At The Water’s Edge
For Alvin Ailey "Wade in the Water": http://youtu.be/H49lzTf6-mE
Exodus 14:10-14, 21-29
10As Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites
looked back, and there were the Egyptians advancing on them. In great fear the
Israelites cried out to the Lord. 11They said to Moses, “Was it
because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the
wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? 12Is
this not the very thing we told you in 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.”
13But Moses said to the people, “Do not be
afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for
you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. 14The
Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.
21Then Moses stretched out his hand over
the sea. The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and
turned the sea into dry land; and the waters were divided. 22The
Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them
on their right and on their left. 23The Egyptians pursued, and went
into the sea after them, all of Pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and chariot
drivers. 24At the morning watch the Lord in the pillar of fire and
cloud looked down upon the Egyptian army, and threw the Egyptian army into
panic. 25He clogged their chariot wheels so that they turned with
difficulty. The Egyptians said, “Let us flee from the Israelites, for the Lord
is fighting for them against Egypt.”
26Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch
out your hand over the sea, so that the water may come back upon the Egyptians,
upon their chariots and chariot drivers.” 27So Moses stretched out
his hand over the sea, and at dawn the sea returned to its normal depth. As the
Egyptians fled before it, the Lord tossed the Egyptians into the sea. 28The
waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire
army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. 29But
the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall
for them on their right and on their left.
In 1933, Martin Nieimoller, a German pastor, was a
part of delegation of religious leaders who met with Adolph Hitler. Nieimoller stood at the back of the
room and observed Hitler closely.
He didn’t say anything during the meeting. Later, when his wife asked what he had learned about the
Nazi leader, Nieimoller said, “I discovered that Herr Hitler is a terribly
frightened man.”
We observe another terribly frightened man in today’s
text. Pharaoh is also a very
frightened man, and history has taught us that frightened leaders are apt to
become ruthless. Especially when they believe there aren’t enough good things
to go around. They decide they
must try to have them all.[1]
Last week, we heard about Joseph and his imprisonment
in Egypt. While in prison, Joseph
becomes useful to Pharaoh thanks to his gift for interpreting dreams. After Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s
dreams as a prediction of a coming famine, Pharaoh puts Joseph in charge of
managing the monopoly on food that Egypt has amassed.
The famine is long and severe, and the peasants run
out of food. On behalf of Pharaoh,
Joseph says to people looking for food, “What’s your collateral?” The peasants give up their land for
food, and then the next year, they give up their cattle. By the third year of the famine, the
peasants have run out of collateral except for themselves. And that is how the children of Israel
become slaves – through an economic transaction with the government of
Egypt. The only option to slavery
is for the peasants to starve. By
the end of Genesis 47, Pharaoh owns all the land except that which belongs to
the priests. And like the shrewd
politician he is, Pharaoh only leaves the priests alone because he needs
somebody to bless him (Gen. 47.13-26).
God created the world as good. The Bible begins with a liturgy of
God’s abundant provision for all of creation. But by the end of Genesis, the fear of “not enough” has set
in with Pharaoh’s hoarding of food, land and, ultimately, Abraham’s
descendents. Pharaoh’s ruthlessness is born of out dreams of scarcity. For the first time in the Bible,
someone says, “There’s not enough.
Let’s get everything.”
By the time we get to our text today in Exodus, the
Israelites had been enslaved for more than 400 years. I think the fact is worth thinking about for a moment. 400 years is longer than our country
has been in existence, longer than any of us could probably trace our own
family’s ancestry, long enough that the Hebrews likely had no memory of
freedom. They had learned how to cope by this time, but generations of
experience had pretty much stomped out any dreams among God’s people of living
any other way.
There’s nothing sadder than a situation in which
people have not only pretty much given up on the idea that anything good can
happen to them, but have also forgotten what goodness looks like. When people are oppressed or imprisoned
for a very, very long time, they slowly, bit by bit, lose the ability to hope
for something beyond the small life to which they’ve become accustomed. Hope requires the creativity and
imagination to envision something better beyond what we can see. Slaves and prisoners eventually lose
the ability to imagine that they deserve any other sort of life, and that lack
of imagination suffocates all hope.
