocks. We will pass the basket, so to speak, and put our
names into the basket. Then, as we leave the sanctuary at the end of the service,
I am asking each one to take out a rock from the basket and take the rock home
with you. I’m asking you then to pray for the person whose name you draw each
day for the next month.
If you prefer not to participate, you can take your rock
home with you. I hope you will take part, but I don’t want anyone to pray out
of guilt or a sense of being manipulated. Rather, this is our opportunity to
put on God’s armour and devote our individualism to complete destruction.
If there’s someone who didn’t get a rock and you would like
one, hold up your hand and the ushers will bring you a rock and a Sharpie to
write your name on the rock. [Give a
moment to be sure everyone has a rock, and then have the ushers “take up the
rocks”.] Once you have your rock with someone’s name on it, remember to
pray for that person daily. If you like (and feel comfortable doing it), you
might ask the person whose rock you draw, “How may I pray for you?” We need
each other in this journey through the wilderness into the Promised Land.
Conclusion
This exploration does not solve our problems with the war
passages of the OT, but it does suggest a way forward. God calls us to live in
the world, using the patterns of the world. We are Canadians, and we live as
Canadians. But Canada has its own idols that we must devote to destruction. In
the past, when we moved from one country to another, the very fact of being
migrants helped us to avoid worshipping the idols of that place. Today we are
more at home, and therein lies our danger.
God calls us to live here in Manitoba, but God also calls us
to live fully as children of God, praying always, “Your kingdom come, your will
be done on earth as it is in heaven. … For yours is the kingdom and the power
and the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
29 January 2017
Steinbach Mennonite Church
1 comment:
A leading news item as I posted this was Trump's ban on immigrants from seven Muslim countries. His action -- applauded by some and condemned by many others -- suggests someone who would take "herem" literally and fail to see the way that idols seduce us. Killing the people and letting the idols live is almost the exact opposite what the passage calls for, but is a possible consequence of a surface reading.
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