white blazes

marriage & mercy || a reading of exodus

Bound || in one direction

To study Exodus is to listen in on a story made up of history clothed in faith^[1], pieced together by some capable characters, and resolved by a God who is identified mostly in terms of action and being for a people what they couldn’t be for themselves. It is a story of liberation with a dominant oppressive superpower getting theirs. One of the main characters, the hero if you will, struggles from the first time he enters the narrative and needs consistent reminding of who he is to be in the story of redemption that God seems to want to tell with him and others. This shepherd, Moses, carries a staff—one he has held in his hand since he left Egypt years before as a fugitive.^[2] When Moses is not sure of what to do or how to move forward God asks him a simple question, “Moses, What’s in your hand?”^[3] In other words, “Moses, do you remember who you are?” Moses is God’s shepherd. God and Moses have something in common—they are both shepherds. The people have something in common with God too—corporately they mediate God. They are to be a kingdom of priests, inviting the world to see themselves in a drama that involves them and the God who created it all.

            Exodus has movement unlike the other parts of Torah. Genesis is more interested in describing the way things came to be rather than developing a plot line—the main plot being, whether or not the blessing will actualize. Genesis is also structurally held together by genealogies. These genealogies land in Exodus[4], as does the question concerning blessing—tying together Genesis and Exodus. Genesis is the background by which Exodus leaps into the foreground of God’s redemptive activity. The first part of the book Exodus 1-18 describes God acting and the second part, Exodus 19-40, God’s presence, or said better by John Durham, “God in the midst acting.”^[5]  The theological significance of Exodus is made vivid by the number of times God is the subject of the speaking and acting through out, but especially in Exodus 1-18.[6] The exodus itself could be paralleled with a kind of birth rite or rite of passage.^[7] The blood put over the doorpost, near death passage and quasi-rebirth all point in this direction.^[8] Whether one sees this motif or not, what happens to the people in the exodus-Sinai climax could be described as birth and binding. Israel is released and then binds themselves to Yhwh through covenanting with Yhwh. The actions of Israel are to imitate the actions of their God, because they are bound and connect. For, as they were slaves in Egypt, so they are to participate in the release of the oppressed.[9] But what does it mean for a people to be bound to God? Perhaps some of the Israelites think it is not far off from what they were experiencing in Egypt, when they were bound to Pharaoh.^[10] This is a question I want to explore further in this essay as the story of the exodus is described in greater detail. What does it look like to be a people bound to God?

Marriage || is what brings us together today

            As the book of Exodus is concerned, there is a real connection between being bound, a way of relating to another, and the concept of marriage.  Marriage is, in our culture, a legal agreement as much as it is an event—just as it is biblically.[11] However, mostly in our culture, it is something you do when you “feel” in love. We set out to find the “one” and when we find out that they are not that missing-piece-to-all-of-lived-meaning we fall out of love with the “one” till the next one comes along. Now surely that is over simplified, but, maybe not.  Marriage, in our cultural setting, is made up of the rhetoric of feeling and falling, specifically those cultures under the influence of the Hollywood myth of perfect love. Marriage seems to be described in terms of fruitfulness, in more ways than one, but ultimately we are pushed to believe that marriage is for the individual. This other person will meet all of my unfulfilled needs. Psychologists have been calling this syndrome “co-dependency” for some time now, yet, often we give ourselves over to the selfish desire to take of another’s self for the sake of self-inflation.  I mention all of this, not because I have anything figured out, nor am I married to a person and therefore writing from some “privileged” place of arrival. I begin by poking, just a bit, at the scripts I hear in my head—these ideologies that one must notice and assault before asking what a text like Exodus might say concern the reality of marriage.

            If one reads Exodus as narrative, a story moving with drama and flow, they may take notice of interesting themes emerging in broad terms. The Hebrew slaves are bound to Pharaoh, an enslaved people with no hope, and so—they cry out. This is not a cry that the Egyptians might notice, because they are graphed into a system of belief, a system that is convinced that these Hebrews are made to serve the interests of the dominate people. The Hebrew people groan as much as they lament with an unresolved voice falling on what seems to be deafness. They become deaf themselves, some, worshiping the deaf gods of the Egyptians and even, at the sign of freedom, doubting its very existence.[12] This is an unhealthy bond. Surely it is a bond woven together by oppression and domination. It is a marriage that reflects what we often find affirmed in culture, and to a malicious degree, in the life of the people who follow after Jesus these days. What is the alternative vision then? The contest between Yhwh and the gods of Egypt display for us what Yhwh is reclaiming.[13] God is interested in the whole creation and a whole personhood. And so God has chosen to begin again with a people confined to a space in the ghetto of Goshen—inviting them to open space.

