Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree: Are God's Words Welcome or Weapons?
This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.
“I love you.” “You matter.” “Well done!” “I’m sorry.” “Let’s go for a walk.” “Is there more?” “What’s important about that to you?” Words like these are powerful, not because they’re novel or especially creative, but because they build relationship.
We live in a world where words have been hijacked by advertising. Whether we’re reading slogans cooked up in an office on Madison Avenue, conjured by machine intelligence in Silicon Valley, or churned up in the cacophony of Twitter. We’re desperate to connect, to share our experience, and attend to the things that matter, but it’s hard.
How do you create connection with words in an age where language is co-opted by the marketplace and the political sphere? How do we persist in our efforts to communicate and connect when a permanent record of our “social” engagements can be and are sold to entities that want to cash in on our behavior?
Day Ten – God’s Words: Exodus 19:1 – 20:20
“Then God spoke all these words: 2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 3 you shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:1-3)
The creator God of the Bible is a speaking God. Unlike any of the ancient or modern creation stories, stories that focus on randomness, chaos, and violence, the Bible points us to a God who speaks creation into being with simple declarative statements. God speaks, through dreams, through visitations, through his angelic messengers, through signs and stories. The story of scripture is nothing if not the story of a God who speaks to and through specific people.
Exodus 20 is different because here God speaks to the whole community at one time. Christian imagination has captured this moment as the giving of the ten commandments. This is a little misleading. While there are ten directives included in these words, the standard Christian imagination of a list of rules doesn’t quite capture the relational dynamic at work here.
The giving of these ten words, as they are referred to in Jewish thought, is meant to be rich with relational and communal significance. Notice that it is God, not Moses, who is said to have delivered the people out of the house of slavery. In the ancient world there was profound overlap between the religious and political. It would have been easy for Moses to claim that his relationship to God justifies his power, and then to use that privilege for himself. God’s words block the way to that kind of exploitation. In these words, God speaks directly to all the people. God is forming a bond of love and connection with his people.
God’s ten words go on to establish rhythms of life and relationships of mutuality. These are not “rules for life” but relational tools wrapped in words.
How have God’s words been a gift to you?