Today’s Scripture Reading (July 8,
2015): Exodus 3
Early in the
17th Century, Britain and Europe began to encourage its religious
dissenters to leave Europe and settle in North America where they promised
there would be religious freedom. Almost immediately religious people began to
make the journey from Europe to North America. Their main complaint was that
they felt that the Reformation had not gone far enough. The established
Christian faiths in Europe, and maybe especially within the Church England,
remained far too Catholic and they resisted any kind of further reformation.
And so the move began – Quaker, Amish, Baptists and Mennonites began to
populate North America with their idea of what Christianity should be.
In North America,
toleration of non-conforming people groups was supposed to rule the day. But quickly
the non-conformists began to decide what kind of belief structures were welcome
in the areas in which they lived. Stories began to circulate of Christians that
refused to conform to the ideas that the non-conformists had brought from
Europe and Britain, and these dissenters were immediately exiled. The reality
was that religious freedom still didn’t exist – just he standard to which other
faiths had to measure had changed.
Religious freedom
cannot exist in any area where one group decides what is right and what is
wrong. The world has never really achieved that ideal. Christian areas continue
to marginalize those of different faiths, Islamic believers persecute those who
are not Islamic and Secular proponents, a label which would now seem to
encompass most of Europe, Britain and North America, ridicules those who tie
themselves to any faith. Real religious freedom requires a paradigm shift among
its inhabitants – a shift that says that belief in something – even if that
something is the secular pursuits of modern society – is better than belief in
nothing. It requires for people to want to grow past their individual beliefs
and learn to value people whose beliefs differ from their own. In a true
society of Religious Freedoms, an atheist will actively defend the right of
Christians, Muslims, Hindu’s, Jews and other faiths to pursue what it is that
they believe – as each religious group does exactly the same thing for other
belief systems. Only then can religious freedom truly exist.
God tells
Moses to go back and gather the elders and tell them of what has passed between
God and his prophet. Moses question back to God had to be “why will the elders
listen to me now when they refused to listen to me forty years ago when I acted
on their behalf.” And the answer is likely that the legend of Moses had
multiplied over the decades since he left. He had most likely achieved almost a
mythical status among the people. Absence often does that. Moses became a
figure from the past that was able to change things. The Legend of Moses had
prepared the people for his return. (Of course, as Moses was soon going to find
out, flesh and blood people seldom measure up to the legend of people that we
can develop in our minds.) But for now, the leaders would listen.
The first
test was to be one of Religious Freedom. If Moses and the leaders of Israel in
Egypt went to the Pharaoh and told him that they had met with their God and
that he had instructed them to go outside of city to make sacrifices to him,
what would the Pharaoh’s reaction be? Israel has never existed as a people who
inhabited a specific piece of land. Israel has ever only existed as a people
with a special relationship to their God. If Pharaoh refused to allow Israel to
worship their God, then he was denying their right to exist. If Israel was to
continue to exist, it had to have the right of worship.
This idea of
Israel’s existence as a function of their relationship with God is the reason
why the nation has been able to exist for extended periods of time in exile. Their
tie is not to land, but rather to God. And it has always been that relationship
that defined them – even when Israel was nothing but a group of slaves in
Egypt.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus
4
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