University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

A DAUNTING DILEMMA

Exodus 14:19-31

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time            September 14, 2008

After sitting with this text all week, I now think I missed the boat when I gave today’s sermon a title back on Monday afternoon.  The situation of the Hebrew slaves at the brink of the sea, with the fast-closing pursuit of Egypt’s armed forces, is not “a daunting dilemma.”  This is something more like a “worst-case scenario.”

I do know something about such matters.  Around our house, in fact, I have been known for years as “worst-case-scenario Dad,” because of the ways I used to alert our children to dangers before they set out in the family car, or made note of a rainy forecast on an otherwise sunny day.  Two Christmases running, my children gave me, as one of my presents, one of those Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks.  You know, the books that give instructions for what to do, say, in the event you drive into a canal and you have to escape your submerged vehicle… or how to escape a swarm of killer bees… or what to do when in grave jeopardy because you’ve worn a Duke tee shirt to a Carolina pep rally… that sort of thing.

But the situation described in Exodus today is no laughing matter. This text details a real-life worst-case scenario. Slavery in Egypt had been tortuous for the Hebrew people, but in the heady days that led up to the exodus, they had begun to get a whiff of freedom’s fair scent… and the escape itself had been rather astonishing.  They were giddy as they headed east toward freedom, led by a pillar of cloud in the daytime and a pillar of fire at night.

But then came the terrifying dilemma described in this morning’s text. With his heart hardened, pharaoh ordered his troops to pursue the Israelites, and pursue them they did, until they closed in on them at the edge of the sea.  Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place!  Their options were clearly limited. Some early Jewish haggadah, that is, legends that evolved from Hebrew scripture, described the resignation of various camps-within-the-camp on that day. According to that legend, when threatened by the oncoming Egyptians, the Israelites divided into strategic factions.  One group counseled that they should cast themselves into the sea, because it would be better to die in the water than to be killed by their enemies. But another group argued that they should surrender and go back with the Egyptians, and if their lives were spared, to serve them again. Yet another group said No, let us take up our weapons and fight with them, and God will be with us.[1] Whatever strategies others might have discussed, Moses was decisive in his response. He stretched out his hand over the sea, inviting the Lord to act. What happened next was one of the great acts of deliverance in Judeo-Christian memory – the safe passage through the sea and the escape from pharaoh’s mighty army. It is intriguing the way the writer of Exodus describes the sea’s parting… first, as an act of miraculous divine intervention… then by Moses stretching out his hand… then naturally, through a strong wind at just the right time.

If it all seems too much to claim, Walter Brueggemann reminds us of the way the Hebrew Torah uses stories like this one for instruction – instruction not necessarily constrained by reason or common sense or by calculable possibility. In fact, he says, it is precisely education in impossibility, which invites the listener to sheer amazement.

Torah tells stories of babies born to old women, of water held back for freedom only to drown the empire, of bread strangely given but not to be hoarded, of water flowing from rocks, of cities falling before trumpets. [Seemingly] impossible claims pervade this …rendition of reality: slaves are freed, empires are brought low, poor become rich, empty become full, dead come to life, last become first.[2]

This outcome is no ordinary turn of affairs, to be explained by any human stratagem or by any natural phenomenon…. In the purview of this narrative, there is only one possible explanation, and the name of that “explanation” is Yahweh, who brings both life and death.[3]

            It’s not the miraculous aspect of this story that I find troubling, to be honest.  I’ve known enough times in my life where the seemingly impossible was overruled that I do believe in miracles.  What I wrestle with in this story is that troubling notion of the power of Yahweh to bring both life and death.  I believe it, that God possesses such power. My discomfort lies in our assumption that we know which side God will take in such life-and-death struggles, and in our confidence that it is our side.  This story of the crossing of the sea pushes me to look more closely.  At its heart, it tells of a great reversal of power: the power and might of Egypt is brought to a stern and deadly test when it rises against the power and might of God.  The nagging question for me is, who do we resemble most in this story?  Our faith tradition, to be sure, places us with the Israelites. They are, after all, our forbears in the faith.  But what if we think of the story in terms of the current world context?  Egypt, remember, was the formidable world power of its day. Whatever they willed, they could pretty much achieve. Whatever they did, be it good or bad, they could pretty much justify as a matter of national interest or national security.

            How we hear and regard this story depends very much on where we stand as we read it, and with whom we identify. I can’t imagine that we have often heard this tale and identified with Egypt… but perhaps we should if we are to hear it rightly.

