Ausust 21, 2011
Text: Exodus 1:8-2:10
For those of us who grew up in Sunday school it is a very familiar story: the one called by God to lead the Israelites out of slavery and to the threshold of the Promised Land began his journey as a baby in a basket, plucked out of the water by a princess. What The Prince of Egypt version of the story leaves out, though, is how the Israelites fell into slavery and whose courageous act of defiance made the Moses-led Exodus possible at all.
At first glance, the descent into oppression seems to come out of nowhere. The Israelites go from distinguished guests to destitute slaves in a matter of only four verses. We are told only that the new king did not know Joseph, the young dreamer turned Pharaoh’s right hand man. Joseph provides the link between Genesis’ wandering patriarchs and Exodus’ Egypt-settled Israelites. It is he who invited the brothers who once betrayed him to join him in his newfound home when there was no food left in Canaan. And what eventually becomes clear is that this blessing was far from benign, for Joseph inadvertently laid the foundations for his own people’s enslavement.
As we learn in Genesis 47, Joseph is the one responsible for the concentration of wealth and power in Pharaoh’s household. Setting aside a portion of the Egyptian people’s grain, Joseph cleverly sold it back to them during a famine in exchange for their livestock, land, and very own lives. By the time the lean years had ended, his master Pharaoh owned just about everything and everyone. Underwritten by an economics of scarcity, Joseph’s dream of abundance had become the nightmare of empire.
Just about the only thing Pharaoh’s household didn’t own was Goshen, which Joseph had set aside for his family with the help of his power and status. So down the line when Joseph is dead and gone, a new Pharaoh comes along and all he sees are free people on free land. Anxious to consolidate his empire, eager to ‘expand his portfolio,’ Pharaoh devises a plan to bring Goshen and its inhabitants back under his control. Turning to the Egyptians, he says ‘look, these prosperous outsiders need to be put in their place. Otherwise they will grow strong, rise up, and run away with our wealth.’ Swallowing Pharaoh’s propaganda, and perhaps hoping to squeeze a little coin for themselves, the Egyptians do just that. They kick the Israelites off their land and corral them into labor camps. Pharaoh enslaves the Israelites and forces them to work on his grand projects of Empire, building supply cities to house the vast amounts of grain he has pilfered from the people. Spending their days in sweat and toil, the Israelites labor in vain under the taskmaster’s whip.
Yet despite their enslavement, the Hebrew people continued to grow, as verse 15 records: “but the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.” All this made Pharaoh quite paranoid, and fearing his propaganda might come true, he decides to change the game. If he can’t wear them out through systemic oppression, he will stomp them out through genocide. And as rulers tend to do, he calls in the vulnerable to do his dirty work. Summoning the Hebrew midwives, he instructs them to kill every male child born to the Hebrew women. These people will die as slaves, a smudge wiped from the pages of history. The promise once made to their ancestor Abraham will be shown to be nothing but a pipedream.
And just in this moment, when all of Israel’s hope has been cut down like a stump, something sprouts up from the roots. A divine conspiracy begins to spread, one emanating from what seems like the most unlikely of sources. The midwives, those whose work it is to call forth life, refuse to comply with this edict of death. Fearing God more than Pharaoh’s wrath, Shiphrah and Puah proceed to welcome the boys, a courageous act which could well cost them their lives. Holy obedience leads them to civil disobedience. Learning that the boys remain alive, Pharaoh angrily calls the women back to his court – ‘why have you done this?’ In their reply, the women show themselves to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” ‘Well, Pharaoh, what you don’t understand is that these Hebrew women are like animals…they just sort of push those things out….they are not delicate like the Egyptian women.’ Slyly appealing to Pharaoh’s own prejudices, the midwives inaugurate an underground railroad for the Hebrew innocents.
