4/24/2005

A.J. Muste on the Passover story:
What was the sign that God had come? It was a bush that burned and burned and did not stop burning. Moses had had a fire kindled in his heart once, but it went out, or at least died down. God is the Being whose heart does not stop burning, in whom the flame does not die down. What was God all burned up about? The voice that came out of the bush said, 'I have seen the affliction of my people that are in Egypt and have heard their cry by reason of their oppressors.' It was the physical, economic, and spiritual suffering, the injustice, the degradation to which actual people were subjected here on earth, that caused God concern. And the proof that God had entered into Moses, and that Moses had really been 'converted,' was that he had to go back and identify himself with his enslaved people— 'organize them into Brickmakers' Union Number One'—and lead them out of hunger and slavery into freedom and into 'a good land, and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey.' At the head of the Ten Commandments stand these great words: 'I am the Lord thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the slave-house. Thou shalt have no other God before me'—before this God who is in the hearts of his prophets as the Eternal Flame that will not let them rest where there is injustice and inequality until these have been done away with and men set about building God’s House instead of the slave-house. To be religious, the Hebrews discovered, is to get out of Egypt into Canaan; to refuse to be slaves or contented draft-horses; to build brotherhood in freedom -- because that is what men , the children of God, were created to do! And religious leaders are those who identify themselves with the oppressed, so that men may carry out this, their true mission in the world.”

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