12/11/2025
You may have heard the phrase “God just didn’t need to get Israel out of Egypt, God needed to get Egypt out of Israel.” Israel had been in Egypt for hundreds of years. It was shaped by its values, whether it knew it or not. God leading Israel through the wilderness was a way of reestablishing relationship with the community and invite it to embody the ways of God over Egypt. The same is true for John’s call in the wilderness. To get people out of the ways of empire and get the ways of empire out of them, while proclaiming the kingdom of God.
Ben Cremer
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If I had been one of those people
Enslaved by Pharaoh in Egypt
Would I have wanted to leave
The comfortable pain of slavery
Why exchange one misery
Well known
For the unknown
My option would have been the wilderness
Bleak and stark
Dry and unyielding
Dangerous
Would I have had the courage
To have stepped across the threshold
Into a whole new way of doing life?
If I had been a shepherd
Called out of the fields by angel fire
Driven to the side of a birth bed
Wonder what it was all about
Would I have gone on my way rejoicing?
Would that visit into
The odd and confusing
Change me, shake my world?
Or would I have quickly slipped back
Into my old patterns
And stolidly, without hope
Gone back to watching sheep
What do I do
When Sacred comes calling
And says “follow me!”
How do I forget the past things
And press forward?
How do I step boldly into the unknown
How do I step free from the funeral strips
That bind me?
Failure, fear, betrayal
My sickness unto death?
How do I leave behind
The relative comfort of the tomb
That grave I have dug for myself (Bolz-Weber)
I so want to follow
But I keep looking back
at what is familiar,
at my old comfortable places
and my old privileges.
Why do I always want to go back to Egypt
Why am I anxious to leave the child
And hurry back to my fields
It is so easy to forget
The angel that passes over
The angels that sing
I take the old with me
Into the wilderness
Egypt clings to me
Like the soft, damp dirt of the grave
I leave a trail of funeral strips behind me
A trail of dirt
Only slowly it seems
Leaving the old world behind
Glancing back, all too often
What lies ahead is vague
Wild
Scary
A dry and empty land where there is no water
I cannot blame those shepherds for going back to their sheep
I cannot condemn the murmuring of the people
I too
Linger
Stuck between two worlds
Between two selves
God, help me leave the old behind
All of it!
You may give some of the old back. You may not
It doesn’t matter
I must be cleaned out
Emptied
So I can stumble through the wilderness
To the promised land
So I can leave the side of the child
Rejoicing
So I can live free
And go where you lead me
