Starting Advent by finishing the Book of Exodus and sampling the rest of the Torah is not your regular approach to the Christmas season. And yet…
There’s that journey motif. The Israelites wander through the desert, hungry, thirsty, confronted by enemies, snakes, and their own infidelity and constant distrust that God will help them. They are given a leader, Moses—whose face shines with the presence of God--and his eloquent brother Aaron and their sister Miriam. They are given manna and quail to eat and water from a rock and a caduceus to ward off the serpents (in the book of Numbers). They are given commandments to guide their relationships and keep them from killing and stealing from each other. You could say that they discovered their identity through that long journey and came to a level of belief and trust in God that was much weaker when they started.
Fast forward to Advent, 2011. Can we characterize our living as a journey? Rather than ‘wandering,’ many would feel we are racing, bouncing along from crisis to crisis like the silver balls in an arcade game. Instead of serpents, we can be bitten by the incessant commercials that are crafted for the sole purpose of convincing us that our real need is to buy this or that product.
But there is still a hunger and a thirst, isn’t there—one that no present, no matter how carefully wrapped and thoughtfully purchased, can satisfy? It’s a kind of homesickness, isn’t it? --A yearning for a ‘promised land,’ or maybe for a ‘promised embrace’ of forgiveness and love?
In our contemporary journey, we come to a mountain, too, a place of encampment, of decision. After we’ve opened hundreds and hundreds of presents over the years and still find a yawning opening in our spirits that is not yet filled, we long for someone to speak to us of a loving God.
Hafiz, the 14th century Sufi master, saw himself as such a mediator and guide. “Bump into me more,” he says in The Gift (translated by Daniel Ladinsky). “Listen. Hafiz knows. Nothing evolves us like love.” Moses knew this, too. However, his knowledge did not take away his problems nor make his journey any easier.
So what good WAS this knowledge of Moses, this trust and this faith? Well, it gave his life meaning. He must have felt that all this wandering was getting him somewhere! And where it was getting him was into a deeper relationship with the God of the universe, the giver of manna and water. “Whither thou goest, I shall go.”
Advent occurs any time we stop and reach for God’s hand. We do not pretend that He is coming; we celebrate His presence. We rush along our life’s path like a three-year old running ahead of her mother. Suddenly we remember that we seem to be all alone amid these crowds of frantic shoppers and blaring carols and we remember to stop, reach out, and clasp a loving hand.
NEXT: Beal, pages 67-74.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Comments on Exodus 7:1-24; 11:1-12, 42; 14:1-31; 15: 20-21 Biblical Literacy, pages 48-56
If you think about it long enough, you can understand the Pharaoh of Egypt’s reaction to the ten plagues. First, you have to put yourself in the sandals of someone who grew up in a dynasty, born to run a whole country. His people thought him a god. He had ultimate power. Secondly, consider that he thought nothing about using that power to kill people. It was expected. It’s how he kept order and ensured obedience.
Third, he considered some people as less than human. There were serious class distinctions to be made. And then there were the aliens, the people from another race and geographical location. Finally, there were a people to protect—HIS people. There was an economy built up that was running smoothly. The Israelite slaves were an important part of it. If he let them go free, who would do the work? The economy would collapse. He would be considered ‘soft.’
And so he put up with these plagues. He probably had his magicians act as PR people to blame the extreme conditions on the Israelites. He must have had a version of attack ads even then, spread by heralds and word of mouth. He could NOT relinquish power nor allow himself to be bested by this one-time shepherd who wasn’t even very articulate.
According to the story in Exodus 11, any campaign leveled against the Israelites didn’t work, because “The Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, Moses himself was a man of great importance in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s officials and in the sight of the people.” In fact, the Egyptians GAVE the Israelite women their silver and gold! Maybe this was because the enslaved Israelites had to put up with the plagues just as the Egyptians did. Maybe misery formed bonds?
But these bonds all came to naught, and this is the most difficult passage to understand because the first born of the Egyptians were all killed—not just the Pharaoh’s, but his servants’ first born and the first born of their animals! Surely the animals were innocent? And who caused all this to be done? Is it the same one who in a few short weeks of desert walking, from a mountain called Sinai, will issue commandments forbidding murder and stealing?
