Doom to those going down to Egypt for help! They rely on horses, trust in chariots because they are many, and on riders because they are very strong. But they don’t look to the holy one of Israel; they don’t seek the Lord. 2 But God also knows how to bring disaster; he has not taken back his words. God will rise up against the house of evildoers and against the help of those who do wrong.
3 Egypt is human and not divine; their horses are flesh and not spirit. The Lord will extend his hand; the helper will stumble, those helped will fall, and they will all die together. 4 The Lord has said to me: When the lion growls, the young lion, over its prey, though a band of shepherds is summoned against it, isn’t scared off by their noise or frightened by their roar. So the Lord of heavenly forces will go down to fight on Mount Zion and on her hill. 5 Like birds flying aloft, so the Lord of heavenly forces will shield Jerusalem: shielding and saving, sparing and rescuing. 6 People of Israel, return to the one whom you have deeply betrayed! 7 On that day, you will each reject the idols of silver and the idols of gold, which you have sinfully made for yourselves. (Common English Bible)
“From Slave State to
Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week Three
Juan
Carlos Coronilla Guerrero was, by almost all appearances, living the American
dream, so much so that you couldn’t tell him from Adam. He had found work as a
carpenter, he and his wife were raising three kids, he had settled down, life
was good.
Then
he had to appear in court on a misdemeanor possession charge for carrying a quarter-ounce
of marijuana on his person. And he had immigrated here illegally from Mexico into
Texas after being deported once before. While the county of the courtroom he
appeared in had previously not, as a matter of policy, turned over illegal
immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nonviolent misdemeanors,
things were different last year with Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary cities and
counties ordered a year ago yesterday. And there at the courtroom to greet
Coronilla were a pair of ICE agents to arrest him for reentry after
deportation, a felony. I’ll let Sarah Stillman for the New Yorker pick up
Coronilla’s story from here:
Coronilla’s wife begged a
federal judge to spare her husband. Gangs had overrun his home town in Mexico,
and deportees were prime targets for crime, since they were presumed to have
money. Coronilla was deported in June. Three months later (in September),
gunmen woke him from the bed where he slept with his young son. According to
the Austin American-Statesman,
he tried to soothe the boy, saying, “Don’t
worry, my love.” His body was found about forty miles away, filled with
bullets. When I spoke to Coronilla’s wife shortly after his death, she told me
that she’d returned to Mexico to claim his body. She now fears for her own
life. “He was a good man,” she said. “Now I have to prepare for his funeral.”
Whatever
your beliefs are about marijuana—and I have my own—holding a quarter-ounce of
it should not merit a cascade of dominoes that results in your deportation and,
three months later, subsequent murder by a cartel while telling your terrified
child not to worry. But that is the death we have wrought, all in the name of “they
took our jobs,” and all while somehow claiming to be “pro-life.” And the reckoning
for such masquerades is fast becoming due.
This
is both a new sermon series and a new year for us. This series began on the day
after a very special holiday on the liturgical calendar. January 6 is Epiphany,
the day that tradition says the Magi finally arrived to present Jesus with
their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Epiphany is the beginning of a
very violent, very sorrowful chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that entails the
massacre of all the infant boys in Bethlehem on orders of the Israelite king
Herod the Great (who was, in turn, a vassal of the Roman emperor Augustus). To
prevent Jesus from meeting that same fate, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt and
remain there until Herod is dead, at which point they safely return to Israel.
The
Holy Family’s flight into Egypt is what fundamentally informs this new sermon
series, which will last the entire month of January, because it is a flight
that we should be increasingly familiar with by dint of the news cycles
circulating around the immigration debate taking place in our country. As we’ll
see in later installments of this series, Egypt holds a terrifying legacy of
slavery and displacement for ancient Israel. Yet in the moment, it acts as a
refuge for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
There
is an obvious parallel for us in the United States today. For instance, how can
we be a place of safety and refuge for, say, the courageous people in Iran
protesting their regime today, if we have also banned them from entering our
country?
Last week, we began this series with
the Epiphany story itself in Matthew 2:1-12, and last week, we dug into the
person who is the Hebrew Bible parallel to the Epiphany story: Moses. Today, we
arrive at a passage from Isaiah 31 that recalls the Israelites’ time in Egypt as
chattel slaves.
The Hebrew Bible professor William L.
Holladay sums up Isaiah 31 as a “message…of the hopelessness of relying on
Egypt,” and it is easy to see why, even just by glancing at the first line of
verse one: “Doom to those going down to Egypt for help!” But the prophet goes
on to explain why, exactly such doom is to be expected in verse three: “Egypt
is human and not divine; their horses are flesh and not spirit.”
Egypt, in other words, may represent a
temporary and temporal solution to the question that faced eighth-century BCE
prophets like Isaiah of what to do about the perpetual existential threat that
an Assyrian conquest of the land represented, but Egypt did not represent a
spiritual solution.
Egypt, then, to turn a phrase from
Isaiah himself at the end of this passage, represents an idol of silver and
gold, such idols that we have made for ourselves and which Isaiah says we must
and will eventually reject.
Such idols can be made of silver and
gold, but not necessarily. The key ingredient is that they are made by us, not
by God, just like the original idol of silver and gold: the golden calf formed
by Aaron at the peoples’ behest at Mount Sinai.
And ultimately, that is what things
like our borders are. We drew them. Humans drew them. Not God. Our border with
Mexico was drawn via the Gadsden Purchase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
that ended the Mexican-American War.
To treat those borders as idols, as gods,
is not what God expects or demands. We can argue for border security, but not
in the name of God, or God as revealed through Jesus Christ. And we cannot use
our love of borders to say that God wants us to act with such cruelty and
wanton indifference to Dreamers brought here as children for whom the United
States is home.
What other things of ours that we have
made, what idols of silver of gold, have we elevated to graven image status, to
godhood in our own selfish spheres of existence?
In what ways have we—and you—become like
the ancient Egypt of old, the ancient Egypt that cannot be relied upon except
for its own selfishness and self-centeredness?
And what can you then do to melt those
idols of silver and gold into something different, something that can be a gift
rather than an empty gesture, a blessing rather than a curse, and a God-image
rather than a graven image?
This past Friday marked the March for
Life on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. But it also
marked the day of a willingness to shut down the government over the lives of people
who want and need only what we already have and are far too stingy with—the identity
of being American.
In the face of life, in the face of
identity, our own objections to them become idols, and that is not pro-life.
Those objections, those idols, create
and cause death, like that of Juan Carlos Coronilla Guerrero, murdered as he
was desperately trying to comfort his terrified son, because we have decided
over the past decade that being American means being white, and that is the
most sinful of graven images.
That is what Isaiah, and Jesus, would
condemn today—our unreliability to people who aren’t us.
Jesus, on the other hand, was the rock
not just for His Jewish followers, but for His Gentile followers. Beseeched by
Romans and Canaanites alike, He performed miracles. Confronted with a Samaritan
woman held in disgrace, He exalted her, so much so that she returned home
singing His praises and bringing other Samaritans into the fold.
We can be the imago Christi—the image of Christ—or we can be the graven image of
idols in the world.
Which will it be?
What way will we choose?
And what will that choice say to others
about our ultimate priorities?
May we choose wisely and
compassionately, then, as God would have us do, so that we may do what is right
not by our idols, but by our God.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
January
21, 2018
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