Walter Brueggemann presses on with this community obligation and what it is that is formed as we enter into relationship with our God as a covenant people. Along with liturgical reiteration, this community accepted rigorous disciplines for the sake of alternative community. These disciplines we regularly call commandments or even laws. The emancipating, resisting community, in the imagination of its self-presentation, moved along to Sinai. Mount Sinai, in this tradition, is the mountain of address. There Israel heard the very voice of Yahweh (Exodus 20:1-17), and then they heard the meditation of Yahweh in the voice of Moses (vv. 18-22). In this holy voice and in its Mosaic echo, it heard a voice of summons and of assurance, a voice of demand and of promise, a voice guaranteeing a peculiar identity. And there they listened. Thus emerges the verb shema as the defining claim of Israel's life. In listening, Israel knows itself not to be self-made, self-invented, or self-imagined. In that listening, moreover, Israel knows it must cease to listen to the voice of Pharaoh that defines reality in terms of brick quotas. In listening, Israel comes to the startling, dangerous conviction that its life consists not in bricks for the empire, but in acts of neighborliness whereby Israel replicates Exodus for its neighbors. This piece will find its way back into my telling of our story of being followers of Jesus. We too are a community that is meant to listen. We hear whose we are and who we are before we have done anything at all and in the face of all that we have done. It is a voice of our God we hear through the Christ of God, Jesus. We do not - cannot - invent this story line we call the way of Jesus. It would be foolish to do that. To serve others, to love enemies, to wash feet, to heal without limit, to rescue without condition, and to forgive as though it is our only task in life is nothing but the life of a fool. That be us! Those who want to invent their own lives and make their own lives or want turn the way of our God into a piece of themselves will continue to build nothing but the empire that is Pharaoh - the world as it always has been. I so look forward to Easter Sunday and the renewal of our baptismal covenant and to hear the promises and to see the water fly and to witness the steady burning of the paschal candle and to watch babies getting wet at the font. I like to listen to it all. The laughter that comes with water wildly whipped around the room is the beginning of remembering how the voice of our God speaks to each of us - forever and ever. Connection: This is, like all of our days, a time to listen to our God calling us by name and embracing us with stories of liberation and salvation. Everyday is the day we become the children of the most high God. Take us up and place us at your feet, O God, that we may listen to your Word of Life that will always pull us into the life that it sows among us. When other voices want to claim our attention, be - as you have promised - the voice of unending love. Amen. |
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