It is right here that we come to a crossroads in our biblical spirituality. What we decide right here at this point in the Bible will determine where we go from here. Our idea of God is formed here. How we pray and get God to be on our side with this tremendous power over life and death is decided here. What we judge about the end justifying the means and about the complicity of innocent people in an unjust society and the rightness or wrongness of punishing descendants for what their fathers have done—it all comes to a head right here. A Passover indeed. Just wars and executions and vengeance seem to go down one path here and peace above all and compassionate forgiveness and political compromise go down another.
Is this just a story, or does this story lay out for us some tragic truths about being human that we cannot escape? Is this where we begin to talk about moral development? About what the real meaning of slavery is and what true freedom from it entails and means? Is this where we come to give UP what we understand about God and about whose side He is on, including any lessons that this passage implies? Is this where we ask: Is this who God is, or is this only who the early scripture writers THOUGHT God is?
Is this the place? What do you think?
Next: Beal, pages 56-66.
Third, he considered some people as less than human. There were serious class distinctions to be made. And then there were the aliens, the people from another race and geographical location. Finally, there were a people to protect—HIS people. There was an economy built up that was running smoothly. The Israelite slaves were an important part of it. If he let them go free, who would do the work? The economy would collapse. He would be considered ‘soft.’
And so he put up with these plagues. He probably had his magicians act as PR people to blame the extreme conditions on the Israelites. He must have had a version of attack ads even then, spread by heralds and word of mouth. He could NOT relinquish power nor allow himself to be bested by this one-time shepherd who wasn’t even very articulate.
According to the story in Exodus 11, any campaign leveled against the Israelites didn’t work, because “The Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, Moses himself was a man of great importance in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s officials and in the sight of the people.” In fact, the Egyptians GAVE the Israelite women their silver and gold! Maybe this was because the enslaved Israelites had to put up with the plagues just as the Egyptians did. Maybe misery formed bonds?
But these bonds all came to naught, and this is the most difficult passage to understand because the first born of the Egyptians were all killed—not just the Pharaoh’s, but his servants’ first born and the first born of their animals! Surely the animals were innocent? And who caused all this to be done? Is it the same one who in a few short weeks of desert walking, from a mountain called Sinai, will issue commandments forbidding murder and stealing?
It is right here that we come to a crossroads in our biblical spirituality. What we decide right here at this point in the Bible will determine where we go from here. Our idea of God is formed here. How we pray and get God to be on our side with this tremendous power over life and death is decided here. What we judge about the end justifying the means and about the complicity of innocent people in an unjust society and the rightness or wrongness of punishing descendants for what their fathers have done—it all comes to a head right here. A Passover indeed. Just wars and executions and vengeance seem to go down one path here and peace above all and compassionate forgiveness and political compromise go down another.
Is this just a story, or does this story lay out for us some tragic truths about being human that we cannot escape? Is this where we begin to talk about moral development? About what the real meaning of slavery is and what true freedom from it entails and means? Is this where we come to give UP what we understand about God and about whose side He is on, including any lessons that this passage implies? Is this where we ask: Is this who God is, or is this only who the early scripture writers THOUGHT God is?
Is this the place? What do you think?
Next: Beal, pages 56-66.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Comments on Exodus 1:8 – 2:22; 2:23-3:15; 4:1-17; Biblical Literacy, pages 43-48
Leadership is a fascinating concept. If you Google “books on leadership,” you’ll get at almost 600,000 links. You’ll discover the 20 books on leadership that you must read; or the five top books of all time dealing with this topic. There are books by Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, James Collins, Peter Drucker, and so on and so on. The titles go from Who Moved My Cheese to biographies of Winston Churchill.
You won’t find the Bible listed as a book to read on leadership. And I doubt you’ll find many references to Moses. Yet there are surely some lessons in leadership that can be learned by considering the story of this outstanding Scriptural character, whose name is forever identified with Exodus, liberation from bondage, mediator between God and man, giver of the law, and pathfinder through the desert.
But first, there are many interesting questions to ask if we want to study leadership. Can leadership be learned? The Ohio Department of Education offers an endorsement on a teacher’s license called “teacher leader;” it requires a Master’s Degree from an approved program and an internship. Six hundred thousand books and countless courses, workshops and lectures imply that leadership, indeed, can be learned.
