By seasons, feasts, and scriptures, the churches seek to lead us through our history to nurture our consciousness on the bread of remembering. In this season we hearken to the biblical themes of exodus, covenant, and the new covenant in Christ as the food that will energize and inform our contemporary struggle for liberation and justice.
An astonishing aspect of the miracle that was the Exodus is the recorded "600,000 men on foot, not counting their dependents" (Exodus 12:37). A whole people uprooted themselves and moved into the unknown. This was displacement on a massive scale. Their readiness to move from the security of slavery, from the only reality they had known for four-and-a half generations, was more awesome than the willingness of Pharaoh to let them leave.
What organizer today would not grasp at the key to a process that would move enslaved people in the Egypts of today? The text of Exodus provides a few elements essential to this transformation of minds and hearts:
• They cried out, and their appeal for rescue from their slavery rose up to God (Exodus 2:23). Liberation begins in the recognition of a state of enslavement and in the faithful prayer for release.
• "But who am I," Moses said to God, "that I should go to Pharaoh..." (Exodus 3:11). Crane our necks as we might to seek the other, the leader, a power outside ourselves, the answer is always that there is none but us. Moreover, there never has been.
• God said to Moses: "....Go and assemble the elders of Israel and tell them that God...has appeared to you and has said, '...I am resolved to bring you out of your misery in Egypt'" (Exodus 3:15-17). Assemble them! Meet with them! The Bible gives no substitute for meetings, for meetings in which people conspire together to take their lives in hand and enter into conflict with those who wield injustice. Moses' meeting with the elders signaled the beginning of new levels of conflict for all.
• Moses performed the signs before the people, and they were convinced (Exodus 4:31). "We don't need saviors so much as we need signs," Dan Berrigan wrote in his Book of Uncommon Prayer. In our own lives and communities, we must be willing to be those signs to one another and trust in God to work through us.
• There followed the repeated meetings with Pharaoh and the acts of God in the plagues sent upon Egypt. Before, after, and during each plague, Moses importuned Pharaoh with God's word: Let my people go! No less than Pharaoh, the Israelites saw these wonders and learned through each to trust in Moses as God's messenger. "Presence is key; you must keep coming," an Air Force officer at the Pentagon said to a friend demonstrating there for the hundredth time. We grow weary of returning again and again, crying out to deaf ears, and we think it useless. But presence is key!
• As Pharaoh heaped greater burdens on the Israelites, some rose up against Moses, saying: You have made us stink in the nostrils of Pharaoh and his subjects; you have put a sword in their hands to kill us (Exodus 5:21). As people in power are threatened, they become more abusive. Many people who would rise up instead fall back at this point; they are bought off, beaten. The antidote is understanding the dynamic at work and offering mutual support through these very difficult times.
• The dramatic culmination in their preparation was the enactment of the rite of Passover in each family. Each heard the call, a call that echoes down through the pages of scripture and history: Come out of her, my people, lest you partake in her sins and share in her plagues (Revelation 18:4). Summoned by the radical hope of a new life, the people readied to move forth.
But this is still the beginning.
The 40 years of wandering in the wilderness may have been a punishment for their constant complaining. But there were good reasons for it that may be more important. They are reasons our settled lives, our lives in isolation, prefer to forget. The wandering was the time in which the Israelites learned to be free and learned to be a people. Neither happened in the condition of slavery from which they came. Oppression can bring out the best in people; more often it brings out the worst as individuals seek to carve out corners of relative security for themselves.
You must remember all the roads by which the Lord your God has led you these 40 years...to humble you, to test you, and to discover whether it was in your heart to keep the commandments... God fed you on manna....The clothes on your back did not wear out nor did your feet swell in all these 40 years (Deuteronomy 8:2-4).
The years in the desert and the displacement they represent are a paradigm of every journey of faith. Stripped of the props in our lives, we learn of God's faithfulness and the strength of corporate vulnerability.
