Freedom!
Exodus 1: 1 14; Exodus 3: 1 – 15
We make the road by walking.
I ask that we start today remembering that. We are on a path – a path of believing and following – along a roadway that others have traveled before us. We are tasked with forging the next miles on that path, mindful of what has happened in the past and the markers that have been left by others on the journey, and watching for how we shape the road for the present and the future.
We make the road by walking….together.
Today we walk beyond the source stories of Genesis - stories that ground us in creation and ancestry and we walk into another key part of the story in which we find ourselves.
This next part of the story begins with expansive drama – perhaps you are more familiar with the King James version:
…there arose a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.
We kind of side-stepped the details of the Joseph story last week (but I hope you thought about it as you followed along in the book!). In the spirit of making sure we all experience the arc of the bigger story, here’s a quick catch-up on necessary details:
Joseph, favored son of Jacob, who had been handled roughly by his brothers, found a place of favor in Pharaoh’s court. And Joseph was able, because of that favor he found with Pharaoh and because he acted with mercy and compassion toward his brothers, to situate those brothers – the descendants of Abraham in safety and prosperity within Egypt while a famine plagued the land that they left.
But…as happens in all realms eventually, there was a new king in town – and the Hebrew descendants of Abraham found themselves to be an enslaved class in Egypt.
The texts for today deliver us right to Moses as he encounters a bush that burns but is not consumed by its burning.
God speaks to Moses from that burning and tells him that he, Moses, is the one to free the Israelites from bondage in Egypt.
Moses is caught off guard. Why me? Who am I to do that work? And who shall I say sends me?
And all of that is probably a perfectly human reaction for just about anyone who is hearing a voice come from a bush set ablaze, but it makes WAY MORE sense when we remember Moses’ backstory.
Back at the beginning of the book of Exodus, Pharaoh was overwhelmed by how the Israelite population was growing – slaves outnumbered Egyptians and that seemed unsafe. So to control the population, Pharaoh commanded the Israelite midwives to kill all the male babies born to Israelite women (hold on to that – it’s another one of those recurring themes that we bump up against in just a couple of months again).
The scriptures tell us that the midwives feared God more than Pharaoh, and so they let the baby boys live. Discovering that the population continues to grow, Pharaoh basically tells the Egyptians they can play a role in destroying Israelite boys.
Then, a Levite woman gives birth to a robust baby boy and the midwives spare him. His mother hides him from sight for three months and then builds a basket and floats him down the river. As his sister looks on, this baby is found by one of Pharaoh’s daughters, who names this baby Moses, takes him in and raises him in Pharaoh’s home, as if he is family.
I assume life as a member of Pharaoh’s household was a pretty good life. Pretty different from the life that Moses’ mother and his sister were living.
I wonder if Moses was conflicted growing up.
I assume he did not LOOK like the family that was raising him.
I assume he could see people that looked like him toiling as slaves in Pharaoh’s cities beyond the walls of his compound. His biological mother was his wet nurse – maybe he actually knew exactly who he was but had to hide from all that or bury it in his soul somewhere.
And then one day, he saw an Egyptian beating an Israelite, and Moses killed that Egyptian – a crime of passion. Perhaps the disorientation about his identity and his allegiance reached a breaking point. Perhaps he was young and full of fire and a little bit of confusion and self-loathing...
He melted in among the Israelites afterward to hide but then some Israelites called him out, taunted him, asked if he was going to lose his cool again, and so he fled, to tend flocks far away...to find a new identity that wouldn’t be so complicated.
And this is his situation when God shows up in the burning bush. He’s buried himself in making a life with family and flocks. He’s living his own form of exile, but he’s alive and getting by.
Then there is this bush that is burning. And from that burning, a voice:
“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…”
And God goes on to tell Moses that he is sending Moses to Pharaoh – with the mission of bringing God’s people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.
So Moses has been summoned for a task.
And his first question: who am I to do this?
There is some clever word-play in God’s response. Because God doesn’t respond by answering Moses’ question about Moses’ identity.
Instead God responds by explaining Godself– I am who I am – I am who I will be.
That feels a little like this:
No matter who YOU are Moses, I AM.
And I want those people to be free.
I think Moses’ question is important– especially if we are trying to find some thread of this story that takes us down the road on our journey.
Who am I to do this, God?
Who am I to leave my privilege and identify with those who are enslaved?
Who am I to leave safety and security to free others?
Who am I to participate in the work of liberation?
Who am I to join in God’s work so that a better future emerges for someone else?
A future where justice and compassion and mercy are available in ways they are not currently available?
This story reveals for us some core understanding of what God is up to – God is with the enslaved, not the slave owners.
God’s word’s – I AM who I will be gather all of this in:
God is at work calling forth a better future for the oppressed.
God is at work interrupting injustice.
And Moses asks:
Who am I to join that work?
Can you relate to that question? Can we relate to that question? Is it possible that this very day we are facing a bush that is burning but not consumed? That God is calling to us to liberate the enslaved?
Who are we to join this work of calling forth a better future for the oppressed?
Who are we to join the work of interrupting injustice?
Who are we NOT to join that work?
In this part of the story, we are plunged headlong into the call that God makes on people’s lives, calling them to join in the work of freeing the captive. And this is a story about Moses today – but it is a story that keeps coming up. In the scriptures and in our lives.
God is seeking the liberation – of an entire people. An entire people who are OPPRESSED. And we are at the very beginning of that story.
Let’s leap forward to Jesus for a minute -
There’s a new king in town – a messiah you might say, and he walks into the synagogue in his hometown, opens the Torah scroll and announces this:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
He’s there as God in flesh – naming what oppression looks like – forced labor, economic oppression, a caste system that creates a permanent underclass, a lack of shelter, food, healthcare, religious systems that would rather stone a person than help them get on their feet.
Scripture shows us time and again that God is working nonstop toward liberation.
The natural order of the Kingdom of God is liberation.
Remember the garden? It all starts in the garden - that place where Adam and Eve had all the freedoms they could imagine and just couldn’t resist the one no-no. That kind of liberation…
I wonder…
Do we take this part of our identity as followers of Jesus seriously? I mean, are we actually working in our daily lives to be part of freeing others?
Freeing others from addiction, from homelessness, chronic under-employment, a lack of healthcare access, from imprisonment in many forms.
Do we hear that voice calling us to this work?
I close today with the text from Galatians – this time from the common English bible translation because it avoids the use of the word “slave.”
I want to offer a disclaimer. There is no simple or uncomplicated use of the language of slavery, especially as we are grappling to understand the centuries old challenges of racism in our own country. Slavery was a fact of life when the early church was forming in the Mediterranean basin. It has been a part of our Methodist church history. And slavery still exists in the shadows of the economy we move in today. No one is called to slavery. And we are called to serve.
You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love. All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbor as yourself.
May it be so.
Amen.
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