Crisis at the Border
Exodus 1:8—2:10
Proper 16A
August 24, 2014
August 24, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
We become the
stories we tell. And there’s a good reason for that.
The world is a very
complicated place, a place that, just counting what we can see and hear and
feel at any given moment, contains tens of thousands of objects. There are too
many things and people to keep track of or even to notice all of the time, so
we make categories for things and people, niches for everything we see and hear
and feel, to make the world easier to navigate.
I suspect that all
animals do the same thing. Of course that’s easy for me to say but impossible
for me to prove, but it still makes sense. I think that cats, for example, have
a few categories that help them sort out the world. Through the eyes of a cat, I
imagine that there are 1) things that I can eat, 2) things that can eat me, 3)
servants, and 4) everything else.
Categories help cats
and us simplify the world into something manageable, something we can deal with.
Categories get mixed up in another very powerful way of managing the world:
story-telling. A story, a plot, a narrative line, helps us sort out the
important things from the unimportant “noise.”
A story connects categories together into a whole that makes sense.
Story-telling is how
we make sense of the universe. That’s true even for scientists who may imagine
that story-telling and science don’t mix. Paleontologists have constructed a
story, called evolution, to tie together the fossil evidence of long-vanished
plants and animals. Cosmologists have a story, called the Big Bang, that makes
sense of the movement of the galaxies and the universe’s background radiation and
all sorts of other evidence.
We call ourselves homo
sapiens, “wise or sane human.” I
wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to call ourselves homo narrans,
“story-telling human,” as John Niles suggests in his book by the same name.[1]
Story-telling is certainly what we do.
We make our stories and
then we bend our experiences to fit our stories. If facts don’t fit our
narrative, we tend to reject the facts. With our stories, we build a map so we
can find our way in the world of hard objects you can bump into. Like all maps,
our stories have to fit the world pretty well. If we don’t have a story to
explain how to behave around moving cars, our lives are likely to end badly, or
at least suddenly. But maps have to simplify the world. A map that shows
everything can’t be folded and a story that includes every detail can’t be
carried around in our heads and hearts.
I say all this as an
introduction to the story in our text from Exodus. Today’s reading is part of
the long narrative arc that tells the story of the earliest history of the
Jewish people. It’s an origin story. Our origin stories are especially
important because they are stories that we tell ourselves to explain ourselves
to ourselves. They are stories that explain who we are and how we came to be. They
create a world for us to live in. They tell us what our place in that world is and
how we should act.
What I’m going to do
this morning is to trace this part of the larger story.
I’ll start with a
warning. Our story this morning is told from the perspective of the Israelites,
an oppressed people, the underdogs in their struggle with Egypt, an established
and oppressive regime. It strips bare the lies and pretenses of power in the
interest of justice and liberation. To the extent that we have embraced false
stories—and how could we have avoided that, since the false stories are part of
what we call common sense?—in order to live comfortably with the events of,
say, the Texas border or Ferguson, Missouri, we will find this story
uncomfortable.
Our story begins by
telling us that there was a new pharaoh, one for whom Joseph and his family
were nobody special. The Israelites were strangers to this pharaoh, they were
Others. This was foreshadowed when Jacob’s family came to settle in Egypt. Joseph
arranged for a visit with Pharaoh, the one who knew him, in order to find a
place where his family and their livestock could settle. He instructed his
brothers that when Pharaoh asked what they did for a living, they should reply
that they were shepherds as their ancestors had been, for—and this is
important—“all shepherds are abhorrent to the Egyptians.” They are given the land of Goshen, empty land
that is useless to Egyptian farmers, so that the Egyptians don’t actually have
to live right with them, because “shepherds are abhorrent to the Egyptians.” I suppose it didn’t hurt that the Israelites
would serve as a buffer between the fertile Nile valley and the wandering
desert tribes.
In this way Israel became
a foreign and despised, if useful, presence in the midst of Egypt. They
remained unassimilated; they didn’t blend in. They were resented. I’m sure the nice people said, “Those people
are Egyptians now, they should act like Egyptians! They should learn our
language, dress like us, and make their living as farmers like decent
people? Why do they insist on their own
ways?”
As all empires do,
the Egyptian Empire put power before people. Joseph—remember what a jerk he
was?—used the years of famine in order to increase the empire at the expense of
the people of Egypt. When the people needed grain, he sold it to them. When
they ran out of money, they sold themselves into slavery to Pharaoh. When the
famines were over, Pharaoh owned not just the land of Egypt, but the very bodies
of the people of Egypt, the Israelites included.
It is a peculiar
thing, but it’s true, that masters fear their slaves, the strong fear the weak,
oppressors fear the oppressed, in spite of the fact that anyone from the
outside can see clearly that the masters, the strong, the oppressors have most
of the power. Nonetheless they are afraid of their victims. Masters fear a
slave rebellion above everything.
The Israelites had
numbered only seventy when they went to Egypt. When they began to grow, that growth was perceived
as a threat. They were forced to labor as slaves. The Empire that claimed to
own their bodies used those bodies to build the warehouse cities of Pithom and
Rameses. But those bodies continued to multiply. And so did Pharaoh’s anxiety. He
blamed the Israelites and began a policy of genocide. The newborn baby
Israelite boys were to be killed at birth.
But this policy is
frustrated by the Israelite midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who it turns out, have
some power after all. But behind their acts of resistance, Pharaoh’s
policy is frustrated by the character who does not figure into Pharaoh’s plans.
Pharaoh has his priests and his religion, the United Church of Egypt. The gods
of that religion all support the Empire because the Empire honors them. But
there is a God who is not part of that or any imperial system and this God does
not side with Pharaoh, or his underlings, or any of the nice people. Oddly,
this God sides with the weak, the oppressed, the enslaved, in short, with those
abhorrent shepherds the Israelites.
Eventually, this
story will lead us to the great deliverance of the Israelites, to the covenant,
to the land of promise and all the rest. These are remarkable events, but to me
even more remarkable is that in spite of this oppressive system, the pervasive
presence of Pharaoh’s security apparatus, and a policy of genocide, there is
Moses. Born to a Levite couple, Moses’ mother hid him for three months and then
found a loophole in Pharaoh’s orders. Every baby boy was to be thrown into the
Nile. So Moses’ mother made him a basket that she water-proofed. Then she put
Moses in the basket and put the basket in the river, fulfilling the letter of
Pharaoh’s order while ignoring Pharaoh’s intent. Then, in a wonderfully
subversive turn of events, Moses’ sister who isn’t named in this passage, but
whom we know to be Miriam, prods Pharaoh’s daughter into rescuing her brother and
then arranges for her mother to be paid for raising her own son! Well done, Miriam!
And behind and in
and through all of these events the barely glimpsed figure of God stands with
the oppressed and exploited slaves, the resisting victims of a genocide in
progress. Later on in the story we will learn more about this God who has a
strange but passionate commitment to justice. Later on in the story we will
witness this God who lives in solidarity with the weak. But to those like us
who know the story, there are already hints enough. The power of oppression
will be broken. The empire will lose. The weak will win.
In ancient Egypt, at
the southern border of the United States, in Ferguson, Missouri, God stands with
the enslaved, the weak, the oppressed, the despised, the Other. God’s decision is already made. All that lies with us is to choose to stand
with God or not.
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