(A sermon preached at St Luke’s by James)
Shema Israel Adonai Eluhenu Adonai Echad.
Hear O Israel the LORD is our God, the Lord alone.
I’m very excited to be back, I’ve missed you, I’ve been in Jerusalem – at least for ten days about three months ago. And I will be banging on about this for some time to come – partly with the intent of getting you to come with me at the end of September next year. You’ll need about £3k.
While I was there I realised that this text from Deuteronomy would be my next sermon. It contains the prayer called The Shema – Shema Israel Adonai Eluhenu Adonai Echad.
Hear O Israel the LORD is our God, the Lord alone.
It is the most important Jewish prayer. I can’t quite think of a Christian version – so perhaps the simple creedal/prayer: ‘Jesus is Lord’ yes but this is more than that – so how about The Lord’s Prayer – well yes but actually this short prayer is really sort of more than that. How about the Summary of the Law – You shall love the Lord you God … and your neighbour as yourself – maybe but…. So I’ll tell you what I think it’s about and if later you can think of what the Christian equivalent is then you can let me know.
(1) While I was in Jerusalem, I asked a tour guide, called Elaine. She was from Sweden, she’d come over to Israel as part of her Chemistry degree, university studies, and stayed there and married a Jew and gained her citizenship and passport.
She said ‘This Shema prayer is about remembering that that worship is not about Sunday’s only. We are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength – not just to love God on Shabbat, or on a Sunday for an hour in Church, but to live a whole life that loves God’.
I like that. I think a key part of how we do that is to focus on others and how we serve others and Deuteronomy is full of advice about how to live as a community. One of our dangers is that we can get so focused on faith as meaning Me and My relationship with God, And we get fixated on Me and My Sins and making sure that I have repented of them and so on – that I forget that there are some bigger sins out there, corporate, institutional, cultural sins.
So we forget to look at the Climate, at Refugees, Safeguarding, any number of political issues to do with why people feel the need to have been going on strike this year – but in the Shema we hear the call of God to live a life of love and not just on Sundays.
(2) I asked another tour guide. He’s called Josh, he likes to describe himself as an Atheist Jew but I think he’s more of a lapsed atheist than he admits. I think he’s got plenty of faith.
But I do understand how visiting the Holy Land can have an amazing effect upon the visitor – I find that I am lifted up and encouraged and filled and the whole experience is just wonderful.
But there are others who arrive there and go into a negative spiral – This place should be so peaceful but instead its full of fear and anger and hurt – this place should be amazing –
Here is where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, here is where David and Solomon and here is where Isaiah and Jeremiah, and here is where Nehemiah, and here is where Jesus and here is where Peter and John and so on.
And so some people have quite a negative reaction to this Holy Land that is so full of faith but to find that its noisy and there are people selling you things that are marked up because I look like an easy idiot.
And I know of other people who have the opposite reaction and find the place so spiritual that they feel that their lives really need to start counting for something, perhaps God wants them to be a prophet and so they start trying to be a prophet.
So I asked Josh: the Shema? Hear O Israel the LORD is our God, the Lord alone. What’s that all about then?
And he says it is about being Different. The Shema is not just a prayer (it is a prayer but…) and, it’s not just a call to love God, it is more like an opening statement to this really long book of Deuteronomy – which literally means the Second giving of the Law.
And the Law is not what we westerners call Law, which is why it’s better if you can to call it Torah, not Law. Torah is the word Jews use for the first five books of the bible, in our Greek NT it gets translated as the Law – so Jesus talks about-his life being a fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets – by which he means the Torah and the Prophets.
So – says Josh the Tour Guide – this is about living a counter cultural life. One way to do that is to be obvious about it.
Don’t eat prawns or bacon, Don’t drive on the Sabbath and things like this. Dress like this – even to the point of wrapping bits of bible on your forehead and around your arm – yes they’re called Phylacteries and you see them all the time in Jerusalem. There’s even a place in the shopping market where you can borrow a set for a while and join someone in prayer.
And You can see Mezuzahs, little thin boxes containing scriptural reminders, nailed to door frames, even to city gates, and as Jews go in and out of their houses, of the city, they will lean over and touch these bits of bible to remind them that God is watching over them as they go out and as they come back. Have a look in my porch next time you visit me its been there for three years
Okay. So what are you doing to constantly remind yourself of God’s love revealed to you in the bible?
Perhaps you read your bible daily, wear a cross which reminds you every time you look in the mirror, one friend I know has an alarm that rings every hour as a reminder to her to give thanks to God there n then and to pray for people just 120seconds of prayer and then back to whatever.
