Imagine if you would a sacred shelf in the Library of Congress. On this shelf would be displayed a unique treasure of hand-crafted work from the highest office in the land. Imagine if there were, on this shelf, a collection of carefully bound and preserved copies of the United States Constitution. Well, the Constitution and notes and personal commentary, each one well worn and thoroughly used.
Imagine if
the practice of this nation was that every succeeding President, between the
time of their election and inauguration, had the task of copying over the Constitution
in their own hand and the responsibility of daily reading, studying, and
elaborating their own thoughts about it throughout their Presidencies? Call it a time of ‘civic devotions’.
Perhaps
there would be a standard type of workbook to facilitate this copying. Maybe a fresh workbook would be left by the sitting President
for their successor. With all the other
practices and rituals and symbols of the office that were established by
President George Washington, perhaps there, this time of ‘civic devotion’ could
have been established.
At the conclusion
of their Presidency, their hand crafted Constitution would become part of the
archived materials of their time in office.
The President could be given the option of having the contents of their
Constitutional missive publicly shared at that moment or shared after their death. But shared it would be, tying together the
framing document of the United States and the person most powerfully charged to
defend it.
Perhaps we would have a massive political blowup within Government to decide where these missives should be stored and displayed. I like the idea of the Library of Congress because I consider it to be the nation's library.
What would each
successive Presidential Constitutional Missive pass along to the next? Continuity?
Challenges? Grace under
pressure? Disasters when things went
astray?
Okay, um,
Pastor…this is not your typical blog post.
Where is this coming from? It is
a reimaging, for our present times, something that I read in the book of
Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 17: 18-19 to be
precise. These are verses dealing with
the eventuality of the People of Israel being ruled by a king.
“When he
(the King) has taken the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a
scroll a copy of this law (the book of Deuteronomy), taken from that of the
priests, who are Levites. It is to be
with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to
revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the worlds of this law and
these decrees.”
The NRSV
translates this as the king having a copy of the law written out for him, but I
like this idea even more, the king writing it out in his own hand. With all the stuff going on in politics in our
own nation, what if we translated that command into our own context? We make fun of politicians so we may not
claim they left behind ‘wisdom’, but what experiences would they have left us?
Pastor Peter
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