Today's passage is Ezra 2:1-60.
Ezra records a list of the exiles returning. He names the villages the people and the priests or their ancestors were from. He lists the descendants of the singers, the gatekeepers, the temple servants, and the servants of Solomon. He lists people who claimed descent but couldn't show their families belonged to Israel.
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When I first started reading Bible I skipped lists like this. I couldn't see the point.
It bothered me that there were so many in the Bible.
How could lists be the word of God?
I was just like the disciples when they had to feed thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish.
They said they couldn't do it. And when Jesus showed them how to do it, they still couldn't make sense out of it.
My mind and my spirit were those loaves and those fish, grossly inadequate before the job of interpreting lists of people I didn't recognize and numbers that were random.
For seven years Pastor Kim kept showing me the key but I didn't recognize it and couldn't fit it into my locked mind.
The key is redemption history and the lock is my life that needs to be interpreted by the words of God's redemptive history on the day that I read them.
Lists and numbers.
My life is full of lists and full of numbers that I have to make sense of.
I can no more dismiss the lists of my ancestors, my church members, my classmates, my co-workers, the people in my apartment building, apartment complex, city, and country than I can dismiss my national registration number or my passport.
They are all part of who I am, pieces of my identity, however temporary or fleeting I may think they are.
Anyone competent with a computer can generate thousands of pages of lists about me.
Websites I've vistited, things I've bought, jobs I've had, taxes I've paid, trips I've gone on.
My modern identity is revealed as lists that anyone can search and make use of.
These lists help me see myself more objectively and less subjectively.
They help me become more aware of who I am.
And the more I become objectively aware of myself, the more I'm able to see my sins for what they are---sins.
Ten thousand visits to a porno site cannot be called anything but a sin. Unpaid taxes and debts are sins.
Today's passage of lists shows me the importance of lists and numbers.
They help me accept my circumstances.
In verses 59-60, people who claim to be Jews are excluded because they can't prove it.
Have of my ancestors came from Ireland and Scotland, the other half from Poland.
But I have no definitive records to prove that well enough to get Irish or Polish citizenship.
All I have are a birth certificate and baptism certificate from Canada.
I cannot be a citizen of any other country except Canada, and even if I could, there would still be the list of my Canadian passports for the last forty-five years.
One of my duties as school principal is to visit my teachers while they are teaching.
To do this in an appropriate manner I need to make a list of who I visit and when and what they did.
Tomorrow I will make that schedule, begin those visits and keep in mind that God's love is in these lists too.