So for Josh, the Shema prayer is a reminder to live your life differently – as a sort of witness in a way, when you stand out as being – for example: kind. I was walking with Josh, on Friday, just before the Islamic Friday prayers start, and we were walking through the Muslim Quarter, which was not very clever because it can really really fill up on a Friday as crowds of Muslims come into the Old City to go up to the Al Aqsa Mosque, or what tourists generally refer to as Temple Mount.
Josh has a very obvious Star of David necklace and so he pauses outside a coffee shop to give a little charity to a beggar. It’s a good move. For Josh this is him trying to show these Muslims sipping their coffee, watching him, to show them the parable of the good Jew if you like. (This for him is less about giving money to someone who needs help and more about showing Others who might distrust him, that he is a good person).
So this prayer, the Shema, it’s the opening summary of this long sermon called Deuteronomy which calls us to live differently. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
The Late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that the word for hearing (hear o Israel) appears over 92 times in Deuteronomy alone. So he thought it was the key word for this book. His question to us is: What are you listening to?
On the one hand we are very visual people. Aaron sorted out a Golden Calf – because that at least is a way of looking at a god – but Christians and Jews worship an invisible God.
Moses lifts up a bronze snake nailed to a pole as a cure for snake bites – again something visible to look to. We like things to be visible. But our God is invisible.
As Christians we can say We have seen God in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. But now God is again invisible, seen at best in the Holy Spirit where we can catch glimpses of where the Spirit has been, glimpses of the Spirit in each of us.
So God asks us : what is it you’re listening to. Hear O Israel. What are the voices that you’re listening to? Very often our news, our papers, our social media, like to stir us up and get us all wound up.
So what are you listening to? What are the voices that you hear that tell you what to believe, how to perceive the ups and downs in your life, in society.
The Shema is a call for us to be listening to God.
When I was in Jerusalem… one of the women who worked at the Retreat centre I was staying at and she asked “Why do you have so many book marks in your bible?”
So I tried to tell her that there are days when I don’t feel like reading Jeremiah (even if it is my favourite book) so then I read some Gospel or a Psalm and that way over the year I will read the whole Bible.
She didn’t like this. I should have more discipline. She’s probably right. But the idea I was trying to get her to think about was this idea of engaging with God in the scriptures and just allowing it to soak in to you. Not feeling that you have to squeeze it for every last drop, but just to keep drinking it in.
Shema Israel – Hear O Israel the LORD is our God, the Lord alone. – what are you listening to. Very often the Bible will encourage you to ‘Fear the Lord’. And what I think that means is that of all the things in our lives that we might be afraid of – of all the voices that try to tell us What we should do, who we should be – if we could take all that fear from those voices and put that noise onto God, so that its God’s voice we hear, we value, we focus on – Oh to only Fear the Lord – and nothing and no one else – to only Fear the Lord who constantly tells us Not to be afraid. Oh that would be a good liberation.
Because then I think we would live differently. We would live with more love and blessings. We would show the nay-sayers and haters of world what it means to not be afraid of their opinion, but how to live a counter cultural life.
It is very likely I will need help remembering your names. Do help me with this. And some of you are new so I should have explained earlier that I’m James, I’m the Vicar and I’ve been away and I’m back.
Shema Israel – Hear O Israel the LORD is our God, the Lord alone. – what are you listening to? We can begin to hear the voice of God as we read our bibles.
Shema Israel – Hear O Israel the LORD is our God, the Lord alone. – its quite something when you hear your own name being said.
Hear O Seaford, Hear O St Lukes, Hear O Andy and Kate and Mark and Alan and Corrinne, I’ll stop there. There’s something quite powerful about God calling your name.
But that’s what we have here – Shema Israel. Hear O Israel the LORD is our God, the Lord alone.
This prayer is the call to a life of love, not just a Sunday only thing. It’s a call to think about what voices you are hearing and reacting to and an invitation to steep yourself in scripture.
And it is a simple daily prayer that says – this is who I am, this is who I belong to, this is my call in life. I am part of God’s family, I am listening, trying to listen, to God, I am going to strive to live this week in a way that loves God with all my heart and soul and strength.
You can see that its not an easy prayer to replicate. To have a daily prayer that reminds you of your identity in God, of the love of God in your life, of the call of God on your life.
So unless you can think of a better one, maybe we should just use this one. Try it, each day this week when you wake up pray something like Shema James- Hear O Israel the LORD is our God, the Lord alone. Amen. //
(Photo is of me at top of Masada, that’s the Byzantine chapel behind me).
Amen!