the We will look at three verbs of great worth and interest to God's people in "YHWH's Originary Love for Israel" - Walter Brueggemann. We will do this by looking take a look at love and today we will look at the 3rd cluster of uses for this love.
The second verb dealing with God's love for Israel is choose - from "An Unsettling God" by Walter Brueggemann.
A second verb, choose (bahar), is regularly cited to speak more frontally of election, whereby Israel is given a special role and relation as having received a nomination or appointment by decree of the sovereign. This term chosenness has been treated in scholarship as peculiarly problematic in a perspective that yearns for universal religion. In such a context, peculiar chosenness is an embarrassment or need for explanation in Israel's own self-understanding. Israel accepts and relishes its specialness. Again, it is Deuteronomy that most fully attends to this verb and to its importance for Israel's presentation:
For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 7:6-7; repeated in 14:3)
This is quite a love story. A word like this cannot help but shape those who hear it. Out of all the people of the world it is you - you have been chosen. I always like to say "for what." Chosen has a quality of life around it. A treasure is safeguarded but it is also they way a person becomes known. We tend to show off our best - our treasures. Israel is a treasure before Israel acts. Therefore, all life is a response to what has been said prior to any action. You are chosen - You are a light to the nations - You become the glory of God in a way that makes that glory accessible to all. The people are not commanded to act in order to be these chosen people. Rather they are told that they are chosen and that reality is then the power that moves them into a life that makes holy the name of God.
Connection: What becomes of that which is chosen?!? We soon learn why something is chosen - maybe it is like a fresh fruit chosen to be an example of what the fruit is to be like - to be nothing more than the fruit - nothing more than the people God calls by names and loves and chooses as God's own.
O God, whose love become the power to shape us, let your light shine among us that all may know what it is to be your own - your beloved. Amen.
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