My sermon for this Sunday. Enjoy! To this day, every Sabbath evening, the people of Israel sing God’s praises, the God who made them a people, who gave them a place to live and a place to worship. The song of Miriam fills the air. I will sing unto the LORD, / for he has triumphed gloriously, / the horse and rider thrown into the sea. // The LORD, my God, my strength and song, / has now become my victory. // The LORD is God, and I will praise him, / my father’s God, and I will exalt him. Israel’s escape from slavery is the story of how one who reveals himself as “I am who I am” takes on and vanquishes the powers of oppression, sets a people free, and gifts them with a social contract, prophets and priests, and a place of worship. The events recounted are a lens through which the course of revolutions has since been understood: oppression; deliverance; social contract; internal conflict; revision and renewal of the contract; and, beyond the book of Exodus, the unraveling of the covenant, renewed oppression, and the promise of a new covenant and a new exodus. Benjamin Franklin, an early American revolutionary, wanted the scene of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea on the reverse side of the Seal of the United States. The American revolutionaries felt that they, like the mixed multitude from Egypt, had been delivered against all odds. Once delivered, the revolutionaries moved on to drawing up a social contract, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These documents have served the American people ever since. The core of the social contract given to the people of Israel consists of the Ten Commandments. One can talk about the pursuit of happiness all one wants, but it is first of all necessary to live according to a moral code and preserve the quality of one’s relationships if freedom is to be preserved and not squandered and taken away. The story of Israel’s escape from slavery is the direct continuation of the story of Jacob’s clan in Egypt. “I am who I am” identifies himself to a leader of his choosing, a man of the tribe of Levi named Moses. Moses is told that their fathers’ God has heard the cry of the people in the slave-house of Egypt. He will set them free and take them to a land flowing with milk and honey. This same God rescues Moses at birth. Though Moses commits murder and runs away, God calls him and appoints him to challenge Pharaoh, unleash ten plagues on Egypt, and escape with a mixed multitude in the dead of night. He appoints Moses to part the Red Sea, and journey with a people to a desert mountain. There they are told that that they “will be for me a treasured possession among all the peoples … a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The people are constituted as one people under God, in the hope that there would be liberty and justice for all. Beginning with the Ten Commandments, God reveals to Moses a moral code designed to safeguard the freedom obtained. Moses and Aaron and the elders of Israel ascend the mountain, behold God, and eat and drink in his presence. In the sight of the people, the appearance of the glory of the LORD on the mountain is like a devouring fire. God gives instructions for the construction of a mobile place of worship, the institution of a priesthood, and reiterates, as a sign forever, the Sabbath imperative. The commanded rest has kept Israel and preserved Israel ever since. The song of Miriam the sister of Moses is clear. The author of salvation and deliverance is God. In our day, there are those who wish to eliminate divine agency from consideration and conceive of revolutions, not as a sudden and unpredictable experience of deliverance through an “act of God,” but as an outcome of human initiative unafraid to storm the gates of tyranny “as if God did not exist.” But, whether we like it or not, it is the LORD who goes about delivering people from oppression. Its who he is. It’s what he does. The prophet Amos put it this way, when the exceptional nature of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel became grounds for irresponsibility on their part. “Are not you Israelites / the same to me as the Cushites?” / declares the LORD. // “Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt, / the Philistines from Caphtor / and the Arameans from Kir? In point of fact, one revolution after another has caught the world by surprise. Each has come like a thief in the night, toppling regimes as various as that of Honecker, Ceausescu, and Ben-Ali. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime is emblematic. Expatriate movements and internal resistance failed repeatedly to “force the End.” The overthrow was achieved by an alien coalition, hated in its own right, but nonetheless victorious. And the battle goes on, as we know. The conflict grows cold and then hot again, just as it does between North Korea and the world to this day, half a century after the end of active combat. How does history work? “Acts of God” matter a lot. Perhaps you think that the Red Sea was never parted, that enormous masses of water did not peel away for some and crush others, that it was just a low tide. But this version of events does not ring true. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was not a moment of low tide. Rather, the Red Sea parted, a people in slavery escaped, and horse and rider were thrown into the sea. The desert, the hard part, came next. It always does. Below the radar, in the bowels of history, a force beyond human reckoning prepares human agents for the moment of revolution. Moses. Paul. Paul Revere and Ben Franklin. Golda Meir, Karol Józef Wojtyła, Lech Walesa. László Tőkés. José Manuel Ramos-Horta. The force beyond human reckoning is named in the book of Exodus: “I am who I am.” Miracles happen if you believe. Let us pray.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 12:08:52 +0000
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