Realizing that he can’t depend on these pesky midwives, Pharaoh commands all the Egyptians to throw any newborn Hebrew boys they see into the Nile. And here too, the God of the oppressed works through the creative actions of resourceful women to thwart the plans of the powerful. A Hebrew mother who can hide her three month son no longer complies with Pharaoh’s order, but only after building an ark of safety to keep the deadly waters from overwhelming him. The child is found downstream by a member of Pharaoh’s own household. Moved with compassion, she does the exact opposite of what everyone—including and especially her father—expects her to do. Instead of calling the proper authorities, she provides sanctuary in subversion of the law. His sister, watching from a distance and waiting for the right moment, steps up to offer her service: ‘can I fetch a nursemaid for you?’ The child’s own mother is brought in to raise the would-be castoff—and gets paid to do so with Pharaoh’s own money! He is given the name Moses, because ‘he was drawn out of the water.’ Little rivulets of mercy converge, forming headwaters for a river of liberation.
While I confess that I often wonder what the ancient stories of Scripture have to do with us, how the word relates to our world, this is not really one of those times. If we look at this story from a few steps back we find:
1) An economic downturn used by a ruling class as the perfect opportunity to effect a wholesale land grab and entrap people in debt-induced servitude, further centralizing wealth and exacerbating inequality
2) A state-supported campaign to drum up fear of the Other—in this case a growing population of immigrants from a poor neighboring country—in order to justify their exploitation and distract from the real economic threat
Hmmm…this story is beginning to sound like something I read yesterday in the Post. In short, don’t get it twisted. Although the names change—‘subprime mortgage,’ ‘secure communities initiative’—Pharaoh’s tricks stay pretty much the same. And just like back then, it is a safe bet that as the multitude grows, so too will Pharaoh’s paranoia and the harshness of his tactics.
In such a situation it’s easy to think that the best thing we can do is play along with Pharaoh’s game. Perhaps, we say to ourselves, lasting good really can come from short-term evil. Maybe abundance is best achieved through induced scarcity. If I just ruthlessly take care of me and mine the rest will work itself out. If I can just position myself close enough to those storehouses of grain and keep others away from them than my people will be alright. And just like Joseph, our buying into these subtle seductions can quickly lead to our enslavement. The reality is that Pharaoh doesn’t play fair—there is no way you can play his game and not somehow lose.
From their place on the margins, the Hebrew midwives can easily see through Pharaoh’s game. They know firsthand the harsh realities beneath Pharaoh’s rhetoric of national security and economic development and have long been adept at creatively thwarting empire’s intentions in order to survive. Their risky act of refusal becomes the human agency through which a God who shares in their vulnerability works to accomplish the people’s salvation. As Ched Myers writes, “in the grand biblical narrative, these midwives appear only in this bit part, yet upon their conscientious resistance hung the whole of liberation history.” When the midwives committed themselves to this course they had no idea of the chain of events they were helping to set off. There are some of you in this room who can relate to these midwives at a level much deeper than I can. You have risked your lives and sacrificed much in the struggle to set your people free, ending up on your own journey of Exodus. Let me just say this – there are seeds you have planted which have yet to bloom, small acts which God has begun to draw up into a mighty work.
There are others of us here, myself included, who perhaps feel most comfortable in Pharaoh’s household. Whether we chose it or not, our lives have benefited greatly from the exploitation of others and the earth. What this story says to us is that there is hope for us yet! Like Pharaoh’s daughter we can hear and respond to the cry of the oppressed. And somehow this cry can become our own, the longing for liberation our longing too. In some ways, this is perhaps what The Church of the Saviour has been about at its best.
I think that part of the work that lies before us as we continue to grow into the community that God would have us be is to begin the deconstruction of Pharaoh’s household. It is to inaugurate an Exodus from the political structures and personal practices which continue to order our world, our country, and our city into an ‘us’ versus a ‘them.’ In some ways this might be a little scary, and no doubt we will have to spend some time in the wilderness before we get where we need to be. And yet it’s a journey I’m so grateful to be on, and especially with all of you.