Martin Luther's 'Yup.'

On hot summer evenings at Lackland Air Force Base, when we basic trainees were granted a rare night off, we’d adjourn to a small patio that had vending machines and bitch about how tough it was. 

It wasn’t really all that tough because the Air Force was reluctant to send out-of-shape young adults to march in the 100 degree Texas heat (we heard there had been fatalities), so we spent many days in air conditioned classrooms memorizing Air Force esoterica. But we thought we were working our asses off, at least compared to the leisurely days of our bygone civilian lives, and we loved the patio breaks. We could sit on hard benches, smoke Luckies, and suck back Dr. Peppers while keeping a wary eye out for psychotic sergeants.

This was in 1964. The Bay of Tonkin incident had happened weeks earlier and, although none of us knew this would trigger a massive U.S. troop surge in Vietnam, we were all wary about the future. We’d smoke as many cigarettes as we could in the time allotted and talk about stuff we thought was important: whether we’d get a pass into San Antonio, whether Sergeant Ellefson was certifiably nuts, whether our girlfriends were thinking about us, whether we’d survive the dreaded basic training obstacle course, or whether we’d be posted to Southern California or to some deadly rice paddy a million miles from home.

We even talked theology. One night I sat smoking with a basic trainee from El Paso while he patiently explained why Catholicism was superior to my religion. My dog tags said I was United Church of Christ, based on a guess I made to my recruiter because my home church was the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y., but I had little idea what the UCC was. 

The intense young Texan on the patio assured me his church was the true church because it generated real miracles, including the appearance of the Virgin at Fatima and the inexplicable bloody tears that trickle down the alabaster cheeks of certain saints. 

“These things give me such an oomph in my faith,” he said, and all I could do is nod vacuously because my church was not big on visitations or dubious phenomena. The young man (whose name I never knew) did express regret that his church wanted him to remain a virgin until he married and he wasn’t allowed to masturbate. “But wet dreams are not a sin because they are involuntary and I do look forward to those wet dreams,” he said. I nodded realizing we had some common ground and watched as he took a deep drag on his cigarette. He smiled but, unexpectedly, his face darkened.  

“The ten commandments,” he whispered. “I’ve broken eight of then.”

I watched him mutely as a sadness crept across his face. I was 18, so it never occurred to me to doubt that a boy so young could be such an accomplished sinner.

“Which ones?” I asked.

He shrugged and looked away.

“Did you kill someone?”

He shook his head adamantly. I tried to remember the other nine commandments. Swearing, lying, having sex, stealing. What else? Not going to church? Worshipping Zeus? Wasn’t there something about coveting your neighbor’s ass, which we used to snicker about in Sunday school? But what was coveting?

We sat in silence. Soon the break would be over and we’d have to retreat to our sweltering barracks for another sleepless night.

I cleared my throat. “What ones didn’t you break, then?”

He shook his head as if he didn’t understand the question, but his mood brightened abruptly again. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Time’s up. Here comes the T.I.” I looked up as the sergeant (a “technical instructor” in Air Force nomenclature) strutted onto the patio pointing to his watch. Still smiling, the young man winked at me and waved. “God bless you,” he said cheerfully. He was assigned to another barracks and I don’t recall ever seeing him again. I wish I had gotten his name so I could Google him to see if he ever became governor of Texas or a shopping mall sniper or, perhaps, a monsignor or bishop. But he disappeared into the night, and now I wonder if he’d ever found the time to break the other two commandments, whichever they were.

These ancient memories come to mind because I've been reading Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, published in 1529 for the training of children. Luther summarized all essential theology into the Ten Commandments, the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, the Office of the Keys and Confession and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The Small Catechism leaves out a whole lot of bible, and the radical reductionism makes me think of a cartoon showing two monks laboring at their calligraphy over two ornately designed bible broadsheets. One monk turns to the other and says with a smirk, “Someone is going to get a break. I’ve left out a couple of commandments.”

As succinct as it is, the Small Catechism is still a lot to chew on, beginning with the ten commandments themselves. When you get to my age, you can’t read the commandments without reflecting on the ones you’ve broken, and how often. Have I worshipped idols? Possibly. Have I disrespected God’s name? Have I misused the Sabbath? Have I stolen? Have I disrespected my parents? Have I lusted – well, let’s stop there.

Sometimes it does seem the law and the commandments are too darn much. This notion was dramatized by the rabbinic sage Mel Brooks, who in his History of the World Part I included a scene of Moses struggling to carry three stone tablets down the mountain. As Moses approaches the crowd, he intones, “The Lord God has given unto me these fifteen …” But one of the heavy tablets slips out of his grasp and falls to the ground in a hundred pieces. Moses thinks quickly: “…these TEN commandments.”

