"there is enough for all of us to be working at"

Continuing on with Brueggemann's sermon on Exodus:

But what these two midwives did was to imagine that the world could be lived outside of the reality of Pharaoh.  

And I believe there is a straight line from the Book of Exodus to Romans 12 which is the epistle reading for today which is why I insisted against our rector that we needed to read it today, he was trying to save us time. 

But Roman's 12 which you didn't have printed in front of you, you can look it up, Paul writes the Christians at the Church in Rome about how to obey Jesus. 

And the thesis sentence is "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed according to God's spirit."

And I propose for these months while we read the book of Exodus we may be reflecting on how we conform and how we are being transformed by the power of God.  It's easy to be conformed.  If you are like me you can be conformed without having to think about it, you just go with the flow. But to be transformed means to be intentional and thoughtful and disciplined about being in the world differently.  

So then Paul gives a catalog of some of the ways that we may be transformed.  First he says if you are conformed you will be miserly and selfish and greedy, wanting to get more. 

But if you are transformed, says he, you are invited to generous generosity, even generosity to people who do not deserve it, generosity in terms of charitable acts, generosity in terms of public policy, about education, about housing, about healthcare.  

Second, he says that if you are conformed you will want to build fences to keep everybody out that is not exactly like us because all strangers are threats.  But if you are transformed, says Paul, show hospitality to the stranger.  And so the Jesus movement is all about reaching out to the strangers and welcoming people who do not belong to our tribe or our national group or our race or our gender.

And third, Paul says if you are conformed you will keep score and take vengeance you will respond to every insult, every slight, every offense, to make sure you get even and get payback. But Paul ends this great chapter in Romans 12 by saying that the People of Jesus never take vengeance because vengeance belongs to God and so what you should do is give your enemy food and thereby heap coals of fire on his head.

So Romans 12 is a catalog that includes these three aspects of transformation, there is enough for all of us to be working at.  And if you do that, what becomes clear is it doesn't have anything to do with being liberal or being conservative, it has to do with conformity to Pharaoh, which liberals and conservatives can do, it has to do with generosity, hospitality, not taking vengeance, which transforms people, liberals and conservatives can do.

So I imagine Shifra and Puah and all sorts of women who practice civil disobedience are still at work in the world.  And every time one of us commits an act of transformation Shifra and Puah dance again. 

Amen.

I would imagine most of those who read me will see the part of the catalog of things to be worked on that I've yet to get to includes taking vengeance on people who attack me, so I should let you know I see that too and get it out of the way.   

I think it's also rather apparent that the conformity that Paul says is the opposite of following Jesus (and, as Brueggemann points out, The Law of Moses) is pretty much the public policy of political conservatives in a more radical way than it is contained in the public policy of "liberals."  I remember back in the Reagan years the terrorist-right winger, enthusiastic wager of war against the peasants of Central America, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who had been a Democrat but who became a neo-conservative, said she was opposed to the stingy, miserly Republican policy against poor people in the United States.  If that seems strange to you, it was pretty much in accord with the JFK and, to an extent, LBJ's policy.   That generosity seems to have not counted as much as their anti-communism, for them, in the end, which, it seems to me, would have been better waged if America had become an example of an egalitarian commonwealth at home and exported that egalitarian, economic justice within the area of our strongest influence.   I think that economic egalitarianism would be a far easier sell than inegalitarian "democracy" which the elite policy makers have stupidly and disastrously attempted to spread by external military force, most conspicuously in recent times in Afghanistan and Iraq.   

So it is clear from our public policy that "liberals" as that word was wrecked in the 18th century "enlightenment," transformed from a word based in the liberal provision of the material and mental and, so, spiritual requirements for a decent, peaceful life to the poor among us to one meaning that the markets were unregulated so the rich and smart could become richer and smarter by any means they chose to.  If "liberal" had kept to its original meaning, based on the reading of The Mosaic Law by SOME Protestants, Walter Brueggemann's statements about "liberals and conservatives" in this sermon would not be nearly as justifiable as they are.  

Just before typing out the somewhat informal transcript of the sermon, I followed a link to an LA Times story about the conservatives in rural California being disappointed with the results of the recall election that only ended up being an expensive attempt by Republicans to use the absurdly easy referendum-recall process in California to have what they hoped was a very low turnout election where the minority in California (Republicans) could rig things through the law to prevail where they can't with a larger percentage of the voters there, these days.  In the description of the,seemingly, largely white-affluent, I would guess college-credentialed Californians intereviewed for the story, it struck me that the descriptions of those people and what they did sounded like the media stereotype of "liberals" drinking chai at what sounded like a high-end coffee shop, having white-collar jobs that one would expect might pay a lot, some involved in what is considered "the arts" (though I wouldn't make that mistake, not these days).  

I think that the thing I took from this sermon,  Walter Brueggemann's distinction between the liberal-conservative political spectrum on one side and "Exodus politics" on the other is an especially useful and so important distinction to make.  I suspect some of the Mormons, Southern Baptists, white Catholics, members of other "conservative" churches, who vote consistently for Democrats who want policies that are more in line with "Exodus politics" do so on that basis - though the fact that Donald Trump was obviously a throwback to the most degenerate of Roman Imperial, Pharaonic gangsterism may have convinced a percentage of them to vote against him.   I have pointed out here before that even some of the worst of recent Popes have, nonetheless, issued Papal policies and statements that are to the left of Bernie Sanders in terms of economic justice, something that he pointed out, himself, when he was running for president.  

Politically I have made the distinction between the entire range of political identity that is opposed to egalitarian-democracy as "gangster politics," everything from Putin and the Kim regime, the various gangster run economies who do without much in the way of ideological clap-trap, up to and including the most seemingly benign of Constitutional monarchies and republics can be included in the category of gangster-run governments.  Clearly, as three House Democrats blocked allowing the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from negotiating prices with drug companies, there is enough of that kind of gangsterism to go around.  I will, though, point out that it is the Supreme Court using the First Amendment to keep our own government thoroughly corrupted with bribery and pay-outs in a way that is flagrantly corrupt.  The Supreme Court is the source of that corruption today, after the elected branches tried to get past that by keeping money out of elections.  They did so by an extension of the absurdity of "liberal" "justices" making things like strip-tease dancing "speech" on behalf of the sex industry* as referenced in something critical of a media "liberal" I wrote here over the weekend.

I do think it's a distinction, between "Exodus politics" and the politics of inequality, anti-democracy and gangsterism, which, indeed, has infected both "conservatism" and "liberalism" so thoroughly that those distinctions are frequently meaningless.  Which is the reason I went through the exercise of attempting to transcribe the sermon.  

*  I'm trying to remember if whether or not local and state governments could require strippers to wear pasties really became a court case and an ACLU style cause celebre back in the day, having previously found it hard to believe the extent to which "liberalism" hitched its wagon to the porn industry (all about turning women and others into objects for the use of privileged males)  and its, even then, enormous money hoard.  And that we really thought that, like keeping public property free of manger scenes, was at all important.   It might take Covid-19 and global warming to slap "the left" awake, though the ones making money in the media will certainly be the last to wake up.