Exodus

As Genesis ends, Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father’s household, seeing his descendants to the third generation. As he lay dying he requested the return of his bones to the land of Abraham. Then he died at 110 years. Joseph had come a long way from the provocative brat prancing around in his technicolor dreamcoat. Genesis concludes by telling us that Joseph was embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt.

With Joseph’s death the stage is now set for the next installment in Israelite history as recorded in the book of Exodus. Exodus 1:1-7 records the 12 sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt, the death of Joseph and that whole generation, and that the Israelites continued to be fruitful and prolific: they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong that the land was filled with them.

Exodus 1:1-7 is the explanatory preamble to what we are now told in verse 8, which begins with the ominous words: Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. Twelve momentous words that introduce us to the story of the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt.

The new Pharaoh has come to fear and envy the presence of a people living separately within his nation. We might read this as the first historical instance of antisemitism proper – a hatred of Jews born of the mix of fear and envy – exacerbated by a refusal to abandon their separate identity. The Pharaoh who had forgotten who and what Joseph had done had come to fear the separate identity of the Hebrews – a nation within a nation separated by customs and religion – a dynamic to be repeated again and again throughout the history of the Jewish people.

Pharaoh indulges in hyperbole when he says the Hebrew people are more numerous and powerful than we are – so come let us deal shrewdly with them. His pretext casts them as a fifth column who, in the event of war would join the enemy. I say hyperbole, because were it true that the Hebrews were more numerous and powerful than the Egyptians, why didn’t they resist enslavement?

We are not privy to Pharaoh’s mindset. We only know what the Deuteronomist compilers of the history say – their aim being to give the pretext to explain Hebrew enslavement.

As we read or listen to the Exodus narrative, we hear the historical echoes in the Nazi use of a similar hyperbole as justification for the extermination of European Jewry. We hear the echoes in this ancient story as the pretext for the internment of the Pacific Coast Japanese communities in 1941 – let us deal shrewdly with them for fear they will give aid to our enemy. We witness it in the CCP’s Uighur interment in vast forced labor camps. We note it in Russia’s forced transportation of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars; in all the attempts to destroy the future through the theft of the children.

The early phase of forced labor seems not to have dented the prolific growth in Hebrew numbers. Growing more desperate, Egyptian policy becomes more ruthless culminating in a policy of infanticide. The Hebrew midwives are instructed to kill the male babies at birth. However, we are told that the midwives feared God and refused to do so. When interrogated, they tell Pharaoh that the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women because they are more vigorous- giving birth before they can arrive. The midwives use the word khayot – meaning brutish- animal like. The midwives complain to Pharaoh – what can we do- these Hebrew women breed like rabbits – thus turning Pharaoh’s dehumanizing trope against him.

The narrative now switches to the birth of a Hebrew male infant whose mother placed him in a waterproofed basket and concealed him among the bulrushes at the river’s edge charging her daughter to watch from a distance to see what would happen.

Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the river to bathe when she and her maids heard the infant’s cry. Of course, she recognizes the infant as a Hebrew. The infant’s older sister offers to find a Hebrew nurse to care for the child and the Princess agrees. Thus, the infant is restored to his mother, who raises him until the time when he is adopted by the Princess as her own son. The Princess names him Moses because I drew him out of the water.

Words matter and it should not be lost on us to learn that the word used to describe Moses’ basket is the same word used for Noah’s ark. We also note that the Deuteronomists are at pains to identify Moses is in some sense like Noah and belonging to the line of Levi – Moses is a member of the tribe which after the Exodus become the Levitical priesthood.

A key detail in the Exodus story concerns the role of women. The actions of the midwives, Moses’ mother, and sister; of Pharaoh’s daughter and her maidservants, express the resistance of women against patriarchal violence. The birth of Moses is a story about female fidelity to God, maternal and sisterly love, and women’s instinctual compassion for the vulnerable.

The initiatives sponsored and led by women among the migrants on the Mexico-US border continue this long tradition of resistance to patriarchal violence because of a concern for the vulnerable. Women are often more likely to be motivated by an appreciation of human needs – seeing in the easily dehumanized migrant faces the plight of women, children, and families – restoring migrants to the fullness of their human dignity.

I only have space and time to note here a link identifying the role of women in six care agencies working with migrants along the Southern Border. Like the women in the first two chapters of Exodus, today women are at the forefront of resisting the dehumanizing processes of the immigrant experience – which opens us to a wider observation.

