Obedience to Our Being - Deuteronomy 34:1-12, Matthew 22:34-46

Last week, winding my way through Allsopp Park, I was met everywhere with rustling of squirrels among the leaves, the blue and white flash of Blue Jays against the ground.  Along the trail I could see pockets dug into the humus, its wet browns now joining with fresh yellows of hickory leaves.  Like a visit to the pumpkin patch and Halloween, rain or shine or virus, I was witnessing an annual tradition.  This tradition began long before I was born or any human even lived in these woods, and it will continue, I hope, as long as the world endures. It must continue, in fact, because the world will not survive without it.

The heroes of our common future are the squirrels and Blue Jays working at this very moment to bury acorns across the forests, yards, and gardens of this city and beyond.  But it is not clear that the participants in this world saving work know the scale of what they are doing.  Each fall they simply answer a call, deep within their bodies, one learned from their parents and others of their kind.  They want to do it because they know it will help them make it to another year, but the abandon and glee with which they commit to the work goes well beyond necessity.

A Blue Jay can bury as many as 5000 acorns in a season, its memory powerful enough to retrieve all they need throughout the winter. Gray Squirrels bury up to 10,000 nuts each fall and fail to retrieve 75% of them.  Whether bird or rodent, squirrels and jays are as much tree planters as they are food warehousers. 

In planting oaks, storing acorns across the forest floor, these creatures are, from a theological view, giving glory to God.  This glory stems in part from their obedience to God, for they are fulfilling their purpose, they are doing what they were created for.  In reflecting on the question of obedience and disobedience, the monastic writer Thomas Merton once wrote: “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means for it to be is obeying Him.” Squirrels and jays are obedient to God by living into the fullness of their nature and answering its call.  They work toward the future, but do not think about it.  They simply do the work of the season, living the lives that they were given.

It is not so clear for human beings.  We were made for something, we have a call to answer in this world, to which we can be obedient.  But our purpose has been muddled.  So close to God in our form, in our willing and desire, we make the mistake of thinking that we are God.  Rather than participating in the chorus of creation, we raise our voices so that the earth is filled with our dissonance. The future is not something we live into through the patient work of obedience to our being, but rather something we shape and mold through our plans, our power however good our hopes.

For Moses that hope was the promised land.  He had led the people from their slavery in Egypt, following God’s fiery cloud through the wilderness.  It had been a long and hard journey, one that tried the patience of the people with Moses and Moses with the people.  At a critical moment on their journey, the Israelites are thirsty and complaining.  But God, true to his promise and care, tells Moses to speak to a rock and ask it to give forth water.  We can imagine the scene.  All Israel watching and Moses who was already being challenged in his authority trying to sweet talk a spring from a stone.  Moses decided to accomplish God’s promise in a different way.  He moves with the decisive action of a military leader and strikes the stone.  It gave forth water, but because of his disobedience, God does not permit Moses to enter the promised land.  God’s salvation did not fit with Moses’ expectations and so we have the tragedy of his death in Moab, just shy of the place he’d been journeying toward so long.

In our New Testament reading it is the Pharisees who have their hope set in stone.  They live in expectation of God’s Messiah, one they are certain will be a Son of David, following in the footsteps of Israel’s greatest king. But Jesus unsettles their expectation, showing from a familiar Psalm that David wasn’t the master, the form into which the Messiah would be molded.  David was the servant, another human struggling with obedience to the salvation God is working in the world.

Jesus offers this challenge to the Pharisees just after they have asked him what the greatest commandment is.  He gives them a familiar verse, one that would have been said daily by faithful Jews, one found in the Law of Moses—Love God, love your neighbor.  In challenging the expectation of the Pharisees, I think Jesus is in a way answering the desire of all of us to keep the future visible, to know what to expect and then to make that expectation happen.  Here though, I think Jesus is instead reminding us where the real work lies. The daily obedience to our being, our call to love.

We do not live under the occupation of an empire like Rome; nor are we wandering in the desert, hoping for the promised land yet thirsty for a drink, but still the future looms heavy on our horizon.  We talk constantly about what will lie ahead, worrying what will come.  Our politicians are obsessed with such questions, promising always that our hopes will be better accomplished through their agendas.  On our darker days we wring our hands, wrapping them around questions like when a vaccine will come, or what our children or grandchildren’s lives will be like.  In the church we have a own special worries, like a report out this week of rapid decline in our denomination, so much that some say there will be no Episcopal Church by 2050 if things continue as they have.  With such fears we begin to think that we must do something and we get a firm image in our head of exactly how God will save us.  Knowing God’s plans we go ahead and get started on accomplishing them.

But if we are to learn from Moses and the wisdom his mistakes, Jesus and his teachings, our work is not to save the future or bring either God’s judgement or salvation into the world.  Our work is not even to save the church or preserve the present.  Our task is be obedient to the small work of loving God and loving our neighbors, simply and directly, in every aspect of our lives.  This is the work of our being, the seeds we are called to plant, not because we have plans for a harvest but because it is the call of our nature, the fullness of our flourishing like jays and squirrels storing acorns.

There is a wonderful poem by Wendell Berry called “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.”  In it, his wild prophetic character issues the call for living into the future:

“Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.,” he cries,

“Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.”

These lines echo the call I hear in our scriptures, a call to participate in the whole of creation, playing our small part with love.  Our work is not to save the world, or close down the possibilities of God’s work in the cage of our expectations.  Our task is the be like the Blue Jay, sowing a future she cannot hope to harvest, being obedient to the seasons call to do again the work for which God made her, sowing a seed of love whose harvest only God can know. Amen.