The people of Israel were freed from slavery to the Egyptians, and led to a Promised Land, so they would be able to live in the world as people of God – a witness to all the world of how human life is to be lived. But all they knew was slavery and the power of oppression and domination; how would they not just replicate that kind of society themselves when they reached the Promised Land and took charge of it? So along the way, from the fearsome heights of Mt. Sinai, through Moses God instructs them in a different way of being in the world – a way that we know as the Ten Commandments.
(The liturgy for this Sunday included the baptism of a son born to one of our member families.)
When
Jacqueline, Ed and I first met to talk about today’s baptism of Callaghan –
what it’s about and when it might happen, we wondered about whether celebrating
a baptism is the kind of thing to be doing in Lent.
Lent
is a time of confession, renunciation and purification of our souls. It’s a forty-day journey of self-examination
on our way to sharing in the death of Jesus to be able to share in his
resurrection. Not exactly conducive to
celebrating new life, giving thanks for another bouncing baby boy born into the
hubbub of the household, and throwing a party to get all the family together to
toast the new arrival.
But
then, babies aren’t always a piece of cake, are they? And family is not always happy and joyful –
not always an easy thing to celebrate, is it?
Family,
like Lent, can test and try our souls. And
sometimes it’s exactly the disciplines of confession, renunciation and
purification – things that can feel like death at times, that are needed for us
to find the new life we look for at the end of the day.
In
many ways, being family day after day and year after year is not unlike the
forty-year journey of the people of Israel through the wilderness.
Just
like the people of Israel on their journey from Egypt, there are things we try
to escape and hope to leave far behind us – things we often feel enslaved to,
that rob us of the kind of life we long for in our family, and doom us to unhappiness
and emptiness in our life together.
Some
of the threats come from inside us – individual traits, inherited patterns of
behaviour, our own particular clusters of unresolved fear and anxiety, a need
for control, mistrust, pride, or difficulty in sharing feelings and being
vulnerable that over and over undermine the kind of family life we really want
together. Like the people of Israel on
their way from Egypt none of us all there yet; we too are all a bit of a work
in progress, needing to be willing to grow and be changed.
And other
threats come from outside. For Israel,
it was Egypt and other empires they would come into contact with, who would
force on them ways of being and thinking that would not really serve them well or
help either them or the rest of the world around them to be the way they were
created to be.
And for
us? Our culture’s values and
expectations of what we need to have, what we need to do, what we need to
sacrifice to be counted as good or successful, are not always what’s best for
us and for the world, and not always the way to be truly happy and most deeply fulfilled.
Ahead
of us – as for the people of Israel, is a vision of a land flowing with milk
and honey – a land where some people already are, where they and their families
are happy and fulfilled, at peace and living full, purposeful and meaningful
lives. And we long to be there too – to
be like them.
But how
do we get there?
I think
I used to think it was just a matter of time – of just putting in the forty
years, of hanging in there no matter what, so that in the end you would just
somehow be where you want to be.
But as
I look at families I admire, and at what I am slowly learning to build into my
own home life – even this far on, I see the importance of something else along
the way. The importance of taking time
to stop a while together at the foot of Mt Sinai.
You
know, to get from Egypt to the Promised Land, the people of Israel didn’t need
to go past Mt Sinai. If you look at a
map and the most direct route that people of the time would have taken, Mt
Sinai is not on the way at all. Most
people did not go there. It was too
difficult, time-consuming and risky.
But
for the people of Israel to make the journey well, and really to be able to
enter the Promised Land as they wanted to, the detour to Mt Sinai was
absolutely necessary.
Because
that’s where together at the foot of Mt Sinai’s terrible height, they got to
know God as ultimate authority and highest power in all the world and in all
things. That’s where things got put into
perspective for them, and they were able to detach and get some distance from
the power of the cultures around them.
That’s where they learned to see what’s really important, face up to their
own shortcomings and dysfunctions, and find a way beyond the things that hurt
their life together.
That’s
where they learned to be free of what enslaved them, so they could live
together and with other people in healthy and holy ways. That’s where they found their way into the
kind of open and honest, meaningful and purposeful, mutually respectful and
supportive life that life in the promised land is all about. That’s where they really became not just
another family on the face of the Earth getting from A to B, but a family of
God learning to live the kind of life we all long to know and enjoy.
If we
really want to get from where we are to where we want to be, time at Mt Sinai
is important – to get off the well-worn path that the world knows so well, to
take the time and trouble to remember God, to commit to God’s ways, to learn to
trust in God’s good will to take care of us, to confront our own shortcomings
and dysfunctions, and in that openness and honesty to find the freedom to live
in more healthy relation with one another and with others around us.
And
just what that means – just how you make time for Mt Sinai in your journey as a
family, I don’t know. How each of us day
after day and year after year makes time for Mt Sinai in our homes and our
families, who am I to say?
That’s
something all of us need to work out, and work at for ourselves.
Except,
I’m sure there are ways we can help one another with it … if we only take the
time and trouble … and the risk, to talk about it together.
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