Garrison Keillor once said that ‘writing and story telling is always about the particular’. Life is in the details. The incidentals. The fairway is for heroics; most of life is lived in the weeds.
Two weeks ago, we heard a sermon that wondered, aloud, if there really were plagues (10 of them, Exodus 7 – 11) that eventually got the Egyptian pharaoh to throw the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt in total exasperation, or at the least, to let them go. Whether or not there were such plagues and whether God really did kill all the firstborn sons as the last ‘tipping point’ plague … wasn’t really the pastor’s point. She wasn’t trying to convince us of anything, except to say there is a lot going on in that story.
Moses is the hero but really, many events and many people formed part of making things happen. Early on, when the pharaoh first notices there are too many Hebrews in the land, it’s the midwives who defied the pharaoh to save the newborn boys. Pharaoh’s own daughter breaks rank to save a Hebrew boy. Miriam, Moses’ mother cleverly colludes with pharaoh’s daughter to raise Moses. He grows up and at one point his wife, Zipporah, saves his life in an odd attack by an angel. What!?! Also, there’s Aaron, Moses’ eventual side kick and voice. And Moses’ own earlier record as a murderer, along with his later reluctance to get involved in pushing into any kind of hope for his people. Serious self doubt. God has to convince him. There are layers!
Another of the pastor’s points was the chaos in which this all happened and how, eventually, evil and abuse fall in on themselves. But in the midst of all that, she said the writers of Exodus wanted the generations who follow to know that God chooses them, chooses us and that after the chaos there is a re-creation. There is an arc in human history towards resurrection and towards goodness and order. Evil is overcome. Everything bends that way eventually, a narrative the entire Bible seems pointed toward … but so much happens along the way.
On first reading, Exodus is just a great Charlton Hesston kind of giant intervention story. The waters part, evil is drowned and new beginnings have a chance. But then there are all those other things that happen. Most of them contribute to the story but really, why did Zipporah have to intervene to save Moses in that unlikely attack? And the circumcision on the spot? Maybe the writers stuck that in there to remind us that life is unpredictable and sometimes just plain weird. Like that!
Kathy and I lived in Bolivia three different times. Each time, several years. In the early/mid 70s. The mid 80s. And 5 years in the 90s. Particularly in the 90s, when we stayed longer, I sometimes wondered about our earlier two terms. In my first term, before we were married, I taught school. I learned a lot but this was also about just plain survival. Language. Some culture. How to get around. Basic stuff of how to live in a rural village where running water was the nearest stream. And how not to mess up too much. In the 80s we had Ryan (born prematurely) so we learned to navigate the medical systems and urban living. Survival was probably the thing even more so than it was in our earlier years there.
By the 90s we had settled down into some kind of family life, church, school for the kids, work, travel, and daily interactions with Bolivians who became our friends. Not just school or health system authorities, but people we were with at work and whom we often saw after work and weekends. What we did every day became more common to what they did as well. So when I think of Bolivia these days, I find myself thinking less about the work we did, and more about the people we know, the interesting and the routine stuff that you can’t really put into a slide show.
Last week, in a visit at a farm home, our host talked about a church split that happened 22 years ago here in Alberta. I had heard about how this new church had begun, soon after it happened. It made sense. A not uncommon disagreement among leadership about what kind of church they wanted to be, and the one side deciding it was better to move out. So, they did. But when I asked about it last week, my friend said something else happened that precipitated the separation. Something quite ordinary at an evening event over which there was some surprize, unexpected disagreement, and that led eventually to … an ‘irreconcilable difference’.
As I listened to his telling of the event itself, I wondered how often we read an account, including the Biblical ones, or a News Report, or we hear a story and we assume that now we know ‘the whole (rest of the) story, as Paul Harvey used to say it. Always, there’s more, some small detail no one thought worth including that might actually have contributed or even preciptated what happened.
All this to say that any story, any history, including the Bible, is an interpreted accounting. Writers write what they know or what they are told, in words they think capture the intent. Every story has people at center stage but also off to the sides, saying and doing things, engaging each other, influencing some part of the action, deliberately or not. The writer comes to us with what he or she has noticed, but there is stuff, left unsaid, and often, unknown. Does that make the text nonsense? No. But it helps me to be more curious about it.
The Bible is that … an invitation to curiosity. Not so much a recording as a teaching (said the pastor) and if we look for the incidentals, or even imagine them, it also becomes a book about us.
Messy Notes 