We're back into "Mandate to Difference" by Walter Brueggemann. This week I will try to lift up pieces that focus around this statement: I submit that in the context of the North American church, worship that is spirit-led imagination is powerfully over and against dominant reality. He turns to three texts to bring our what a "contrary" way may be.
The first text is a song in Exodus 15:1-21, the joyous celebration of the overthrow of Pharaoh by the God who is incomparable in compassion and power. ...Pharaoh is not only a historical person, but has become a metaphor and symbol for all established power that seeks to organize the world against covenantal freedom, justice, and neighborliness.
He goes on to say: But imagine the world of Pharaoh without this poem. ...But of course that is the world that the dominant narrative of our time offers us. It believes that technological capacity, economic monopoly, and military mastery can keep the world the way it is forever. It believes that control of finance means that wealth and poverty are to be kept as they are, which places most social pathologies beyond redress.
...And then imagine...imagine...that the congregation, in the wake of Miriam, began to sing and dance and remember the overthrow of power.
When we look at the world in which we live, we must do it with a sense of the whole history of God's people. Too often, we dismiss the stories within the Bible because they are of another time and place that is not at all as real as our day. Ha! We are a contrary people who are asked to hold up this life we have been handed. This is a life that is filled with the "freedom and justice and neighborliness" into which we are invited to live day by day. When we are pulled into that life and pull out of the clutches of the dominant narrative of our time, something does take place. Resistance is often best put to life as we live according to its affirmation and grace that is handed to us no matter what might be the will of the powers around us. Among us, we must continue to check ourselves so that our imagination is always shaped by the vision of God's Reign and not that of Pharoah alive around us. The church can do that. We must do that for one another. We are called to sing and dance praise God in the face of the cultural lords who may call on the name of God but they worship the gods of their own making.
Connection: Take some time today to look around and take note of the gods of the dominant narrative. They should be easy to see...and...they may not be the kinds of things we want to admit are gods among us. For too often, we trust those gods more readily than the God of the Exodus.
Come and take us into the midst of the power of your courageous love, O God. We long to dance today as the saints of old danced and lived in the face of the powers of the world. Too often we are afraid to enter this kind of action, and yet, we trust that you will be among us dancing for all time. Amen.
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