The Rechabites Commended
Adversity sometimes brings with it what is now known as a
"teachable moment." This story certainly has that slant. There is a
nomadic people forced by an advancing army to seek shelter in a strange
environment, there is a temple, a friendly neighborhood prophet and an audience
of locals who need to be taught a lesson. It has all the requisite components.
The Rechabites were nomads, descendants of Rechab who was
probably either a member of the same tribe as Jethro (or Reuel), the Kenite
father-in-law of Moses, or was somehow related to the Kenites. Being nomadic
forces a group to live close to the land but without being bound to any one
small part of it. They didn't own land and have to defend it, till fields or
vineyards and have to maintain them or erect houses. Their very presence in
Jerusalem gave testimony to the threat from the approaching armies. For
safety's sake they entered a strange and probably somewhat overwhelming
shelter. It must have been almost claustrophobic for them being inside the city
walls when they were used to open fields. They also had to deal with all the
bustle, noise and smells of a city when before they had nothing but pure clean
air and silence broken only by the wind, the sounds of their clan folk talking
or the animals they herded.
Enter Jeremiah the prophet. In his teaching moment, he
brought representatives of the Rechabites into the temple and offered them a
jug of wine. Most people would consider that good hospitality but to the
Rechabites, it was not. Their ancestor Rechab had set the rules and they were
to follow them. Those rules were designed to make them an independent people,
dependent only on themselves and God. They rejected Jeremiah's offering and
here came the teachable moment. For them, the fact that their ancestor had
given the orders was enough. On the other hand, God had given instructions to
the Israelites time and again but the people had been unfaithful not just to
the law but to the law giver as well.
Jesus taught that there were rules and he boiled them down
from ten to two -- love God and love your neighbor as much as you love
yourself. How much simpler could it get? And how much harder could it be to
live into those two?
It seems there are often two perspectives of the law,
whether it's local, state, federal or even God's. One view is that the law is
meant to be obeyed and that the safety and well-being of everyone depends on
adherence to those laws. That's one function of law anyway: to set boundaries
that protect people, property and, in fact, creation itself. On the other hand,
the opposing viewpoint sees the law as irrelevant to their lives and an
imposition on their freedom to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, no matter who gets in the way. Most folks are somewhere in the
middle; they want their rights protected but they also want the right to skirt,
bend, stretch or even outright break the law if they don't think it applies to
them or it's just plain inconvenient. Oddly enough, if the shoe is on the other
foot, that's a whole different story. You can see it play out on every freeway
or street corner. There are those who go the speed limit and there are those
who don’t, those who use crosswalks on city streets and those who dart across
in the middle of the block.
Rechab’s laws gave them boundaries as well as protection.
The people obviously felt they were good laws or they wouldn’t have continued
to obey them many generations later as their sacred duty to their ancestor. The
laws governing Israel and Judah were also set up for a reason, but, unlike the
Rechabites, the people of Israel decided that the laws weren’t important to
them any more than the close relationship with God. It got just too
inconvenient for them.
Jeremiah’s teachable moment for the people of Jerusalem was
also a teachable moment for me. How can I expect others to respect the law, any
kind of law, if I don’t respect it myself? That brings up a whole new set of
problems. A case in point is immigration. The people who live in the area where
I live frequently scream loudly that some immigrants are breaking the law by
not entering the country legally yet they hire those same undocumented workers
to do jobs at a cheaper rate than those who have the legal documents. The law
only applies when they want it to, so it seems. They haven't had their
teachable moment yet, most likely, otherwise they might have what a 12-step
program would call a "spiritual awakening” or even just a plain awakening.
Both have their purpose.
A co-worker wrote an editorial in the local paper the other
day about her teachable moment. It came during a stop-smoking public service
announcement featuring a woman with no hair or teeth and a stoma, the result of
having smoked for a number of years and gotten cancer because of it. The
co-worker, a dedicated smoker who has tried unsuccessfully many times to quit,
saw that announcement and it hit hard; she is now up to 50+ days of no
cigarettes. She said that when she gets a craving, she remembers that woman and
is even more determined not to have that same scenario play out in her life. Sometimes
it takes someone else's tragedy to make us wake up and change direction.
God has given us a number of teachable moments, just as he
did the people he chose all those millennia ago. When they remembered those
moments things went well for them but when they lost sight of them through
laziness, greed or impatience, they paid for it, sometimes very dearly. Yet as
soon as things got better they went on their way again, forgetting God, the
commandments, the covenant and the lot until the next catastrophe. At that
moment, suddenly God got very important. Amazing how many things haven’t
changed at all over the centuries.
Teachable moments don't announce themselves ahead of time; they
just sort of happen when they are supposed to happen and it is up to me to pick
up on what it is I'm supposed to learn from it. Mostly, right now anyway, I
think I need to concentrate on looking for the ones that point me to a more
spiritual life, not necessarily as a Bible-thumper but as a citizen of the
kingdom of God. That citizenship isn't a superhighway to speed along but rather
a winding path with rocks and gullies and streams of water to navigate, strewn
with teachable moments that I need to heed.
If I keep my eyes too much on the skies, though, I trip over
the things under my feet. If I keep too much attention on my feet, I miss the
rainbows. Life, like the law, must be held in a fine balance. Too much either
way and I can lose my footing altogether.
Originally published at http://www.episcopalcafe.com/thesoul/daily_reading/teachable_moments.html"> Speaking to the Soul
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