2019 Sermon Series: God Organizes

Anyone who has had a conversation with me in the last few days has probably heard me thinking out loud, often, with incredulity, and without much regard for the parameters of what we generally consider to be normal conversation, about how I can’t wrap my head around the symmetry of our reading from Exodus this morning and the news coming out of Sudan these past days and weeks.Tragically, the common thread between these two things is dead bodies in the Nile River. Yes – we are getting very serious, very quickly here. But leaning on the strength of our community and God who is the God of hope and justice, we will sit together with this difficult text buttressed against our difficult reality. And then, I hope, our community will continue the work we have already begun, which is to be the hands and feet of a God who organizes.<

For our guests who are visiting today, “God Organizes” is one of the daily themes of our programming this summer, in which our overarching theme asks campers to consider the question of “Now that we know that we don’t have to do anything at all to earn God’s favor because of God’s grace, what are we going to do?”. Our hope for this day of programming is “to understand that God equips many types of people to bring about God’s kingdom on earth, and God organizes them to work towards justice and peace. As God’s beloved, we have the privilege of taking part in this.”

Which is a lovely daily theme, right? And yet, a very reasonable person might ask what these words even mean in the face of unspeakable tragedy and violence across the globe from us. What can we do?

Which brings me back to the story of Moses’ birth in the beginning of Exodus. To set the stage before Moses was born, the Israelites were in Egypt under the rule of a Pharaoh who was literally trying to eradicate them, beginning with forcing them into slavery. Pharaoh then escalated things by commanding the midwives to kill all baby boys born to the Israelite women. The midwives ignored Pharaoh’s instructions by telling him a very good lie, which led Pharaoh to instruct all his people to throw every Hebrew baby boy into the Nile River. (As a side note, the reason that Pharaoh was particularly interested in killing boys was because the Israelites understood both their connection to their families and to their community through fathers; by killing boys, Pharaoh’s aim was to destroy the Israelites as a whole group).

Moses, who ultimately goes on to lead the Israelites out of their slavery in Egypt, should not have even been allowed to live. And this story about his birth and survival is a great illustration of how God Organizes. In fact, God starts organizing in Moses’ story before he is even born. One good sign of this is that in the story of Exodus, the first place that God is mentioned is through the context of the Hebrew midwives:  Exodus 1:17 states that “the midwives feared God.” And think about the incredible impact that the faith of these women had. It led them to work together to first of all collectively ignore the directive to kill baby boys and secondly, to come up with a united excuse as to why the babies were living (which incidentally, was that the Israelite women were so strong that the babies were already born before they had time to arrive). I have to imagine that there were more than two women involved in the care of tending to all the Israelite women giving birth, especially as the text tells us in Exodus 1:7 that “the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.” There were obviously enough of them that the Pharaoh perceived them as a significant threat to his rule. So, I think it’s safe to say that there were many women acting as midwives. And if this is so, the amount of coordination it must have taken to accomplish this level of resistance is incredible. Were they having secret midwife meetings? Did they have some kind of system like an ancient phone tree, where they planned out who would talk with who? How were they making these decisions? Did they elect leaders? Did they hold votes? Did they have a talking stick that they passed around? We may have no idea of what it actually looked like, but I feel confident in staying that they HAD to be organized to pull this off. God Organizes.

And it doesn’t stop here. Consider the women that facilitated Moses’ survival. His mother Jochebed hid him for as long as she could, and then she technically followed Pharaoh’s instructions of putting her baby boy in the Nile River but did so safely, by placing him in a basket. Then, Moses’ sister Miriam planted herself nearby the scene she surely imagined would unfold, further placing a hedge of protection around Moses. Next, Pharaoh’s daughter discovers Moses and, knowing it must be a Hebrew baby boy who should be killed, decides to rescue him anyway. And then Miriam pulls a great move; she asks the Pharaoh’s daughter whether she might want a nurse maid for Moses and then offers up Jochebed, which means that not only does Moses’ mother get to stay with him, but she is getting paid to take care of her own baby when as a slave, she should be earning nothing for her work. Considering the story of these three women, theologian Dennis Olson from Princeton Theological Seminary states, “Pharaoh allows the Hebrew girls to live; he wrongly sees them as no threat… It is a powerful cross-cultural and intergenerational alliance of three women – Moses’ Hebrew mother Jochebed (Exodus 2:1-3, 7-10; 6:20), Moses’ Hebrew sister Miriam (Exodus 2:4. 7-8; Numbers 26:59), and Pharaoh’s Egyptian daughter (Exodus 2:5-10) – who disobey Pharaoh and rescue the baby Moses. Pharaoh tries to make the Nile River, Egypt’s main source of water and life, into an instrument of death. Yet the three women allies succeed in making the river a place of rescue and life.” God Organizes.

