Fallen Into Knowledge

This morning I kicked off a new sermon series in the book of Deuteronomy.  Here is and exerpt from my manuscript:

Moses’ goal is to inculcate obedience in a new generation, in a generation that had not experienced those events.  The key word is remember:” bring to mind again the story that forms you, the story that brought you about as a people.  Any account of Israel’s faithfulness has to be embedded in the story of God’s prior faithfulness.  Not just faithfulness as belief, but I think - and this is critical also for us - faithfulness as obedience.  Moses tells the story of the exodus, and it is from within  that story that he recounts the Law.  I think its really important to keep this in mind, that Moses begins be recounting the story of God’s faithfulness: before he starts in on the law, before he points Israel forward to the promised land, he starts by looking back at the events that shape this people - the events that constituted Israel as a people.
In many respects our place in the world is similar to Israel’s here:  we are called aliens and foreigners in the land, we are called to live faithfully - called to a way of life that is different from our neighbor’s, we are called to live in a way appropriate to a land that we have never experienced.  We have been constituted and are being shaped by events that we did not experience - the death and resurrection of Christ.  Moses’ advise to Israel is to Remember, bring up our story - the story of God’s faithfulness, and even the story of our unfaithfulness.  To retell it, to tell it for the first time to our children.  We usually think of this sort of story telling in Sunday school terms - we are to teach the youngin’s the bible stories.

But Moses does not stop with the story of God’s faithfulness, but also recounts Israel’s sometimes faltering response.  He does not varnish the truth - Israel’s failures as well as successes are told to this new generation.   We could easily lose hope if we try to place our spiritual state in a story of our faithfulness; and in fact, in such a story our unfaithfulness needs to be hidden from our own view as well as from the view of others.  But Moses places the story of Israel’s faithfulness and unfaithfulness in the larger and more secure story of God’s faithfulness.  We see this move also encoded into the Law:  Israel’s calendar is a testimony to God’s history of with the people.  This is how liturgy functions fro us as well:  we are called to find our lives not in the story of national glory, or in the story of self-achievement or any other self-indexed story: rather our day-by-day lives are shaped and carried along as they are found in the yearly and weekly retelling of our common story - the story of the Cross.