The Rebellion in the Desert, and in Our Hearts
The New Year 2024 is just a few days old, but one thing is pretty clear to me. Although we live on the juncture between two cities that each have noise and anti-fireworks ordinances, everyone agrees that the fireworks explosions heard as the old year ended were the worst in memory. And even in Utah, DUI arrests were higher than in recent years. The U.S. population is suffering a huge bout of depression, and I know why. The key can be found in the Scriptures, most notably in the readings and song we just heard and participated in.
Psalm 95 starts out like a lot of psalms. It invites everyone to “come.” Join together to give praise and thanks to the Lord. Make what the psalmist calls “a joyful noise” to the rock of our salvation. When I read that, I think of the book Dune, where giant monsters dig just under the surface of the planet, chasing anyone who they sense. People run for their lives to huge boulders, which they climb for safety. High rocks for the ancient world were truly places where they could be saved from human or animal adversaries. And the Lord was such a Rock. Centuries later, our Lord encouraged us to build our spiritual homes on rocks, not the sand. We are told that the Lord is mighty, greater than any of the other elohim. As Christians, we know that the Lord, the Trinity, is not even like the gods of the nations, who are either nothing or demons. God is entirely different from any spirit, any physical thing. He is Being. He creates and sustains everything that is. And He is ours. We are His. We kneel and worship not just because of God’s greatness and power, but because He treats us as the sheep of His flock. He wants to gently shepherd us and as in another psalm, use His metaphorical crook and staff to guide us.
Ah, but just as sheep are pretty stupid, so can we all be. All of us have sinned and fallen short of God’s expectations. The psalmist looks back at Israel’s history. He tells us that He wants us to hearken to His voice. Specifically, we must not harden our hearts. Not long after God saved the people of Israel from Egyptian slavery, they rebelled against His leadership and threatened to go back to Egypt. They rejected God’s law and their human leaders, Moses and Aaron. They had seen His work parting the Red Sea and giving manna-food in the desert.
What’s a hard heart? What’s a “heart” in the first place? The psalmist pictures God saying about His people–their hearts go astray. The word ‘heart” is used for the faculties in human beings that enable us to make moral decisions–our consciences, our minds, our “gut-feelings,” our memories of what worked and what did not, our family traditions. Our moral sense, or prudential judgement, gives us reliable input when all the faculties involved work closely together to produce a coherent result. For instance, we naturally revolt against killing children, even if they are throwing a tantrum. That’s gut instinct. But we are also guided by our mind knowing, from law, tradition, and common sense, that a society that murders its children will ultimately die itself, and that we will be held responsible by family and society for that evil act. This is why, even if the law is corrupted as it was in Roe v Wade, abortion is murder and is reprehensible. When all our faculties contribute to a consistent moral decision, we can claim that we “have it together.”
Let me give you an example of a situation that might happen if one did not “have it together.” An incapacitated driver is tooling down a residential street, quaffing a beer and not paying good attention. A little boy chases a ball into the street. Any alert, sober driver would have been able to stop, but this guy was neither, and the child dies. He made a decision earlier that cost a human life. Maybe his wife left him, or a friend died. He thought he needed a drink; he ended up downing four. The bartender offered to call a cab; he felt invincible and slurred, “no, I don’t want to leave my car in a neighborhood like this.” His mind was blurry. It knew the law but ignored all the signs that said “buzzed driving is drunk driving.” He convinced himself he was a great driver and could safely drive home. He acted on feelings, feelings of abandonment, then feelings of pride. He didn’t have it together.
A society can make blunders like that, too. Maybe you recall an election when you voted for a guy or gal that made you feel good. Talked a good line; everybody seemed to like. The other candidate was a mean-looking fellow it was easy to hate. Both of them made high-sounding promises, but the one looked and acted like a kindly grandparent and the other looked and acted like a rude thug. So grandpa or mom was elected and turned out to do everything wrong. You and most of the state voted on your feelings, without much thinking going on. And four or six years later, everything is worse and you find yourself with another decision between gramps and grumps. What should you do before casting your ballot?
Out in the desert, thousands of years ago, God suffered multiple rebellions of His people. Their hearts went astray, it seems, every time they came to decide. Old, patient Moses even lost it once, pounded on a rock impatiently before getting water for the people, and lost his chance to lead his people into the land of Promise, which God called “his rest.” He even took an oath on Himself that after forty years of putting up with their revolution, He would never let them enter that rest.
But God gave them a little substitute for that paradise, that rest. He gave them Shabot, or the Sabbath. They were the only society in the ancient world to have a mandated day off every seven days, for themselves and even their servants or slaves. It was a day on which work was forbidden, and it evolved also into a day of prayer and family time. It became so important that the Pharisees made it too important. Instead of it being the day to commemorate their liberation from slavery, they encompassed it with many regulations that turned it into a burden for the little guy. Jesus fought to restore liberation to the day, all the way to His death. His Sabbath rest then was a day and night in the tomb, which He escaped in the Resurrection. So now our day of rest is the 8th day, not the Christian sabbath but the weekly day of Resurrection/liberation.
It became important early on so that when the letter to the Hebrews was written, perhaps by St. Paul the liberated Pharisee, he emphasized that Jesus gives true rest, eternal rest in His arms: “there remains, then, a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” That suggests, and even mandates, that we keep our weekly day of Resurrection a time of restoration, not of work, and of prayer. What we need to cure our depression is a national conversion to repentance and restoration of our obedience to God's law of loving God and loving our neighbor.
