Hilton Head Island, SC – July 26, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Hosea 4:11-19; Deuteronomy 6:1-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is One!”
Biblical scholars, like all other scholars, are paid in part to explore thoughts that the rest of us are very unlikely to think. For example, most of us who contemplate it at all would say that Abraham was the first person in the history of the world to believe there is only one God. That’s what I always thought until I got to seminary. There I encountered professors who suggested that Abraham was the first person in history to believe in only one God for himself. Everyone else eighteen centuries before the time of Jesus believed in many gods, but Abraham was committed solely to one God, whose title in Hebrew was El (which means “God”), or, interestingly, Elohim (which means “GodS” [plural]), or Adonoy (which means “Lord”), or Yahweh (which is God’s name in Hebrew, except that it was so sacred they said it should never be pronounced out loud).
Personally I supposed it was okay if that is what Abraham believed, but I did and still do choose to imagine that Abraham believed there was only one God --- period. Nonetheless, by the time of Moses, six hundred years later, the Hebrews, who by then called themselves Israelites and in another six hundred years would call themselves Jews, had adopted the unique theological notion of monotheism. Monotheism poses the idea that there is one God, and only one God. Polytheism, on the other hand, is the belief that there are many gods.
In the ancient world, the Hebrews or Israelites or Jews were the only ethnic group who adhered to the concept of one God alone. All other peoples everywhere believed in many gods.
Many Christian denominations have adopted creeds. A creed is a short statement of the essence of what a people believe. The word credo, from Latin, means “I believe.” Thus there is an Apostles Creed and a Nicene Creed and an Athanasian Creed, and so on.
Jews never wrote any creeds. The closest thing they have to a creed is our sermon text for today, Deuteronomy 6:4. It is recited in the liturgy of almost every Jewish service for any occasion. It is called simply “the Shema,” after the first word in the statement: Shema, Yisroel, Adonoy Elohenu, Adonoy echod.” Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!”
Traditionally, when a Jewish congregation came to the last word in the Shema, which is echod, they would shout it: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is ONE! How long they followed that tradition no one will ever know. But it surely goes way back into the distant history of the Jews, when they alone were the only monotheists in the world. They wanted to remind themselves and everyone else that they alone held fast to the one Lord of Israel and of the entire Universe, Adonoy, The Lord of all.
When you think about it, though, polytheism must have seemed very natural to ancient people, all of whom made their living either as herders of animals or tillers of the soil. They were outside in the weather most of their waking hours, and it seemed logical to them that there was a sun god and a moon god, a rain god and a wind god, a god of the mountains and a sea god, a goddess of animal fertility and human fertility, and so on and so on. Each polytheistic divinity had a particular and limited job description; that made perfect sense to the ancients.
Despite the unique concept of monotheism, It would be a mistake to suppose that by the time of Moses all Israelites were monotheists. They were not. Polytheism exercised a strong pull on the religious allegiance of many Israelite shepherds and farmers for centuries after Moses. Our scripture reading from Hosea indicates that.
Hosea lived in the eighth century BCE, five centuries after Moses. In his prophecy, he was livid because some of the Israelite farmers were still going to the Canaanite temples on the tops of mountains to make sacrifices to the Canaanite deities. There were women in those temples who were cult prostitutes. That is, it was their sacred responsibility to have sex with the Israelite farmers. Those particular apostate farmers believed that the Canaanite goddess, Astarte, would cause their crops to grow if they had sex with these women.
I suspect that is a religious concept that seems like a bit of a theological stretch to you. It does to me too. It certainly did to Hosea. In blazing fury he wrote, “My people inquire of a thing of wood” (an idol). “For a spirit of harlotry has led them astray, and they have left their God to play the harlot. They sacrifice on the tops of mountains….The men go aside with harlots, and sacrifice with cult prostitutes….Like a stubborn heifer, Israel is stubborn….Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone” Hosea 4:12-17selected).
Gods who have short job descriptions may command more allegiance than one God who rules over everything. A monotheistic deity is much harder to comprehend than a god who causes it to rain or a goddess who makes the wheat grow.
But what a remarkable historical leap of faith it was for an entire people eventually to place their sole trust in a God whom they called Adonoy, the Lord. They declared that Adonoy was the Creator of the world and everything in it. Not only that, but He also created the sun, moon, and stars, and everything in space, although they did not comprehend space as we are able comprehend it.
Think of it! Think about it! Every other ethnic group everywhere in the world believed in dozens or scores or hundreds of gods and goddesses. The Egyptians did. The Babylonians did. The Persians and Hittites and Arabs did. Many of the Indians of India still do. But for at least thirty-five hundred years, most of the Jews have worshipped and served one God and Him alone, and that God echod: is one.
There is a very short eight-word poem which says this: How odd/ Of God/ To Choose/ The Jews. It does seem odd, doesn’t it? There were so many more numerous and powerful nations two millennia before Jesus. If God particularly wanted a people from the Middle East, the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the Syrians or the Persians would have been far more likely candidates. Indeed, how odd of God to choose the Jews.
But did God choose the Jews, or did the Jews choose God? Who made the first move?