The marriage between God and people has been well on its way however, the Hebrews are jumping on a moving train.[14] This is a new season of courtship, one might say, but God has loved well for a while now. The first rhetorical glimpses of covenant relationship that we find in the early chapters of Genesis involve God in relationship to all of creation.[15] The relationship is always between God and individuals with the scope of involving all of the creation. Covenant legitimates the interests of the witnesses without violating the interests of those in covenant relation.[16] Simply put, the covenant between God and Israel is for the world. But becoming bound to God in covenant relationship is a process it seems. This is seen not only by the reminders of Yhwh’s desire to be with the creation back in Genesis, but also in the narrative of Exodus itself. The literary arc, that spans chapters 3-19 of Exodus, is put on the lips of Moses each time he addresses Pharaoh. Sure, Moses says on behalf of God, “Let my people go” but then a reason is given, “that they may serve me.”[17] This serving or worshiping is to take place at the mountain where Moses first met God (i.e. Sinai). This is the place the people will return with Moses—their return and worship being the ultimate sign that Yhwh was with them.[18] This should seem ironic—them knowing after the fact—but Israel is on that moving train where “faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance”—the conclusion being that once the people reach Sinai Yhwh will be a god worth trusting.[19]

At Sinai, heaven and earth are preparing to intersect—consummation or the wedding event, is in final preparation. Legality is in some ways set aside. To look intertextually, the Torah does not describe marriage so much as legally binding but rather an event witnessed, which is binding.[20] The up and down that Moses does between God’s realm and the realm of the people helps us see how the two are coming together. Exodus 19 is the culminating picture “of a delicate and complicated process whereby Israel becomes covenantally bound to Yhwh, a gradual bridging of the nigh-unbridgeable gulf between the divine and the earthly.”[21] The Sinai event is a happening marked by dressing up, trumpets, thunder, vows spoken and received—not to mention the shape of a people is described in relation to the world they find themselves in the midst of. God is in the midst acting, and, now Israel is to go and do likewise through a communal ethic that is ultimately an invitation to the nations to see the world in term of covenant—an ongoing relational reality. The first verse of chapter 19 helps us see the implications of the Sinai event quite clearly. It says, “On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone forth from the land of Egypt, on this very day, they entered the wilderness of Sinai.”[22] Most translations render this as “that.” The intent is to help us to look back on the story, but rabbis have mentioned that perhaps this is most accurate because it teaches, “the revelation at Sinai—the words of Torah—should be newly experienced each day.”[23] Maybe the question to how do you know you are saved could be is as simple as the way you know you are married. The answer being—everyday.[24]

Mercy|| is what goes with us for tomorrow

Everyday has added up to forty years by the time the Israels are on the edge of the land. Unlike Deuteronomy, Exodus does not conclude with Moses’ departure, nor to we get the sense they are entering the land right a way. Exodus is not a parallel account, it is its own. Exodus ends the way the book of Deuteronomy is framed as a whole, Deuteronomy being a prophetic recasting of the teachings given by Yhwh. It seems Exodus has a concern to recast these teachings as it closes. The text also focuses its ending words with concern for a clear vision of the tabernacle, Yhwh’s home in the midst of Israel. However, all of the betrayal registered to Israel’s account has Yhwh troubled with whether to re-enter into the midst of the people. It seems that the betrayal is rather grevious. Now often we make God out to be a superhero with no will or desire other than one to save everyone from everything. Certain interpretations of the Exodus saga seem to emphasize this idea in order to fit God into a very focused vision of the Jesus. But if we were to step back and read the ending of Exodus through the lens of covenant—seeing the relational reality being severed and then healed, we might be able to draw some conclusions, not only concerning marriage but also concerning the mercy that constitutes the ethos of this relationship. 

