Saturday, July 5, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Fireworks
No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth,
for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse.
Majoring in history has its advantages and disadvantages. I watch events unfold in 2025 that disturb me, and then I remember the same kind of attitudes, policies, and laws passed by hook and by crook in America’s past. The patriotism I cannot help but feel when the music swells and fireworks explode also writhes in shame because I am a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) with only a peripheral sympathy for the Jews, Native Americans, women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and others who have struggled throughout American history to be recognized and empowered by authorities who were, like me, mostly WASPs themselves.
Hebrew law required various kinds of rest, beginning with Shabat, all day on every seventh day. Then every seventh year Israelites were commanded by God to liberate slaves, forgive debts, and let the land rest for a whole year. Finally, every 49th year (7×7) during the Year of Jubilee, for anyone who had lost their land or gone into debt, all was forgiven and everything restored.
Perhaps you have heard the phrase “preferential option for the poor” spoken in Catholic and Methodist churches and elsewhere. It is described in Wikipedia:
This refers to a trend throughout the Bible, of priority being given to the well-being of the poor and powerless of society in the teachings and commands of God as well as the prophets and other righteous people. Jesus taught that on the Day of Judgment, God will ask what each person did to help the poor and needy: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25). This is reflected in Catholic canon law, which states, “[The Christian Faithful] are also obliged to promote social justice and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist the poor from their own resources.”
 Neither the original Hebrew laws nor this Catholic/Methodist/Biblical “trend” get much press on any given day, in America or anywhere else in the world. The fireworks boom, bright multicolored stars quietly explode in the night sky, while John Philip Sousa’s marches stir my American soul. My chest swells with pride when the music plays. Then I read what Isaac told his son Jacob, after he lied and tricked his dad into giving him the blessing which should have gone to Esau.
Let peoples serve you,
and nations pay you homage;
Be master of your brothers,
and may your mother’s sons bow down to you.
Cursed be those who curse you,
and blessed be those who bless you.
As Rebekah schemed to get her way, Jacob gets the blessing. I guess you could call this a biblical mandate for WASP-life, for permission to accept the lying and cheating required to hold position against the rest of the God-created world of men and women.
Or you might not think of it that way at all.
We have chosen to mostly ignore the Sabbath, and the Year of Jubilee. Our theology rises up in smoke and mirrors from our history as fallen humans who chose at the very beginning to seek out our own good and evil, rather than RESTING in God’s given good.
There might be gunshots disguised in the sounds of firework, but we are no longer able to tell the difference. Perhaps we never could.
People do not put new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined.
(Genesis 27, Psalm 135, John 10, Matthew 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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