Sunday, October 1, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (reading starts around 22:07; children’s sermon starts around 28:26; sermon starts around 39:02)
Reading: Exodus 1:8-2:10; 3:1-15
I started out the children’s sermon by asking the kids about bullying and was pleasantly surprised when almost none of them had had any significant experiences with bullying (that was emphatically *not* my childhood experience!). But we talked about imagining how it feels to be bullied and why it can be so hard to stand up to someone who is bullying people – and what it feels like to someone being bullied to have someone else stand up for them. We talked about the violent actions of Pharaoh in our bible reading and about the courage of those who opposed him. Moses, the midwives, and everyone who resisted Pharaoh’s violent plans was motivated by love – love for God and love for their people – while Pharaoh was motivated by hate and resentment. And love is the side that wins. This is how we can overcome bullying and the like as well: by choosing love – showing love to those who are being bullied, and even to the bullies themselves, who are often deeply in need of love.
This story of God calling Moses in our bible reading for today is one that’s very familiar to us. But as you probably noticed, this reading is such a long one that it’s hard to remember all the particular details. Everyone remembers little baby Moses in the basket, and then Moses at the burning bush – and maybe you remembered God declaring to Moses, “I AM who I am.” It’s a lot less pleasant to remember that the whole inciting incident behind the story of Moses and all the amazing things he saw and experienced was the mass murder of children.
The trouble begins with a breakdown of relationship. It was Jacob’s son Joseph who had brought the Hebrew people down to live in Egypt. He was the one who had a good relationship with the Pharaoh, and in return, the Pharaoh had given him land for him and his family to settle in and prosper. But time has passed; Joseph and his brothers and that entire generation have died, and now there’s a new Pharaoh in town. And this Pharaoh deeply resents the wealth and security and comfort that the Hebrew people have built up for themselves in Egypt.
So he starts riling up the Egyptian people against the Hebrews by stoking feelings of fear and xenophobia toward them. He says to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we are. We better do something about this, or they will just keep reproducing and then probably turn on us at the first opportunity when some other country declares war on us.” So the Egyptians basically enslave the Hebrews, imposing harsh conditions and hard labor on them. But to Pharaoh’s great consternation, the Israelites continue to flourish and multiply. Now there are even more of them – and he has just given all of them pretty good reasons to be upset with him and the Egyptian people.
So Pharaoh decides to take some even more drastic measures. He goes to the Hebrew midwives and casually orders them: “When you are helping these Hebrew women give birth, if you see the child born is a girl, that’s fine; but any time the child born is a boy, kill him.” But the midwives are deeply faithful to God and they courageously defy Pharaoh by refusing to kill any of the babies. So, in frustration, Pharaoh then commands all of his people: “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile.” The bible doesn’t give us a direct account of this actually happening, but considering what lengths Moses’ mother goes to to protect her infant son – even giving him up and placing her beloved son in a basket in the river – it certainly seems pretty clear that the people obeyed Pharaoh’s terrible orders.
It’s bone-chilling to think about. And it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could possibly bring themselves to do such a horrific thing – especially to a helpless child. But it’s important to realize that none of them probably went directly from zero to baby-murder. As we see in this story, it’s a gradual process – a process that begins with this dehumanizing kind of language that Pharaoh uses to talk about the Hebrews. He casts them as others, even as enemies. And over time, the people of Egypt come to see the Hebrews as parasites on their society – as foreigners trying to steal their jobs, perhaps, or maybe as lazy, entitled welfare queens – and they start to treat them as less than human, and force them to work as slaves. Their feelings of resentment toward the Hebrews move through fear into hatred and finally culminate in violence.
But while the Egyptians may have forgotten their relationship with the Hebrews, God most certainly has not. God hears the Hebrews cry out under the harsh treatment imposed on them and chooses to act. God finds Moses out in the wilderness of Midian and speaks to him through the burning bush, calling him to go to Pharaoh to bring the Hebrews out of Egypt. Moses is totally taken aback by this call and says to God, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh and ask for the release of the Hebrews??” but God promises Moses, “I will be with you.” And when Moses asks who he should say God is, God tells him, “I AM who I am.” And God hearkens back to this long relationship with the Israelites, telling Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And you can hear an affirmation of the covenant God made with the Israelites in God saying, “I have come to deliver the Hebrews and bring them into a good and spacious land, flowing with milk and honey.” It’s an echo of what God promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
And even though Moses doesn’t feel like he is worthy of this call, God knows that he is actually *exactly* the right person for the job. Moses was raised in privilege as an Egyptian – by the daughter of the Pharaoh, no less. But despite his privilege, Moses is moved by the suffering of the Hebrews, so much so that he actually flies into a rage when he sees an Egyptian man beating them and kills him. This is why Moses ended up fleeing to Midian. But despite what he’s done, Moses has connections with both the Egyptians and the Hebrews and he can stand in the gap between them.
Moses accepts the call, and from there the story is quite familiar. Through Moses, God gives Pharaoh and the Egyptians ten different opportunities to repent and to let the Hebrews go peacefully. But Pharaoh refuses to cooperate. And in the end, God of course brings about liberation for the Hebrews – but it comes at a massive cost to the Egyptians: the decimation their crops and waterways and land, the deaths of their firstborn children, and their entire army drowned in the sea.
There is so, so much suffering and destruction and death in this story – and it all results from this deliberate breaking of relationship. It all starts with this deliberately dehumanizing language that Pharaoh uses – and it leads to tragic and terrible outcomes for everyone involved.
There are lots of things you can take away from this story. But this is what has stood out to me the most this week: how critically, vitally important it is that we never forget our shared humanity. It is so crucially important to remember that each and every single human – regardless of who they are or what they believe – every single person is a beloved and precious child of God. And God will fight for every last one of them.
And this danger posed by dehumanization is by no means limited to the ancient world. Luther Seminary put out an article I wish I’d seen earlier this week about the German pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer lived during the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and was eventually executed for his part in the resistance. The title of this article reflected the central theme of what Bonhoeffer himself preached again and again in response to what he saw happening in his country: “The Urgency of Loving Others.”
Bonhoeffer saw firsthand how the process of dehumanizing other people paved the way for unimaginable atrocities to happen. And it should trouble us greatly when we hear that kind of attitude start creeping into public and political discourse in our own times – for instance, in the way we hear people talking about immigrants or homeless people or people in prison; in the way that trans people are cast as somehow being a threat to children, all the while there are literal neo-Nazis rising in our country again.
The need for compassion and empathy in this world is urgent. The lack of it is leading us into greater and greater polarization, into a greater inability to see the humanity of the people who disagree with us. And it is already leading to suffering for the most vulnerable among us.
But God still hears the cries of the suffering. And God still answers. And just as God has done all throughout history, God invites human agents to be part of this mission of love and liberation. And that means you and me. Us. We are called, like Moses, like Shiphrah and Puah, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and like the many others who have gone before us, we are called to be courageous and faithful messengers of God. We are called to stand up and speak out on behalf of those who are suffering. We are called to bear witness to the love of God and to the preciousness of every single person as a child of God.
And we may well respond to that call like Moses, saying to God, “Who are we to take this on? What can we few do in a world that sometimes seems so hell-bent on tearing itself apart?” But God reassures us, saying to us: “You are exactly the right people for this job. You are exactly the right people to carry my love to the world, and I am with you. I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses. I am the God who brought the Hebrews safely out of Egypt. I am who I am, and I will be with you always.”
This is the Day 