Chapter 32 recalls an event that brings God to the point of disassociating with the the people. God says to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought  up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely.”[25] Once Moses is able to get a word out he asks of God, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you  brought out of the land of Egypt?”[26] Israel has shifted categories it seems, from being the persons bound to Yhwh toward what the prophet Hosea describes as Lo-ruhamah or Lo-ammi.[27] Did God’s compassion dry up? Do God’s people not belong? The covenant was sealed with blood just chapters before and the people seem to be well indended when they make for themselves an idol.[28] The implication of the betrayal is directly related to whom the people are to be in relation to Yhwh, that is, how they are to act in partnership with Yhwh. They have “acted perversely” or maybe to get closer to the term—“they have corrupted themselves.”[29] The idol, or better, image, could never be the image of Yhwh, “who brought you out of Egypt,” because no image brought the people out.[30] They are the image of Yhwh and Yhwh is the character who is with them—so by making an image of Yhwh they have altered the position of, yes,  themsleves.  If anything they should be worshiping eachother, of course this misses the point as well, but the reader can sense God’s frustration in the narrative. The relationship has shifted with the self understanding of the Israelites being scued. 

It would be like a women watching her husband give himself over to alcohol, numbing himself to real presence with her. Yup, God is a her! Women have, like mariage in our culture, been forcefully invited to adapt to an oppressive—even perverse way of relating to their world. Many have refused while living an alternative way amist altered realities. In reflecting on how we as people, specifically women, have “inherited” a former way of seeing the world mixed up with a new way—much like the Israelites are dealing with in Exodus, Marta Benavides describes the process of “inheriting her mother’s garden.”[31] It is a figurative garden, one that is better describing as a way of viewing the world. Her mother’s garden has become the whole creation, and future hope is in becoming partners with the Creator to bring about new creation.[32] In Genesis 1-2 we notice creation newly appropriated and connected to God, and then, the narrtive of corruption climaxes in chapter 8. What is significant for our purposes is what comes after—a new covenant and a new creation described in chapter 9. The Exodus text moves in a similar way with the first Sinai covenanting event birthing a new people, the worship of an idol and its corruption, then finally the renewal of covenant, all parallel the Genesis story.[33] The people in the Exodus story are invited into a renewed covenant—but this covenant is to be reappropiated, (i.e. a new creation). The range of the peoples eye view was not wide enough, worshiping deaf objects could not be the fragrance of Israel’s worship, rather justice and true relationship was to be their vocation and vision.

So God has Moses make another batch of stone tablets so God can speak new and familiar words once again. This comes only after Moses impinges on God, changing God’s mind to once again act in their midst.[34] Moses’ prayer in Exodus 34.9 is stunning, “LORD, if I have found favor in your eyes, then let the LORD go along in our midst. Although this is a stiff-necked people, forgive our wickedness and our sin, and take us as your possession!”[35] Surely, in Moses’ prayer we can hear the echoes of Exodus 19 and his desire for things to be the way they once where. Moses’ prayer being that God would be in the midst acting, and would take once again, Israel, as a kind of architype spouse, its just beautiful! The tabernacle is pitched and the mercy seat of God is mentioned in passing several times. And, when God passes by Moses after Moses demands to see the kavod of God, God says, “I will be compassionate,” a chant that echoes a “transgenerational mercy.”[36]  And so it is with us, the kids of later generations—many of us graphed in by this same transgenerational delivering mercy. To have mercy is to have compassion defined in terms of with-ness.[37] God continues to be with us, showing up in the flesh—as the kavod was beheld in the person Jesus. Jesus was a new way for God to tabernacle in the midst and continue the activity of new creation.[38] We are in the constant the everyday—working out what that relational reality looks like in flesh and blood, in the lived experience. Exodus then, is not some distant guide for a people long ago, it has been for many (myself included), a story to live in and be shaped by. Our ethical resolves fail us as we worship the iconic symbols of our culture, but, there is an alternative. It is the way Yhwh is traversing with us. It is a way marked by newness and it has us on fertile ground where selfishness might by coverted to a covenanted self[39] that finds relation with God—everyday.

^[1]Godfrey Ashby, Go Out and Meet God, ITC: Exodus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 1.

^[2] Exodus 2.15, 3.1.

^[3] Exodus 4.2.

[4] Exodus 1.1-7.

^[5] John Durham, Exodus: WBC (Waco, TX: Nelson, 1987), xxii. Exodus 29.46.

[6] Terence Fretheim, Exodus, Interpretation (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1991), 10.

^[7] William Propp, Exodus 1-18: Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 35.

^[8] Ibid.

[9] Exodus 22.21.

^[10] Exodus 17.3, 16.3.

[11] The Essential Talmud

[12] Exodus 2.14.

[13] Nahum Sarna, Exodus: JPS Torah Commentary (New York: JPS, 1991), 38.

[14] Stanley Hauerwas; William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abington, 1989), 52.

[15] Genesis 1-3, 9, 15.

[16] Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 119.

