6th Sunday after Epiphany
Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:21-37
February 13, 2011
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
I set out this week intending to preach a sermon on the rather sharp-edged demands of the text from Matthew. “No Excuses” is the title that you find in the bulletin and announced to the community on our sign board. But events have overtaken me and I found myself hearing the passages from Deuteronomy and Matthew quite differently than I had several weeks ago when I made my choice of text and topic. I will get to the question of how that happened in a moment, but first, let’s begin with the text from Deuteronomy.
In this reading Moses is addressing the people of Israel for what he knows will be the last time. It is his farewell address. Moses used this occasion to reflect on what the Israelites had gone through in their recent past and to sound a warning. As the story tells us, these events began a little more than a generation before. The Israelites had found themselves as slaves in Egypt, slaves who served the Egyptian imperial machine and the gods who protected it. Their lot was wretched. They were forced to make mud bricks to build cities of warehouses to store the plunder of empire. They had quotas to fill. They were given starvation wages. They served the gods of production and profit.
When they complained about how hard their work was, their Egyptian masters forced them to gather their own materials without adjusting their quotas. The Israelites lived unhappy lives. Then as now, God’s people have felt free to complain. They didn’t know God, so their complaint was addressed to the universe at large, to whoever might be listening, to whom it may concern. And God heard the cry of the Israelites. Yahweh came to Moses and said:
“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey...The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.1
And God did indeed bring them out of Egypt. God set them free from slavery to Pharaoh.
We’d like to be able to say that everything went well for the Israelites after that, but we know better. They had experienced the world as a harsh place, a place of scarcity, a place of lack. They experienced life in the empire as a constant struggle. They lived under the thumb of an empire whose only interest in them was its own self-enrichment. They produced great wealth, but enjoyed none of it. The whole experience made the Israelites anxious and distrustful.
Strangely, it made the Egyptians anxious and distrustful, too. The Egyptians worried about how many Israelites there were and how rapidly they multiplied. They were afraid of an uprising. They were afraid of their own slaves. The Egyptians, too, were driven by anxiety and fear.
We would think that the Egyptians would not be anxious or fearful. After all, they were powerful. They were the strongest empire they knew of. They had so much stuff they had to have slaves build warehouse cities to hold it all. Why should they be anxious?
But they were. In fact, if I read the whole of the Bible correctly, it is anxiety that is at the heart of all imperial ambition. When we are anxious, we are less able to live in community. We are distrustful of others. We see the world as a place of scarcity. We see others as rivals, as competitors for scarce resources. When we are anxious we are less able to work out peaceful ways of living with each other. Our minds play tricks on us so that we can justify nearly anything if only it will make us less anxious. Naked aggression becomes “securing our vital interests.” An ancient and nearly universal piece of wisdom like the one we know as the Golden Rule—“Treat others as you would be treated”—gets twisted into something like: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”
So the Egyptians looked out at their world and saw nothing but threats and danger. They responded accordingly and, in the course of history, became a threat and a danger to everyone in their neighborhood. Anxiety drives us to try to control things. But the more we try to control, the more there is to control.
This is why anxious rulers tend to become tyrants. At the root of every dictatorship is anxiety, whether on the scale of a household or an entire nation. This, I argue, explains a great deal about a man like Hosni Mubarak. He became the president of Egypt when President Anwar El Sadat was shot and killed by a radical Muslim assassination squad. Mubarak himself was wounded in the same attack. We can understand his anxiety. And we can see where it led. And we know that, in the end, his strategy for managing anxiety did not work. However much he tried to control the events around him, there were always events just beyond his grasp. And in the end, as we have seen in the last two weeks, he could not control his people.
Moses, of course, did not know about any of the events of modern Egypt. But he saw easily enough that an anxious people cannot create a humane life for themselves. In their quest for control they would never be able to live with the God who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. Indeed, they would recreate their slavery in their new land. They would make one of themselves a king. They would act like the nations around them. They would fashion their own gods out of wood, metal and stone, gods whom they could control, gods who would in their turn offer them control of their world, gods who would be just as cruel and harsh as the gods under whom they had suffered in Egypt. Moses knew this.
So Moses warned the people while he had one last chance. This way, he told them, was the way of death. They could choose it, but it would not offer them good lives or long in the land of promise. What then would?
It’s natural to read Deuteronomy as if the deal that God were offering the Israelites were actually a threat: Follow my rules or else! In reality what God is giving them is a choice. If existence in Egypt was slavery under an anxiety-driven imperial regime of scarcity and control, then the life that God offered the Israelites was in every way its opposite.