            Anyway, that’s what was on my mind this past Thursday, when as a nation we paused to remember the visitation of evil upon this land seven years ago.  I use the term “evil” consciously, because I believe the willful disregard for human life embodied in the attacks of September 11, 2001 was evil, an evil rooted in a demonic distortion of the Islamic faith in whose name it was carried out.  We know, of course, that there were some in the world who argued then and argue still that the lives lost in those attacks were justifiable because the attacks themselves were aimed at an evil and oppressive nation, evil and oppression in which all its people were complicit. And we know there are many in this land who have argued just as strongly that the lives we have taken in retribution for those attacks, and the terror and torture we have employed to interrogate those we deemed responsible, were justified as well.  Neutral observers often see the fault lines in the arguments of both sides. How you see such matters clearly depends on where you stand, and what you see, and what you don’t see.

            But whether or not we identify with Egypt, there’s         another part of this story that makes me uncomfortable, and that is the act of divine violence through which the Israelites were delivered at the sea that day.  Back in the nineteenth century, when sensibilities were different, the Episcopal preacher Phillips Brooks preached a sermon on this text at Trinity Church in Boston, in which he spoke of the children of Israel looking back over their shoulders as the waters came crashing in on the Egyptians:

The parted waves had swept back upon the host of pursuers. The tumult and the terror, which had rent the air, had sunk into silence, and all that the escaped people saw was here and there a poor drowned body beaten up upon the bank, where they stood with the great flood between them and the land of their long captivity and oppression. It meant everything to the Israelites. It was not only a wonderful deliverance for them, but a terrible calamity for their enemies. It was the end of a frightful period in their history. These were the men under whose arrogant lordship they had chafed and wrestled. These hands had beaten them. These eyes they had seen burning with scorn and hate. A thousand desperate rebellions, which had not set them free, must have come up in their minds. Sometimes they had been successful for a moment; sometimes they had disabled or disarmed their tyrants; but always the old tyranny had closed back upon them more pitilessly than before. But now all that was over; whatever else they might have to meet, the Egyptian captivity was at an end. Each dead Egyptian face on which they looked was token and witness to them that the power of their masters over them had perished. They stood and gazed at the hard features, set and stern, but powerless in death, and then turned their faces to the desert, and to whatever new unknown experience God might have in store for them.[4]

            It is stirring, this rejoicing in the calamity that befalls an enemy, but again, it depends on where you stand.  I confess that I am convicted by another sermon that borrows from that one – a sermon preached years later, in a different context of struggle, by Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King spoke of the grim reality of evil in the world… and of God’s response to evil, and of ours:

When the children of Israel were held under the gripping yoke of Egyptian slavery, Egypt symbolized evil in the form of humiliating oppression, ungodly exploitation, and crushing domination, and the Israelites symbolized goodness in the form of devotion and dedication to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Egypt struggled to maintain [its] oppressive yoke, and Israel struggled to gain freedom. Pharaoh stubbornly refused to respond to the cry of Moses, even when plague after plague threatened his domain. This tells us something about evil that we must never forget, namely, that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of a persistent, almost fanatical resistance. But there is a checkpoint in the universe: evil cannot permanently organize itself. So after a long and trying struggle, the Israelites, through the providence of God, crossed the Red Sea. [And] like the old guard that never surrenders, the Egyptians, in a desperate attempt to prevent the Israelites from escaping, had their armies go into the Red Sea behind them. As soon as the Egyptians got into the dried-up sea the parted waters swept back upon them, and the turbulence and momentum of the tidal waves soon drowned all of them… For the Israelites, this was a great moment. It was the end of a frightful period in their history. It was the joyous daybreak that had come to end the long night of captivity. The meaning of this story is not found in the drowning of Egyptian soldiers, for no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being. Rather, this story symbolizes the death of evil and of inhuman oppression and unjust exploitation.[5]

            There is evil and inhuman oppression in the world, and that is a fact all of us would acknowledge. What is harder is to acknowledge is that evil and oppression are part of our own history and identity, and not just in the long-ago past.  And perhaps the most daunting dilemma of all, at least for Christians in this nation, is to acknowledge that God champions not the powerful but the weak, not those who call the shots but those who suffer the violent oppression of those shots, and yet also remember that God loves all the children of earth.  How can that be? There is an old Hasidic tale that I find helpful at this point. According to one of the rabbis, the angels were all rejoicing over the deliverance of Israel at the sea: playing their harps, singing, dancing. “Wait,” said one of them. “Look, the Creator of the Universe is sitting there weeping!” They went to God. “Why are you weeping when Israel has been delivered by your power?” And the Creator of the Universe responded, “I am weeping for the dead Egyptians washed up on the shore – somebody’s sons, somebody’s husbands, somebody’s fathers.”[6]  

            In these days of national remembrance, we also would do well to remember both God’s mighty power and God’s tender tears… for both the power and the tears are grounds enough for our repentance… just as both sides of God are worthy of our trust.