But slavery didn’t become normative only for the
Israelites. Slavery had become a
way of life for Pharaoh as well.
Both the Egyptians and the Israelites have become bound up by fear. Pharaoh is fearful of losing control
what he perceives as limited resources, and the Israelites are fearful of their
master. All of the later chapters
of Genesis and the first 13 chapters of Exodus are set against a backdrop of
cultural anxiety and fear.
It is in
this hopelessness that God decides to act. God remembers the promise God made to Abraham. God sees the suffering of the people --
not only the suffering of the Israelites, but also the crippling anxiety of
Pharaoh. And we can see in this
story that liberation is entirely God’s idea. God’s imagination is larger than human dreams. And we see God’s creative redemption at
work in Exodus. First, God
captures the imagination of Moses.
Once Moses captures God’s vision of freedom and abundance, Moses
continue to hold that vision in front of those who have completely forgotten
how to dream, including Pharaoh.
Which isn’t the easiest job in the world to do. But Pharaoh finally relents and that is
where our story begins today, with the Israelites on the banks of the Red or
Reed Sea.
In front of them is nothing but water with endless
wilderness beyond, and coming up behind them is the entire Egyptian military
led by Pharaoh. And in their
panic, it occurs to the Israelites that they didn’t ask for this. As far as they are concerned, this trip
was all Moses’ idea, so they throw all their anger and sarcasm at him: “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us
away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of
Egypt? 12Is this not the very thing we told you in 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.”
Freedom wasn’t the Israelites’ idea, but it wasn’t up
to Moses either. God imagined more for God’s people then they could imagine for
themselves. None of them were
operating from a place of faith.
All they had was fear and a growing desire to go back to something that
wasn’t good, but a life they understood.
Slavery seems better to the Israelites than to die on
the banks of the Red Sea – either by drowning or at the hands of the Egyptian
army fast approaching. This
is not the first time they have been unable to see a future beyond their
immediate fear. And it won’t be
the last. The Israelites will keep
murmuring and doubting and falling into despair all the way through the wilderness
and into the Promised Land. Moses
will keep holding God’s vision before them. And over time, the memories of slavery in Egypt will be held
together with memories of God’s liberation.
And so it is for us. Sometimes we prefer the misery we know to the mystery we
can’t begin to imagine. We are
like the Israelites, standing at the water’s edge, wondering if it’s too late
to turn back around and make a deal with Pharaoh. We depend upon our excellent coping skills to deal with
anxiety as best we can. But God
hasn’t created God’s people to cope, but to flourish. So out of grace and love, God will part the sea for us if we
muster up enough gumption to push on through the mud. And sometimes, maybe most of the time, God doesn’t even wait
for us to get a grip. We’ll be
pushed out into the wilderness despite ourselves.
But we have to experience liberation for ourselves to
believe God’s freedom is real.
Nobody can convince you that everything will be ok, anymore than the
people believed Moses. The children
of Israel had to experience God’s grace for themselves, over and over again, in
crossing the sea, in seeing Pharaoh defeated, in seeing manna every morning and
water springing forth from a rock.
They had to live through their loss of certainty about knowing to
expect. Grace came to them as loss
and bewilderment, and sometimes that’s how we experience grace, too. We have to live through loss and then
learn to see it as the deliverance it often is. The longer we live, the easier it becomes to see God’s
grace, but it is never, ever easy to receive it.
Pharaoh could not see that having control of everything
would never save him. After the
plagues, he told Moses just to go and take his people out of Egypt. But the scarcity narrative of Pharaoh’s
empire could only be defeated by the power and goodness of God. When the Israelites make their escape,
instead of turning back to Egypt to rebuild a new society based on freedom and
justice, Pharaoh and his army foolishly follow into the water. The chariots’
wheels become clogged in the sea bottom and Egyptian drivers cry out, “Let us
flee from the Israelites for YHWH is fighting for them.” Pharaoh had been given the opportunity
to escape too. But it’s too
late. Pharaoh lost his
chance.
