Moroni 10, Part 1

For the past week or so I have been reading Moroni chapter 10 looking for patterns and themes that I have not seen before. I don't recall exactly how this project began, but it's been a very good experience, and I think that over the next few entries here I will highlight some of what I am noticing this time around.

To begin, I feel it important to mention my history with this chapter. I've been familiar with the promise of verses 3-5 for 20 years now, and I've put it to the test a good dozen times. One experience in particular stands out. While on my mission, I read the Book of Mormon front-to-back at least 6 times in Italian (the first time through took 4-5 months, and the shortest time was one month).

As I reached the end of my mission, I decided to pace my reading so that I would finish the final chapter on the last day of my mission. That day I knelt in prater one last time and asked for a confirmation of what I had know at some level for nearly 10 years, and what I had spent two years sharing with people. The sense of surety and peace that came was the most direct witness I have received of the truth of the gospel we preach, and a gift I will never forget.

Through the years that have followed, I have read this chapter several more times, and while the answers to my prayers have been less memorable, they have still been real. I remember the first time I spoke in sacrament meeting in our current ward; I talked about those three verses, bearing testimony of what Moroni says and how knowing that changes your life forever.

With that lengthy preface, let's start parsing the chapter. I expect that some entries will cover just one or two verses, while others will fly through much more. For today, let's just look at verse 1: “Now I, Moroni, write somewhat as seemeth me good; and I write unto my brethren, the Lamanites; and I would that they should know that more than four hundred and twenty years have passed away since the sign was given of the coming of Christ.”

What stands out to me immediately (and I can only blame my career teaching writing to college students for this) is that Moroni directly announces his intended audience, and it's not what we typically think. He's not writing to everyone, or, at least, not directly. He is very clearly addressing this chapter, his final words, to his enemies, the apostate descendents of Lehi, the Lamanites. By this point in history, the term “Lamanite” is less a pronouncement of genealogy than it is a self-identification, as the centuries between the birth of Christ and the end of the Book of Mormon are marked by first a widespread conversion to the truth of all of Lehi's descendants, followed by another widespread conversion away from the gospel. Among the Lamanties now they were surely many of Nephi's descendents.

But the fact is that Moroni is not thinking about me as much as I had always thought. I am much less central to Moroni's thinking than I would want to admit. This doesn't mean that what he goes on to say doesn't apply to me; it just means that I have to work harder to make it apply.

For example, in 1 Nephi 14 we read how the Gentiles can overcome the wickedness of apostasy and come to the truth of the gospel (this comes right after chapter 13, in which Nephi's use of the term “Gentiles” makes it clear that he is dealing Europeans and Euro-Americans, what we in New Mexico call Anglos, whose modern history has been marked by some pretty awful eras—think Middle Ages, colonial conquest of indigenous peoples across the globe, and imperialism). To be acceptable before God, we have to repent, which includes accepting the witness of Nephi's fmaily as found in the Book of Mormon, and joining the true church.

According to 1 Nephi 14:2, doing this numbers us among the seed of Lehi. So, I think it is not too much of a stretch to say that, by being humble enough to read, study, and pray about this book of scripture, we become eligible for the promise the Monroni goes on to give.

In my case, this realization is very humbling, because none of this was my own doing. I first read the Book of Mormon because of the example of my parents and grandparents. I was fortunate to be born in a family that had already begun the process of joining Lehi's seed, or being converted. Clearly the communal aspect of this process is balanced by the individual need for faithfulness, but I fear to think what my life would be like if the generations before me had not accepted and passed on the truths I now know for a surety.