The history of religion is filled with con artists and nut cases, including a few in our own tradition, so it can be a little tricky parsing what stories are actually constructive, more than a little tricky mining that vein of eternal truth buried in the middle of so much human muck.
Xenu, the nuclear-armed intergalactic dictator of Scientology, and a favorite of mine, is science fiction, and not even particularly good science fiction, a billion-dollar con job that works only because it is so brazen. It reflects the historical context of the charlatan that created that cult, L. Ron Hubbard, in the years immediately after the Second World War.
Genetics confirms that Native Americans are not the lost tribes of Israel, no matter what appeared on magic tablets under the hill up the road in Palmyra. That con reflects the social context of the white colonizer’s expansion across the continent, the mass hysteria of the Great Awakening, and the misogyny inherent in polygamy. Not that we didn’t have our own brush with Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery in our own tradition.
Other fictions are more benign. Take, for example, the traditional claim that Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of Hebrew scripture shared by Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. He didn’t, as I’ve said before. We have a pretty good understanding of the traditions and events that led to the version of the texts we use today, texts assembled from other sources centuries after the Exodus, and including a forgery that dishonest priests claimed had been discovered in the Temple of Solomon during renovations, the long lost book we call Deuteronomy.
Despite the obviousness of the fraud, this text that has been part of the Judeo-Christian canon for millennia, has taken on a sort of sacredness, and absolutely contains truth.
The Torah was written and revised in the years between the destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel and the later destruction of the southern Kingdom of Judah. Refugees from the north brought their own texts and traditions, which were eventually merged with those of the south.
Theologically, this is a critical period, for it is when the Hebrew religion moves closer to ethical monotheism, the belief that only one god, Yahweh, should be worshipped, maybe even that Yahweh is the only real god. It is when they come to believe that Yahweh is good. God the Father, as conceived by Jesus. A God of love and grace rests on this re-perception of the holy.
The socio-economic context is critical too, and one of the ways we know that Deuteronomy is not the product of escaped slaves wandering in the desert. It reflects a second transition in the social organization of day-to-day life of Canaan. The first was the move from a loose tribal confederation, the period reflected in the stories of Joshua and Judges, to a nation-state of small-hold farmers, of kings and priests. This was an age of increased urbanization and the consolidation of wealth into fewer hands.
Every time you read about laborers in scripture, you are reading about someone who has lost their own land, is no longer a small-holder, and has therefore become vulnerable to economic exploitation. Every time you hear a reference to laborers, in Hebrew Scripture, or in the parables of Jesus recorded in the Christian Testament, you should be listening for teachings about justice, human and divine, for those lessons are there. Day laborer meant poor and vulnerable then, just as it does now.
Immigrants, of course, had no land rights to begin with. And in a deeply patriarchal culture, where only adult men could own land, testify or enter legal agreements, widows and orphaned children were particularly vulnerable.
These are not issues in the tribe. The tribe may be patriarchal, but it is based on mutuality.
The commands we read in today’s text reflect the reality of war and ethnic cleansing, the disconnection and displacement seemingly inherent in specialization and urbanization, and plain old human greed, our tendency to exploit the weak. The efficiencies we gain with urbanization and specialization come at the cost of connection. These new social structures required new standards.
Debt slavery was a reality when Deuteronomy was concocted by the priests in the Temple, and even though they themselves were protected, were privileged, they understood that the situation was not sustainable. They may have mischaracterized their Law as direct revelation received by Moses, but that does not mean there is no truth there. The truth is there, found in the focus on the vulnerable and the command, repeated again and again, to do justice, not human justice, nailed to a cross of fear, but divine justice, which is radical, is unearned grace, is love.
The most interesting part, however, may not be that the priests wrote about economic justice in Deuteronomy, or even that they were able to look beyond their own privilege to see the needs of others. After all, it is twenty-five centuries later and we still live in the tension between greed and justice, still wrestle with the theft of land and labor.
No, the most interesting part to me is that they grounded the new solutions to new problems in their deep story. Moses may not have carried hundreds of rules and regulations down the mountain on impossibly heavy stone tablets as they claimed, but they understood their need to be a just people as connected to the fact that they, the Hebrew people, were once slaves themselves, their labor stolen.
It isn’t just about lending the new rules authority, Mosaic authority. It is about understanding their own story and being able to see through the lens of their own story the immigrants and vulnerable in their own community. It is about remembering.
And memory is a dangerous thing, truth telling is a dangerous thing.
Better to give the people bread and circuses than to allow them to remember that before the rapacious Caesar, Rome had been a republic. Better propaganda than the truth that the wealth of Europe was built on the violence and exploitation of colonization, that colonists were not the freedom seeking pilgrims of the American fiction, but were brutal, seeking raw materials, cotton and black bodies and the rubber of King Leopold’s personal slave-labor state in the Congo just over a century ago.
Memory matters. Locating ourselves in the deep story matters. Seeing ourselves in the vulnerable matters. Better to divide us in factions, cheering for modern-day gladiators sacrificing their bodies in subsidized stadiums.
So many can no longer see themselves in the poor, convinced that their privilege is earned, that they have a right to it. They can’t even accurately locate themselves in economic space, everyone imagining themselves as belonging to some mythical middle-class whether they are one diagnosis away from poverty or the recipients of intergenerational wealth.
Justice says that the person hopped up on painkillers working an eight-hour shift at Walmart could be you, and that an exploitative economic system with no sick time is killing us, literally.
The priests who created Deuteronomy did not say “You were once exploited. Now it is your turn to exploit others.” What they said was “Never again.” They didn’t say justice required the debt-slave to remain a slave. They declared jubilee. And Christ went even further, the laborer who works but an hour receiving a full days wage, the prodigal son welcomed home, though his jealous brother demands that he suffer as justice.
It is amazing how few Christians remember their faith when they discuss Biden’s plan to forgive the interest-bearing loans that are crushing so many of us.
The deep story… the deep story of The Park Church is that a courageous and faithful people decided that human bodies were not commodities, to be used and exploited to make the rich even richer.
Wage slaves, working sick because there is no sick leave, wearing diapers because there are no bathroom breaks, not getting the overtime they have earned because they are afraid they will lose their job. Isn’t labor activism, still about exploited human bodies, just a new expression of our deep story?
Amen.