SAUCIER — Servitude by any other name

Genesis is the first book of the Bible and contains the creation narratives. But, it is Exodus, the second book, that provides the origin story of the Israelite people.

With Moses, the burning bush, and the 10 plagues, Exodus tells how God brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt.

The remainder of the book, the saga of the wanderings in the desert, is about the formation of a community in relationship with their God, each other and the world.

According to Brian McLaren, the 40 years in the wilderness is about getting the slavery out of the Israelites.

We’ve learned about slavery from the plantations of Virginia to the gulags of Russia.

We see it today in news about debt bondage, human trafficking, and forced marriage.

From all this, we can at least imagine the horrors of life in servitude to another.

What is more difficult to grasp, and far more difficult to change, is slavery that is within each of us.

Freed from the pharaoh’s lashes, the Israelites still proved to be a bellyaching band of malcontents.

This new life of freedom, with all its demands for change and trust, was not for them.

They wanted their old gods and their old ways. One thing you could say about a life of slavery, there was a comforting certainty to it.

We’re not forced to make bricks or tend fields under a blazing Egyptian sun, but we are not free from slavery.

Ours takes the form of habits, attitudes and compelling emotions that can subjugate us as much as any taskmaster.

Our addictions — and not just the apparent ones like drugs, sex and other compulsive behaviors — bind us and prevent us from flourishing as the person we were meant to be.

In Exodus, the Israelites are given the Ten Commandments. For too long, we have seen these as a checklist of the primary behaviors that annoy our God.

What they really speak to is not one-off actions, but forms of slavery to which we are most susceptible.

Anger, righteousness, materialism, self-serving deceit, and denial of any power greater than our own judgment and desire are not just immediately harmful to ourselves and others, they enslave us — distracting and diminishing our lives.

For the Israelites, 40 years in the desert represented a generation. For us, it is a reminder that getting the slavery out takes a lifetime, no less needed at 75 than at 17.