| | | | Adventures... in Hope - Redeemer Devotions | | | | | | | Walter Brueggemann keeps us looking at the importance of the command to keep holy the sabbath. This is again from "Mandate to Difference." This command stands at the center of the decalogue and dominates the horizon of commands at Sinai; - The seventh day is holy....requiring a disengagement from the way we devote our other days to ourselves
- The seventh day is for work stoppage....
- The requirement of work stoppage is comprehensive....
- But it is the motivations for work stoppage that is important for us. The grounding of this dramatic work stoppage is that creation itself culminated in work stoppage for the creator after six days of creation. As a consequence, this day, which is unlike every other day, is blessed, invested with power of life and healing, devoted to the mystery of God's own life.
- From the eternal foundation of the world, the reality of God is not invested in perpetually "continuing creation," and so the ones in God's image are not invested in perpetual productivity. Work stoppage characterizes the way in which the creator relates to creation.
As I was reading through this, I realized that this day is also a day when there would be nothing to do. This could mean no worship. We worship and honor and obey our God by letting go of our control of the day and maybe - even how we think we are to "structure" the day. Rest - do nothing - do not use it a day to complete a project or even one where people have to pick up responsibilities within what we call a worship "service." What would that kind of thinking do to worship life. Well, it might make worship something we do in the midst of all the other things of the week. it might be that worship is the work of the people that orders our week. That is work. Then, another day - a day of rest - a time to let go of the pull to create the world as we would want it. Productivity is our way of attempting to rule. I have to hear this more than I have to write about it. Then....I wonder if it is work to enter into something that brings a person joy and refreshment and a sense of community. I don't think that is so. I suppose we simply need not make the whole command to rest something we think we must regulate so that even thinking about the day makes us work about how to keep it holy. Connection: It has taken me years to let go of the ordering of the day into segments of work. Some weeks, I do let go and rest even when I could be "doing something" or "getting something done." I have also come to see being with friends a way to rest and enter into a sacred time of simple conversation, fun, and food...and whatever. You bless this day, O God, and you hand us our lives and tell us to be full of life and then also to make sure that we are full of rest. Guide us in our resting and stepping out of the currents of the day and simply sitting back and putting our feet into the refreshing movement of your river of life and rest in you alone. Amen. |
| | | | Adventures... in Hope - Redeemer Devotions | | | | | | Today we pick up from the words God spoke at Sinai. Yesterday there were nine times that God spoke (love of God - love of Neighbor). Brueggeman now writes of the ten time God speaks. And then this emancipatory voice circled back and pressed the "insert" button on his computer; YHWH inserted between the three on love of God and six on love of neighbor, the longest of all commandments. The command on sabbath occupies a central position, because it looks back to the first three and the God of restfulness and it looks forward to the last six concerning the neighbor who needs restfulness. Right at the center of this charter for freedom, the great God of freedom has placed the central provision for freedom that rings always and now in the years of the faithful: Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Most often this command is associated with a "day of rest" - as though it is fulfilled when we stop everything and do absolutely nothing - and rest. The rest is vital for our lives. It is much to easy to keep on running until we run ourselves out of life. And yet, I wonder if it is good for us to look beneath the day of rest. In some ways, taking a day of rest can be like another bit of work we have been able to accomplish - "Look what a good boy am I!" In reality though, the sabbath rest is given to us as a gift - not a work. We rest because God has promised to be our God and save us in and through all the days of our lives - even when we think we must win the day and make something of ourselves. Sabbath rest is an explosion of laughter - at all our ways of making things work out and all of our controls that we think will win the day. The laughter is an unbounded joy in which we are invited to remember that covenant with our God. It is for me whenever I am able to rest as I remember the mark on my forehead - no one else notices it but it helps me breathe, laugh, rest, breathe again. Connection: A good restful discipline is a wonderful gift to the world. For the undisciplined (like me) we must be vigilant to enter that rest and honor our God whose word of promise is enough to sustain us and bring life. Again and again, O God, come and be our rock and foundation upon which we will rest and smile and laugh and love and know that you alone grant us such peace and rest. Praise to you, O God of New Life. Amen. |
