Shelter from the storm.
Have you ever had to seek shelter?
From a hail storm, a blizzard, a tornado, a hurricane, a crazy world?
Shelter from the storm.
The Law of the Lord. It is a shelter from the storm.
It is the shelter from the storm of swirling chaos that is always eroding creation.
Have you ever heard the Law spoken of in that way?
The Torah, the Teaching, the words that speak the world back together and that holds the world together.
So often we are taught that the Teaching is a bunch of rules that we are punished for breaking, a legal system, a moralistic system of guilt and punishment.
But as shelter?
As revealing God?
That might be something new.
But it isn’t new. It is ancient. As ancient as the foundations of the world, as the pillars of creation.
The first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. That is the Law, the Torah, the Teaching.
Stories of beginnings, and rescues, and failures and starting over.
Stories that reveal who God is, what God is like, what God is up to.
The Decalogue, the Ten Words, the Ten Commandments are usually seen as the mountain top of the Torah.
And the ten words begin with a clear definition of who God is, “I am the God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” Words of freedom. Words of liberation. Words of ending slavery.
That is the Torah.
That is who God is.
In Matthew’s Gospel we are in the midst of several Sundays of hearing Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We are seeing Jesus as the new Moses. The new law giver. Who fulfills the Law.
You have heard it said of old…but I say to you…
Jesus is often understood as intensifying the Law, making it more difficult, more strict.
But that would be a merely moralistic reading.
I think he is getting to the heart of things.
The things we do that hurt each other and ourselves? They start a long time before we actually do them. The stormy chaos that erodes the world bursts out of our untended hearts flooding into our words and actions.
Murder. Infidelity. Deception. These all come from hearts that are untended.
Jesus tells us to know our hearts, to tend them, shape them, protect them.
We are shown that God has a deep reverence and respect for life.
It is revealed that God doesn’t manipulate, coerce or deceive.
These are foundational words of God’s character, and of the character that holds the world together, when the storm would tear us apart.
That is what the new Moses is saying.
The world falls apart.
The Law.
The Torah.
The Teaching.
The Revealing.
Is that God pulls it back together.
And that Jesus is the fulfillment of the word that speaks all things and holds all things in life.
Jesus is the shelter in the storm.
Walk in the law.
Walk with Jesus.
He is the shelter where life can take root and flourish once more, as the storm swirls all around.
There is a storm that is both out there and within.
It consumes everything.
There is shelter. That is the message.
There is good company.
Pull up a chair, get cozy, stay awhile.
We’re having some weather.