It’s entertaining to speculate what those additional five commandments may have been, but it’s not really necessary. Once the basic ten became a part of Jewish law, they began to multiply like sea monkeys in water. Leaf through your bibles, through Leviticus, through Deuteronomy, through Numbers and beyond, to see what happened. The original ten commandments were annotated, expanded and commented on sixty-fold. Oy vey. I’m wondering how morose my friend at the Texas patio would have been had he been moved to confess, “I’ve violated 585 of the 610 laws in the Pentateuch.”

And well he could have done so. Who can possibly remember all the laws of the bible? 

Consider just a handful, arbitrarily chosen from Deuteronomy 22:

You shall not watch your neighbour’s ox or sheep straying away and ignore them; you shall take them back to their owner. If the owner does not reside near you or you do not know who the owner is, you shall bring it to your own house, and it shall remain with you until the owner claims it; then you shall return it. You shall do the same with a neighbour’s donkey; you shall do the same with a neighbour’s garment; and you shall do the same with anything else that your neighbour loses and you find. You may not withhold your help. You shall not see your neighbour’s donkey or ox fallen on the road and ignore it; you shall help to lift it up. If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long.When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof; otherwise you might have blood-guilt on your house, if anyone should fall from it. You shall not sow your vineyard with a second kind of seed, or the whole yield will have to be forfeited, both the crop that you have sown and the yield of the vineyard itself. You shall not plough with an ox and a donkey yoked together. You shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together. You shall make tassels on the four corners of the cloak with which you cover yourself.

And so forth. 

The original ten commandments are difficult enough to interpret. The weight of 600 biblical laws is so burdensome most people think they have only one choice: to be crushed beneath them, or stop reading them. 

As I was reading though the Pentateuch this week, I remembered something I had read in my youth, an article in Mad magazine. Mad, also a product of rabbinic insight and dead-on humor, noted that President Eisenhower had a tendency to ramble, obfuscate and puzzle the public with musings and non sequiturs. The President probably did this deliberately, as his press secretary, James Haggerty, suspected. Prior to a press conference, Haggerty warned the President that a number of issues were sensitive and he could not afford to make a gaffe. “Don’t worry, Jim,” Eisenhower said. “I’ll just confuse them.” And on many occasions, he did just that.

Mad magazine’s solution was simple: Hire the most laconic and taciturn man in America to serve as an interpreter for the most circumlocuitous president. Their candidate: Gary Cooper. During each press conference, the magazine suggested, after Eisenhower finished speaking, Coop would go to the mike and say, “Ike says, ‘Yup.’” And if the rambling utterance appeared to head in a different direction, Coop would distill it again: “Ike says, ‘Nope.’”

How nice it would be, we say to ourselves, if we had a similar device to help us interpret all the laws and the prophets going back five millennia.

Thankfully, the device is already in our possession – in the words of Jesus.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? ’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (Matthew 22:34-40)

You don’t have to be an ecclesiastical lawyer to realize how complicated biblical law can be. The very complexity of the law has led to wide misunderstandings and dangerous misinterpretations. Over the centuries, good Christians have used the law to start wars, burn each other at stakes, trade in slaves, commit genocide on cultures that were considered inferior, relegate women and girls to the status of property, and despise others whose languages, complexions, religions, or sexual orientations are different from ours. All in the name of God’s law.

But lest we be confused, Jesus offers a clarifying note: “God says, ‘Nope.’”

All the law and the prophets can be distilled into two simple sentences, Jesus declares:

Love God.

Love your neighbor.

In the final analysis, it may well be that each of us has broken one or four of the ten commandments. And it goes without saying that the Decalogue is one of the most important documents to emerge from human history, because these commandments constitute the first time basic rules of conduct and morality were written down.

But it would be a shame to follow our ancestors into the maze of confusion that the law became.

Love God. Love your neighbor.

Jesus has shown us the way through the maze, in five unforgettable words.

God grant that we discover the secret of living them. Despite its daunting profundity, the secret can be stated even more simply than in Luther’s Small Catechism.

When God says love everyone, don’t try to figure it out. Just say “yup.”

Moses Deals With Cranks and Snakes

Numbers
21:4b-9

John 3:13-17

Moses practiced management by wandering around. 

It drove his people nuts. They were disobedient ingrates.

Surrounded by whiners, Moses must have reflected a lot on the good old days when his heaviest responsibility was sheltering sheep. Back in the day, he had no distracting ambition, no overweening desire for a prestigious title or better pay. He liked sheep and the sheep liked him.

