Join the Freedom Movement

11^th Sunday After Pentecost

Romans 12:1-8

Exodus 1:8-2:10

The storyline of the Bible turns on two major events of deliverance: Israel’s Exodus from Egypt and God’s deliverance of all people from sin and evil in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Yes, there’s lots of other stuff in there.  But all the rest is background or commentary on these two events.  Both events picture God as a deliverer and liberator.  And they picture us as people who have been delivered from captivity into freedom.

These two seismic events of Old and New Testaments raise a pointed question for us to explore today: Do you experience yourself as a person who has been delivered from slavery into freedom?  Are these stories telling a deeply true story about who you are?  Does this story of God providing an “exodus” out of slavery illumine and explain your life in helpful ways?  Is God freeing you from anger, jealousy, selfishness, and greed, from anxity and from the expectations of others?

 

But let me turn the question around another way as well: Are you part of God’s freedom movement?  Have you been mobilized by God’s Spirit into the work of helping others find freedom and life in a world full of death-dealing prisons?  If the Bible is true, then there is an energetic freedom movement happening in us and around us and calling to us for us to add our own energies to the movement.  Some of us have energetically joined.  Others of us have grown sluggish, we’ve forgotten or overlooked the liberating work of God.  Some of us may be in a position where we need to repent: we are resisting the call of God’s Spirit into some important role or work on behalf of others.

Exodus 1:8-14

In Genesis, Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt but rose quickly to become the Prince of Egypt, Pharaoh’s most trust official.  He brought his father Jacob and all his brothers and their families in Egypt to provide for them.

Now we’re in a different world.  It’s many years later, Joseph’s descendants are still living in the land.  Several generations have arrived and the size of their family and their role in Egypt has continued to grow.  The new king or Pharaoh has no connections to Joseph’s descendants, the Israelites.

The new King relates to God’s people primarily in fear: he fears that their population is growing out of hand.  He fears that the Egyptians will be eclipsed or overrun by these foreigners.  He does not relate to them in trust, rather he assumes the worst about them.  As he looks at the future, he imagines war breaking out.  He thinks of the future not in terms of partnership or collaboration or friendship, but as a brawl over power and resources.  Here is a powerful leader who is afraid of losing any of his power.  So he begins to hate the people he fears.

So the new Pharaoh implemented a strategy of stern slave masters and demanding, degrading labor.  This policy was designed to control the future of the Israelite people and to publicly express that they are second class and less human than the Egyptians.  But the Israelites continued to multiply.  And the Egyptians came to dread them.  And worked them ruthlessly.  They used them up as disposable, unimportant, undignified slaves.

The reason this king isn’t named is to free the story to be used by future generations of God’s people. It’s a story written for our benefit so that we can learn to live like free people in a world of death-dealing powers.

Thousands of young girls every year are kidnapped or sold by their families into the brutal sex industry.  And it’s not just in places like Bangkok, Thailand.  Hundreds of young sex slaves are brought here to the United States.

In the African tribal conflicts of the past couple of decades, young boys are kidnapped from their homes, drugged, and forced to fight in guerilla warfare.

People trying to raise their children in parts of Honduras and Mexico can’t send their children to school or let them outside to play because of the violence of the drug cartels.

We could, of course, go on and on, multiplying examples of people who are denied the freedom to be the people God created them to be. 

But we don’t have to look to foreign countries to find examples where God’s freedom is desperately needed.  We need only look nearby, in our own community, and in our own personal lives.  There are those around us who are consistently overlooked and devalued: those who are too old, those too young, those disabled, those without formal education, or without the right connections and relationships.

David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King raises the question whether even middle class people with jobs are as free as we think we are.  The novel focuses on the mind numbing work done by people working in grey cubicles at a massive IRS processing and auditing center in Indiana.  Their productivity is tracked minutely every day.  At first they had to process a certain number of returns each day.  But then the measure changed – they were evaluated by how much revenue they recovered in their audits.  On the back of your bulletins is a paragraph that appears in a section detailing the stress of their work . . .

“Our house was outside of the city, off one of the blacktop road.  We had us a big dog that my daddy would keep on a chain in the front yard.  A big part German shepherd.  I hated the chain but we didn’t have a fence, we were right off the road there.  The dog hated that chain.  But he had dignity.  What he’d do, he’d never go out to the length of the chain.  He’d never even get out to where the chain got tight.  Even if the mailman pulled up, or a salesman.  Out of dignity, this dog pretended like he chose this one area to stay in that just happened to be inside the length of the chain.  Nothing outside of that area right there interested him.  He just had zero interest.  So he never noticed the chain.  He didn’t hate it.  The chain.  He just up and made it no relevant.  Maybe he wasn’t pretending – maybe he really up and chose that little circle for his own world. He had a power to him.  All of his life on that chain.  I loved that damn dog.”

                                                                        David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

This image of the dog – chained, hating the chains, but full of dignity – this is such a powerful image for all of us.  God creates us to live in freedom.  And yet there are so many chains that hold us captive in life.

