Gathering Growing Going
What kind of ‘saviour’, what kind of ‘deliverer’, do God’s people need? The need for their deliverance is not in doubt – by the end of Exodus 1, God’s people are oppressed by the profoundly anti-life forces of those arrayed against God (who is fundamentally pro-life and good). In slavery, with the lives of their children threatened, God’s people need a deliverer. And the implication is that they need a deliverer who is mighty and magnificent. We meet Moses – a baby, threatened, remarkably saved, taken into Pharaoh’s household. And we are meant to notice his uniqueness, but his confused cultural heritage is problematic. As he reaches mature adulthood, our hopes are raised… but then he moved progressively away from his people, to the margins of society, and rejected by his own. What kind of deliverer is this? But it is the parallel ‘seeing’ of God that returns our hopes to the right place. Moses has potential but it is God who is powerful, because of his promises. In this way, Moses is both a tie to what God has already done (a people created by him) and the shadowy template for the Saviour still to come.
Reformation Sunday—the Anabaptists There is so much that we enjoy as a wider society, and as a church, that we take for granted. The whole idea of the nation-state, the process of liberal-democracy, the wonderful privilege of religious freedom, accessibility to information, education, a free-market economy, the Bible in English...and all of these privileges can be traced to the Reformation. This cataclysmic event of the 1500s was really the climax of a long period of fermentation, and it’s consequences remain vitally active—and debated—even today. Within the Reformation, there is a wing that has been labelled ‘the radical reformation’. And within that wing, there is a group that was pejoratively described as ‘the Anabaptists’ - the ‘rebaptisers’. There is much about this group that I love, and which we can applaud and agree with—their wholehearted view of Jesus and God’s word and making decisions in line with that, and their embracing of the notion that the church is on the outside. But there is also much that is problematic … and today we will be looking at the Anabaptists.
‘I will sing the wondrous story’ is one of my favourite Christian hymns. In the second verse it has lines that capture the truth of so much of our experience as God’s mob: ‘Days of darkness still may meet me, sorrow’s path I oft may tread’. For anyone of God’s mob, those words ring true – and even more so when the very promises of God – and our good obedience to them – have led us to such a situation. In fact, Jesus could have sung those lines at any moment. God’s mob, at the start of Exodus, could sing those lines in a choir of slavery. But, F.H. Rowley knew the truth of God’s word – perhaps even Exodus 1 itself. That is why the lines just quoted are paired with these lines: ‘but his presence still is with me, by his guiding hand I’m led’. God is not absent in those moments – the continuity and unity of his promises guarantee us of this. Moreover, his presence is not passive but active – and so, in Exodus 1, we have the great battlelines made clear, and God’s people assured. The salvation, and the triumph, is about to unfold!* *Credit to Alec Motyer (‘The Message of Exodus (Bible Speaks Today commentary)) for making this connection for me.
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