Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More (Exodus 14:10-14, 21-29; Pentecost 16; September 28, 2014)

Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More

Exodus 14:10-14, 21-29
Pentecost 16
September 28, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

The story that we just heard lies at the center of Israel’s memory and imagination.  They certainly treasured the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs.  They admired David, or at least some things about him.  They thrilled to the prophets.  They reveled in the Torah.  But at the center of it all was this strange story of deliverance and freedom.

They returned to it again and again.  Its pattern of events—the experience of misery out of which the people cry out to the God who hears their cry, knows their suffering and acts to deliver, and Israel’s response of jubilant faithfulness—form the basic structure of Israel’s testimony about God.  When enemies threaten this story gives them audacity to look to God rather than to an all-consuming defense budget for protection.  When Judah finds itself in exile at the heart of the Babylonian Empire it is this story that inspires their hope for a home-coming: as God had acted in the past, so God would act in the future.

This pattern forms the bases of Israel’s piety, as well.  In the psalms of lament this pattern is prayed out in Israel’s life.  In the midst of suffering, whether that suffering is shared in the community or is the concern of a single individual, impatient and sometime even angry claims are made on the God who spoke to Moses from the bush 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…[1]

The God who delivered Israel from Egypt expected to be counted on to deliver individuals from sickness or oppression at the hands of enemies and the Israelite community from famine or the threat of invasion.  And when that expected and astonishing deliverance came, the psalmist promised to break out in exultant witness to God’s deeds and joyful faithfulness to the covenant.

That was their pattern of prayer in the psalms of lament.  In the psalms of thanksgiving they followed the same pattern.  The only thing that differed was that the affliction is now in the past, God has acted, and the psalmist is fulfilling her promise to bear public witness to what God has done.  Most psalms are accounted for in these two types, this one pattern.

We Christians, too, have placed this story at center of our faith, piety and life.  The pattern of slavery and deliverance and exile and return is duplicated in the movement from Good Friday to Easter.  It is no accident that the old name for Easter is Pasch (from which we get the name of the paschal candle).  Pasch is the Latin rendering of the Hebrew word for Passover: Pesach.

This story of liberation is what the Old Testament is about, what the New Testament is about, what Jesus’ ministry was about, what we are about.  If someone were to ask me, “What, in a single phrase, is your religion about?” the answer I once heard given to a group of kids during church, “It’s that we should be nice to each other and believe in Jesus so that when we die we can go to heaven” must be regarded as falling far short of our legacy.  Our religion is about the God who sets us free and our struggle to live into that freedom.  In the light of this story this appears to me with crystalline clarity.

So it is amazing to me that in the middle of this remarkable rescue the people of Israel are complaining.  The Egyptian army is bearing down on them and they are terrified.  The escape plan that they had shared in conversations on their front stoops and dreamed of as they gazed into the dying embers of their hearths in the evening suddenly seemed not so much daring as foolhardy. 

Now they wondered if they hadn’t traded a hard life for death itself.  But maybe in their panic they had forgotten how hard life had been.  They were slaves.  The Empire owned their bodies and had the power of life or death over them.  They had no right to rest.  If Pharaoh wanted more bricks, they had to make more bricks.  If Pharaoh wanted to economize and didn’t feel like supplying the straw they needed, they would have to find straw for themselves.  If Pharaoh wanted their sons thrown into the Nile, it was going to happen.  The power of the empire and the empire’s gods stood behind Pharaoh’s every whim and wish.

It’s surprising, in a way, that the Hebrews hadn’t risen up long before Moses came on the scene.  It’s surprising that they hadn’t laid down their tools and refused to work, or even turned their tools into weapons and revolted.  This was something the Egyptians clearly feared.  And yet it never happened.

I guess it’s what happens when the onset of oppression is gradual.  It’s the frog effect.  You know what I’m talking about.  Supposedly, if you put a frog in very hot water, it will immediately jump out.  But if you put a frog in cold water and then gradually heat it to boiling, the frog will never make its move.  I don’t know if frogs behave this way in fact, and I remind any seventh-grader who is thinking this would make an interesting science fair project, that testing this idea would be highly unethical and would therefore receive a failing grade.

What I do know is that the Israelites behaved this way.  They tolerated their oppression.  In fact, when things got scary there beside the sea, and at various places along their journey, they asked to have their oppression back.  “[I]t would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness,” they said.

It’s not that much different in our day.  People who are oppressed lose their ability to see through their own eyes and to name their own experience.  They are “mystified” by the powers that be.  The poor blame themselves for their poverty and the unemployed blame themselves that they can find no work, even though there are three people looking for work for every job that is open, even though the smooth functioning of our system requires a large supply of disposable labor.

Take the middle class, long regarded as the foundation of our society.  It was created because wages and salaries kept pace with the increases in productivity.  Between the end of WWII and the year that Carol and I got married, American workers became nearly twice as productive and they got over two-thirds of that increase as increases in wages and salaries.  In the last part of the 20^th century American workers have gotten only one-third of the additional wealth they have been creating. 

Since 2007, it’s far worse than that, as ninety-five percent of the gains have been realized by the top 1% of households.  We’re making a lot more bricks, but our pay is not going up. 

That would be bad enough, but Pharaoh has taken away the straw.  The costs of being middle class—child care, housing, health care and higher education—have increased for a family of four by some $10,000 since 2000.  The middle class is getting squeezed. 

Well, at least Pharaoh isn’t throwing our children into the river.  Unless, of course, you count the school-to-prison pipeline.  Zero-tolerance discipline policies turn students—especially students of color—over to law enforcement and the criminal justice system and provide a constant flux of raw materials for the prison-industrial complex.  We have five percent of the world’s population, but twenty-five percent of the world prisoners.  Black male children have a one-third chance of being in prison at some time during their life.  And, yes, they are our children.  And, yes, I’d call that throwing them in the river.

When is enough too much?  When does the frog jump out of the pot? 

We come to church for a lot of reasons.  We need some time when no one is measuring our productivity.  We need time with our friends.  We need a way to lend our efforts to helping people who need our help.

But we also come to hear a story that makes sense of our lives.  Stories come a number of flavors, but like snacks that are either salty or sweet, our stories come in “flavor families.”  There are stories that keep us from seeing past the myths that our culture tells.  If we are looking for these stories, we will come to church hoping for some tips on how to make our lives a little easier, how to work around some of the pressure that we feel.  We will come as consumers looking to “get something” from the service.  We will come as over-worked brick-makers hoping to make the whole thing more doable.

Then there are the stories that help us re-describe and redefine our circumstances.  They lay bare the Pharaoh’s velvet-gloved fist that offers lives of comfort to some at the cost of misery for others.  They reveal the truth of our lives and our world.  This story of how a runaway murderer stood against Pharaoh and how what appeared to be minor storm-god stood against the gods of Empire and won freedom for a band of slaves is one of the second kind of stories. 

This story at the center of Israel’s memory and imagination is not a story that tells us how to get along with oppression or how to make our way in Pharaoh’s world.  This is a story that invites us to overthrow Pharaoh’s world.  This story is a call to revolution.

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[1] Exodus 14:7-8a.