Drawn Out

Exodus 1:8-2:10; Isaiah 51:1-6; Romans 12:1-8

August 24, 2014

We’ve been following the founding sagas of the people of Israel this summer, and the lectionary cycle this morning brings us to this story:

(Exodus 1:8-2:10 from The Message)

This is the beginning of the story of the people of Israel being drawn up from or pulled out of slavery. It is the foundational story of Judaism, and has been a powerful motivating narrative for oppressed people the world over for millennia.

But what’s in it for me?

Seriously. What’s in it for me?

There’s just no way I can look at my life and see myself as, in any way, oppressed. I’m a straight, white, middle class, educated, Protestant, man in a culture that privileges every single one of those characteristics over its alternatives. Oh, to be sure, there are a few aspects of my life that do not reflect privilege: child of a father with a serious mental illness; southerner; pacifist in the capital of an empire built on the myth of redemptive violence. But, clearly, I am an incredibly privileged human being, so what is there for me in an exodus narrative?

I can’t authentically read this text “from bellow” – from a perspective of the oppressed, from the point of view of a people being drawn up from beneath the heel of their oppressor. So how can I read it?

I’m drawn, in particular, to the role of the midwives in this story. While they are certainly not people with any significant power in their culture, they do have a few privileges, some of which are clear in the text and others perhaps implied. For one thing, they are adults and thus not subject to Pharaoh’s death decree for Jewish baby boys. In addition, if they are Hebrews, they are, at least, not boys so they’re not the target of the king’s violence.

But they may be, themselves, members of the dominant culture. The text is not clear, but the context – the king giving them instructions – suggests that Shiprah and Puah may well have been Egyptian women who were midwives to the Hebrews not Hebrews who were midwives.

In any case, through their trust in God, they are drawn out of whatever privilege they enjoyed to a perspective informed more by their faith than by their social privilege.

That’s one key for me: these women may be shaped by their privileges, just as I am by mine. But they are not determined by them.

If they were Egyptians, they not only were drawn out of their privilege, but, in some sense, they act against it, or, at least, undermine the violence upon which that privilege was built.

Contrast their behavior, under the king’s orders, with that of those charged, by the same king, with oversight of the Hebrew workforce. The overseers seem to have no problem whatsoever acting out the orders of the powerful to oppress the powerless, although one can probably safely assume that the overseers are no more powerful with respect to the king than were the midwives.

Yet these women practice a wonderfully clever bit of nonviolent resistance, turning the prejudice of the privileged back on itself to rob privilege of its power. In other words, they know pharaoh, and they know his racialized prejudices, and they play on that prejudice with their claims that the Hebrews are animals. Indeed, pharaoh already believes that the Jews are less than human, so it’s easy to convince him of something he already wants to believe.

Nevertheless, one can safely assume that there was nothing safe in their actions. Defying pharaoh had to be incredibly risky business. In a very real sense, Shiprah and Puah anticipate the apostle Paul’s invocation to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. They are not conformed to the values of the world – values that consigned the Hebrews to slavery and oppression. Instead, they are transformed by a relationship to the God of justice and love, and inspired to follow that God into radically subversive action for the sake of the least powerful people in their social world: boys slated for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

That’s how I understand this text, but still I’ll ask myself: what’s in it for me?

In particular, for me, there is something of call and confrontation in this text. I am confronted, in my privilege, by the urgent call to participate in midwifing justice.

The texts from Romans and from Isaiah remind me that such work is done most faithfully in community. After all, I am but one part of the body of Christ – a body that remains far from complete in this world, and that needs so many other members in order to complete its work in the world. I hear in the stirring words of Isaiah the urgent call to be about the work of justice, to bear light to the nations and communities and peoples that dwell in deep darkness.

And I don’t have to look very far to find them. Indeed, the Hebrew boys marked for ethnic cleansing bear, for me, a striking resemblance to young African-American men in our culture, and we certainly do not have to have any great gift of vision to see this. What we do need, however, is the be drawn out of our privilege in order to see through the eyes of faith what is going on around us, to hear, with faithful ears, God calling us to act like midwives, and to feel, with faithful hearts, compassion for the oppressed, the marginalized, and the victims of institutionalized racism and violence.

As I wrestled with the text this week, I was struck by one more thing.

How many of you have, by now, seen the ALS ice-bucket challenge that is dominating much of social media at the moment? In case you’ve somehow missed it, the ice-bucket challenge is a remarkably successful creative campaign to raise awareness about Lou Gehrig’s Disease – ALS – and to raise funds for research. It involves a whole lot of people shooting brief videos of themselves saying a few things about ALS, usually promising to make a donation to an ALS organization, and then dumping buckets or more of ice water on themselves and challenging friends to do the same.

It’s all good, clean fun to raise funds for a good cause. Though I’m a bit tired of it after seeing dozens of videos pop up, I don’t have any problem with it. If it prompts people to make donations to ALS research, or to other causes they feel strongly about, then more power to it!

As I’ve watched the videos, the preacher in me can’t help thinking about Moses being drawn out of the water, and about baptism. You see, the Moses story is also a baptism story: a story of being drawn out of the water to life a new life.

That comparison pushes me to observe that while there’s nothing at all wrong with a fun campaign to raise money for a good cause, such charity is a long, long way from justice.

The baptism that claims us, as followers of the risen Christ, is about a whole lot more than charity, and it calls us to something far more uncomfortable and far more risky than an ice bath. Baptism invites us to be transformed in a way that acts of charity simply do not.

We are baptized into a new way of living marked by compassion, justice, and hope. Such a way of living will entail risks, not the least of which is the risk to every form of privilege.

In a stirring call to the Presbyterian Church to live fully into its baptism, former General Assembly vice moderator and present executive of the Synod of Mid-America, the Rev. Landon Whitsitt last week called on “the members and congregations of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), over 90 percent of whom are white, to stand with the people of Ferguson and ‘witness against and strive against’ systemic, institutionalized racial injustice.” Drawing upon the language of the Belhar Confession, Whitsitt said,  “We must act ’as the possession of God … stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged.’ Sisters and brother, we must stand arm in arm with the people of Ferguson. Black bodies matter and our white bodies will signify that the killing of black bodies is unacceptable.”

In another statement released last week, the Rev. J. Herbert Nelson, who directs the denomination’s Washington office for public witness, said:

We must be willing to challenge the culture that tells African American boys that their lives are worth less than the lives of White boys. We live in a culture that attempts to justify itself by claiming “self-defense” when we really mean fear and bigotry, or pride, or individualism. But all of this is sin. Our faith reminds us that God is all sovereign and that “God calls us to love our neighbors, not protect ourselves against our neighbors.”

We are drawn out of the waters of baptism for this: loving our neighbors, and standing in solidarity with the marginalized and the oppressed – whether they be marginalized by virtue of race, gender, sexuality or whatever other attribute our culture continues to use to mark and enforce privilege. That’s what’s in it for me, and I’ll just call it the hashtag baptism challenge. Amen.