The Exodus story can help us identify all kinds of dehumanizing powers at work in our world. But it’s also a story that reminds us how much God loves those who suffer.  This is a fundamental story passed on generation to generation to remind us that those who suffer from any kind of captivity are at the very center of God’s loving concern.  We are never to forget those in any kind of pain. 

Exodus 1:15-22

Here we see that Pharaoh’s fear of Israel has now become a national policy of the murder of children.  First, Pharaoh attempts to enlist Hebrew women working as midwives.  When that doesn’t work, Pharaoh submits to violence on a scale that is difficult to imagine: he enlists the entire population in an effort to murder every male child born to Israelites.  Here the fear has metasticized into a maniacal plan of genocide.  At this point it might appear that there is no hope for this little struggling people.  The king of the most powerful empire on the face of the earth wants to annihilate them.

Only, there are these two women.  As powerful as this Pharaoh is, he’s not named.  But these two women are named – Shiphrah and Puah.  They are ordered to betray their own people by participating in Pharaoh’s murderous plans. 

But they “feared God,” which means they trusted God.  They believed that Pharaoh’s murderous, slave-master approach to life couldn’t last.  So they disobeyed the orders of Pharaoh.  Who are these women?  Who do they think they are?  They’re single, childless women, working in the lowly position of delivering babies.  How on earth did they ever get the idea that they have the freedom to resist Pharaoh’s power?

They get caught, of course.  And Pharaoh confronts them, “Why are you letting the Hebrew baby boys live?”  And they give an “aw-shucks” routine that conveys their smarts and ingenuity.  “These Hebrew women are built differently than your Egyptian women,” they say.  “They’re vigorous, athletic birthers!  They go into labor and just grunt and push it out in no time.  We hurry to the scene but by the time we get there the baby’s already come and the family is celebrating.” 

These two women are models of how to join God’s freedom movement in world full of hostile powers.  No matter what situation we find ourselves in, there is always room for a creative use of our energies and our power.  No matter who you are, no matter how big the powers surrounding you, there is always room for you to engage in creative resistance.

Now I invite you to consider for a moment your role in the ongoing conversation around over shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson.  That incident has unleashed some powerful forces in our culture.  It has unleashed some powerful emotions in all of us.  But you and I have roles to play, because we are part of the freedom movement of people gathered around Jesus Christ. 

We are not outsiders or mere bystanders, indifferent to what’s going on.  Issues of race relations and community health, peace, and justice matter enormously to each of us.  And yet we are not to wade in as expert know-it-alls, taking one side or the other.  In our daily conversations, we have an opportunity to be peace-making voices, reconciling voices.  How do we do that?  With regard to the situation in Ferguson, we do the best we can to honor the complexity of the situation.

I bet it’s tough to be a police officer.  They work with courage and bravery in countless dangerous situations.  They put themselves on the front lines of our communities to keep us safe.  And they do this for little pay and even less thanks.  The police in Ferguson had to deal with a chaotic situation, worries about gunfire, the throwing of rocks and bottles.  Most were protesting peacefully, but some weren’t.  Who among us can truly answer that we would know the right thing to do in a frightening confrontation?

And I bet it’s tough to be black in Ferguson, MO.  Blacks make up 63% of the population, but they account for 86% of all traffic stops and 92% of all arrests.  In a town that’s 63% black, only three of the 53 police officers are black.  Surveys after the incident show that 80% of black folks feel that the shooing raises important issues of race, while only 37% of whites do.  A vast majority of whites are confident in the investigation of the shooting, yet 76% of blacks have little to no confidence in the outcome of the investigation.

We need not pretend to be experts.  Nor to have any special insight into the Ferguson incident or race relations in general.  But we do know that Scripture pictures God as a liberator and it pictures congregations of people like us as part of God’s freedom movement.

And with regard to our own congregation and community, we work as hard as we can to make sure that we are a welcoming, loving, hospitable place for people from all different backgrounds, anyone who looks or feels different – whether they’re disabled or gay or Black, Hispanic, or Asian.  White congregations like ours will have to pray for extra grace to welcome those who are different.

Exodus 2:1-10

Here we get one more example of how God’s freedom movement works.  It often works by unlikely people acting courageously and creatively in the face of enormous threat.  These are people who are able to live with hope even when all the dark powers have gathered in their fullest strength.  They link themselves to God’s freedom project even when it looks like God is absent.

Moses’ mother and sister, as well as Pharaoh’s daughter, act in ways that further God’s plan to liberate a people held in captivity.

This part of the story invites us to see ourselves in the life of the vulnerable baby set afloat in the threat of a murderous regime.  That baby’s story is our story.  We’re the ones delivered from threats by a mysterious coordination of events and a cast of characters we don’t even know.  God has been at work through all this to provide for us the freedom to become ourselves.

You and I no longer live in the death grip of powers that can harm us.  Jesus Christ has set us free from all that and given us power to live in a new way.  He is the new Moses, who has saved us from all that threatens to destroy us.  He has done this for us through his death and resurrection.  It is his work and his gift to us.  And yet his work of freeing us does not leave us passive.  It does just the opposite.  It flips the switch that turns us on and energizes us as people who are now part of God’s freedom movement.  Jesus saves us by including us in a new people given the task of working for the freedom of all people everywhere.