| | | | Adventures... in Hope - Redeemer Devotions | | | | | | When Israel is at the mountain in Sinai - God speaks. As you know, this mountain God of freedom speaks ten times, only ten, and then not again at Sinai, for after that everything comes via Moses. These ten utterances constitute the only direct speech of YHWH. As he spoke ten times, he spoke three times about the love of God, "love" being a covenant word for honoring treaty commitments. You know them no rival gods, no manufactured replicas as fetishes, and no words that reduce God to a means. A pause....and then he spoke six times about love of neighbor, "love" being a covenant word for honoring treaty commitments. You know these six about parents and killing and committing adultery and stealing and giving false witness and coveting. Three for God and six for neighbor - nine altogether, love of god and love of neighbor, the two great commands. The two great commands that must really be spoken together - one close to the other. These are to be so close they must never be allowed to stand alone. In fact, we must argue that they cannot stand alone. To love God is to love neighbor - to love neighbor is to love God. To go about the day saying we love God and yet the way we live with our neighbors is in the way of warfare and abuse and oppression, we are not really a people who "love" God - or enter into a covenant relationship with God. We become a distant people separated from God and separated from our neighbors. At Sinai the life of the new community is being shaped for life that will not only be a covenant among themselves, it will also be a witness to the world of what it is to be in a covenant relationship with this God and God's people. The covenant is no coercive. It is a gift just as the life that is held up in these "words" for the people. Connection: We are always walking in the covenant. It is for us - it is for our living - it is for our joy and our fullness of life. You, O God, make us your own and we are given the opportunity to reflect your glory within the simplicity of this day - in how we live with one another. Guide us to be for others the touch of your love. Amen. |
| | | | Adventures... in Hope - Redeemer Devotions | | | | | | Today we will continue in - Mandate to Difference and a chapter called, "You Cannot Fool Your Nephesh." In the midst of theire stay at Sinai: ....then and only this one time, the God of the mountain spoke. This was a strange God whom they did not know. First off, this God tells his name. this name, however we are to take it, is a set of consonants with ill-fitting vowels. Christian scholars say "YHWH"; Jews refuse to say it. The name is an enigma, except that utterance fills out the inscrutable name, "....who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." Surprise! The God they had already known as their great advocate and emancipator turns out to the God of the mountain. This is the God who, on their behalf, outmatched and outmuscled Pharaoh, terminated the brick quota, and ended the hot , demanding brickyards. That is the God who speaks, who now offer a charter for an alternative existence outside the categories of Pharaoh. Tomorrow we will look at what God speaks. Today it is all about the one who speaks. In our faithful storytelling we need to know who it is that we are following. This is the God who takes life so seriously that God claims people and liberates them - no matter what odds against them might be. Even though they were complaining all along the way, here they were at Sinai and God helps them make the connection between their past and their future. This life in the embrace of this God would not shaped around the expectations and rules and demands of Pharaoh's empire. This is going to be new life that is (as we so often say) to be a light to all. Brickyards and the lord of those never-ending hell holes will not be the pattern of life anymore. Now God's people are being introduced to a future that will become the reason they will for generations - and even to this day - return to Sinai to remember whose they are and who they are to be. This is so often how I see the Eucharist each Sunday. It is the story that opens up the vision of who this God is that we say we follow. It is the story that then becomes our next steps as we move out in God's name to be the body of the Christ of God in and through all things - "an alternative existence." Connection: What are the brickyards from which our God liberates you? And then, what is the life into which you are invited today? It is to be a discipline of hope. God of Liberation and Freedom, teach us how to live within your Reign and let your light shine among us throughout this day. Amen. |
| | | | Adventures... in Hope - Redeemer Devotions | | | | | | This week we will begin a move in a new direction. I'm staying with Walter Brueggemann but moving to a part of another one of his books - Mandate to Difference and a chapter called, "You Cannot Fool Your Nephesh." In the books of the Torah, all paths lead to Sinai. The Israelites had escaped Egyptian slavery, though they remembered Pharaoh's Egypt wistfully as a place of adequate food. The had traversed the "stony road" of wilderness, been contentious and received "wonder bread" from the sky. Then they approached the mountain. It was an awesome, dread-filled place that signaled divine presence that was in no sense user-friendly. As they approached that dread mountain. Moses reminded them of the heavy cost of life with YHWH. They would have to obey.... The mountain was an offer of a new identity, of life in covenant with YHWH. That is all Moses said. He gave them no details. Coming into a new identity is not easy. For example, to be a person who is forgiving demands a lifelong discipline. To say I forgive is not necessarily the life of forgiving. There is the day in and day out exercise of this life. We must continue to go back to the one who forgive us and remember what it is to be a forgiven people. Then - after we turn to the One who initiates all forgiveness - we step into the way of the Reign of forgiveness. As we all know, it is so very easy to let forgiveness fall to the side of the road as we move forward in the way we want to go and in the manner in which we will be going. So, like Israel returning to Sinai to in order to remember the life into which they were led by their God, we must keep returning to the word of forgiveness that is the power to change our own lives so that we might be a part of this forgiving Reign no matter where we are. That become our identity. I think that identity is a big change in identity. It takes practice and it take the power of God's creative Spirit to make it happen. Like Israel in the wilderness, we are a people who are handed a new identity that is not at all what we would choose for ourselves. Israel cried to go back to the food of Egypt - under oppression. God invited them into promise - where life is whipped up and will always be enough. Connection: Have you ever wondered about the way God's forgiveness could be the directive of this day? How would we be changed within that gift given to us? Bless us, O God, for the gift of life that is handed to us. Blessed is the Reign we are invited to enter and live all the days of our lives. Lead us in this day along this way. Amen. |
