KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 24 October
Because God is God!
There is all the difference in the world between regulation and legislation. The first binds and confines, the second liberates and enables. The phrase ‘being over-regulated and under-governed’ refers to the first in the absence of the second. Much is made of our ‘rule-based’ international or global world. But does that mean rule by law or the rule of law? Another important distinction.
In Chapel we have gone from the stories of the Fall and the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis to the Exodus with the revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush and the giving of the Law, the Ten Commandments. They provide a powerful way to reclaim the ethical imagination and its truth even for our post-truth world. The story of God’s revelation to Moses leads to the revelation of God’s will and purpose for our humanity universally considered. The Ten Commandments are the moral code for our thinking and doing. They are not simply something arbitrarily and dogmatically given but provide a comprehensive way of thinking about the dignity and truth of our humanity. They encompass the whole range of human thinking and doing. They speak about the nature of our relation to God, to one another, and to creation, and even to ourselves in our self-awareness. In that sense, they connect with the theme of our awakening to self-consciousness explored through the stories of the Fall and of Cain and Abel.
Most profoundly, they are about liberation. Our human freedom and dignity is not just in being liberated from what constrains, limits, or enslaves our hearts and minds but what we are liberated to – our being with God and one another in love and service. The Prayer Book Collect for Peace expresses this concisely: “O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.” If we think of freedom only in terms of freedom from, negative liberty, as Isaiah Berlin called it, then we forget the more powerful and more liberating form of positive liberty, our being freed to an end and purpose which confers dignity and real freedom.
“I am the Lord thy God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”, introduces the Law. It looks back to the revelation of God to Moses in the Burning Bush who identifies himself in two ways: The God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob – a form of tribal or familial identity, on the one hand, and I Am Who I Am – as the universal principle of the being and knowing of all things, on the other hand. The bush burns but is not consumed, signifying that this is not something natural. It reveals what is beyond the natural as its principle through God speaking to Moses. This is the idea of revelation: something being made known to us rather than something which we discover on our own. Yet what is made known to us tells us something about ourselves as intellectual and spiritual beings. Creation, too, is used in this novel way to point us to what is beyond creation, the Creator. This complements rather than contradicts the order of creation which reveals ‘the Mind of the Maker’ as Dorothy L. Sayers wonderfully puts it. Hearing and seeing are the two most intellectual of our physical senses which are commonly used to mean what we understand.