We all know we’re supposed to practice gratitude; what we can easily forget is just how good it is for us.

Remember that we are not left alone or without direction. Jesus’s words—those strange and gracious blessings—keep pointing the way to life, and Jesus promises to walk with us as we stumble along.

This was never just Moses’s story. It was always the story of freedom, far bigger than any one person, and when Moses’s chapter was finished, there were other chapters to be written.

it is often easier to spot God’s presence in our lives looking backward, tending to those places where an encounter, a phone call, a landscape, a book was in fact a vehicle for grace, a gift we profoundly needed

We want answers, and when they don’t come on our timeline, we can get restless. We can grow weary of waiting, and we can find ourselves trading the living God for something more manageable.

Freedom is the thread running through all the commandments—even, and maybe especially, when it comes to the one about rest.

Preached in the English-Speaking Congregation of the ELCG on 27 September 2020.

Yes, Moses is telling the Israelites to stand firm and not run away. But he’s also calling them to much more than that.

That’s what good and meaningful rituals do: help a community to remember, in the fullest sense of that word.

Moses’s story gives us another angle for looking at the question of home, of identity, of where we belong. Moses, the perpetual stranger, finally finds his home in the calling of God, and in the profound relationship it opens up for him.