Prospecting the Bible, Week 2

July 15, 2012  Week 2 Prospecting

Series: Prospecting for Gold: Finding Treasure in the Bible
Anchor: Prospectors and Miners
Frame: Flakes and Nuggets
Thread: Prospectors skits, “God Is Still Speaking” song

Exodus 17:1-7

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as Yahweh commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarrelled with Moses, and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’ Moses said to them, ‘Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?’ But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’ So Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.’ Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.’ Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested God, saying, ‘Is God among us or not?’

                Last week we talked about moving from nuggets to seeking the vein of ore in the bible. Part of that implies that we open ourselves to larger seams of scripture, and not just a pebble here or a nugget there. Yet nobody wants to come to a Studio where we read scripture aloud for an hour and fifteen minutes! Nonetheless, that is how scripture used to be experienced. After the Exile in Babylon, Ezra the high priest read the entire book of the covenant (possibly Deuteronomy, maybe the whole Torah) to the gathered people on the steps of the Temple. Even the gospels were read aloud to the gatherings, not a piece at a time (chapters and verse were not applied to the bible until the 13^th to the 16^th centuries of the Common Era) but the whole story in one sitting. But how do people like us who are culturally habituated with attention-deficit sensibilities experience the larger swath of scripture?

                I think Borg helps us here. He points out that whole sections of the bible have their own arc or theme. This is true of the Torah. While we often think of the Torah as the books of Jewish Law or as the early history of Israel (and they are in part), these five books tell a broader story. Genesis is the prologue, telling the story of where Israel came from, how they got their start. The story really starts when God makes a promise to Abraham and Sarah: you will be the parents of a great nation and live in the land that I (God) will give to you. The rest of the books tell how that promise is threatened, skewed, forgotten, blocked, and threatened but ultimately how God keeps the promise. The Torah ends with Moses (and the people) poised on the banks of the Jordan looking at the land God has promised them for generations.

                Remember Borg’s 2 questions for reading the bible: Why did the author’s tell this story and what does the story mean to us? The Torah was not written as a straight-forward history (at least as we understand history). While some parts of these books go back before the Exile, it was that historical event that precipitated gathering the Torah together in this form. Their conquest by Babylon had all but destroyed Israel. When they returned from exile, there were under the hand of a new empire, Persia. See their Temple, city, and culture was still just heaps of rubble they set out to restore and reconstruct their faith, culture, and nation. They gathered together the writings of Torah in order to do just that. The meta-story of the Exodus was the story Israel needed to know to continue as a unique people. That meta-story showed them that again and again when it seemed impossible that God could keep the promise, the God of possibility made a way for it to happen. And therefore, this latest impossibility could not keep God from remaining faithful to that promise even in their very uncertain day. God had not abandoned them, and still wanted to be in covenant with them.

                It is not difficult to begin to imagine what this says to us today, we who live in the “God is dead” era. For all of the difficulties in our present day world, it is easy to give up hope – most notably the hope that God cares. But the witness of the story told in the Torah says that God will come through, that God still wants to keep covenant with us. And for us as Christians, that kind of story is what the life of Jesus is all about. Jesus proclaimed that this world could be the best of all Promised Lands: The Kin-dom of God. In fact the Gospel of Matthew can be seen as a retelling of the Exodus with Jesus himself playing the part of a new Moses delivering us from the power of the Pharaohs of this world.

                And that is the crux of this week’s Frame: we are in a covenant with God. Our covenant with God goes far beyond a promise or a legal contract, it is a relationship. God wants to be a part of our reality, our lives. Again, Borg says it this way: “First, there is a deep sense of the reality of the sacred. God is not only real, but knowable. Moreover, the sacred is known not in a set of statements about God, but experientially, as a Mystery beyond all language. This Mystery – God – transcends all of our domestications of reality, including those generated by theology and even the Bible itself. God also transcends empires and emperors, nations and kings. These humans and their creations are not lords; God alone is.” The authors of the Torah wrote their stories because they knew this reality first hand, it was a living experience for them and an experience they were inviting Israel to claim again.

                So maybe the ore we are mining this week is that sacred sense of the reality of God. In our own language, God shows up. When Abraham was old and Sarah was barren, God shows up and keeps the promise. When Jacob was a liar and a cheat, God shows up. When the Hebrews were slaves and in bondage, God shows up with a stuttering prophet. When the path to freedom was blocked by an inland sea, God shows up. When the people are starving to death in the wilderness, God shows up. When they forget who they are and who God is and worship and idol of gold, God shows up. These are our stories, and metaphorically also our own experiences. The covenant we share with God is seen when God shows up.

                One of those Exodus “God shows up” stories tells about the people dying of thirst in the desert. They wonder if Moses led them out into the desert just to let them die. Moses talks to God, who tells him to rap on a rock in the presence of the gathered people. The rock opens and water gushes out. Two thoughts about this story: Though they thought they would die because there was no water, that life-saving water was already present for them. Secondly, a Jewish Midrash (kind of an imaginative commentary on scripture) tells that from that day on that rick followed the Israelites wherever they wandered so that they always had water. God does not call us into covenant just to abandon us. God shows up with what we need most.

                We may not need gold, or silver or copper, but the rocks will provide what we need so our spirits do not die of thirst. This might be a good week for the talking rock to reappear. Our thirsty old prospector might be looking for gold when something entirely different shows up.