[17]Exodus 8.1 (NASB).

[18] Exodus 3.12.

[19] Hauerwas, 52.

[20] Essential Talmud

[21] William Propp, Exodus 19-40: Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 151.

[22] Exodus 19.1 (JPS), emphasis mine “that” has been changed to “this”.

[23] Sarna, 103.

[24] A guy named Mitch McViger said this in a spiritual formation class I took in undergrad.

[25] Exodus 32.7 (NRSV).

[26] Exodus 32.11 (NRSV).

[27] Hosea 1.6-8.

[28] Exodus 32.4.

[29] NASB’s translation gets closer.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Katie Geneva Cannon, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Kwok Pui-Ian, Letty M. Russell; Inheriting Our Mother’s Gardens: feminist theology in third world perspective (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1988), 139.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Walter Brueggemann, Exodus, NIB (Nashville, TN: Abington, 1994), 927.

[34] Walter Brueggemann, The Unsettling God: the Heart of the Hebrew Bible

[35] (TNIV//NASB).

[36] Exodus 33.19, 34.6. Propp, Exodus 19-40, 610.

[37] Justo Gonzalez, Santa Biblia: The Bible Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville, TN: Abington, 1996).

[38] John 1.14 (I am thinking of the book as a whole, but specifically John 9).

[39] Walter Brueggemann, The Covenanted Self (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), title.

staging presence

I finished a class last night. For some in the class it was the last class session of their seminary career. There was tears, even for those who have plenty of time at this place. Interestingly, when I visited the school two years ago with my friend Sean we sat in on a class that just so happened to be the same professor, the same class and the same week of the summer as the one I experienced last night. The content was the same and I was in nearly the same seat in the same classroom. Then at the end of the class, as is the professor’s custom, we all shared a verse from Torah that has us living and thinking different than before. I read:

for the cloud of the LORD was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey.

Those are the last words of the book of Exodus. The last half of the book describes God’s presence while the first part describes God’s activity. The story of the exodus seems to turn on God’s doing and being. God does some cool stuff but to back it up God is with people on the journey they are set on—in on their doing and being. Recently I have been catching up with friends from back home, one of which said before I left, that she didn’t want me to come out here while at the same time she’d be angry if I didn’t. Community entrusts you to the journey—believing that the LORD is a God on the way and so we will all be alright, through each stage.

It is odd looking back this morning thinking of two years ago. In some ways I have grown up and in other ways I’m more a kid than ever. Growing pains pull us in different direction sometimes, the trick might be, holding on to self while letting self go. But yesterday I ran to this park near our house nicknamed Narnia, it is beautiful. Often when I am trying to think something through I will sit somewhere, usually a coffee shop, and attempt to draw out ideas through the manipulation of setting and warm liquids. The distractions that present themselves in a place like this usually soak up my thoughts and nothing is quite sorted out. Sitting in one spot just doesn’t work for me. But when I run and wander through the neighborhood catching a view from atop a hill, its like I am sorted out and helped in ways that goes beyond me, beyond self.

It is on the way that we meet the unsettled God. Between comfort and chaos Presence seems quite content to stir us up, love us well and sort us. It is only in looking back that I seem to notice the subtle ways in which the divine has been snagging my attention—each stage with its own pattern and surprise. And so we are displaced, scattered and removed from the kind of grounding that we believe would offer an arrival. The interesting thing about the Torah is that the people remain on the edge of arrival. On the edge of the land, looking forward to where things should be better, we allow ourselves to exhale—in the staging of another water crossing—another kind of salvation and coming through.  

reckless

I am struck by possibility this morning. Behind this possibility is change, the shifting of consciousness and terrain that used to define the categories we operated in. I know that all sounds abstract and maybe event nuanced, so, allow me to speak concretely. Things are changing inside me, shifting, as it were. Maybe it is expressed outside too, but there is an energy that has been lit and has been fueled by this person Jesus and the people that belong to him (i.e. everyone). The dreamer in me is theoretically reckless right now and who knows what will hit the ground, but there is one thing true and gripping. Spirituality is partly yielding the one thing, being welcomed into love while loving—but it is also, hoping enough to move. That is, to get up and shout newly into the tired past to bring about fruit in the now. Future fruit is the business of Someone else. What we are given is right now and it is all gift, ripe and full. And if it is gift it is to be shared, recklessly, without preservation—like an open dam fills the river.

