SIGNS OF GOD’S FREEDOM
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Text: Exodus 12:1-14
Who doesn’t love the end of a movie like “Indiana Jones” or “Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars”, when the forces of good come charging forward at the last minute to overcome the forces of evil? Who has not felt a lump in the throat and a tear in the eye, that emotional swell, when justice triumphs over oppression? Who hasn’t wanted to jump up and cheer as your team, your side, your people have broken free of the foe and won the day? In the history of the children of Israel, there must be some of this very sense of elation when considering the ancient story of the Exodus.
When we left these people last, they had moved lock, stock and barrel to Egypt because of a great famine in their own land. There they had encountered their long lost brother, Joseph, now Pharaoh’s chief administrator, who embraced and forgave these brothers who had sold him into slavery. Subsequently, we were told that the children of Israel became fruitful and multiplied to the point that Pharaoh and the Egyptians were fearful that these refugees would completely overrun their land and undermine their Egyptian way of life. Since Egyptians of that time apparently did not engage in raids on packing houses and factories with the subsequent deportation of the aliens found in their midst, they opted instead to enslave the outsiders and put them to work building pyramids and temples and other monuments to Egyptian culture. Come to think of it, slavery might not be that different from living in terror of being captured and deported while trying to raise a family and make ends meet on the substandard wages paid by exploitative employers, but I guess that is a different story for another time.
Since we left the Hebrew people, celebrating with Joseph, in the book of Genesis, a lot of water has flowed down the Nile. Exodus brings us the dramatic story of Moses, born to Hebrew parents under an Egyptian edict to kill all new born Hebrew boys in a crude and violent attempt at population control. We all remember the charming story of Moses, hidden in the bulrushes near the banks of the Nile, discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter, raised at court as her son with his own birth mother as his nurse maid. We recall the hotheaded young prince who killed an Egyptian overseer for beating a Hebrew slave. We know how he fled to the desert land of Midian, married the daughter of Jethro, the priest. became a shepherd, lived incognito until God confronted him in a burning bush, sending him back to Pharaoh with the clear word, “Let my people go.”
After a concentrated effort to resist God’s call, we find Moses in Pharaoh’s court, doing as God has commanded, with little positive result. We have had plagues of blood, frogs, gnats, flies, livestock disease, boils, hail and thunderstorms, locusts and dense darkness, and watched the vacillating ruler agree to free the slaves and then renege. In preparation for a final confrontation with Pharaoh and all he represents, God warns the Hebrew people to sacrifice a lamb, spread some of its blood on the door posts of their houses, make a meal of the rest, but eat it like the fast food you pick up at the drive-through and eat in your car on your way out of town. The final confrontation seems familiar; there is a revenge motif in the last of the plagues. God is going to pass over Egypt, the text tells us, and kill all the firstborn sons of those whose door posts are not marked by the blood of sacrifice. Since this is a secret warning, imparted only to the Hebrews, we can assume this means a retributive slaughter of all the Egyptian firstborn as well as those of any other resident aliens in the land; it even extends to the animals.
What we get in this morning’s text is not actually the exciting and bloody narrative of the liberation of the children of Israel from slavery. What we get are the legal instructions for the proper practice of celebrating, in perpetuity, this Passover event, this liberating moment, this embrace by God of a chosen people. In their legalism, the words LeAnn read for us, written down hundreds of years after the Exodus, during the time of the Babylonian Exile, are not exactly page-turning adventure. They do, however, secure the special relationship between God and God’s people. They also instruct the people on why and how they must never forget how God has set them free from bondage. The Passover celebration becomes forever a sign of God’s freedom for God’s people.
Now, some would argue in God’s defense that it is not God’s fault that the Egyptian firstborn are killed. They would say Pharaoh had more than fair warning that if he did not let God’s people go there would be severe consequences, that there would be “hell to pay,” and Pharaoh chose to ignore the warnings and risk the lives of his people. Well, we know that there have been and still are leaders willing to risk the lives of their people in mad pursuit of power or because of some illusion that they hold authority over matters of live and death. But once again the story of leaders who send their trusting subjects off to die in battle for the leader’s own peculiar sense of patriotic pride, delusions of glory or other dubious intention is for another time and place.
