The Blueprint

I invite you, in one of your quiet moments, to read your Bible. You do? Good, but pay particular attention to Leviticus 18-19, Deuteronomy 5 and the next few chapters, and what we call The Sermon On The Mount, which is Matthew 5 and what follows there. I know, it’s a lot. But it’s pretty important.

Just before the Hebrew people were to enter the Promised Land, just out of captivity and wandering and now about to set up residence in a new land, Moses, their trusted leader, gathers all the people and gives them a blueprint for how to live, how to behave, and how to relate to their new environment. He touches on almost every aspect of life: money, sexuality, courts and justice, speech, worship, etc. It is a comprehensive outline of societal living. Now move from the Old Testament stories to the New Testament words in Matthew 5 and following. This is the Sermon On The Mount, the famous words of Jesus delivered to the Hebrews of his time. Note that Moses went up on the mountain to get his message for the people and Jesus did the same thing. A mountaintop, sacred experience meant to be delivered to the people waiting at the foot of the mountain, a people who would hear the remarkable words and live them out everyday. They would become a new and decisively different community from that of their new neighbors. They would follow different rules, observe different standards, and look to a very different authority…in their case, God, not a tribal leader or, in the time of Jesus, a reigning Caesar. This would have been astonishing to them and to the local culture into which they were moving. Nothing like this existed before. Of course there would be local leadership to help the new society function, but the basic framework of culture and society was unalterably set on the foundation of this new covenant pronounced by God and delivered by Moses and later Jesus.

I think it is rightly assumed that as we ignore or betray the covenant outline, as we disregard the blueprint in favor of our own personal interpretations or adaptations, the wheels fall off the wagon and we become our own worst enemies. One of the worst things that ever happened in the history of our covenant gift was “personalization.” The shift from “we” to “me” undermined the covenant plan. To say it another way: my “personal” salvation is much more caught up in community than I’ve been taught over the last few centuries. Neither Moses nor Jesus took people one at a time and discussed their “personal” salvation. And when Jesus did address individuals, he always called them back into covenant with God. The message they delivered was “here’s how we live together under ethical, moral, and spiritual guidelines directly from the mind of God.”

It’s about “we.” It’s about each of us living in our minds, our hearts and through our behavior in covenant with each other. Everything Jesus taught emphasized covenant and community…the blueprint of living productively, peacefully, and gratefully as “a people” not simply “as an individual.”

At least, that’s what I think.