Scripture: Exodus 3:1-7
I want to continue interacting with the story of the Exodus and the book of Exodus this morning, but before I get to today’s reading I need to acknowledge a couple of problems lingering from last week that were brought to my attention by other Sojourners.
One of those other Sojourners happened to be my wife, who pointed out to me that I had conveniently (somewhat too conveniently, in her opinion) just sort of coasted by that little detail in the story from last week where Moses killed an Egyptian. O.K., so he was defending a Hebrew slave who was being beaten by that Egyptian. O.K., so it was a good thing for him to step out of the safety of the palace, step out of his place of privilege, take the first step toward the liberation of his people and a giant step toward his own liberation. But he did end up killing the Egyptian. And I have to confess that I intentionally did slide by that part of the story, hoping no one would notice. Ava noticed. I imagine others did too. And I do agree that there are some issues here that deserve some attention.
For one thing there is the general issue of Christian pacifism. From a Christian point of view is violence ever justified? I tend to agree with what Ray East said during our forum last week: that it would be hard for anyone who takes the words and the life of Jesus seriously to be anything other than a pacifist. As I recall he didn’t make that quite an absolute statement, but at the very least the heavy burden of proof would fall on those who would resort to violence, even if there are very good reasons for doing so. This is all an interesting question, an important question, at any time. In the current situation, it becomes an urgent question: what the Christian attitude ought to be toward using lethal violence in response to a harmful, evil action. We can discuss what Jesus would do, or whether violence, even massive violence, is consistent with a Christian teaching or life or practice. In the story, though, Moses did. And the fact that the main characters in the story were Hebrew and Egyptian, and that in a sense Moses was both, only adds to the pointedness of the story.
Which leads me to the other important comment made to me by a sister Sojourner. After worship last Sunday, Alice Justice relayed to me a perspective on the Exodus story held by her Egyptian brother-in-law. For him and for many, if not most Arabs and Muslims, this is not at all a friendly or inspirational story. It is ugly and hostile.
For Jewish people, as I said last week, the Exodus is absolutely crucial. It describes who the Jewish people are and how they came to be, and it describes who God is—one who looks on the suffering of God’s people and who works to bring about their liberation, even if it sometimes seems to be taking a very long time. For Christians too the Exodus story has been deeply important, and one of the many reasons it has been important is that for Christians also it has reminded us that God is by nature one who draws especially near to those for whom life is the hardest. And so, when the Christian church becomes too closely connected with those who exercise power, as it has done many times and in many places, the book of Exodus is referenced to bring us back to what many of us see as Jesus own understanding of God as friend of the poor and powerless. I have witnessed the power of this story, for instance, among indigenous people in Latin America who heard the message, through the book of Exodus, that God looked upon their suffering, that God saw them as precious, and that God desired for them to be free from oppression, free from poverty, that God desired them to have enough and to live in peace. The Exodus story has, in a very real way, fed many people spiritually, and it has fed me.
But I can understand why Arab Muslims would be likely to see the story differently. After all, who are the heroes and the villains of this story? And whose suffering is lifted up to God in this story? From an Arab point of view, the western, Jewish-Christian viewpoint, which has always scapegoated Arabs, can easily be seen to have its roots in this story. All of which is to say that we do well, especially in our current situation, to acknowledge the troubling aspects of this story: the violence of Moses, the presentation of the evil Egyptians (and their eventual destruction in the Red Sea), the whole motif of a chosen people being led to a promised land. These troubling aspects, and there will be others too, need to be acknowledged and not resolved, not explained away in a few sentences. Even as we look to these stories for positive meanings, we need to say out loud what some of the dangers are. Just as we cannot read the passion stories in good conscience without being at least aware of how anti-Semitism is intertwined in those stories, so we need to read Exodus in full awareness of its involvement in the whole hard history of Arab-Jewish relations.
Now, back to the story. In the passage last week, Moses did kill an Egyptian, and when it became clear that this was known, Moses… ran away. Far away. Somewhere far away from all the trouble—injustice, ethnic conflict, beatings, killings, recrimination. “Just let me get out of here,” Moses said, or something to that effect. “I think I need to just go tend sheep for a while. I mean that stuff back there in Egypt was pretty scary. I can’t just stand by while people get beaten. But I don’t like killing people either. I don’t really want to fight. I don’t want to be a hero. I don’t want to be all involved in causes. I just want to lead a normal life—a family, a useful job, enough to eat, a few friends, some time to look at the stars—that kind of thing is good enough for me.”
