There’s something about othering people that feels so good. It’s just nice to know that there are some bad people in the world and those people are not us! It gives us the freedom to sort of assume all sorts of bad motivations and poor character without having to really know them. We see this all the time in the political arena as well as in the religious arena.

So can God do something that God hates - is that even possible?

In Dr. Tracey Shenell’s remarkable sermon yesterday, she addressed head on the question of whether God hates those who divorce their spouses. It was refreshing to hear her own honesty of struggling with preconceived notions of what marriage is and the shame that followed her divorce.

It’s a poem. It’s a breathing exercise. It’s a chance to reconnect with yourself, your world, and your God.

Anger is a tricky thing, isn’t it? It’s so easy NOT to do the hard work of interrogating our anger. It feels so much better to let it out. But if we did stop and ask our anger a few questions, we might do a lot better in our relationships.

The people of Israel, with their backs up against the wall, start asking some really big questions: Is God with us or not? Sure, they’ve been delivered from the last crisis, but is Yahweh the God who can deliver them from the next crisis?

Many of us who grew up religious were taught not to test God. We were told that if we doubted God’s promises or questioned God’s handling of a situation, that we were like Satan in the wilderness testing Jesus and that God would be very angry with us.

In the passage we looked at yesterday, God brought the people to a spot in the middle of the desert where there was no water. Before you try to make up any excuses for God, just sit with this passage. Imagine the sights and smells, the heat and the hopelessness - really let yourself feel it.

The death metal band Every Time I Die has some remarkable lyrics about the journey towards discovering ourselves. When looking inside, too often we find that we are parts of a system of injustice, and it feels so much easier not to look…

So how about us - what is it that guides our approach to the Bible? Certainly we each come to scripture with certain assumptions, making the text fit some way of seeing things.

Kat Armas writes about how those who have been marginalized have a better chance of correctly interpreting the bible’s passages about oppressed people than those who come at the text from privilege (see her keen insights beneath this devotional). Because of their lived experiences, they understand the actual lives and issues of those in the Bible in parallel circumstances.

The people of Israel had been enslaved and worked to the bone and treated ruthlessly. They’d cried out to God, and God was in the process of answering. God sent Moses to face off with Pharaoh and to demand change, to demand freedom.

What if Miriam’s fierce, embodied, liberating joy echoes God’s own? Perhaps it shows us a different picture of who God is - not proper & orderly, tame or quiet - loud, exuberant, flowing through every piece of her being.

This week we’ve been considering our insecurity and looking underneath the hood of our souls to see what’s really inside. Turns out, the journey of self-discovering is a sacred trek, a holy enterprise. And it can be frightening as well as releasing.

Jesus taught us to pray “on earth as in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). So if we have complete self-knowledge in heaven (1 Cor 13:12), doesn’t that naturally mean we should pray for it and work towards it now? Yes!!!!

There are key moments in our lives when we realize just how awesome God is. Maybe it’s a sunset or an answered prayer or a time of reflection on our lives, but in that moment everything is clear and obvious: God is God and we are not.

I believe that we are all on some level, prophets, women and men, and that all prophets are reluctant prophets. - Mirabai Starr

When God came to Moses and invited him to join in rescuing the people from oppression in Egypt, Moses responded by saying, ““Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” ( Exodus 3:11). He just didn’t feel up to it.