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Morning Meditation
September 24, 2025
Reading: Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Meditation by Peter Vanderveen
There is an urgency in these verses. The verbs seem to tumble forward, crescendoing in intensity: keep, recite, bind, fix, write these down. And the sweeping movement of the verbs is matched by the rhetoric of everywhere and always: whether you’re home or away, whether you’re standing or lying down, whether you’re inside or outside. This, one might say, is the nature of a divine commandment; it has this kind of breadth and depth.
The problem with such commandments, however, is that their urgency can darken into ruthlessness. They can be employed with a blinding self-righteousness and used as a cudgel to beat others down – especially when the authority of God is invoked. There is a long and tragic history of weaponizing the Bible and making the words of God too much the allies of our own dreams and desires. They are convenient and effective means to the power we want for ourselves. I grew up within the Protestant tradition, which began with the insistence that the Biblical text should be made available to all. And I am still dedicated to this. But I am also painfully aware of how often the Scriptures are purposely misread for one’s own gain.
The central command of God given by Moses, however, is based on an abiding ambiguity – and not the fundamentalist certainty that drives so many modern day prophets. There is only one God and only one Lord, whose presence, direction, intention, and name remains utterly mysterious. To love the Lord with all your heart and soul and mind and strength entails giving nothing else the same stature – not country, not party, not any form of ethics, not any establishment of rules or laws or mores. Even commandments can’t usurp the place of God. So none of us can be so sure that we are so right. Faith begins in humility, being always aware that we wait upon God, who can be infinitely surprising in the love he himself reveals to us.
The urgency of Moses’ address points to our predilection to forget God in favor of other things that are more definite and palpable – things that we can possess for ourselves. Moses knew the danger of the idolatries we happily engage. He warned that we should be assiduous in keeping YHWH, the one who will be who he will be, in front of us, so that the many false gods we imagine will neither sweep us away nor drag us down. More than all else, commandments are timely. We so need to be mindful in the way Moses instructed.
Prayer
We will stand before you, O Lord, at the last,
and we will know as we are known,
and we will see what we have failed to see;
open our eyes to see and know
that we stand in your presence now,
that you are here before us
in the needs of family, friends, and strangers alike,
seeking our response of love;
grant that we may respond now in such a way
that we may be prepared to stand before you at the last.
Christopher Webber: Give Us Grace
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