I know this isn’t an exact comparison, but this dynamic that I see going on in Moses made me think of the dynamic I sense we are dealing with in our society in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11. There’s this wrestling with the question of when is it o.k. to take up normal life again. On the one hand there’s this tremendous sense of grief and all the questions that always attend grief. How long is grief supposed to last? Up to a point it’s unhealthy not to grieve. Beyond that point it’s unhealthy to continue grieving. There are all the questions about what may need to change in the way we do things. What needs to happen to make life safer? What needs to happen to prevent further attacks? What needs to happen to address the conditions that gave rise to, though not reason for, terrorism? There’s all sorts of questions to be asked and issues to be addressed.
At the same time, there’s an urge, in some of us more than others, but widespread, to want to get back to normal. Partly, I think, out of denial and partly out of defiance. It’s a kind of peaceful way to say that terrorism will not win the day, that life as we know it will go on, that the fabric of our life will not be so easily destroyed, that we won’t give in to fear…there are lots of variations on this theme. It’s also a way of saying that the world has become and different and much harsher place than I thought it was, or than I was pretending it was, and it is just too uncomfortable to live in a world that is that violent and that filled with hatred, and so I think I would just rather go back to pretending. Let me just get away from here and find some “normal” place to live, some safe place, or safer place. Let me just find somewhere where I can tend sheep, be with my family, look at the stars.
This is all a dilemma, this business about how and when we return to “normal”. I don’t presume to say, or to suggest that scripture says, how we ought to handle the dilemma, all of us or any of us. But we do still have this story to reflect on, and we know what happened to Moses. God let Moses be for a while, but not forever. And eventually God came to Moses in a burning bush and said, in effect, I have work for you to do.
I’ve recently begun reading a book entitled “The Bush Was Burning but Not Consumed”. It’s a book about building multi-racial, multi-cultural communities, specifically multi-racial, multi-cultural communities of faith. And as you can guess the author took the title of his book from this story that we heard today.
He begins the book though not by talking about the scripture but about an overwhelming event that he lived through, the Los Angeles riots that occurred in the wake of the first Rodney King verdict, where the police were acquitted. The author talks about the fires that seemed to burn out of control and the anger that was unleashed and that also seemed to burn out of control and how scary it all was. And how destructive. This was a fire that consumed—everything. It destroyed building and people. It destroyed the rioters themselves. As he said, when people become the fire, when people are so filled with rage or the need for revenge that they become the fire, then they themselves end up being consumed.
It was out of his reflection on that experience that the author turned to the story of the burning bush which spoke to him about a fire that does not consume, and a fire in which God was somehow present. In the situation the author was describing, the riot was not the only fire. There was another fire, the fire of race relations in the United States, that could flare up and burn out of control but that doesn’t have to, and that does not have to consume us, but that cannot be left untended, that calls us back to being engaged, and that may even contain within it the voice of God.
Again the parallel is not exact, but reading that book I couldn’t help but think that acts of rioting and acts of terror are similar phenomena. They are fires that burn destructively out of control. But quelling a riot or punishing terrorism does not put out the fire. Within that framework, the image of the burning bush in Exodus suggests that not every fire needs to consume us, but that fires do need tending, that tending sheep is not enough, and that when attended, when paid attention to, some fires may even contain the voice of God.
All of this is only suggestive of course. Nothing in the Bible story, nothing in this book that tries to bring us to deal creatively with the smoldering anger involved in race relations, nothing in the ways we may play with the image of a bush that burns but does not burn up and that contains the voice of God—nothing in any of this tells us what to do next. It is only suggestive. But one of the things it does suggest to me is that there is in the midst of all this a calling, a calling that goes beyond the flurry of activity we are experiencing right now, and that we need, I need, to be in the process of discerning. There is not for us, any more than there was for Moses, a “normal” life to turn to that is safe from the world’s troubles. The fire will find us, even in the midst of the desert, when all we wanted to do was tend the sheep. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 30, 2001