Exodus 17:1-7
So you go ahead and trust faith, trust it enough to go into the wilderness having left behind everything you are familiar with. You are doing this in the name of God. You've got good reason to trust God's closest representative because in the recent past he's got you out of Egypt and crossed a sea and provided manna and quail and come up trumphs most of the time. This faith thing is going quite well. In fact you might take it up seriously yourself.
But there is the small problem of water in this wilderness. There is never enough and, you know, come to think on it, you were better off as a slave. You had food, you had water, you had shelter, you were slaves but you were fat slaves. Here, God's freedom is a bit lean. We've got enough, just enough and sometimes hardly that. Freedom isn't all it is cracked up to be. The writer Brueggemann says that given God's lean promise of liberty, they chose the fatness of slavery.
Gaining the freedom that kingdom justice brings doesn't seem to mean getting all that you materially had before and then some. God's freedom works in a different way: it is an invitation to receive justice and then live justly/sustainably with each other, with the land and with God. Freedom is an equation: Freedom = receive justice + live justly.
Freedom is a lean existence, a sustainable existence: to live sustainably with all you have been given the freedom to enjoy. Otherwise you aren't free. If it isn't a sustainable relationship with the land, with each other or with God then you are back in a relationship of dependence again. And that's not freedom, not justice. It's slavery once more.
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