What do we want in a leader? Do we want a person of vision, who shows us a new way to approach reality and to discover a better future? Or do we want a ‘tweaker,’ as some feel best describes Steve Jobs? Do we want an inventor or do we want someone who can make inventions (what we already have)--better, faster, more efficient and useful? Good questions for these next 12 months during which we will be choosing a leader for our whole country.
Do we want someone who knows what they’re doing right away, and can land the disabled airliner in a river? Or can our leader be someone who has failed many times and has recovered from those failures, and who is still learning? Does our leader have to have impeccable moral character, or can he or she have flaws, even tragic ones? Do we want someone we LIKE or someone we will FOLLOW? Finally, do we want someone who encourages US to become leaders, or would that be terrible since there are already too many chiefs and not enough followers?
The Bible may be the absolutely worst place to study leadership. I suppose the same could be said of Shakespeare’s plays. Take Moses, for example. From the Israelite point of view, he was raised by the enemy—in the very court of the man who had enslaved a whole people! He has a violent temper and kills a man. Then he’s a fugitive. He becomes a lowly shepherd. He admits he doesn’t have the gift of persuasive speech. And he fails miserably again and again as he tries to get the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go.
On the plus side, he learns. From not seeming to know much about God except to take off his sandals and hide his face, he comes to know a great deal. He has courage. He confronts Pharaoh even though he keeps failing; he argues with God; he delegates the speaking to his brother Aaron, but tells him what to do based on his own relationship with God. And he leads a very difficult crowd on a very difficult journey for a LOT of years! Talk about earning a leader endorsement!
If Moses were teaching us leadership, my hunch is that his most powerful and most difficult lesson would be stated in very few words. A whole book would NOT be needed. And those words would be something like: “Stay in touch with God, and be prepared to MOVE.”
You won’t find the Bible listed as a book to read on leadership. And I doubt you’ll find many references to Moses. Yet there are surely some lessons in leadership that can be learned by considering the story of this outstanding Scriptural character, whose name is forever identified with Exodus, liberation from bondage, mediator between God and man, giver of the law, and pathfinder through the desert.
But first, there are many interesting questions to ask if we want to study leadership. Can leadership be learned? The Ohio Department of Education offers an endorsement on a teacher’s license called “teacher leader;” it requires a Master’s Degree from an approved program and an internship. Six hundred thousand books and countless courses, workshops and lectures imply that leadership, indeed, can be learned.
What do we want in a leader? Do we want a person of vision, who shows us a new way to approach reality and to discover a better future? Or do we want a ‘tweaker,’ as some feel best describes Steve Jobs? Do we want an inventor or do we want someone who can make inventions (what we already have)--better, faster, more efficient and useful? Good questions for these next 12 months during which we will be choosing a leader for our whole country.
Do we want someone who knows what they’re doing right away, and can land the disabled airliner in a river? Or can our leader be someone who has failed many times and has recovered from those failures, and who is still learning? Does our leader have to have impeccable moral character, or can he or she have flaws, even tragic ones? Do we want someone we LIKE or someone we will FOLLOW? Finally, do we want someone who encourages US to become leaders, or would that be terrible since there are already too many chiefs and not enough followers?
The Bible may be the absolutely worst place to study leadership. I suppose the same could be said of Shakespeare’s plays. Take Moses, for example. From the Israelite point of view, he was raised by the enemy—in the very court of the man who had enslaved a whole people! He has a violent temper and kills a man. Then he’s a fugitive. He becomes a lowly shepherd. He admits he doesn’t have the gift of persuasive speech. And he fails miserably again and again as he tries to get the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go.
On the plus side, he learns. From not seeming to know much about God except to take off his sandals and hide his face, he comes to know a great deal. He has courage. He confronts Pharaoh even though he keeps failing; he argues with God; he delegates the speaking to his brother Aaron, but tells him what to do based on his own relationship with God. And he leads a very difficult crowd on a very difficult journey for a LOT of years! Talk about earning a leader endorsement!
If Moses were teaching us leadership, my hunch is that his most powerful and most difficult lesson would be stated in very few words. A whole book would NOT be needed. And those words would be something like: “Stay in touch with God, and be prepared to MOVE.”
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Comments on Genesis 37:3-36; 39:1-23; 45:1-28; 47:1-6, 27-31; 50:15-21 Biblical Literacy, pages 36-43
The stories in Genesis surrounding Jacob’s son, Joseph, are so familiar that all of the morals and applications that can be made have already been formulated. What remains is to taste them.