Then the Celestial Headhunter appeared in a burning bush and pressed upon Moses a job he was sure to hate.

“No thanks,” Moses said respectfully, but the Celestial Headhunter insisted it was a promising sales job with straightforward goals and objectives: (1), convince Pharaoh to release his entire labor force, and (2), lead said labor force to the land of milk and honey.

It sounded simple enough. The Celestial Headhunter refused to listen to Moses’ demurrers that he was not the man for the job.

And as we all know, the job wasn’t as simple as the Celestial Headhunter made out. 

But as we also know, whenever Pharaoh or the uncooperative children of Israel challenged Moses’ authority as CEO, the Celestial Headhunter assumed a more controlling role of Chair of the Board. 

The Chair had an uncanny (if unnecessarily dramatic) way of removing obstacles to the enterprise’s objectives.

Plagues, angels of death, parting seawaters, and pillars of fire were enough to convince investors that Moses had some powerful backers.

But if Goal 1 seemed difficult, Goal 2 proved to be a four-decade-long disaster.

The Children of Israel, who might have shown a little gratitude when Moses freed them from slavery, were never happy.

They started kvetching the moment they were free. 

We’re tired. We’re hungry. We’re thirsty. Yahweh is invisible, let’s worship something pretty, like a golden calf. What gives with these stupid commandments? Moses is a lousy leader.

Amazingly, God the Chair of the Board calmed everyone down by showing Moses how to do amazing tricks, like making food fall from the sky or water flow from a rock. The tricks usually placated the unions.

Even so, at some point during the 40-year-trek in the desert, the people went too far and both the Chair and Moses lost their patience in a dramatic way.

But the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food. Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.” Numbers 21:4b-6.

That seems a harsh response to legitimate grievances, and surely the shop stewards were furious.

I also suspect Moses was beginning to wonder if his turbulent trek to the Promised Land was about to end right there on the arid plains, with everyone ankle deep in writhing hissers. 

What a terrible sight that must have been: ravenous snakes with hideous fangs, snapping at the toes of terrified Israelites as they leaped away in a macabre ballet.

As it turns out, the scene was also too much for God the Chair of the Board. Clearly something had to be done, and the Chair – as always – had an idea:

And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live. Numbers 21:8-9.

Moses may have been thinking sardonically of a certain bovine idol when he placed the shiny figure on the pole, and no doubt people stared at the bronze serpent far more intently than they had beheld the golden calf.

As it turns out, the story is an excellent model of crisis management. It reminds me of a couple bosses I had who solved problems by creating crises that needed urgent attention and made people forget everything else.

In this case it worked. One can almost hear the placated Israelites singing:

Turn your eyes on the serpent,
Behold his tongue and his teeth
And as we stare we feel strangely calm,
It’s God’s style of blessed surcease.

The travails of the Children of Israel, from slavery in Egypt to privation in the desert to eventual settlement in the Promised Land, are rich metaphors of life.

We take it as a given that life is unfair. 

Some people are born to a life of desperation, trapped in poverty so lethal that the only way out is slavery and human trafficking. 

Some people are born into comfortable homes where money and possessions are plentiful. But status does not protect anyone from fatal diseases or abuses or addictions that destroy life.

Some people live all their lives in peace and harmony with their neighbors, and work until they retire in comfort. But others people lose their jobs when they are too old to seek new ones, and lose their homes and livelihoods and happiness.

Some people live safely in their homes. But others die in crimes involving guns, or in unexpected accidents on the highway or in mishaps in their own dwellings.

“There is always inequality in life,” President Kennedy said, putting it in military terms. “Some … are killed in a war and some … are wounded and some … never leave the country. Life is unfair.”

Certainly the Children of Israel did not think it was fair when their complaints were met with vicious snakes snapping at their feet.

The fact is, God who loves us beyond our powers to understand it does not promise us that life on earth will be fair. God does not promise us tomorrow.

But God does promise us not to desert us amid the vicissitudes and tragedies of life.

John writes in the famous third chapter of his gospel:

No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. John 3:13-17

No one knows what is in store for us today, or where we will be, or how we will feel, or what we will be doing at sundown. 

Nor does God make any promises about our wellbeing, or assure us that we will always be happy and treated fairly.

But God does promise this: that even if we stand in nests of snakes, or face devastating illness, or lose loved ones, or lose our jobs, or lose our minds, God will find a way of letting us know our God is with us.

And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

No matter what happens today, or tomorrow, or this week, or this month, or this year, this promise remains:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face;
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.