Today the myth that promotes a fear of immigrants as having some secret power or potential to steal our jobs –jobs we no longer deign to perform; who and pose a dangerous threat to law and order and national stability. This would be ironic if it was not also a tragedy. In a nation chronically short of unskilled labor to fill the jobs vacancies we rely on an yet reject as somehow beneath us – it’s ironic and tragic that in a nation of immigrants – where a sizable portion of the population is separated from the immigrant experience only by one, two or three generations at most – should now so vehemently advocate pulling up the migration ladder behind them.

The economic health of the US now depends on immigration. Like the ancient Hebrews, migrant communities have higher birth rates and instead of seeing this as some kind of race replacement conspiracy we need to remember that like our parents and grandparents’ today’s migrants long to become American and to imbibe American values as they integrate. Yet cultural interaction and integration is a two-way street and immigrants bring elements that are currently revitalizing the host culture from the arts we celebrate to the food we eat.

If concern for the plight and suffering of fellow human beings is not enough to move our hearts – and clearly it’s not -let’s not forget that necessary immigration will ensure a healthy labor and tax pool large enough to sustain the Social Security and Medicare systems that an aging boomer population is increasingly reliant upon.

I want to highlight two further elements in the Exodus narrative. FIrstly, the experience of enslavement and liberation from slavery – fundamentally shaped the development of the post-Exodus Israelite community. In remembering their own captivity and liberation, Israelite law enshrined a sacred duty to welcome and respect the stranger in their midst. This sacred duty – like many sacred duties – more often observed in the breach yet, nevertheless, became a central moral principle for the post-Exodus Israelite society.

Secondly, the Exodus as recorded in the book of the same name marks a crucial transition in the evolution of God’s identity. The Creator now becomes the Liberator. The Exodus event becomes for all enslaved people a sign of the promise that God not only hears their cries and notes their suffering but works for their freedom.

This weekend as we celebrate the memory of the historic 1963 March for Freedom, we remember the Exodus experience graphically demonstrated in our own national history as the spiritual and social catalyst in the African American journey from the days of enslavement into the continued Civil Rights struggles of our own time.

The Liberator God is also a personal god. A god who requires human collaborative agency – be they midwives, mothers, sisters, or princesses. In the birth and life of Moses, God now find a principal collaborator.

Not since the days of Abraham has God encountered a human being in the intimacy of a personal relationship. The promise to Abraham is now renewed in a promise to Moses. The God of Abraham now becomes for all intents and purposes the God of Moses. More about Moses next week.

August 26, 2023 0

What’s the Hardest thing of All?

Image Jaymi Hensley in Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

The OT readings from both last week and today focus on Genesis’ story of Joseph.

Last week I offered a 30,000 ft overview of the book of Genesis – the first book of the both the Torah, and Christian Old Testaments. It’s part of what is known as the Deuteronomic corpus composed sometime between the 7^th and 6^th Centuries BCE. In a way we might think of the Deuteronomists as the equivalent of our Founding Fathers, whose writings laid out the constitutional framework for the new nation emerging after victory in the Revolutionary War. Similarly, Deuteronomists wrote a history of Israel to cement the transition from a loose tribal confederation into a centralized monarchy through the central theological filter of Israel’s covenant with God.

The Deuteronomic history follows a pattern with Genesis accounting the stories of origins. The book of Deuteronomy retells the Exodus experience with the books of Joshua, Judges, focusing on the period after Israel’s conquest of the land. Samuel 1 and 2 and Kings 1 and 2 cover the period of political transition from tribal confederation to monarchy – and the period of the Monarchy under David and its eventual fragmentation after the death of Solomon. A major theme in the Deuteronomic history is the explanation of God’s punishment of Israel when it ignored God and the covenant. Thus it was later re edited into its final form by the priestly scribes seeking to explain the reasons for the Babylonian Exile.

As the the written synthesis of older oral stories predating by centuries the written text – Genesis comprises two great narrative sweeps. The first begins with the creation stories, detailing the fall, the flood, and other myths – stories from before the beginning of recorded history. The second narrative sweep in Genesis brings us into human history with the personal stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. These story cycles are the result of a weaving of originally unrelated oral traditions into a family story of father, son, grandson, and great grandson. The Joseph story epic is truly a family saga in the vein of the recent HBO drama – Succession.

Who is Joseph? The short answer is he is Jacob’s next to youngest son – born to him in his old age by Rachel his first and most beloved of his four wives. Put politely, Joseph is something of a teenage brat, who plays on his father’s favoritism to really piss his older brothers off. To add insult to injury, as a sign of his favoritism Jacob weaves Joseph a coat of many colors – the inspiration for Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musical Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The sight of Joseph preening and prancing around in his coat – the reminder of Jacob’s favoritism – must have been a daily provocation to his brothers. As Rice & Lloyd-Webber’s title hints at Joseph was not only a prancer, but he was also a dreamer – more precisely the receiver and interpreter of what Carl Jung called big dreams.

