Exodus: Reflections of a 24 Year Old Seminarian

I have already written one note touching on my short lived experience at the Episcopalian seminary of Nashotah House, a thirty mile car drive from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One day I will get around to writing the whole story of what happened there during a brief and very painful stay in the fall of 1975. Until then, let this reflection paper, the only paper I ever wrote and the only grade I ever got during my very brief stay at Nashotah House, speak for the left wing religious idealism of my youth, which also reflects the Zeitgeist in which I came of age. 

The reflection paper:

The saga of Exodus has stirred my imagination since I first heard as a child of those crucial events in the story of a people. Although I no longer understand it in quite the same way as DeMille depicted it, the story has become one of the focal points for the way in which I respond to the Christian message. 

The central fact of Exodus is a personal God who cares for and is involved with His people. "I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt... I have known their sufferings and have come to deliver them." Here speaks a God of liberation, in this case, from political as well as spiritual bondage. Throughout Exodus, He initiates the liberation of a politically and spiritually oppressed people. 

Exodus speaks very personally to me, for I understand God, on one level, as a personal God who cares, who will not tolerate injustice and who acts through spiritually perceptive people to eradicate oppression, in whatever form that may take. The bondage of the Hebrews was two-fold, political and spiritual, and God's actions on behalf of them speak to both forms of slavery. 

After He restores their human dignity by freeing them from slavery, God reveals to His people ways by which they could unfold spiritually. From my own perspective, I would like to integrate the Church's traditions of the mystical and the prophetic into a theology that is both spiritually and socially liberating. It is Exodus' underlying motif of a God who acts, "He causes to be," in human history to promote freedom that I find most appealing about Exodus.

Exodus also raises serious questions for me, as a Christian, which I have not yet resolved. In order to free the Hebrews, God performs violent acts. After reading of death and destruction, I painfully ask myself what role, if any, violence might play for us today, whenever we are faced with an obvious evil oppression. Living in a liberal democratic society, which allows room within the system for cultural (r)evolution, the question does not torture me greatly. However, if I lived in a repressive totalitarian system, could I resort to violence as a tool for liberation? Although I doubt it was through a series of direct quotations, I am convinced that God inspired Moses. Exodus makes me grapple once again with the question of violence in the process of human liberation. How would God work through a contemporary Moses in Chile or South Africa? I do not have an answer, but I see Exodus speaking to the question of political liberation as directly as the resurrection speaks to the question of spiritual liberation. 

The love and concern of God for His people inspired me in many places in Exodus. His acts on behalf of His people are summed up poetically in what for me is the most beautiful statement about God in Exodus. 

"Who is like thee, oh Lord, among the gods?
Who is like thee, majestic in holiness
terrible in glorious deeds, doing wonders?"

"Thou hast led in thy stead fast love
the people whom thou hast redeemed
Thou hast guided them by thy
strength to thy holy abode."

That these magnificent lines can be in the same book as: "Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death" offends me. When I came to Exodus 21 in my reading, I felt that the inspiration of God ceased and man's mind completely took over. To quote God directly as the giver of such laws made me angry.* 

I found Exodus 25-40 interesting in general. I was very excited by the theme of the tangibles by which we respond to the Holy. However, it did become boring to read all the details. Then again, the underlying theme of what place, what clothes, and what symbols we use to respond to the Holy was fascinating for me. It spoke to me personally, because my religion features symbols which help mediate the presence of God to me and the gestures which I feel, in some small way, must mediate to Him the absolute awe and humility I feel as I come before His love and majesty, the source of all creation. Even man's eternal donning of "elegant plumage" to confront God is evident in, "They shall receive gold, blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine twined linen..."

I was inspired, baffled, bored, and angered by the book of Exodus, but it did most definitely speak to my faith. A personal God who loves us and who acts in human history is central to my understanding of the Gospel. I received this great truth from Exodus. To know this truth, which underlies all the sometimes funny, sometimes sad details of Exodus is to know that I must continue the joy and struggle of following our Lord. 

*In the professor's only comment, save for his final one, he underlined this sentence and noted, "It would be helpful to look more at WHY?"

The professor's second and final comment: "A fine paper! Thank you." I got an A. :-)


In front of the chapel

By the lake on campus I was told that Nashotah is an Indian word meaning "land between two lakes," but my memory might be faulty!