One of the treasures of having
lived in Speedway over the last 25 years has been the opportunity to reflect with
Professor Gerald Janzen, a brilliant Anglican scholar from Canada, who has been
a fixture at Christian Theological Seminary for years.
In his commentary on
Exodus Janzen tells the story of his teenage son coming down to the kitchen
late one morning, groggy from too much sleep. The youngster opened the
refrigerator and started complaining about why there was never anything for
breakfast. When told that it was nearly
lunch time, he returned to the fridge and replied,
“Oh, well, I will look
again under a different pretext.”
When the Israelites found
themselves victims of oppression in Egypt, they began crying out for help. But the fertility god of their nomadic
ancestors didn’t seem relevant to their new situation in a sophisticated,
beaurocratic state. Wanting a liberator,
Israel felt it had outgrown the God of nursemaids.
A similar experience has
befallen many Americans. Recently I
spoke with Krista Tippet, now the host of the religious National Public Radio
program, On Being. She says that at one time the God of her
rural Oklahoma upbringing made no sense to her.
Many Americans, likewise, have closed the refrigerator door on Christianity
because it is not serving up their kind of breakfast.
God’s response in such
situations is to reveal himself as Yahweh, which means “I will be who I will
be.” It turns out the God of ancestral
tradition was much broader than what Israel’s assumptions about God had
allowed. God was free to defeat Pharaoh
and send bread from heaven, which the Israelites needed, but which they had not
yet learned to crave. Yet, this God of
self-sustaining Fire refuses to be carved, in the image of his people’s breakfast
appetites.
God’s invitation is for
us to open the door again to ancestral Wisdom, this time under a different
pretext. We may discover in that storehouse what our grandparents once saw, and
experience with surprising freshness, that it is now time for a heavenly lunch for
which we thought we were not looking.
