This story (Exodus 14: 19-31) of the Israelites fleeing to freedom through the parted waters of the Red Sea is one of the most familiar stories in our scriptures.
There are two big themes here.
God will rescue you and God will do in your enemies.
These days, the idea that God will do in our enemies – pick your favorite enemy because there are so many to choose from – can seem awfully attractive. And there are no shortage of stories in the early parts of the Bible of God smiting enemies.
Here’s one of the fascinating things about the Bible. Over time, the way the Jewish people and then the early Christian community came to know God kept changing.
Yes, in the early days of the Jewish people, they often looked to God not only to bring them to safety but also to do in their enemies.
This was a common theme among many ancient religions, but the Jewish people put an interesting twist on it.
In most of the other religions, the gods brought destruction on those who threatened the powerful. In the Jewish stories, God is always on the side of the weak and the vulnerable.
But then in the later books of the Bible, the Jewish and then the Christian understanding of how God used divine power shifted.
When the leaders of the Jewish people were taken into exile in Babylon, their eventual freedom came not because God killed off their captors but because Cyrus, the king of Persia, came to respect the variety of religious traditions in the lands he ruled and let the Jewish exiles go back home to Jerusalem. The people were rescued by tolerance, not by destruction.
You remember the story of Jonah? We know him best because he was swallowed by a whale, right? But the essence of that story is that God wanted to Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and encourage people to repent. Jonah wanted God to just do them in.
Nothing doing, says God. You can help them be saved, he told the reluctant Jonah. And so there was this wild ride inside the whale. Salvation, not destruction.
And then there is Jesus. Remember, he talked about loving our enemies, which seems like a pretty hard concept. When Peter cut off the ear of one of the people coming to capture Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus healed the man’s ear. As he was dying on the cross, Jesus asked forgiveness for those who were executing him.
The portrayal of God as the hit man had changed to the image of God as the source of love.
How we perceive God can matter in how we behave.
If we think that God is there to get rid of our enemies, then it is way too easy for us to figure we can give God a hand and smite them if God seems too slowing in getting to it.
If we think that God is the source of love, then that can guide us in how we treat others – even those others we view as our enemies.
Let’s keep that in mind as we explore this story of the Israelites’ journey to freedom.
It’s a story that has lots of drama, of course.
It’s a story that has particular resonance in the African-American community, where the journey from slavery to freedom sustained their hopes during the 250 years they were enslaved in this country and in the years afterwards as the struggle for equality continues.
It’s a story that I think can have resonance in our own lives as well, as we seek to go through the rough waters and threatening moments of each day. It’s a story that reminds us that God is with us in the midst of everything we experience, both good and bad.
For the people captured in Africa and then sold into slavery in this country and for their descendants born into slavery, the Jewish story of escaping from 400 years of slavery in Egypt continually offered hope.
You may know a bit about Harriet Tubman, the woman who led some 300 slaves to freedom through what was called the Underground Railroad. This often involved walking through river water to hide their scent from the dogs their pursuers were using. It was as if the waters were parting to lead them to freedom.
For us in Wisconsin, the Underground Railroad is very much a part of our history. There still is a place in Milton – near Janesville – that served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. There was a lot of action in the Racine and Milwaukee areas.
Between 1842 and 1865, the Wisconsin Historical Society estimates that at least 100 formerly enslaved people found freedom on a journey that passed through Wisconsin.
And sometimes those fleeing slavery in the midst of great peril must have felt like the Israelites once they realized Pharaoh and his army were pursuing them.
Just before the section from scripture we heard today, the Israelites complained to Moses, “What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”
Harriet Tubman is sometimes called the Moses of her people for her efforts to lead them to freedom against great odds. There were times she surely echoed the words of Moses to the frightened followers: “Do not be afraid, stand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will accomplish for you today.”
There’s another parallel here for the African Americans as the Civil War ended and they rejoiced in their new-found freedom. In the story from Exodus, after Pharaoh freed the Israelite slaves, he had second thoughts and began to pursue them, which took us up to the point of today’s reading.
The same thing happened to the former enslaved people in our country in the century after the Civil War. The joy of freedom gave way to economic exploitation, segregation, lynchings. And while the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s knocked down many of the legal barriers to freedom, we are still struggling with the deep aftereffects of slavery in our nation.
The Exodus story touches lives in so many ways. I did not grow up in slavery nor have I faced the kind of discrimination and discouragement so many African Americans have faced. Yet I know there are times I feel as though I am facing a wall of water and that I am being pursued by an army of adversities that I could not outrun.
I’ll bet there are other folks here who have felt the same way, that maybe still feel the same way. There’s the disruption of illness, the grief of death, the worry about work and income, the anguish of divided families, the despair that has grown with political polarization.
Whatever army of misfortune is chasing me and you, I think there are glimmers of hope for us within this story of the Exodus.
Think of the power of water in this story and in our life as followers of Jesus.
We sang at the beginning of our service today about the power of water in the hymn “Crashing Waters at Creation.” We sang how:
Parting water, stood and trembled
As the captives pass on the through
Washing off the chains of bondage
Channel to a life made new
In our baptisms, we had an image of water taking us through a channel from an old life into a new life.
When Jesus met the woman at the well, he offered her the water of new life.
Think of the water of the Red Sea as God’s grace surrounding people seeking a new life, closing on the old life they were leaving behind.
And remember in this story – which of course portrays God as performing a miracle to rescue a people fleeing and oppression and seeking freedom – that God did not act alone. It was only after Moses stretched his arms out over the sea that the waters parted.
After the waters parted, after the Israelites were on the other side, their journey was not over. They had years of wandering in the wilderness ahead. That can seem pretty discouraging – to them and to us.
Yet they were not traveling alone. God was traveling with them – and with us. Sometimes they felt that God had abandoned them, but then they remembered the escape through the waters of the Red Sea, they recalled the song of Moses and his sister Miriam that “the Lord is my strength and my might and he has become my salvation.”
They pushed on through the wilderness, much as we have to do in the midst of whatever obstacles we are facing. They pushed on trusting that God would be there with them.
I’d invite you to think with me for a moment about the ways we can act like Moses. I’m not sure we can part a vast body of water. But are there places where we can stretch out our arms and embrace someone who feels trapped by their circumstances?
Are there places where we can stretch out our arms and widen the places where people who disagree can find common ground?
Are there places where we can stretch out our arms and lead people through the hard moments in their lives so they know they are not alone?
And then can we let others do that for us?
Can we accept the love and care others can offer us in our own hard times?
Can we let them open the way for God’s grace to bubble up in our lives?
None of us may be at the level of a Moses or a Harriet Tubman, but each of us can be part of that vast gathering of people who follow Jesus, who share the water of abundant life, who try to heal the divisions in our world and who finally get to the next piece of solid ground.
We know the journey goes on, whether through the waters or in the wilderness, but we also know we do not have to be alone on that journey.
For me, the power of the story of the escape to freedom through the Red Sea is precisely that. We do not get to freedom in our lives alone. We get there together and with God’s help. That is true for us as individuals and it is true for us as a nation still trying to overcome the divisions among us and the things that keep people trapped in systems that exploit them.
We’re about to sing the hymn “When God Delivered Israel.” Notice when we get to the third verse, we will sing:
O God, restore our nation,
come irrigate dry souls
That those who sow in sadness
may reap their sheaves with gladness
May we join in that irrigation of dry souls so that all may reap with gladness. Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment