Exodus is both an ancient story and a contemporary one. The book within the Torah called Exodus is the epic narrative of God's deliverance of the children of Israel that continues to speak to all who wander, seek, or flee. It is the story of a larger gospel of Missio Dei-the work or mission of God. The center, or subject and object, is with YHWH moving ahead, leading, calling, and summoning. Through Exodus we read of Israel's experience as part of the greater story of God at work in creation.
In the book of Exodus, we read of the LORD God working through the particular people called Israel to bring about liberation and deliverance and along the way we read of wanderings, apostasy, grumblings, and restoration. This is a story about a particular people in a particular time. And yet, it is also a story for all people groaning, murmuring, wandering, and searching for God to remember, direct, and work in their lives.
God is still at work in this world, from one generation to the next, in a mission of liberation and redemption. We are invited to join with God in that holy enterprise. In joining God, we also recognize our own need for liberation and redemption, as well as our call in and to a world of dislocation. Walter Brueggemann writes of the Exodus story, "...it provides for us the essential characters and the recurring plot that is always being performed and re-performed in the world." (Truth Speaks to Power (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), 16.)
In Exodus, we witness a "contextualization" of the good news of God speaking to weakness and power, to enslavement and liberation, to deliverance and inheritance. As witnesses, we listen for our call of God, see the dislocation of our world, and re-imagine what could be. This work inevitably involves its own kind of wilderness wandering along with failures, sin, and broken faith. Yet YHWH invites us back into covenant and restoration as we move forward into a world broken and waiting.
The Latin term missio dei, the work of God, provides an interpretive framing of the sermons based on Exodus. Lesslie Newbigin and later Alan Roxburgh challenged the church to move from an ecclesiastically-centered mission to catching up to where God is already at work. As such, just as God was at work in the Exodus narrative and in the hearing and telling of it, God is also at work in our world today. The role of the community of faith is to discover how and where God is working and to join with God in that holy endeavor.