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Tag: peace

  • Exodus on bringing about peace

    An image of a door opening as a metaphor for bringing peace as told in the book of Exodus.

    The book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible is a sobering look at the difficulty in bringing about peace. Starting with a new king, to heading into the wilderness, nothing is easy for these ancient people.

    And here we are over 2,000 years later still seeking peace. Maybe walking humbly alongside them in their struggles, we can see more clearly our own.

    What Exodus shows is needed to bring peace

    The Bible reminds us of this simple truth. What one sees and hears changes the possibility of peace. Whether ruler or minion, God or mortal. And Exodus, the first story in the Bible about empire, is a master class.

    There is a new king in Egypt as the book of Exodus opens. And the first thing he does is to tell the Egyptians to see.

    “Look, [says the king to the Egyptians], the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we.” Exodus 1:8

    And this is where the story begins. Not with the miracles or the plagues but with the simple choices we make about what we hear and see.

    Pharaoh tells the Egyptians to see a threat by focusing their sight on the Israelites’ growing numbers. And immediately the Egyptians “set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor.”

    There is fear and violence, not peace.

    Close your eyes and block your ears

    Bringing peace to Egypt will elude the pharaoh. Hope is lost. Fear and violence grow.

    But the Lord, hidden from sight, has heard and seen. And the Lord says to Moses,

    “The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.” Exodus 3:9

    As the story unfolds, you will see what happens when rulers do not rule wisely. Their eyes and ears blocked by the fear of losing power, or, trying to gain it. You will see how difficult it is for their subjects to see and hear for themselves.

    You will also see the Israelite people turn to an unseen power as they sink lower into powerlessness.

    For when you are powerless, miracles and signs that a force unseen is on your side corrects that imbalance of power.* It makes visible the power of the unseen for those who plug their ears and shut their eyes to reality.

    Miracles and signs are utilitarian, amazingly, in order that all God’s people are at the table. Pharaoh and slave.

    Bringing peace is a journey in Exodus

    I did not expect Exodus to so richly tell of bringing peace through the simple acts of seeing and hearing. Nor did I expect to see miracles in a new way. There is so much to experience here. But it needs to be an experience shared.

    Only when people with different world views sit down to speak of what we see and hear can peace come. So come, grab a group of friends to journey through this story of Exodus. You will travel a lot of ground, politically, personally and theologically. So, when you finish Chapter 15, rest for a while. As did the Israelites. For this is still the beginning for those ancients and we moderns. The road to peace is long.

    First though, remember, as the Israelites remembered, of what must happen to bring peace. To listen carefully to the voice of the Lord and do what is right in the Lord’s sight. “For I am the Lord who heals you.”

    In the last verse of the fifteenth chapter of Exodus, we are reminded of the universal desire for peace. We catch a glimpse of the garden in Eden.

    Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees, and they camped there by the water. Exodus 15:27

    We too will catch glimpses of peace, even if briefly before journeying on, when we turn to look towards it together.

    Peace be with you.

    *A loving shout out to a faithful book group discussing Yangsze Choo’s book, The Fox Wife, and the author’s thoughts on writing it. Thank you all for helping me see.

    Postscript: Bringing hope for peace

    Check out More Perfect, a non-profit partnership formed as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

    It may bring you hope. It did me. Here is their statement.

    “At a moment marked by dysfunction and division, More Perfect – a campaign to align America around a shared vision for democratic renewal – is our reminder that our finest moments come when we set big, bold, long-term goals that capture our imagination and then rally across our differences to achieve them.”

  • SEE and HEAR in Genesis

    The words “see” and “hear” in Genesis speak to peace. When we forget these actions, or do them poorly, reality is hidden. Injustices are overlooked, the poor are not heard and the powerful take much. Peace cannot come. Likewise, if a person looks and hears, there is the possibility of peace. But only in real seeing and hearing can we build towards a peace that is real.

    A photo to represent seeing in Genesis. A close-up of a pair of simple wire frame eye glasses set on a simple table in the light coming from a window in the background.

    To see

    And God saw that it was good.

    Genesis 1:10

    The importance of seeing is in the very beginning of creation told in Genesis, chapter one. At the end of each new day, with the exception of the second day when God made the sky to separate the waters above and below it, God looks and sees that his work is good.

    Now the creation story could have just had God say, “and it was good.” But that is not what this story says. First God takes a look at the work and sees that the work is good. It is the act of seeing that establishes that it is real. It is not about thinking, it is about seeing.

    “And God saw that it was good.” A sentence so simple we might skip over it. Missing the power of it. One sentence repeated six times in this story saying what a creator needs to do upon creating: To look to make sure that in the real world, what you created is in fact good. How often do we do that? How often are worlds built that aren’t good, just by our looking away. Refusing to see. How often do we say, “Oh, I am just fine” when we know there is something not right in us. Really looking at the impact of our actions on the world is one of the hardest things to do. And looking away from it, one of the easiest.

    Consider the importance of a creator seeing what is real. Whether the creation is the universe, or a community, or a life.

    On the sixth day God completes creation with the making of humans and the gift of food to all life that breathes. Then, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” Surely peace is possible.

    Represents hearing in Genesis. A closeup of a large whelk shell on a sandy beach holding the "sound of the ocean" if you put it up to your ear and listen.

    To hear

    They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze…

    Genesis 3:8

    This is the first time in the Hebrew Bible that the act of hearing is told. The one earlier phrase that you get any sense of sound is in the second verse of Genesis at the very beginning of creation when “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” But there was no living creature yet to hear.

    And then God puts Adam and Eve in a garden and hearing enters creation. And what a knock-out-of-the-park this first telling is. Can’t you just hear the sound of the steps softened by the green under foot and the gentle breeze that only evening can bring? Written two thousand years ago and still speaks to us. But this is the beauty of this ancient book. We have all very simply known this moment told here. A moment of peace when we hear something greater than ourselves.

    And that leads to another observation. The first sounds heard in the creation story are not big thunderbolt superhero sounds but quiet sounds. Definitely sounds that cannot be heard if you are making a lot of noise. They are sounds requiring your silence and attending to the sights and sounds of the real world around you.

    To see and hear beyond Genesis

    Some people think of God as outside reality. Rosy glasses stuff. But a close reading of the earliest writings show God rooted in reality. Demanding us to look at and listen to all of creation in its realness. There is never a time for covering our eyes or plugging our ears and yet, the rest of the Bible records us doing just that.

    Take a deep dive with someone you know. The Bible is many things to many people. Which is the beauty of this old, old collection of testaments to the challenge and amazement of being a one-off human being. The Bible passes from hand to hand across human time and human space.

    Share, with the hope that a story in the Bible will be a stepping stone to seeing and hearing another person’s insights into the questions the Bible demands that we ask.

    Check out another posting on what the Bible says about seeing:

    Amos 8:1-2 Looking deeper at America

    Read blog posts on other action words of the Bible