Five Minute Friday • Rescue

Five Minute Fridays

It's been called a flash mob! Most Thursdays Kate our host publishes a one word prompt with a small image and then dozens to a couple hundred write to the prompt. The linkup party stays open seven days—until the next Thursday! If you haven't played yet, we'd love you to join us.

• Five Minute Friday Rescue Linkup

Anamnesis from Eucharistic Prayer

You are indeed holy, O God, the fountain of all holiness;
you bring light from darkness, life from death, speech from silence.

We worship you for our lives and for the world you give us.
We thank you for the new world which will come
and for the love that will rule all in all.

We praise you for the grace shown to Israel, your chosen,
the people of your promise:
the rescue from Egypt,
the gift of the promised land,
the memory of the ancestors,
the homecoming from exile,
and the prophets' words that will not be in vain.

• With One Voice, ©1995 AugsburgFortress

Taking Five…

"If you obey the Lord your God, blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field." Deuteronomy 28:2-3

"…the rescue from Egypt, the gift of the promised land…"

The rescue from slavery, liberation from empire with its incessant production quotas and deadly objectification of everything. From bondage into freedom, and then? The grace-filled gift of the commands to help us stay free. After they left Egypt, the history of Israel became the story of their journey toward a land where they could settle, obey, live, farm, and thrive—a quest and a hope for flowing rivers and boundless goodness from the ground.

After they crossed the river Into Canaan, Israel would keep covenant with the God who rescued them and with each other by regarding their neighbors' needs as important as their own. They no longer depended on what they could eke out of the dregs of a system that disproportionately rewarded those who already had a lot and offered almost nothing to anyone who didn't. They didn't even depend any more on God's provision of manna and quail from the sky, water from the rock. As a sign of trusting freedom they'd keep Sabbath: a ceasing from striving, from work, from quotas.

You may know scripture has two versions of the Ten Words or Commandments of the Sinai Covenant? The one in Deuteronomy says we keep Shabbat because God freed us from slavery. In my featured verse from Deuteronomy, the land of promise would yield, the city would flourish if the people obeyed.

I opened this blog with the remembrance or anamnesis from a late twentieth-century Eucharistic prayer. Like the blessing and invocation over baptismal water, the anamnesis in a service of holy communion brings all God's people together to remember the past, celebrate this now, and anticipate the new world that will be when love rules all in all. We tell the salvation story in order to make it part of our own stories. We remember and retell the story so (just maybe) we won't need to be rescued again?

That's all for this time. # # #