Because I moonlight as a feminist anthropologist, this whole story brings to mind a concept coined by bell hooks in her book “From Margin to Centre” from 1984. hooks critiques the mainstream second wave feminist movement for the way in which the concerns of well-off white women are at the center, and the concerns of black women were relegated to the margins. She states, “To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.” hooks argues that if we want a truly and fully feminist activism, we must move the focus from the center to the margins. While hooks is talking about specific groups of people in a particular moment in American history, her frame of reference can be useful to us here today. It reminds us to pay attention to the folks whose oppressions put them out of the main focus of our stories, our attention, and our activism (or we could also say, “our organizing”). If we don’t move ourselves towards the margins, our organizing is incomplete and exclusive.

I think it’s worth mentioning that this chunk of Biblical text we are talking about covers about one and a half chapters of Moses’ story, which spans the entire 40 chapter book of Exodus and beyond. It could easily be glossed over in the entire scope of Moses’ story. But when we do pay attention, we gain so much insight. This text focuses on people who have the least amount of power in the context in which it was written: Israelite women, who live at the intersection of being women in a patriarchal system and ethnic minorities who are being enslaved by the dominant Egyptians. And it is in these women where we not only see God, but we see God organizing for peace and justice. God is with those in the margins, and it is in the margins that we see God moving God’s people towards a radical new order.

This theme of toppling oppressing regimes of power in favor of people on the margins appears elsewhere in the Bible, and is echoed in Mary’s Magnificat from our gospel reading today. Luke 1:52 says, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” Jesus similarly reiterates this theme in his Sermon on the Mount where he says “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (which we will hear more about on a future Sunday this summer!). He demonstrates over and over again the ways that he associates with those on the margins when he cleanses and heals, he forgives, and ultimately overcomes death on the cross.

Our theme verse for the summer from Isaiah 43 reminds us that we are redeemed, God has called us by name, and we are God’s. Nothing can separate us from God, and because of God’s immense grace, we don’t have to do anything to receive this love. So, the question I posed earlier that guides our summer theme remains: what do we do, now that we don’t have to do anything at all?

I suggest that one way we can respond is for us to try and mix up the margins and the center. And I would propose that the first step in doing this is to try and orient our attention away from the center of our society. There is a meme floating around on the internet some of you may have seen that compares the global mainstream reaction to Notre Dame burning down and the reaction to murder and violence in Sudan. After the news about Notre Dame broke, I remember seeing a wave of folks on social media sharing photos of their visits to Paris and lamenting the destruction and loss. It’s worth asking why a similar number of people don’t have photos from vacations to Sudan, or at the very least aren’t expressing similar lament, particularly when the Notre Dame fire did not result in any loss of human life whereas in Sudan the death toll is thought to be around 100 or more lives lost. It’s not hard to see which of these two world events exists in the center for our society, and which exists on the margins. Of course, we have the capacity to lament for both of these things, and many more. It’s not like we can only pay attention to one tragedy at a time. But we should be paying just as much attention to what’s happening on the margins, and that takes active work.

Because that’s where God’s organizing is happening. This is where the work of restoration and justice is happening. And if we want to be a part of it, that’s where we should be too. Just as marginalized women in Egypt in 1250 BCE were subverting the dominant power for a radical new vision of what life could be, Sudanese protesters today are fighting for a new democratic system of governance after the ousting of their authoritarian leader while being attacked by their own military forces. In the last days and weeks, it is estimated that dozens of bodies have been retrieved from the Nile River, just south of where our story in Exodus takes place. Hundreds of other civilians have been injured and raped. Let us witness and grieve these stories of violence. Because if we allow ourselves to move towards the margins, we open ourselves to a deeper understanding of how God comes to us.

And then, friends in Christ, let’s organize. How, you ask? I don’t necessarily have the answer, but during staff training, we had many, many moments where we said, “this is just the beginning of a conversation that we will continue to have.” So in that same vein I offer this as a continuing conversation starter for all of us, that we might collectively consider how we can take our gift of God’s grace out into the world and organize.

Amen