That Which Enslaves Us

Credit-Card-SlaveryLent March 3, 2015

Scripture Reading: Exodus 20:1-17 Then God spoke all these words:  I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. — Exodus 20:1-6

It is interesting that the first commandant relates God’s salvation of the Israelites from slavery to worship of other gods. Israel’s salvation from Egyptian slavery, as far as I can tell, was an act of pure grace on God’s part. God heard the people’s cries and God responded. In relation to Egypt, there are none of the stories about Israel’s sinning and being taken into exile that followed in later stories. No claim that the slavery was the result of any specific misdeeds.  Yet the Bible reminds the children of Israel many, many times of God’s saving the Israelites from their enslavement in Egypt and in most of those instances, I think, the Israelites had lost faith or took it for granted and were placing their trust in lesser gods.

Lent is a great time for us to dust off our faith that may have been stored in an honored place but left there for all practical purposes unattended.  What lesser gods are we serving? Most of us do not have little effigies to which we bow, but we do have other gods: the quest for power at any cost, the desire to control other people’s lives, greed in all its manifestation, addictions certainly to drugs and alcohol but to things also, and the need to be better than other people played out in self-righteousness.

Just as God groomed Moses and sent him to lead the Israelites out of slavery, God sent his son to bring us salvation, also a gift of pure grace. I know it is hard to take in our tit for tat world that such a thing could happen. It requires us to grasp an entirely new way of being. It demands our full commitment, our very lives. It is the way to God’s abundant life in Christ.

Prayer: God of Justice and Mercy, grant us the strength and courage to accept your gift of grace and may our receiving it be reflected in our lives. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.