Deliverance had come, but it came with a tremendous cost for
everyone involved. There is a famous Jewish Midrash in which the rabbi says
that God prevented the angels from celebrating the deaths of the
Egyptians. God’s heart was filled
with pity for Pharaoh and the Egyptians, as well as pity for the anguish of the
Israelites and their terror at the water’s edge.[2]
So there is a stark choice in this story. Who are we to be? Will we stand with Pharaoh’s ethic of
fear, greed and anxiety? Or will
we trust the God of abundance and believe we will be cared for? Where will we
put our trust? In our own ability
to defeat our enemies and secure our own future? Or with Jesus whose vision for all people is peace and the
wholeness of God’s shalom?
Next week, we will receive one of the special offerings of
our denomination, the Peace and Global Witness offering. This is an offering specifically
designed to witness to the Shalom of Jesus and the love of God for people who
are suffering from violence, oppression and exploitation. One of the places Presbyterian mission
co-workers have been doing this kind of important work is in Columbia. At the heart of
Columbia’s struggle is a modern day version of Pharaoh’s land-grabbing. As soon as someone with power wants a piece
of land in Columbia, whether it is the government, wealthy land owners, or the
cocaine industry, the campesinos (peasant farmers) are run off, harassed or
even murdered.
The Presbyterian Church in Columbia is speaking out against
this kind of oppression and violence, and has asked American Presbyterians to
stand with their communities.
Presbyterian missionaries partner with Columbian Presbyterians to
accompany people who have been displaced or have lost family members. An American missionary wrote in a
journal she kept during her time in Columbia about a young man named Yeison,
“He wanted Americans to know how he felt.
He told me, ‘Not everything here is drugs and violence. There are lots of us simply striving to
live a good life. Columbians like
their life, they just want it to be more peaceful.”
Another mission worker writes, “We sent to the town of El
Tamarindo after a young man was murdered.
There was a spokesperson for the man who claims he is the ‘real owner”
of the land, the paramilitary thugs who ran the farmer off by destroying his
crop and his home, the military that was called in as back-up, a cluster of
campesinos who have all worked the land for years, and the grief-stricken
father of the murdered young man.
We had nothing to offer the father except our presence, love and
compassion, but in that moment of personal connection, it felt important, it
felt like it helped. It was what
accompaniment is all about, and it was a moment we will never forget.”
It seems like such a small gesture, doesn’t it? Such a small moment of peace in the
face of almost overwhelming violence and injustice. But when we are standing on the side of those who are vulnerable
or oppressed, we know that we are on God’s side, not Pharaoh’s.
This week, I spent Tuesday night helping my sister in
Christ, Jennifer Frayer Griggs and many others at Hot Metal Bridge serve what
we called “The Fancy Table” to the folks who come for a meal at their ministry
“The Table.” Instead of Sloppy
Joes or spaghetti served cafeteria style with paper plates, the people who came
on Tuesday night sat down at tables covered with white tablecloths, set with
real china and glasses, and were served a three course meal including steak and
shrimp, prepared by local chefs and students. As our staff of volunteers moved among the tables clearing
plates and pouring refills of iced tea and coffee, the guests kept asking, “Why
are you doing this? What’s the
special occasion?” And the truth is, there wasn’t really a reason or an
occasion. The whole idea was
basically to love people who don’t experience whole-hearted love very often.
Jenn said that as one man was leaving, he said to her: “That was wonderful. For a few minutes there, I completely forgot I was homeless.”
Such a small insignificant thing, right? A couple minutes of forgetfulness. A
steak dinner served by a bunch of earnest volunteers and high school kids. Such a brief interlude in the on-going
issues of homelessness and poverty and lack of mental health resources. But when we stand on the side of people
who are hungry and insist that God’s abundance is for everyone, we know we are
on God’s side, not Pharaoh’s.
Truth is, most days it is almost impossible for me to know
whether I am the oppressed or the oppressor. Truth be told, most of us stand much more closely to the
powers we can see with our eyes because we do not trust our hearts to be
reliable. Some days we are as
fearful as Pharaoh and other days we are as faithless as the Israelites, but
through all of it, God’s peace is held up to us as a new script, a better
narrative for our lives. God and
God’s angels are rooting for us, guiding us, through deep seas and high
mountains and too many days in the wilderness. Let us wade into deep water together, trusting God will make
a way out of no way.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
