As we’ve thought about the question this week, “Who speaks for God?” it might be good to end with some simple reminders.

Jesus had a strange habit of lifting up children as the kind of people we should imitate. And he thought that a pagan Roman centurion had more faith than anyone in the nation of Israel.

Often we think of religious leaders as speaking for God. Often we look for their approval or ask them for advice. And so many times they’ve given it (sometimes without us asking!).

Being part of God’s covenant family gives a sense of groundedness, stability and love. And it’s free.

God spoke this promise to the people of Israel: they would be special. As priests, they would play a role in blessing the whole world. This was the corporate fulfillment of what God had spoken to Abraham generations before: “All peoples on earth will be blessed by you” (Yahweh to Abraham in Genesis 12:3). This promise complicated because it can be both dangerous and excellent.

Three reflections on lament today. See what strikes you.

In order to stay present to the Spirit, sometimes it’s helpful to look at things with a fresh perspective. Consider that ancient Hebrew had no punctuation marks. The means the phrases of this poem could be combined in slightly different ways.

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.