Of course this story is rooted in primitive culture and ancient mythology. In order to remain people of faith, we are not required to embrace it fully or argue passionately that this is the way God works. This is a troubling tale for me, and I imagine for some of you, too. It is true that the story of the Exodus, the liberation of God’s people from slavery, has been a defining one for more than one oppressed people. Surely it was for the Hebrew people; that is why they have memorialized it for millennia. Surely it was for Africans brought to the shores of our own country in chains to work the fields as slaves. Many of the spirituals we are singing this morning were figuratively and literally signs of God’s freedom for an oppressed people, longing for the freedom of a better place both in heaven and on the other side of the Ohio River.
“Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land. Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.” For our modern sensibilities, the version of this spiritual in our hymnal leaves out the verse that proclaims, “Thus saith the Lord, bold Moses said, let my people go, or else I’ll strike your first-born dead. Let my people go.” It may be difficult for us to imagine the pain and anger that makes people cry out for revenge, demand retribution, wish their tormentors ill, desire their enemies dead. We may not know firsthand the rage that incites young men and women to become suicide bombs or fly jetliners into symbols of oppressive power and elitist privilege. Still, there are areas of the world in which these sentiments are alive and all too healthy. We still live under the illusion that taking another life, no matter how justified we believe the execution to be, will somehow be life-enhancing and make the world a better place. The culture of vengeance and violence is actually a dark and fearful place from which we might long to be forever free.
What is troubling about this text is its glorification of sacrifice and the shedding of blood, whether innocent or guilty, and its attribution of vengeful violence to God. God may lead God’s people out with “Egypt’s spoils” but the wailing of Egyptian parents for their lost children does not make the Hebrews a better people nor ultimately enrich God’s reputation. Revenge begets revenge, hate breeds hate, and an eye for an eye keeps us imprisoned in a primitive state of being.
In the evolving history of culture and religion, one can argue that this is a tale that both draws God close to God’s people and God’s people close to God. It is a tale that shows persuasively that God desires freedom for her people. There is a powerful word here about abuse of power and its inevitable consequences. Those who presume that they are more powerful than God, who think they owe no allegiance to the Creator of the universe, who stand in arrogant defiance before the Lord of life, will inevitably face the consequences of their posturing, will pay the price for their self-aggrandizing, and, yes, sadly that often includes what we so glibly and euphemistically call “collateral damage” but could still be called, with searing accuracy, “the slaughter of the innocents.”
For us who claim to follow Jesus, who have committed ourselves to new life in Christ, who believe that God came to earth and into our very lives because we couldn’t grasp the fullness of the arguments put forth in the law and the prophets, there is “still a more excellent way” – the way of love. As Jesus sets it forth, it is not just love for those who love us, not just for our families and friends, not just for some exclusively chosen people – Hebrew or American. God calls God’s people to be a light to the nations – all nations. Jesus comes as the very manifestation of that light, as the ultimate sign of God’s freedom for all God’s children.The challenge that God, in Christ, puts before us, in a new manifestation of Moses’s burning bush, is to proclaim the word that God desires all creation to be free, not free to live without responsibility for feelings, thoughts and actions, but free to turn to God in trust that God will see us through – even when times are tough, even when we have to let go of enmity and our desires for revenge in order to recognize strangers and enemies as our neighbors, even when the way is not clear, even when we “tread the verge of Jordan,” even on that morning when “death comes creeping in the room.”
In a few minutes we will sing another spiritual that affirms that “I’m gonna eat at the welcome table.” If you want to go beyond the personal, feel free to sing “We’re gonna eat at the welcome table.” If it feels right sing, “We’re gonna join with our sisters and brothers.” Because the truth is that this table we set, based in the freedom-loving tradition of the story of the first Passover, celebrates a new covenant, a covenant which, as my friend Mark Wilson loves to remind us, is one to which “whosoever will may come.” This is God’s welcome table and there are none who seek to embrace God’s freedom and live for God’s future who are not welcome here, none who crave God’s presence and struggle to walk God’s way who do not have a place here, none who want to share a home among God’s people or who desire to be part of a community of faith who may not eat and drink here. Bread broken, wine poured, people gathered in faith, hope and love, these are signs of God’s freedom for all who desire to be free. Amen.