In place of control God offered a life of covenant. Life with Yahweh was not to be some sort of technology or technique that guaranteed that the world would be run for Israel’s comfort. Israel and Yahweh were not bound together by their mutual convenience. Israel and Yahweh were bound together by love. In their covenant they are both free. God deals with real people who are stubborn and resistant but also intimately honest. Israel deals with a God who has a passionate commitment to justice and a massive ego and who will not stop loving them no matter what the cost.
In the place of empire, God offered life in community. In community others are not regarded as competitors for scarce resources. Others are not regarded as untrustworthy strangers to be rejected. Others are not regarded as enemies to be fought and conquered. This how empire treats others. In community by contrast we embrace others as those with whom we share a common life and common future. We welcome them as those who already belong. We see them as those with whom we might enjoy the blessings of peace.
In place of slavery God offered freedom. This is not the freedom to do whatever we want, not the freedom to make our own rules or treat each other as we please. It is instead the freedom to live truly human lives in covenant community. Let me say by way of a footnote at this point that this is the freedom that Jesus offers us in the Gospel reading. Not only murder but even hatred are incompatible with life in a covenant community. In a covenant community reconciliation is more important than victory. In a covenant community, we cannot treat others as objects for our gratification. In a covenant community we do not play games with truth. What Jesus is doing in the text that I’m not preaching this morning is laying out in exacting detail what it takes for us to live into the choice that Moses set before the Israelites. The freedom to become truly human is not easy, but anything else is in fact slavery. In place of slavery God offered freedom.
In place of scarcity, God offered abundance. The land that they were about to enter was a “land of milk and honey.” It would give the Israelites everything they needed. In fact it would give them enough that they would be able to do something no one had ever done before: they could set aside one day out of every seven and do nothing at all, but celebrate the goodness of life. Six days of work would yield seven days of living. There would be an end to production quotas and the endless postponement of promised rest. There would be enough of everything, even enough of rest and leisure.
Covenant, community, freedom, and abundance all rested on one last choice, the choice that the whole sweep of the Biblical story regards as fundamental to human life: the choice between anxiety and trust. What God offered to the abused survivors of the empire was a relationship that they could trust. If they would trust God to be their God, if they would be faithful to their covenant with God, then they would have no need for anxiety and for the inhumanity that anxiety spawns.
In truth, God was not easy to trust. Truth to tell, the Israelites weren’t all that easy to trust, either. Have you ever done a thing called a trust walk? A group is divided into pairs who will be partners. One partner is blind-folded. The other partner leads them through a series of obstacles. The blind-folded partner has to trust their guide. The guide has to behave in trustworthy ways. In the trust walk that is life in covenant, it seems to me that God sometimes forgets that we cannot see. And we sometimes forget that God can. So naturally there are misunderstandings on both sides. Trust means being vulnerable. Being vulnerable means we can get hurt. And sometimes real hurt happens to Israel or to God or to both.
So trust isn’t easy. But it’s the only alternative to anxiety. Anxiety is the way that leads to death. Trust is the way that leads to life. Those are the alternatives. There are no others. So the Israelites had to choose.
Now to the events that overtook my sermon writing. The Egyptians are an ancient people whose civilization was old when my ancestors were still painting themselves blue and worshiping trees. They are a people of heritage and dignity. They have suffered over the centuries and in the last few decades this suffering took the form of a series of autocrats. They have known what it is to live under anxiety-driven oppression and anxiety-induced scarcity. They have finally had enough. The people of Egypt have reclaimed their dignity and their humanity. Like the Israelites in our text they are poised on the brink of a new future.
Now they have a choice. And it’s not the choice many in Washington and Tel Aviv suppose that they have. It’s not the choice between being ruled by a secular strongman or a fanatical theocrat. That’s like saying they have a choice between being ruled by a devout thug or a non-devout one. Not much of a choice. No, the choice is between thugs or the genuinely new possibilities of a trust-based life in covenant community.
That’s the same choice that all of us have. We can surrender to anxiety, seeking control over our neighbors and over creation itself. In that case we will know slavery, scarcity and death. Or we can choose to trust God and begin the careful, messy, difficult work of fashioning a covenant community. In that case we will know freedom and abundance. That’s our choice.
In the mirror of the choice that lies before the people of Egypt I have seen our choice and mine, a choice that both thrills and frightens. I feel overwhelmed for my fellow human beings in Egypt. I will pray for them that they will choose well. I hope that they will pray the same for us.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
1Exodus 3:7-8a, 9.
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