Deuteronomy 12.1-10, 26-27
A debate rages within the modern European Church of all denominations. As church attendance and membership fall, and more and more local churches are forced to close, people ask should we give up the struggle to keep as many community based churches open as we can and instead fall back upon centres of mission, from which we could make occasional forays out into the wider area around each one.
People are even asking whether churches might have to take a new form in future. Perhaps we will have to meet together in a virtual church online. Perhaps we will have to commute from time to time to larger gatherings in the cities, just as we commute to work and to shop.
Deuteronomy envisages and indeed champions this sort of religious practice and organisation. The writer aims to sweep away the local hill shrines where people had traditionally gone to slaughter their animals and then offer part of the best animal as a sacrifice to God.
When I was a minister in a small town in Lancashire the butcher would have rosettes hanging up in the shop taken from the 'best in show’ animals which he had bought. And we would help him eat them! That's sort of how it was at the hill shrines. But, for whatever reason, probably anxiety that the shrines would also be used for pagan rites, the writer wants to see one national centre of mission and, instead of the shrines, allows for the ritual slaughter of animals at local butchers’ shops or abattoirs in the towns.
The decision to centralise worship in Jerusalem was made in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. One unanswered question is whether it was inspired by an early version of Deuteronomy or whether an early version of Deuteronomy was inspired by the reforms. A previously unknown book of laws, showing how far the people of Judah had strayed from the true practice of their faith, was certainly discovered in the Temple during the reform campaign.
On the face of it, centralising worship in just one place seems like a backward step and not a true reform at all. Whereas sacrifice had been part of local community life, now it was something set apart which people could only join in on special occasions. But actually the writer is advocating a new way of practising religion, focused more on prayer and Bible study than on sacrifice. It was a bit like the new ways of being church that we are having to think about.
Some people have tried to say that there was a humane aspect to the reform, reducing the unnecessary sacrifice of animals, but all the reform really did was separate sacrifices from the ritual slaughter of animals for food. The writer isn't a vegetarian or an animal rights’ campaigner.
What the writer does achieve, perhaps without intending to, is a weakening of the link between religious practice and animal sacrifice. Now personal devotion, rather than regular sacrifices offered at a local shrine, becomes the key to an individual's right relationship with God.
For Christians sacrifice does remain important, but only the once for all offering of Christ upon the Cross. The link with animal sacrifice is broken, to be replaced not just by personal devotion but by the celebration of the Eucharist.
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