Tasting requires remembering or imagining as clearly as possible what it feels like to be a son or a daughter who is NOT the favorite of your parents. You have to attempt to grapple with the enormity of jealousy and bitterness and hatred. Or you can think of being betrayed by a lover, passed over for a promotion, fired for a trumped up reason, sniped at and gossiped about by fellow workers.
These emotions, real or imagined, convey what Joseph’s brothers must have felt.
Joseph himself is more difficult to understand. It is easy to immerse yourself in the brothers’ jealousy. It is far more difficult to put yourself in Joseph’s place. Far from being depressed and rendered helpless by being a victim of attempted murder, then sold into slavery, he rises from trouble “like a tree straightens after the rain.” He is eager to help, to use his considerable talents for vision, leadership, and friendship.
He astounds his captors with his accomplishments. He rises to the top of the Pharoah’s household. Even after he is falsely accused of raping the Pharaoh’s wife—after he refused to smirch his benefactor’s hospitality by giving in to his wife’s lust for him—he picks himself up and plays an important role even in the dungeon! What a man!
On top of all this, he receives his brothers without rancor when they come to Egypt begging for food. He does toy with them a bit, but only to get his father and their whole family to come live near him where there is enough food stored up for the survival of them all. He forgives; he weeps with joy to see his father and his perfidious brothers, who can’t believe he’s not going to have them all killed for what they did to him. Joseph is very like the Prodigal Father in the Gospel parable.
Genesis keeps reminding us that “the Lord was with Joseph,” implying that’s why he was so successful. We forget that our belief is that the Lord is with us all, at every step. Joseph gives us a taste of what is possible. We might never realize that what comes naturally after you have been disregarded, passed over, shunned or even imprisoned is NOT the only possibility. There are other choices besides revenge, festering hatred, violence and despair.
Joseph chose to keep walking in the presence of God, relying on That Strength. Many others after him have done the same. We probably know some. They rarely make it into the evening news. But here is one of the first, in the first book of the Bible. It can encourage us—who may feel thrown into a deep well—to give up all that is weighing us down and rise to the light, and use the talents we have, and walk in the presence of God.
NEXT week: pages 43-50
Tasting requires remembering or imagining as clearly as possible what it feels like to be a son or a daughter who is NOT the favorite of your parents. You have to attempt to grapple with the enormity of jealousy and bitterness and hatred. Or you can think of being betrayed by a lover, passed over for a promotion, fired for a trumped up reason, sniped at and gossiped about by fellow workers.
These emotions, real or imagined, convey what Joseph’s brothers must have felt.
Joseph himself is more difficult to understand. It is easy to immerse yourself in the brothers’ jealousy. It is far more difficult to put yourself in Joseph’s place. Far from being depressed and rendered helpless by being a victim of attempted murder, then sold into slavery, he rises from trouble “like a tree straightens after the rain.” He is eager to help, to use his considerable talents for vision, leadership, and friendship.
He astounds his captors with his accomplishments. He rises to the top of the Pharoah’s household. Even after he is falsely accused of raping the Pharaoh’s wife—after he refused to smirch his benefactor’s hospitality by giving in to his wife’s lust for him—he picks himself up and plays an important role even in the dungeon! What a man!
On top of all this, he receives his brothers without rancor when they come to Egypt begging for food. He does toy with them a bit, but only to get his father and their whole family to come live near him where there is enough food stored up for the survival of them all. He forgives; he weeps with joy to see his father and his perfidious brothers, who can’t believe he’s not going to have them all killed for what they did to him. Joseph is very like the Prodigal Father in the Gospel parable.
Genesis keeps reminding us that “the Lord was with Joseph,” implying that’s why he was so successful. We forget that our belief is that the Lord is with us all, at every step. Joseph gives us a taste of what is possible. We might never realize that what comes naturally after you have been disregarded, passed over, shunned or even imprisoned is NOT the only possibility. There are other choices besides revenge, festering hatred, violence and despair.
Joseph chose to keep walking in the presence of God, relying on That Strength. Many others after him have done the same. We probably know some. They rarely make it into the evening news. But here is one of the first, in the first book of the Bible. It can encourage us—who may feel thrown into a deep well—to give up all that is weighing us down and rise to the light, and use the talents we have, and walk in the presence of God.
NEXT week: pages 43-50
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