Friends have gifted me with presence and honesty of recent and it has been life to me. Reading ancient stories has given this kid some traction. And I think God’s feet are dirtier than ours. This God seems interested in our lives and the stories they tell. I sense too, that we may all need to be open to the breath that sustains us—breathing deep—being okay with where our jotting go for today. As reckless as it seems to imagine a different tomorrow, it just might be our activity in the daily.

with all watching

How evil he seemed, with a care for no one. Yet with all watching he began to speed away before she could close the door. She was half in the car and wondering yet trusting the car wouldn’t move until she was safe. She had already taken the time to fasten her little girl in the back—the child bobbing up and down excited to go some where even if it was with this impatient boy-of-a-man as her guide. Perhaps she felt safe because she knew that her mom had some measurable power over the man driving the car. He had turned the music up to avoid having to explain his impatience but as soon as the car was rolling she turned the music off and began to stick up for herself as they all drove past my front porch. 

I watched the scene unfold while finishing an Emily Dickinson poem that began:

the night was wide, and furnished scant

The sky performs its duty not out of impatience but out of love—with a broad understanding of the world below as its participants. We are everyone and we are no one—looking up to the sky admiring its space and dealing with the evil manifest in the ones who are close to us. Perhaps deal is the wrong word, because in its utterance one might think your coming out better than the other. When we deal, scold, react with a kind of defensive preservation we deal ourselves away. We are less, sold, devoid of love. The other direction, the way of love and sustainability, trusts that when we offer ourselves—broken and often carrying intentions like the other, we are no longer dealing. The endless cycle of back and forth is broken and we can open ourselves to the wide sky scantly furnished turning off the music and uttering a better way. 

One of my favorite writers points out that only in utterance, can new realities be born. They exist in our imagination but only take form when we say the thing we know beneath our skin out loud with all watching. I was at the Hollywood Bowl last night with 17,000 other people singing the best of the Beatles out loud. The LA Philharmonic Orchestra played with a huge spectrum of artists  as we all joined in sipping wine and dipping our snap peas in hummus. The conductor pointed out that we are still singing these songs because they have become true to so many of us. Talking with Heather as we were all walking back to the car, we reflected upon how pop music used to be so great—the utterance of hope is often a faint voice from within a culture.

But, with an ear to the pavement and with an awareness to the pulse of the human heart, this hope is unmistakable. It is a cord we can all hum to, rocking back and forth resting our arms on each others’ shoulders. Its the truth that fills the scant sky as love clouds our vision. 

normality

I’m sitting on the couch and Jon walks by with his gallon of water. I can hear Cake playing in the back ground, someone is getting hyped for work in sounds. Jon stops and asks a simple question—one I think to be loaded with significance. He asks, “What is a pirates favorite letter in the alphabet?” I begin to ponder as Jon begins to smile and before I can land my thoughts he exclaims, “RRRRR.” Then he says that if I were to say, “RRRR” he would say that I was wrong and tell me it is the “CCCCC.” 

It is a pretty normal morning, I got some homework done and ate some oatmeal—thinking it would be good energy for the homework and the bike ride I am plotting for later when the gloom burns off. I’ve been taking some classes this summer that have encouraged lots of time reading the bible and asking good questions of the text. When you ask good questions often you find a text reading you—breaking through in a sense. At the same time I have been asking hard question of my life. Friends have helped me ask these questions recently. There are some breakthroughs emerging. Some have to do with calling, time, women and others with hope, experience, and that space in us where we are able to freely give to another. 

To be at home in your skin is to locate yourself in time, within call, in relation to others, experiencing some kind of loving reality that leads to a daily kind of hope. My questions are aimed here, as I notice the gloom burning off. Getting up to ride seems foreign right now—just not sure how I am going to get from this couch to the bike in the next few minutes. They are literally three feet apart yet they signify for me extremely diverse ways of experiencing the day. But some how I’ll manage to saddle up, clip in and ride—getting out the wiggles while finding God speaking from within my skin.   

Normality is ripe with the divine. The conversations that bloom and silence that seems to have voice accrue the kind of sustained meaning that ascribes to moments, the Transcend.

wet pavement

in the vortex drifting closer to you

there’s about two things that haven’t died

caught up in the trouble of a few

crawling through sheets and waking up

from the perplexed nuance—time spent in wonder

and tumbling hail teasing out meaning

these bitter sayings that find little traction 

but we’re spinning out now—from the existential high

leaning into conversations that bloom

healing our thoughts and the memory of loss

laughing like we mean it cause we must

if these sounds are for us

thunder from the light of the day