Foundry United
Rev.
“Unbound - From Slavery to Freedom”
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Rev.
The Hidden Hand of God
Exodus 2:1-10
In the Exodus story, the Egyptians enslave the Israelites gradually and carefully. The Israelites become slaves step by step before they hardly know what is happening to them. The Egyptians' strategy was to get the Israelites to accept their own enslavement inch by inch until it would be too late.
This is the same way we usually become enslaved to the things that enslave us. It happens before we hardly realize that we have become bound.
Let me give you a preview. The turning point in the story of the Israelites being freed from slavery is when they finally realize that they have become slaves…when they cried out to God about their slavery…they groaned and complained to God. They hit bottom. (Ex. 2:23-25) That will happen two Sundays from today.
Most of us will not begin the process of participating in our own liberation until we hit bottom and realize that we have become slaves.
What I want to say today I mean to be a word of hope, and it is this: God is present working for our liberation even before we are aware we are enslaved.
The teaching series we are doing here at the beginning of 2012 is entitled Unbound: From Slavery to Freedom. The topic is the Exodus story and how it can help us become freed from the things that enslave, oppress, and addict us.
The point I want to make this morning is that God is working for our liberation even before we realize that we have become a slave. God is helping us even before we know we need help. Because this is just who God is. God is the God of liberation. God is the God of freedom. God is whoever, whatever, or however people become free. This is God's nature. This is God's identity.
There are two parts of the Exodus story I especially love. One takes place at the end of Exodus chapter one and the other is at the beginning of chapter two.
At the end of chapter one you will find the wonderful story of the Israelite midwives. There were two midwives – their names were Shiphrah and Puah.
The Egyptians are trying to increase their control over the Israelites but there is one thing they cannot control. Exodus 1:12 says: "But the more they [the Israelites] were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites."
The Egyptians could not get the Israelites to stop multiplying, so the king of Egypt – the Pharaoh – tried to force the Israelite midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill the male babies. The midwives refused to kill the babies even when disobeying the king might cost them their own lives.
When the Pharaoh asked the midwives why they had disobeyed him, they said that Israelite women were not like Egyptian women. Israelite women were so earthy and vigorous that they gave birth before a midwife could get there. The babies just popped right out.
The midwives used the Egyptians' own racist and sexist stereotypes against them to save the lives of the Israelites babies. They lied on behalf of survival. They shucked and jived.
They did what they needed to do on behalf of the Israelites' survival and freedom.
The second story is in chapter two. When the midwives would not kill the Israelite babies, the Pharaoh ordered the Egyptians to drown any male babies they found. Exodus, chapter 2, begins with the story of how baby Moses' sister and mother tricked Pharaoh's daughter to save the life of Moses whom God would use to lead the Israelites' to freedom.
Even before we know we have become slaves, God is working for our liberation. Whatever it is that is trying to enslave us – a substance, an illness, an attitude, a feeling, an addiction to work, relationships, power, moods, fantasies – God is working for our freedom even before we know we have become slaves.
And the way God does this is sometimes unconventional. It may involve tricks and less than obvious interactions. And God often uses women to do this – midwives and mothers and sisters. I don't know why but you will find it throughout the Bible. God has a way of using women in tricky ways on behalf of freedom.
So I am moved to tell you a personal story today. It is about a midwife who freed me in a weird way from something I did not even realize I was a slave to.
In my generation and gender of Methodist clergy, one of our strongest enslavements is an addiction to upward mobility. It may be different now, but when I came out of seminary, we all wanted to move up the ladder to become a district superintendent, a council director, or the pastor of a large prestigious church, or even a bishop.
I was no different. And I hung out with a group of male Methodist ministers about my age just like me.
Some of my old friends among that group are now disillusioned with the Methodist Church -- disillusioned and disappointed. They did not climb as high up the ladder as they had hoped.
When I started out I was no different from them, but something happened to me. I stopped caring about the ladder. I took assignments that were not steps up the ladder. I took them because I thought they were important to the Kingdom of God, because they were a challenge, because they would be interesting. There were several times friends of mine thought I had thrown my "career" away.
Yet I eventually found myself here at Foundry, and the only way it happened is because I stopped caring about upward mobility.
The way I got liberated from this addiction to upward mobility is a sort of quirky story.
In my first assignment after seminary we took our youth to one of our church youth camps. I was a volunteer counselor for a week every summer. The couple who directed the camp were from Appalachia, country folk, really, old enough to be my parents. The wife, whose name I cannot remember, was the seventh child of her family from up in the hills of Appalachia and she said that she had been born with a cawl. She believed she was psychic and could read palms.
At the end of the week, when the kids had gone home, she would sometimes read the adult counselors' palms, even though it probably would have got her fired if the church authorities had found out.
So one summer my second or third year of ministry, she read my palm. I can't remember what else she said to me, but at one point she looked up at me and said, "You have no career line. Do you know why that is?"
I can't recall what I said, but I know that the rest of my ministry when I was faced with a choice of assignments between ones I thought would be interesting and challenging versus the ones that would be upwardly mobile, I said to myself –"Well, I have no career line anyway, I may as well do the interesting one."
Do I believe in reading palms? No, I don't. I'm pretty sure I don't…. But I know this. Unlike some of my Methodist minister friends of my age and gender, I have no regrets and no resentments about the course of my ministry.
Because a midwife read my palm.
There are forces in the world working to enslave us. To bind us. To oppress us. To addict us.
But even before we realize we have become slaves, God is working to free us. I hope you find and listen to your midwives and mothers and sisters whom God has placed in your life to work, often in unusual and nonconventional and even quirky ways, on behalf of your liberation. God has put them there.
This is part of the meaning of baptism, by the way. That even before we know it, God is working on behalf of our freedom.
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