The Bible is very clear about this. God chose the Jews, it says; the Jews did not choose God. There are hints here and there throughout the Old Testament that suggest God selected Israel mainly because they were such an unlikely nation to become the proclaimers of the only God who is God. In fact, the concept of “being” is encapsulated in God’s name. As it is explained in Exodus 3, Yahweh means either “I Am” or “I Am Who I Am” or “I Will Be Who I will Be.”
God often seems to prefer the unpredictable, and whoever would have guessed that the only God who is God would have chosen such an unlikely leader as Moses and such an unlikely people as Israel to become His light to the nations?
The so-called “sacred tetragrammaton,” the divine four-letter name, J-H-W-H, is synonymous with the origin of everything. Everything that has ever existed had its origin in the Creator, whose name is Yahweh, the only God that has ever existed. As the Muslims say in their “creed,” (La ilaha Il’Allah: There is no God but God).
And that introduces the next astonishing feature of monotheism and the Jews. A commitment to only one God characterized the Jews from the beginnings of their ethnic origins in antiquity, but they had a profound influence on the other two universal western religions, Christianity and Islam, which became monotheistic as well. Jesus was a Jew, and perceived himself to be a Jew, and not a Christian. Muhammad was an Arab from the Arabian Peninsula, and thus was not a Jew, but Muhammad was familiar with both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures. He lived among a people who were quite primitive for the time, some of whom were polytheists, but others of whom were animists, people who believed there were mini-gods in everything: animals, trees, mountains, water, oases, rocks --- everything.
Monotheism thus translated from Judaism into Christianity and Islam, and now, over half the world’s population believe in one God. Nonetheless the radical notion of one God alone pre-dated Christianity by at least five centuries. The three greatest Greek philosophers – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – never talked about Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, or any of the other Greek gods or goddesses; they spoke only of Theos: God. From the word “Theos” comes the word “theology”: the study of God.
The longer time went on, at least time west of the Indus River, polytheism slowly lost its grip on people. Perhaps the primary reason for that was urbanization. More and more, people began to move into cities: Persepolis, Damascus, Byzantium, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Athens, Rome. Jericho is claimed by the Israelis to be the oldest city in the world, while for the Syrians, that distinction goes to Damascus. In one sense, for the past ten thousand years, the march of history has been the steady movement of the masses into cities.
When you no longer make your living off the land, the multiplicity of divinities somehow loses its appeal. If people tended to become united in cities, it gradually seemed to become clear that the idea of gods, plural, also became united in just one God.
The more educated people became, the more they naturally coalesced into monotheism. However, that was not true for all educated people. Many of those who devoted their lives to such disciplines as philosophy, medicine, mathematics, or physics concluded there is no God at all. They either became atheists (a-theos – without God) or agnostics (a-gnosos) – without knowledge [of God]. Still, over the last two millennia, the great majority of people in the western world became monotheists. And it is all because of the Jews.
So it was that God, speaking through Moses in the Sinai Desert thirty-two hundred years ago, said, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might….And you shall bind (these words) as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and upon your gates” (Deut. 6:4-5,8-9).
I will never forget the first time I flew on an El Al plane to Israel. I was with a group of seven Christian clergy from northern New Jersey who were put together as a group by Morrison Bial, a Reform rabbi from Summit, New Jersey. Our guide in Israel, Walter Zanger, had been bar mitzvahed in Brooklyn by Morrison when Morrison was the rabbi of that synagogue. Walter had emigrated to Israel to become a professional tour guide. Walter called us the Seven Samurai of Summit.
You know how, when you fly east across the Atlantic, you generally take off in the early or late evening? You’re generally excited because of where you’re going, and I was especially excited on that trip, because I was going to be seeing dozens of places I had only read about in the Bible. Well, sunrise usually comes quickly on such a flight, because by the time you have flown a few hours, it is only 1 or 2 AM in New York or Atlanta, but it’s 5 or 6 AM over Ireland or France. When the sun came up on that long-ago El Al flight, the Orthodox Jews on the plane stood up in the aisle, facing Jerusalem (which is where we were going, almost), and they began praying and bowing forward, again and again and again. But they had attached a unique something to themselves I had never seen before. The first thing was a little square leather box that had a leather thong fastened to each side of it and then tied at the back of each man’s head. (They were all men.) Each man also had some long leather straps which they wrapped around their arms and hands as they prayed. For a goy, a Gentile, who grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and knew many Jews in high school and college, but none of them was Orthodox, it was a cultural and religious eye-opener, even at 1 AM New York time, I can tell you. I was spellbound watching them.
Inside every such little leather box is a folded-up script of Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21. And because of Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the phylacteries on the arms and hands are also a reminder of those verses. Have you ever visited a Jewish home, and beside the door there is a little metal piece tacked at an angle onto the door jam? It is called a mezuzah. It has a few Hebrew letters stenciled into the metal, and inside is another tiny script with all of those verses printed onto the parchment. The parchment says, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is ONE.” It is an astonishing insight! Did God give it to the Jews, or did they figure it out on their own? However it happened, it has transformed the entire Earth.
A plethora of gods is a problem. Over the long haul, polytheism will not work for most people. But monotheism, monotheism: now there is a concept to which we can devote our entire being for our entire lives. He is one, Christian people; He is ONE! Shema, Yisroel, Adonoy Elohenu, Adonoy ECHOD!
Amein and Amein.