Exodus Like Cecil B. Demille Never Imagined It And Wouldn't Have Wanted You To Either

You might have noticed I have recently started slamming the entire enterprise of inventing, developing, promoting, converting people to and enforcing adherence to those wildly popular and wildly contradicting secular, academic, "theoretical" substitution for religion, ideologies.   I had, long ago, before I started using my name online called myself "olvlzl no-ist no-ism" but I really hadn't developed my understanding of "-ists" and "-isms" to the point that I realized it was central to my increasing skepticism of modernism in general and secularism in particular.  "olvlzl" meant nothing, it was just a series of random characters that showed up in a captur verification that I liked the looks of, something I grew tired of explaining when asked.

I was doing the dishes, listening to a sermon given by Walter Brueggemann in which, talking about the story of Moses and Aaron trying to force Pharaoh to let the Children of Israel go by bringing plagues to the Egyptians, after pointing out that the plague of gnats was one that Pharaoh's scientific establishment was not able to duplicate with their magician's technology,  pointing out with that failure that the power structure of Egypt had thus been exposed as incapable of . . .  Well, he said it better than I can:

And what the Bible is all about is the endless discovery that the dominant political, economic, technological system cannot deliver security and cannot deliver happiness. 

And, I don't now, that's what we're discovering now.   We're discovering that the political economy in which all of us have been invested cannot make us safe and cannot make us happy.  

So the Gospel question is to whom shall we go.  And Yahweh is a candidate. 

And so what I mean to suggest is that the this liturgy, this contest [of who can make the plagues happen] is endlessly being replayed in the world.  And we are, all of us, tempted to imagine that the centers of power and wealth and wisdom will make us happier and safer and every time we're disappointed. 

And a more radical statement I have not encountered since I finished reading Good Pope Francis' Fratelli Tutti.  Here's Walter Brueggemann's entire sermon. 

You will notice that those things that will inevitably disappoint us are the products of "wisdom" of what the smart guys around us dream up that is supposed to explain everything and bring us to an optimal situation, what most of the popular ideologies does. Though some of them are too individual for that, those mostly make those who adopt them feel happy through cynicism or pessimism or solipsism, either a solipsism of existence or what solipsists don't admit to, of restricting the scope of their tender concern to themselves.  There's a lot of that going round, whether they know the word or, more likely, don't have a clue. We are ruled by one of those.