Moses was taking care of the flock for his father-in-law Jethro, Midian’s priest. He led his flock out to the edge of the desert, and he came to God’s mountain called Horeb. 2 The Lord’s messenger appeared to him in a flame of fire in the middle of a bush. Moses saw that the bush was in flames, but it didn’t burn up. 3 Then Moses said to himself, Let me check out this amazing sight and find out why the bush isn’t burning up.
4 When the Lord saw that he was coming to look, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” Moses said, “I’m here.” 5 Then the Lord said, “Don’t come any closer! Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground.” 6 He continued, “I am the God of your father, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God.” Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said, “I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain. 8 I’ve come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live. 9 Now the Israelites’ cries of injustice have reached me. I’ve seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them. 10 So get going. I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” (Common English Bible)
“From
Slave State to Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week Two
The
daguerreotype of the young man was remarkably moving, not just for the striking
nature of his portrait, but for the scenes of his short but extraordinary life
that surrounded the portrait. And for Anthony Burns, a black Christian preacher
and escaped slave sold back into slavery, it was a life that ought to have been
taught to every single child in the United States.
One
of the most under-taught aspects of United States history, to our discredit, is
the extent to which black slaves who were introduced to Christianity by white
slaveholders in bad faith—the slaveholders did not actually care about life and
liberty for their slaves, but simply saw Christianity as a way of making their
slaves more subservient—and then took that racist brand of Christianity and
turned it into a worldview of freedom and liberation. Absalom Jones was a slave
who became the first black Episcopal priest in the United States and went on to
campaign vigorously against the slave trade. Harriet Tubman, the famed
conductor of the Underground Railroad, was a devout Christian.
And
Anthony Burns escaped slavery in Richmond to Boston before being arrested,
tried, convicted, and extradited back to Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850, which mandated that escaped slaves be sent back to a state of slavery
with only perfunctory due process, if any at all.
Abolitionists
in Boston rallied and protested for his freedom to no avail, even going so far
as to raise the funds to buy Burns’s freedom from the slaveholder, who refused
to do business with anyone who wanted Burns emancipated. It took another black
pastor, Leonard Grimes, to surreptitiously buy Burns’s freedom from the next
slaveholder. This time, Burns stayed free, wrote his memoir, earned a
scholarship to Oberlin College, and became the minister of a church in Canada before
his life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis at age 28.
Of
the significance of Burns and his plight, the abolitionist Amos Adams Lawrence
said, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union
Whigs, and woke up stark mad abolitionists.”
It
is the sort of transformation I see as well in the Biblical figure of Moses,
and it is one I hope we are able to draw from and hearken back to in present-day
America, especially today, on the weekend of Martin Luther King Day.
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. 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 today, we’ll dig into the
person who is the Hebrew Bible parallel to the Epiphany story: Moses.
The story of Moses at the burning bush
is one of my absolute favorites in all of Scripture. A passage from it was read
at my ordination, I did a sermon series on it here exactly six years ago, only
months after I arrived out of seminary, and I still get goosebumps listening to
Val Kilmer voice that scene in The Prince of Egypt.
Exodus 3 represents the start of that
story, after Moses was born to a Hebrew slave mother and, to save him from the
purges ordered by Pharaoh, set adrift the Nile River in a basket. Moses was
found and, ironically, subsequently raised as a member of the royal family
before killing an Egyptian guard, burying him in the sand, and going into
exile. In exile, he marries Tziporah and enters into the service of her father,
Jethro, the priest of Midian, as a shepherd, which is quite a downgrade from
being a member of the royal family of one of the most powerful nations of the
ancient world—from prince to, quite literally, peasant. And that’s where today’s
story opens.
Moses is, in short, presented to us the
sort of old-fashioned, keep-your-head-down-and-do-the-work chap. But upon
encountering the voice of God at the burning bush, and hearing God say that God
has seen the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt, and has heard their cries,
Moses is woken up as, to use Amos Adams Lawrence’s term, a stark mad abolitionist!
Sometimes it takes a specific injustice
to get a person up from their workaday existence and into the realm of a
prophetic, like with the plight of Anthony Burns. Other times, it takes a
direct wake-up call from Almighty God, as was the case for Moses, who, after some
wheedling and pleading, agrees to take up the cause of God’s people to the
Pharaoh of Egypt.
What that divine spark is that ignites
our own passion for faith, and of doing right through that faith, thus varies.
Maybe you haven’t seen a tree catch alight and hear a booming voice crashing straight
down from heaven into your ears. That’s fine.
But God still expects us to be moved by
one another, if not also by extemporaneous pyrotechnics.
It is easy to forget that this happened
this week after the president referred to “these people” from “sh*thole
countries” and expressed a desire for more actual, real-life Aryans to immigrate
to the United States, but it was also announced that the government would be
ending the protections for some 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants who had been
living here as economic refugees, after similar moves had been made last year against
Haitians who have been living in the United States as well.
Like ancient Egypt, the United States
has a painful and horrible history of slavery in its past (and present,
truthfully—slavery was still alive and well in ancient Egypt under Roman rule,
and human trafficking still exists to a larger scale than we probably think
today). And, like ancient Egypt, the United States is still capable of being a
sanctuary for those outsiders who need us to be that. But to do that, we must hear
the cries of those hurt by our racism, and see the harm that we have done.
For God never stopped hearing the cries
of the people. God never stopped seeing their suffering. God may not be parting
Red Seas at present, but that does not mean that we escape culpability.
Nor do we do not get to excuse
ourselves from being moved by what others experience to be able to live in what
we call the Land of Opportunity, not the least of which is because we call it
that. We do not get to brag about being the best country in the world (because
there’s a gold medal to be had in that category…) only to then resent the fact
that other people want to be in said best country in the world. If we’re being
made great again (debatable), and other countries are sh*tholes (even more
debatable), we don’t get to tell people to stay in their holes if we really
care about their flourishing.
But more to the point, Moses was a
murderer in exile. God still charged him with a tremendous responsibility—to seek
the liberation of a people enslaved. That may seem above your particular pay
grade, but it is not as though Moses had a perfect past and a sterling resume
with which to begin.
The United States, and the Christian
Church, may not have a perfect past either. Far from it, in fact. It is a truly
brutal past. But God still charges us with a colossal responsibility to love
our neighbors as ourselves, and those neighbors include the people being made
to stand up and be cast out.
We can acknowledge our sinful
collective past and begin to make things right by resolving not to repeat the
sins of our forebears. We can begin our communal repentance by recognizing that
no matter how difficult it is or how uncomfortable it may make us, that we have
an institutional advantage in this country.
Jesus, when presented with such
disparities in the Gospels, is always unequivocal: you can give up unfair and
ill-gotten advantages, or you can end up being condemned by them.
So may God bring us out of them. “Out
of Egypt, bring my people.” Out of Egypt and the slavery it represents, and
into something new to be: a refuge and a sanctuary for all. Out of slavery, including
slavery to sin, may we be brought by the liberating Christ of whom the Gospels
speak.
May we, then, as a church and a nation
stand, then, not on the side of condemnation, but on the side of the Samaritan,
of the neighbor whom we are called to love as ourselves, of the slave, and, ultimately,
of God as revealed by Jesus Christ.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
January 14, 2018
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