| | | | Adventures... in Hope - Redeemer Devotions | | | | | | Today we continue in Brueggemann's chapter "The Scandal and Liberty of Particularity." Following from yesterday we look at the second footnote about these totalizing superpowers. ...in addition to the standard lineup of imperial powers, we may mention a prophetic concern about Tyre, especially in Isaiah 23:1-18 and Ezekiel 26-28. What interests us is that Tyre's significance is not military and political, but economic. Indeed, Isaiah suggests that Tyre is the epicenter of a world economy that features opulence, self-indulgence, and general social disregard, so that Tyre can be imagined as saying: "I am god; I sit in the seat of the gods, in the heart of the seas." (Ezekiel 28:2) It is quite amazing how much power is contained in the ability to be an economic powerhouse. It makes me think of the military-industrial complex. It can, as Dwight Eisenhower warned, become a power that we will not be able to control. Now we look around and see how this "industry" is able to map out what the government will do next. In another way, simply look at Wall St. It is an economic power that is able to rule not only our country but also weigh in to the economic powers of the world. The market - something one would think has not power - becomes the one of the most powerful elements of the society. This is to the point that the people able to do something about their power and their use of it are quite impotent - or frightened. But let's not point fingers at others unless we point them right back at ourselves. We are the ones who buy (literally buy) into the prevailing whim of economic powers - what we say we "need" - what we want to have - where we must go - how much we want stored up for later. As long as the economic powers of the day are allowed to go along making the rules of the day among us, we follow for we become a very part of this machine of the day. Connection: So as we long to be free - we are a part of that which oppresses. Again we must consider living within a discipline that helps us see how we are able to be a part of God's Reign in the midst of this reality. How do we live contrary to the powers around us? Lord of Life, you are the power that brings all life into its own. By the power of your Spirit, guide us into your ways of new life in the middle of all that is old and oppressive. We long to be filled with your hopeful Reign. Amen. |
| | | | Adventures... in Hope - Redeemer Devotions | | | | | | Today we continue in Brueggemann's chapter "The Scandal and Liberty of Particularity." Now the discussion takes a look at Jerusalem as a "power" and what they do with it. We may register only two footnotes in this parade of totalizing superpowers. First, in the early part of the monarchic period in Jerusalem, emerging in a brief pause from imperial interference, the Davidic-Solomonic regime was not beholden to any external power. And yet the evidence we have, admittedly from a certain (Deuteronomic-prophetic) perspective, is that the Jerusalem regime practiced the same totalizing efforts, surely to be "like all the other nations." Both the relentless prophetic critiques and perhaps especially the Rechabite alternative in Jeremiah 35 indicate that even this regime is no exception to the pattern of hegemonic rule. The oppressed also will become the oppressors if they do not keep fresh in mind the vision of liberty and hopefulness and justice and peace that is usually on their minds when oppressed. This is not merely an observation concerning "powers." It is also a comment about individuals. Power has a way of making itself known through the lives of those who once had no power and now seem to "carry some weight" so to say. Therefore, we must all be aware of the ways groups and individuals and corporate entities can and do so easily turn to the "dark" side and make sure that they keep whatever it is they have - or want to have. We continue to return to Scripture to serve as a reminder of the vision of God's Shalom that is not oppressive and will never be oppressive. And yet, we know that the Scriptures are used by many to shape their own vision of greatness and power. We also have all seen how the argument that someone has been oppressed or was devastated by another group eventually becomes the argument that allows them to devastate others in order to make sure that they will never suffer under any other rule. The problem is, this kind of thinking - even when it is attractive to other powers of the day - continues the cycle of oppression. Even the once beaten down will beat down others to have life as they want it. Connection: The journey of the Reign of God is one that is meant to keep in our minds the fresh and liberating vision of God that does not seek to dominate or oppress or simply overcome others. It is a daily task for each of us in our ordinary days. Continue to abide with us, O God, as we cannot turn to you except by the power of your Spirit that will always attempt to pull us into your Reign even as we look to be secure in the face other powers all around us. Amen. |
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