This autumn, we drop into various stories of the Bible sequentially, starting at the beginning — following along with our young people in Church School. Through October 20th, we look at the promises God makes with humanity and how those promises get broken. We look at our relationship with God and how we honor and keep it.
This Sunday, we graduate from the book of Genesis and dive into Exodus, or the epic tale of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt and their journey to the land that God had promised to them as descendants of Abraham. Generations upon generations after Joseph and his brothers reconciled with one another, our story picks up when their descendants are slaves in the land of Egypt. Moses is bargaining with Pharaoh to free the Israelites, but not even the threat (and delivery) of nine plagues (bloody water, frogs, lice, flies, livestock disease, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness) has been able to convince him. Finally, God sends a message for Moses and his older brother Aaron to deliver to the Israelites with detailed instructions for how to protect themselves from a final, deadly plague.
Our scripture reading then jumps ahead, skipping over Pharaoh’s response to the plague (he finally agreed to free the Israelites), to another set of instructions from God, detailing how this chapter in their journey as a people is to be commemorated in perpetuity.
Given that we’re reading from the Narrative Lectionary this year, it’s somewhat ironic that our scripture reading this week contains very little narrative at all, instead it is mainly instructions written for readers past and present. Just as Jesus did with his meal-time exhortation, “do this in remembrance of me”, God instructs the Israelites to adopt a discipline of remembrance in commemoration of the Passover.
Why is remembrance a spiritual discipline? How do the journeys of our past inform our faith in the present? What lessons and values do we hope our story passes on to future generations?
Join me on Sunday at 11am in the Sanctuary and on YouTube to worship, sing, pray, and ponder these questions together.
In faith,
Amy
Image credit: Exodus, lithograph, by Shlomo Katz
