Brueggemann On Exodus - Deeper Than Words To What They Are Talking About

Grace peace and mercy,in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

The Exodus story is our indispensable story. It is indispensable for Jews and for Christians.  It keeps showing up in the Old Testament, it keeps showing up in the New Testament.  It keeps showing up in the daily newspaper wherever there are questions of justice.  So when you read the newspaper, look for Pharaoh, Pharaoh will be there.  

We know a lot about Pharaoh, we know from the book of Genesis that he had dreams of scarcity he was afraid of running out. So he was a very anxious man and what he set out to do because he thought he'd run out that he would accumulate, that he would accumulate money and land and food, grain, people to work until he had a monopoly of everything in Egypt.

And then the book of Exodus begins as in our reading by saying when you have the monopoly you think you don't have enough yet, you will, we will always end up in violence.

And so he treated the slaves harshly because he thought it was legitimate to oppress them in order to enhance his monopoly.

But the book of Exodus is not written by Pharaoh, it is written from underneath.  It is written by this company of people who were in debt, who were in despair and who were in bondage and who became a cheap labor supply for Pharaoh.  They tell the underside of the story of world history.

And when the story begins, Pharaoh, who is scared of his slaves, the way all slave masters are scared of their slaves, was so afraid that he made a decree that all of the baby boys born to slaves should be killed because he did not want to have too much dangerous manpower around.

Then something happens in the story that we read today, there are these two Hebrew midwives.  They are uncredentialed, the amazing thing is that we know their names, their names are Shifra and Puah. [To the congregation] Say, Shifra [Shifra] and Puah [Puah] and don't you forget that!  And what Shifra and Puah did was to defy Pharaoh, they did not kill the baby boys but birthed them, and birthed them and birthed them. And we are told that because they feared God.  They did not fear Pharaoh. If you look at what they did they engaged in civil disobedience. They engaged in political resistance.  

There are people, I've heard there are people who are afraid that the Church is becoming too political.  Well, it's political from the ground up.  It's not liberal politics, it's not conservative politics, it is Exodus politics. 

And Exodus politics are at work wherever there is a predatory economy where the big ones eat the little ones and people in power take advantage of powerless people. But they did not fear Pharaoh and so they engaged in dangerous action.  They are called in for interrogation.  And Pharaoh asked them, "Why did you do that?  Why did you not do what I told you to do and kill all those baby boys?"

Well they're very clever women so they did not tell Pharaoh that they feared God because that would have been inflammatory. Instead what they told Pharaoh - you can look it up in the text - "Well, it just happened, the Hebrew baby boys just kept popping out and we couldn't stop them because The Force is with us." The Force is not with Pharaoh, The Force is not with those who are at the top of the heap who have a monopoly of money and power and land and food but the Biblical story all the way to Jesus of Nazareth is that The Force wells up from below and works justice and mercy and compassion and freedom for those who live in despair.

It's amazing that we do not know Pharaoh's name. I suppose that's because if you've seen one Pharaoh, you've seen all Pharaohs. But we know the names of the two midwives.  Their names are Shifra and Puah.  And the Bible believes that the course of human history is the contest between Pharaoh and Shifra and Puah. Or it is the contest between Cesar and and Jesus of Nazareth. Or it is the contest between all the powers of injustice and the strange work of justice that is done by people who commit civil disobedience and refuse to obey Pharaoh.

Today, when the true believers of Donald Trump, the entirely typical Pharaoh of the present are allegedly going to gather to promote their big lie and try to sway juries and judges into letting their ilk off of their attack on democracy and decency, it's good to point out that that is an entirely different thing than the risky civil disobedience against Pharaoh or Cesar or Trump though the words used mislead the dishonest and gullible into believing it is the same thing.  Instead of those in the American underclass who performed the insurrection on January sixth, it was largely an affluent crowd who could afford to travel, to rent rooms in one of the most expensive places to do that and to fly back home who manned the insurrection that the President called to maintain him in power, with the help of Congressmen and Senators and thugs in his Department of "Justice" (irony surrounds that word like flies around a three day old corpse) and others with power.  Some of the insurrectionists who attacked Capitol police and DC Metro police were police and firefighters in their own towns, some of them were members of the military.  These were not your Hebrew slaves, they were not members of our underclass so a legitimate springing up of "The Force" could not have come from them.   Not that many in the elite commentariate could have noticed that because, you see, the words used for both would be the same so the fact that the one was not like the others would have escaped them like someone who watched cartoons instead of Sesame Street.

I decided to transcribe the sermon of Walter Brueggeman that I recommended the other day, sometimes it's helpful to have the text though when it's so well delivered that gives you something letters on a screen can't.  This is to about the half-way mark.   I will try to have the rest of it soon if I don't get a cease and desist order, first.