Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering.

― Elisabeth Elliot

Scripture: Exodus 6.9

Moses spoke thus to the people of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and harsh slavery.

Reflection: The Pain of Being Forgotten
The Park Forum

It’s intensely painful to be forgotten. When we’re forgotten professionally it costs the accolade of others: the promotion we hope for, or the compensation we’ve earned. In friendship and dating, it launches a restless search for a reason. In divorce, it cuts to the deepest parts of the soul. In disease, like Alzheimers and dementia, it destroys dreams, lives, and families.

The book of Exodus begins in the darkness of being forgotten. In a matter of a few generations, Israel went from saving Egypt to being enslaved by them. They toil and suffer—ultimately coming to believe that even God has forgotten.

Being forgotten is a fruit of the fall. It’s a condition of a broken world that people can cease to be mindful of others who are made in the image of God. It’s no wonder God’s words to Moses are the words of someone who remembers—who holds close—the cry of his people. “I have seen… I have heard… I know… I have come to deliver…”

When the authors of scripture say God remembers someone they are not contrasting it to God’s forgetfulness, but the the world’s. The book of Exodus chronicles God’s remembrance of Israel alongside their pain of being forgotten by Egypt.

Evil has no regard for our wellbeing of the world. Yet God remembers. It was the Son of God’s hands which were nailed to the cross because God refused to forget us—even in our sin. It was his body that would be bruised and broken so that we could be known.

The true and greater exodus is found in God’s redemption of his people. The forgetfulness of the world may wound us deeply, but it cannot diminish in the least the vibrant life and work of Christ in our lives. In him we are remembered. In him we are restored. In him we are loved in a way the transience of this world cannot take away.

Prayer: The Refrain for the Morning Lessons

Behold, God is my helper; it is the Lord who sustains my life. — Psalm 54.4

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Reading
Exodus 6 (Listen – 3:56)
Luke 9 (Listen – 8:05)

Sinai stands significantly midway between liberation from Egypt and settlement in Canaan. Liberation was not an end in itself.

― Christopher Wright

Scripture: Exodus 5.1

Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’”

Reflection: Of God and State
By Christopher Wright

The People of God begin this period as an oppressed ethnic minority within a very powerful imperial state. The demand of Yahweh confronts Pharaoh: ‘Let my people go that they may worship/serve me.’ A state which denies freedom to those who wish to worship Yahweh finds itself Yahweh’s enemy.

The God who, in the patriarchal narratives, had shown himself to be transcendent in the sense that he was neither bound to, nor very impressed by, the greatest of human imperial civilization, upholds the right of his people to freedom of worship in the midst of a state with other gods, including the pharaoh himself.

His demands go much further than the spiritual right of freedom of worship. Egypt was engaged in civil discrimination against Israel as an ethnic minority on the grounds of political expediency, playing on public fears and claiming to act in the public interest. They were engaged in economic exploitation of this pool of captive labour. And they were guilty of gross violation of normal family life through a policy of state-sponsored genocide. On all these fronts Yahweh demanded and then achieved the liberation of his people.

In the course of events, the state, which had professed ignorance of who Yahweh is, learns his identity and his power in no uncertain terms. Indeed the process of Egypt’s move from ignorance to acknowledgment of Yahweh is undoubtedly one of the sub-plots of the narrative (*1).

The claims of Pharaoh and the other gods of the state must bow to the fact that Yahweh is God as much over Egypt as over Israel, his own people. The climax of the song of Moses, after the sea had sealed the reality of Israel’s deliverance, celebrated that Yahweh is king, for ever; and not, it was implied, Pharaoh.

*Excerpt from Christopher J. H. Wright, The People of God and the State in the Old Testament.

*1 – Notice the train of ideas through the following texts: Ex. 5.2; 7.5, 17; 8.10, 22; 9.15, 29; 14.18, 25.

Prayer: The Greeting

My lips will sing with joy when I play to you, and so will my soul, which you have redeemed. — Psalm 71:23

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Reading
Exodus 5 (Listen – 3:15)
Luke 8 (Listen – 8:09)

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.

― Søren Kierkegaard

Scripture: Exodus 4.10

But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.”

Reflection: By Means of a Struggle
The Park Forum

In an interview conducted shortly before his death, philosopher Carl Jung expressed:

To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.

The very notion of God is disruptive. (Though Kierkegaard would have challenged Jung—the struggles we face because of faith are substantively different than those we face simply because we are human.)

Perhaps God simply disrupted Moses’ agenda. Or—and this seems to be the way the authors of Scripture would lead us—God disrupted Moses’ view of himself and his understanding of what has value in the world.

In other words, God’s confrontation with Moses did not end at the burning bush. Each step forward challenged Moses’ framework, chipped away at his pride, and opened his life to possibilities that could not have been considered when the journey began.

When the Scriptures introduce God’s Spirit they use the word pneuma—breath—not static, but dynamic, filling as well as emptying, something we lose track of regularly despite its steadfastness. The journalist Alec Wilkinson reflects:

My hope in life is eventually to be wise. Wisdom, so far as I can tell, is the capital one collects from years of endeavor and failure, of sadness and joy, from an attentive engagement with life, that is. The melancholy element of this arrangement, of course, is that each advance is exchanged for an hour or a day or a year in one’s life….

I have spent a good part of my life trying to reconcile the way I was raised, and the person I was raised to be, with the person I hope to be, which has involved facing thresholds that the psyche insists be crossed. The crossings are often forbidding, at least to me, and require faith and can only be managed by means of a struggle. I expect to run out of time before I finish.

The Call to Prayer

Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord; shout for joy, all who are true of heart. — Psalm 32:12

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Reading
Exodus 4 (Listen – 4:17)
Luke 7 (Listen – 7:14)

Because the schooling of suffering is so dangerous, it is right to say that this school educates for eternity.

― Søren Kierkegaard

Scripture: Exodus 3.5

The angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.

Reflection: When Suffering Lingers
The Park Forum

The burning bush appeared at the height of Israel’s suffering. Early rabbinic writings understood the bush to be a symbol of ancient Israel—persevering under the flame Egypt’s brutality.

The Greek philosopher Philo expanded the rabbi’s imagery to include all of humanity. “For the burning bramble was a symbol of those who suffered wrong, as the flaming fire of those who did it,“ he explained in his work On the Life of Moses.

Philo was a contemporary of Christ, although the two never would have met (Philo was an aristocrat in Alexandria). The philosopher spent his life exploring the synergy and tension of Jewish scriptural study and Stoicism. His writings reveal through scripture what he could not find in philosophy—meaning in suffering.

“Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful,” writes Timothy Keller In Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. “There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine.”

Though we burn, we are not consumed. This is the mere beginning of God’s grace. Endurance is the deposit guaranteeing great reward. God’s promise to those who suffer is not only that the flame will be extinguished, but that all it has burnt will be restored.

The prophets joyfully proclaim God as the one who will return the wasted years. The New Testament crescendos with no more tears, no more death, no more pain—all of it replaced by  new life.

It is the cross that is the enduring symbol of the Christian faith, not the burning bush. The bush reminds us that God always hears the cry of his people. The cross shows us that God stops at nothing—moving heaven and earth, even sacrificing his beloved—to bring them restoration.

Prayer: The Greeting

“Restore us, O God of hosts;* show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.”

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Reading
Exodus 3 (Listen – 3:59)
Luke 6 (Listen – 6:46)