To cut a long story short, consumed with jealousy, his brothers intending to murder him threw Joseph into a dry well. But after second thoughts they pulled him up to sell him to Midianite traders who in turn, sold him on into slavery in Egypt. Through a series of events Joseph’s gift for dream interpretation enables him to climb out of slavery and up Egypt’s political ladder. He eventually comes to the notice of the Pharaoh himself – as the one to interpret a very troubling dream Pharaoh had about seven fat cows who devour seven skinny ones. Joseph interpreted the cows as seven years of good harvest followed by seven years of famine. He so impressed Pharaoh that he made Joseph prime minister with responsibility for putting the dream’s interpretation into practice. Joseph confiscated seven years of good harvest and stored the grain away in barns to ensure survival during the seven years of famine. Egypt’s continued abundance of grain during the famine years compelled Jacob to send a delegation of his sons – all except the youngest Benjamin – down to Egypt to buy grain.

The brothers come before the Prime Minister as bedraggled supplicants. Of course, Joseph recognizes them, even though they have no idea he is their long lost brother. Joseph, the inveterate joker, plays on their ignorance – manipulating them into returning home with gifts for their father and a request to return with the youngest brother, Benjamin.

On their return, Joseph can’t keep the charade up any longer. He breaks down in front of them. Today’s reading opens on this scene when Joseph reveals himself to the extreme consternation of his brothers. He cries:

I am Joseph, is my father still alive? But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence. And they came closer, and he said, I am Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.

But instead of savoring the moment – revenge being a dish best served cold – seeing their distress Joseph allays their fears of retribution. He explains to them that God planned all this – sending him ahead so that he might be in position to save them from dying of famine. There is much weeping, kissing, and hugging – to the puzzlement of all in Pharaoh’s household.

With the Patriarch epics and esp. the Joseph story cycle – the Deuteronomic compilers objective was to construct an account of origins. With the Joseph saga the stage is set for the next installment in Israel’s history with Moses and the Exodus.

We have the advantage of psychological curiosity. For us the patriarchs are stories speaking to the enduring human nature of personal and family tensions. Looked at from this angle, the spiritual value of the Joseph story lies in its study of conflicting human emotions – favoritism, jealousy, rivalry and hatred, betrayal, revenge and the complexities of forgiveness.

Joseph – the visionary trickster – is not above playing with his brothers and making them squirm. But this is the extent of his desire for revenge. As a dreamer and interpreter of dreams, Joseph has always been able to penetrate the thin space between human perception and divine intimation. He’s had time to meditate with gratitude on God’s larger purpose for him – with the arrival of his brothers, this purpose is given ultimate meaning .

In today’s portion we see him abandoning his game-playing to reveal himself as someone who responds to memories of betrayal. He meets the impulse for revenge with forgiveness. The brothers are relieved and yet continue nevertheless to feel disquieted because they remain stuck in a more primal stage of emotional development in which one bad turn always deserves another. In Joseph’s self-revelation, they are confronted with having to process the hitherto unprocessed unconscious legacy of their jealousy and murderous intent toward their younger brother.

Today’s portion ends with a scene of tearful reconciliation. The youngest brother, Benjamin, has joined them in Egypt and their ancient father Jacob will soon do so. It seems all’s well that ends well. But emotions are never so simple.

With Jacob’s death in the final chapter of Genesis, at chapter 50:15 we read:

Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us, and pays us back in full for the wrong that we did to him?”

Learning from experience seems not to have been a skill Joseph’s brothers had acquired. They once more concoct a lie to ward off what they imagine is Joseph’s desire for revenge – in reality their own projections of unresolved guilt. They tell Joseph that Jacob’s dying intention was to beg him to forgive his brothers.

Without the benefit of a modern psychological analysis, the 6^th-century BCE Deuteronomists knew that it’s easier to forgive than to be forgiven – or more specifically, to forgive ourselves through the transformation of being forgiven.

August 19, 2023 0

Post Vacation Reflections

I returned last week from my annual July vacation break. As some of you know, Al and I have been vacationing in the Lot Et Garonne – Dordogne Departments of SW France for many years. It’s a region of Bastides – fortified villages and small towns whose fortifications date back to the 100-years war between England and France that raged approximately between 1337 and 1453. This is region of rolling vineyards producing the classic Bordeaux wines, although more locally, Duras and Bergerac have their own wine appellations. The wines of the SouthWest became the staple wine for the English to which they gave the generic name of Claret. The region is also the heartland of French Rugby. To gain a flavor of this region I recommend Martin Walker’s novels featuring Bruno Chef de Police. Although Southern Europe experienced an unprecedented heatwave this July, the misdirected flow of the Gulf Stream resulted in this region experiencing the coolest July we can remember.

