Time for a New Operating System?

​Maybe I’m just a masochist. You see, I spent three years in my Lutheran days participating in the Bethel Bible Series. To gain your diploma you spent two years studying the Old Testament—the less judgmental term is the “Hebrew Scriptures”—followed by a final year studying the New. Then, more recently, as an Episcopalian, I did the four-year Education for Ministry (EfM) Program put together by theologians at the Episcopal Seminary in Sewanee, Tennessee. Here we covered the Old Testament in Year 1, the New in Year 2, history of the Christian religion in Year 3, and theology in Year 4. At the end I received a frameable diploma from the University of the South on behalf of its School of Theology implying that I was now an educated lay minister. (Consider Luther’s statement about “the priesthood of all believers.”) But here’s where the masochism comes in. Our Episcopal parish, St. John’s in Boulder, Colorado, has now offered a program whereby participants read the entire Bible in 365 days. And guess who joined the 79 other parishioners in this so-called Bible Challenge: Me!

I have two favorite passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. The first is Deuteronomy 30:19: “. . . I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live” (New Revised Standard Version). Anyone familiar with Fiddler on the Roof, the show or movie, will be familiar with the song “To Life, to Life, L’chaim!” For a people so often the target of other people’s hate-based violence, survival as a living being is especially important. The key phrase here is “Choose life.” The onus is on us to be clever, disciplined, and wise enough to make life-preserving and life-affirming choices. I think of those Jews who did what it took to get out of continental Western Europe in the 1930s, before it became too late.

My other favorite Old Testament passage is Jeremiah 31:31-34, abbreviated here:

"The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . . It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors. . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. . . .  No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD,  for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.'” (NRSV)

In the divisive times we are living in today, with thinking-based secularism in the ascendant, I wonder if now might not be the perfect opportunity for the Almighty to download this new humanity-wide operating system. The old system clearly is not working. We seem more able to choose death than life. And I doubt that a few tweaks here and there or some new apps will do much good. Jeremiah’s kind of Divine surgery would be amazing grace indeed. We are now blind. May we live to see the day when we can see. 

My modern copy of Luther’s 1545 translation of the Bible into the German of his day.