When the time came for the Israelites to end their wanderings, Joshua spoke to them at Shechem. He spoke not as a leader to his people but, in the cultural context, he spoke "for me and my family" to all present as families and heads of families. He articulated the truth that the covenant with God exists directly between God and the most rudimentary social unit.
New Life in the Covenant
For 200 to 300 years, the covenant was the political and social reality that bound the Israelites. Our contemporaries would label it anarchy because people had no king or leader who told them how to live. They did what was right in their own eyes, remembering God's commands. There was among them a fundamental equality of status and responsibility. Their lives, though simple, were decent. There were no poor among them. Covenant traditions were taught and enacted within families. Justice was pursued and conflicts resolved by those whose personal qualities or gifts led them to be chosen by the people as judges.
The disadvantage of the theocratic system that impelled its demise was that no one had authority firm enough to rally people for a war of conquest. Wars were fought when there was a threat to Israel's existence. These were mounted in ways that revealed God's power rather than the Israelites' strength in arms. In their option for a king, the people expressed their will to be like other nations - to wage wars. They effectively terminated their covenant with God.
God bound God's self in covenant to the people; they violated that covenant. "But in this the final age God has spoken to us in his Son..." (Hebrews 1:2). God has bound himself to us in Christ in full freedom, in covenant. God still works in us that we might grow into the image of the Faithful One.
BECAUSE OF OUR enculturation, our lack of understanding, our willfulness, and the divided nature of our lives, we do little better than our forebears in the faith. Faithfulness is a totality; it is also a paradox. Only those who are obedient have faith; only those who have faith are obedient.
To commit our lives in covenant with Christ is to allow our lives to be totally altered. The relationship bids us create a style of life in concert with that commitment. Right thinking about Christ is important only if it leads to living in the light of that commitment.
Fidelity in this new life will exact all the creativity of our spirits. Beginning with an "I believe," we must, like master craftspeople, forge it into an "I exist." The end is to achieve a parity - or better a transparency - between the affirmation of faith and the life lived. If those seem hard thoughts, Christ never promised us it would be easy, despite the soft sermons offered in many of our places of worship.
What are the grounds upon which one enters a process as transforming as exodus, covenant, and a life of displacement? It cannot be a matter of counting on oneself or one's own resources to live this commitment. Rather it begins with the fact and the person of God and grows on the abundance of gifts that the Lord bestows upon us. And the greatest gift is the love, the unity one with another that is the sign of God's presence and the source of the new creation that God wills to make through us.
I submit that enfleshing this faith process will necessarily involve us in the displacement of our lives into communities of faith and hope. Community, let us confess, remains a beacon and a burden to us. We seem incapable of living in community and incapable of living without it. Perhaps that is because we try to build community apart from the integrated process of faithfulness. Only by beginning with the absolute fidelity who is God can other fidelities, such as in community and in marriage, become possible for us.
Nor is community possible without bringing to bear on it a creativity rooted in energizing memories and summoned by the radical hope of God for our lives. The elements of such community may be familiar:
• Community begins in the inspiration or vision that brings people together out of scatteredness and isolation and binds them in one hope. People gather together in voluntary displacement.
• It finds its authority in Christ's mandates, "Remember me," and "Gather together that I might be among you."
• It grows through the willingness of its members to conspire or breathe together on behalf of life, which is the proper work of community in the Spirit of God.
• Like the communities of the ancient covenant, it lives in enfleshing, in enacting its covenant with God and with one another, making visible the power of God in our world.
"With my mouth," God said through Hildegard of Bingen, "I kiss my own chosen creation. I uniquely, lovingly embrace every image I have made out of the earth's clay. With a fiery spirit I transform it into a body to serve all the world." No lonely task this, but one that involves us with our world and with one another.
Elizabeth McAlister, a member of Jonah House in Baltimore, Maryland, and a mother of three children, was serving a three-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Alderson, West Virginia, for her role in the Griffiss Plowshares civil disobedience action when this article appeared.
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