(Devotion by Graeme Harrison)
Prayer:
For strength through the day
Great Bunji God,
you sent your Son Jesus
to be our Saviour, our Guide and our Friend.
At the dawn of this new day
we pray for strength to follow in his steps,
and to be true witnesses for him
among our people who love the great earth mother,
your gift to them from the dreamtime.
We pray for all people of all countries,
that they may become one great family
with Jesus as Saviour.
As we come to the evening of this day,
may we go to our rest in the quiet hours of the night
knowing that, in spite of our human weaknesses,
we have truly walked with Jesus.
This prayer we offer in the name of Jesus,
our Good Friend. Aralba.
(Bunji is an Aboriginal word for Father.
Aralba means: I have spoken from my heart.)
Revd Lazarus Lamilami, 1910-1977,
the first ordained Aboriginal minister
of the Uniting Church
(Sourced from A Treasury of Prayers in Uniting in Worship, copyright 1988 Uniting Church in Australia)
Read:
Exodus 2:1-10. Read this 3 times, each time asking God’s help and thinking about those words or phrases that leap out at you.
The Birth of Moses
1Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, 2 and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. 3 But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. 4 His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.
5 Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. 6 She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she said.
7 Then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?”
8 “Yes, go,” she answered. So the girl went and got the baby’s mother. 9 Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” So the woman took the baby and nursed him. 10 When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.”
(Exodus 2:1-10 NIV)
Thought for the Day:
Privileged people are quite unconscious of their part in wickedness and often confuse it for kindness. Moses was born of the Hebrew race who were being persecuted by the privileged and powerful Egyptians because they feared the growing population of the powerless Hebrew minority group. The Pharoah ordered the death of all male infants. The baby Moses was put in a basket in the pathetic hope he would be overlooked. Instead, Pharoah’s daughter found him. In an act of “kindness” for the endangered baby she “adopted” him and asked his birth mother to nurse him till he was old enough to be taken away. Moses was a “stolen child” and he always knew it.
Is your mind now drifting to our aboriginal brothers and sisters and the “kindness” they had to endure in this very nation in our lifetime? Privilege can never see its own use of power is obscene. No wonder Jesus said of his privileged persecutors, “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.”
Yet the story of God’s people is not defined by oppression but by how God sees them. They are precious and full of life and faith. The same applies to the First Peoples of this land. Through Jesus eyes they are not charity cases for “kindness” but precious peoples deserving of justice and respect. It is time we stopped looking through the eyes of the privileged and started looking through the eyes of Christ. Do not lose sight of these Australians as we bunker down with our many resources and wait for the virus to pass over.