Sept. 17, 2023

I speak to you in the name of God: Creator, Savior, and Sanctifier.  Amen.

This morning’s reading from Exodus is the final chapter in the story of the Hebrew peoples’ escape from Egypt, where they’d been slaves for generations.  To recap, Pharoah had finally been convinced by the deaths of the firstborn to let the Israelites depart.  But now he’s changed his mind and mounts a last-ditch effort to dominate them, leading his vast army into hot pursuit in his own chariot. 

And as the tension mounts and the chariots draw closer to the fleeing Israelites, Moses stretches out his hand and God parts the waters.  The Egyptians continue their pursuit, but after the Israelites pass through the sea Moses again stretches out his hand.  It turns out that Pharaoh has led his mighty army into defeat, not victory, as the waters cover them all.

The story is one of how deliverance and liberation from slavery is brought about by God’s power alone.  The Hebrews do nothing except allow God to lead.  In many ways it’s inspiring and celebratory.  And yet, if you’re anything like me, this story of liberation from slavery is difficult to read because it’s so brutal.  God’s victory on behalf of the Israelites comes at the expense of dead Egyptians floating in the sea. 

The easy way out is to try to ignore this inconvenient detail.  But let’s face it: it’s hard to square the image of a generous and loving and merciful God that we find in so many places in Scripture with a God whose liberation of Israel comes with the death and destruction of the others.  So this morning I want to pay attention to this story and reflect on it, instead of skipping to a more comfortable part of the Bible.

If we’re conflicted by this story, maybe we need to accept how challenging it is to put ourselves in the shoes of a thousands-of-years-ago culture where violence was seen as part of God’s way of accomplishing God’s purposes.  Maybe the violence and death in this story tells us more about the people who wrote them, and less about the God in whose name they claimed these things were done. 

It might bring some comfort to know that our ancestors in faith struggled with this paradox of justice and wonton death, too.  One Jewish rabbinic commentary imagines God demanding that the angels, instead of chanting hymns of praise in celebration of this victory over the Egyptians, keep silence – since those dying in the sea are God’s children as much as those who have been saved.  Even God, they imagine, might be conflicted by what God has done.

With all this in mind, I wonder if God’s dispute in this story is even with Pharaoh’s people.  If it were, Scripture would have a word from God boasting of these deaths.  But it’s only the Hebrews that celebrate.  It’s easy to imagine God lamenting the deaths of the Egyptian warriors – part of God’s beloved creation – if God’s dispute is really with the systems of oppression that bound and enslaved the Hebrew people.  Depriving them of their basic humanity. 

The reality is that it wasn’t just the Hebrews who were trapped in an oppressive system.  So was Pharoah’s army of professional soldiers and charioteers.  They weren’t forced into backbreaking labor, but they answered to Pharoah just as much as the Hebrew slaves.  Even Pharoah was denied his humanity – he set himself up as a god.  Everyone in an oppressive system is oppressed, whether they realize it or not. 

So whether we identify with the Hebrew people – with the slaves – or whether our lives afford us opportunities that align us much more closely to Pharaoh and his army than we might want to admit – we’re all trapped in systems that oppress God’s people.  Since we don’t live in a society where slavery or apartheid are in law, it can sometimes be challenging to recognize these systems when we see them.  Because they’re often built into our world in subtle ways. 

This subtlety means that we might not see how the need for a working single parent to scrape together enough for a damage deposit plus a month’s rent makes it so much harder to find a safe place to live.  Or how bureaucracy, with its forms and middle-class, educated language, makes it that much harder for the less-educated or non-English speaker to receive the benefits they desperately need.  Or how the lack of reliable transportation makes it that much more difficult for someone to hold a job.  Spend a few hours talking to the people who use the Resource Center we host in our basement, and you can find things like this out, and more.  Sometimes the systems of oppression are invisible, until they aren’t.

The Good News for us today is that the God who parted the seas and led Israel from slavery into freedom continues to break systems of oppression today.  God is constantly entering into human history, not through the brutality of death and destruction, but instead through the Holy Spirit.  Leading us on a journey of faith that is taking us from fear toward our final destination – a new community whose heart is Jesus, who has liberated us from sin and death and given us our full measure of humanity through his self-giving sacrifice on the Cross.

And so the questions I want us to go away pondering are: what would the Exodus look like today?  What is God delivering the peoples of the world out of … and into?  Amen.