Transcribed from the sermon preached Sept 3, 2006
The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor
St. John’s Presbyterian Church
2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705
Telephone 510-845-6830 Fax 510-845-6837
office@stjohns.presbychurch.net http://www.stjohns.presbychurch.net
Scripture Readings: Exodus 3:7-8, 14:5-14, 19-22 Mark 6: 47-52
It is important and interesting to return to the great epic stories of the Bible with which I assume most of you are vaguely familiar. Let me give you a little refresher. By chapter 3, Moses has already been put in a basket to escape the murder of first-born Hebrew males. He is picked up by the princess who raises him with all the benefits of a royal son. After murdering a particularly brutal taskmaster, he must flee Egypt. He flees to the land of Jethro, a Midianite priest, and marries Jethro's daughter Zipporah. Then one day he was out tending the flock near Mount Horeb and saw the burning bush. This brings us to our passage this morning in Chapter 3 of Exodus.
Moses is a Hebrew but he knows very little about Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews. From the bush God says, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look at God.
Then God says, "I have seen the misery of my people who are in Egypt: I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. 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 to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.
God intends to enlist Moses to liberate the Hebrews from Egypt. Moses doesn't think he is the person for the job. He has several excuses, but God insists, so Moses heads to Egypt and lets Pharaoh know that Yahweh says, "Let my people go." Pharaoh, the King of the Super Empire of the day thinks such a request is ridiculous. But after ten plagues devastate Egypt, including the death of firstborns, among them Pharaoh's son, Pharaoh relents, and gives permission for them to leave.
The Hebrews gather up all their belongings and head out of Egypt following Moses. They are excited and jubilant to finally be free. After a short time, however, Pharaoh changes his mind. He amasses his great army of chariots, the tanks of the time, and races after the escaping Hebrews who are camping by the sea.
The Hebrews, a moment earlier celebrating their freedom, are now filled with shock and awe. They begin to complain, "What have you done to us? Bringing us out of Egypt? Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians. For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness."
Next we have an account of Yahweh's great powers for victory. The Hebrews are protected first by a great cloud. Then Yahweh opens the sea.
The Hebrews pass through and when the chariots try to follow, the sea swallows them up.
The Exodus is one of the great epic stories of all time. It was written as part of the first edition of by Bible by David's scribes at roughly 950 BCE to legitimate his rule in Palestine. David draws on historical legend to weave a story of a people whose destiny is ordained by Yahweh, a god, to culminate in a united kingdom identical to that which David is establishing.
We learn in I Samuel that David grows up under the reign of King Saul, amasses power as a mercenary in the Philistine lowlands, evades murder by Saul to eventually take over his kingdom and then add territory to it. This Exodus story is oral legend of a certain group of people who gained freedom and evaded Egyptian chariots with help of miraculous weather, not an uncommon occurrence in war. They lived as nomads until coming to settle in Palestine. This story helps David unite the nomadic peoples now settled in an agrarian lifestyle who might otherwise choose to oppose his rule.
We notice that Yahweh, according to David's scribes, is not just about liberation. There are people in the land flowing with milk and honey, and they will have to be violently displaced or absorbed. It is hard for us either not to ignore the violence and genocide in the Promised Land, or to judge it as primitive, patriarchal self-justification leaving the Bible no longer worthy of reverence or respect.
In the same way it has become difficult to celebrate the crossing of the great sea by Protestants to reach the freedom of the New World in the Americas, without also acknowledging the great devastation brought by the Europeans to the indigenous peoples.
Yet to side with the victims does not necessarily eliminate the problem of violence and injustice in the name of God, or some great universal idea. For the victims, when they had the advantage on another people, were also quick to exploit the advantage. And once the oppressed are liberated, it is too easy to become oppressors themselves.
History, almost universally retold and written by the men who win, is a record of how they won, and how their winning not only served their own immediate purposes but also some deeper, universal value or god. The Bible is just such a history.
The universal lessons we may gain often fail to manifest themselves fully in the human beings who bear them. We know that the memory of the injustice and burden of slavery did not prevent Hebrews from enslaving other themselves. It didn't take long for followers of Jesus, the same Jesus who led his disciples across a stormy sea to bridge the gap between cultures, to turn him into a general at the head of ethnocentric crusades.
The idea that "All men are created equal" did not immediately equate to equal justice for Native Americans, Africans or women.
Still, we can say that though the full implications of new bits of beauty, wisdom and truth are seldom fully recognized at their birth, and may be born into service to an oppressive ruler, we can have faith that they will be liberated, and move toward a time and place where they will come into their own and flourish.
It is part of the uniqueness, beauty and wisdom of the Bible that though it is written or sanctioned by men in power to justify themselves, it incorporates the perspective of a God who hears the cries of the poor and oppressed.
The stories of liberation and freedom, of a God who hears the cries of the oppressed, carried by a people who then oppress others, haunts and plagues them, and is taken up by the new oppressed to offer hope and faith in a God who hears their cries.
Thus the great story retold in immigrant Anglo Protestant churches on Sunday morning inspires them to stand strong against the oppressive policies of the European nations, and inspires something quite different in the African slaves who meet to worship down by the river at night. "Go down Moses," the old spiritual goes, "Go down to Egypt land, tell old pharaoh, let my people go." No one can keep God's truth and power enslaved forever.
These Bible stories help the emergence of self-criticism and self-consciousness, a gift not without its own perils. I don't know about you, but I fear being overtaken by those who ride the swift and powerful chariots of certainty. We think we are free from some oppressive belief, from racism, from sexism, from theocracy, and it comes back to hunt us down. They come, not only from the outside but from within our own culture, from within our own psyche - pharaoh's chariots and oppression and death storm through the desert of our own mind. And freedom itself is scary. Freedom from one thing opens up the responsibility to figure out a new way of life. We know what was, but we do not know what we are to do and be tomorrow. It is good to be free, but we don't want to wander through the postmodern wilderness forever, with no identity we can call home.
Many want to go back to the empire, where God and worldly power were one. At least there we knew what to expect. God tells us to remain faithful. Even though we may not see how we will evade the chariots, or where we are going, God is here with us, protecting and guiding us. And we will get to a broad and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.