During my month away each year I try to read something substantial and was pleased to be able to complete Tuck Shattuck’s Christian Homeland, his recently published history of Episcopal-Anglican missionary activity in Palestine between 1850 and 1950. I also had time to delve into numerous Tom Holland podcasts and online lectures.

Tom Holland is a renowned historian of the Classical period. A much-published writer and speaker and host of his own podcast The Rest is History. His book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is of particular interest. In it he explores how the revolutionary impact of Christianity completely remade the ancient world with profound reverberations that have continued into our own age.

Holland has some interesting thoughts on Western Secularism which he sees as the child of the Christian revolution. He notes that pews may be emptying and the institution of the Church fading, yet Western Secularism continues to preserve the Christian revolution despite most secularists’ overt hostility towards conventional theistic Christianity.

Love, equity, justice, the protection of the rights of the individual, freedom of expression, the championing of justice for the oppressed – are among the principles Western Secularism claims – as the US Constitution states – to be truths that are simply self-evident. Secularists seem to assume these self evident truths float in a rational vacuum awaiting discovery in the Enlightenment. Yet, as Holland points out these values are nowhere to be found in historical societies not shaped by the Christian revolution. What secularists discern as self-evident truths- those for instance enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights – are the legacy of the fact that like fish in water we are all, people of faith as well as secularists, swimming in the same Christian sea.

What distinguishes Christians from Western Secularists is not values or principles but simply that for Christians the active presence of the mind and hand of God remains discernable to us in the flow of events in the world around us.

Yet, the immediate difficulty for people with a Christian faith story is how do we arcuately discern the presence of the mind and hand of God in the flow of daily events. The simple yet problematic answer is we look to the Bible.

However, the problem is how do we distinguish between the mind and hand of God and the influences of our minds and hands. Can the Bible be a conduit for discerning the mind and hand of God’s activity unsullied by our own projections? The power of text lies not in what the text says – that is – the plain meaning of the words on the page – but in what can be read into it. The temptation for both conservative and progressive Christians alike is to project into the biblical texts a reflection of each’s culturally conditioned priorities, hopes, and fears and assume they are evidence for the mind and hand of God.

In the contested heat of biblical interpretation is that the biblical witness still matters for progressives as much as conservatives. What is often missed however, is that at the heart of contested interpretation lies an area of commonality – a mutual recognition that the function of the biblical witness is not to confirm but to disturb. The Bible functions not so much to affirm or align with our projections but to confront us with what we refuse to see. The mind and hand of God’s activity in the world is one of judgement – calling us to repentance for the willful conflation of our priorities and self-interests as if they are the same as those of the mind and hand of God.

Since Pentecost we’ve been journeying through the significant story lines in the Book of Genesis. On the 14^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we arrive at the story of Joseph – the final epic story cycle in Genesis.

The date of Genesis’ compilation as a written text is still debated, but consensus favors sometime between the 7^th– 6^th centuries BCE by a group of scribes known as the Deuteronomists. 200 hundred years later, the Deuteronomic corpus received a complete editorial makeover during the Exile between 585 and 457 BCE – leaving us with the Torah pretty much in its present form.

Genesis contains two grand narrative sweeps. It begins with a sweep from creation through the fall, the flood, and assorted events leading up to the arrival on the scene of a man called Abraham. The second great sweep chronicles events in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and finally Joseph – men collectively known as the Patriarchs. Whereas Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph have their own extensive narrative cycles, Isaac gets short shrift – appearing only through his relationships and never in his own right. He is Abraham’s son, Rebekah’s husband, Jacob and Esau’s father. Isaac’s main function for the Deuteronomic compilers of Genesis is that he is the procreative link allowing them to conflate independent patriarch traditions into a contiguous narrative through the fiction of kinship – father, son, grandson, and great-grandson -connecting Abraham to Jacob and beyond to Joseph.

The Joseph cycle brings Genesis’ grand story of origins to a close. The book of Exodus opens with the list of Jacob’s eleven sons before reporting the death of the 12^th son, Joseph. After the deaths of all the patriarchs, the Hebrews continue to flourish and multiply in the land of Goshen. However, a significant shift in tone occurs at verse 8 which simply begins with the ominous words: Now a new king arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph. These words – so full of import become the preamble to the enslavement of the Hebrews – setting the stage for the next act in the Israel’s epic story – Moses and the Exodus.

The OT reading for next Sunday continues Joseph’s remarkable story – details which we will pick up then. So, stay tuned.

August 12, 2023 0