Exodus 1:8-2:10

Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians subjected the Israelites to hard servitude and made their lives bitter with hard servitude in mortar and bricks and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this and allowed the boys to live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”

Sermon Text

The story from our scripture is arguably one of the most brutal that is recorded in scripture. It is a story of genocide executed against the Hebrews in Egypt long ago. Generations after Joseph had saved Egypt, his people had become part of the community. The people lived in Goshen and had their own customs and culture, but this was not a cause for conflict. That is, until it was. The people in Goshen lived under the good graces of whoever was in power, and for many years the dynasty in question was sympathetic to them and their part in Egyptian life. Then, with the turn of a page, everything changes. A new dynasty takes power, a new Pharaoh that “knows not Joseph.” A new world begins, and it begins with fear and with danger.

A program to eliminate the Hebrews is launched. “Kill every male child, leave the daughters.” In a patrilineal world, and at the time both Egyptian and Hebrew cultures both followed descent on the father’s side, the destruction of a son was the destruction of a people. Daughters were married off, sent to live with their husbands, subsumed into their new culture. Pharoah wanted to destroy an entire people bit by bit, not all at once. Afterall, they still needed bodies to do the hard work. Overtime the hope was that the Hebrew people would be erased into a generic lower caste of Egyptians, the perceived threat they posed erased through murder and eugenics.

This story is from a specific moment in history. It is not, however, a story that only happened once. It has been repeated time and time again.. When there is a group of people in power, they often become concerned at the idea of losing their power. It is difficult to maintain peace and prosperity in a society, and when things get hard people question the people who are in charge. A good leader might own up to shortcomings and redirect their actions, but few leaders are good enough to do that. Many defer to pointing fingers, and when power points a finger, danger naturally follows.

There is a lie that we often tell ourselves in life, that the conflicts we see are somehow inevitable. We tell ourselves that, given that there is only ever a limited amount of resources, people will come to a place where they fight for control of them.

Certainly, people have fought over limited resources plenty of times, but that situation can only happen if the people in question are on comparable footing. If we are in the middle of the desert, and we find a single bottle of water, it is very likely there might be some fighting over who would get to drink it. We might imagine ourselves being noble and giving it to the other person, we can hope we would do that, but it would not be unreasonable to think that there might be a fight. However, life often gives us a completely different version of this conflict, where one person has a great deal of means and another person very little.

The Pharoah had nothing to fear from the Hebrew people. They were a minority in Egypt, living with them for centuries. In centuries past, it was a Hebrew that saved Egypt – not only Egypt, but all of the Ancient Near East. Egypt had proven that even in the worst of times – a famine – it was possible for everyone to get food and shelter, to be taken care of. It was only years after that disaster, as opulence and success poisoned the minds of power, that it was decided something had to be done about their neighbors. The solution they conjured up? Long knives and brutal murder in the rivers of Egypt.

We can mention countless examples of people taking this tact throughout history. The worst recorded events came during the past five hundred or so years of human history. The wars of religion in Europe, Christian killing Christians over who has the right way of taking Holy Communion. The Crusades, Christians and Muslims killing over who has the right to own a few hundred miles of land. The imperial programs launched across the world by many nations, declaring that the land of native peoples no longer belonged to them, but to kings and emperors far away. In every case, the conflict was to relieve some perceived problem in society. Sometimes that problem may have been, “I need more money,” on the part of a monarch or industry, but that would not sell the conflict to the average person. No, instead it is disguised. “You would have a better life, if not for those people over there!”

“Those people,” can take on any characteristics we like, as long as we look just enough unlike them for it to be ok to hurt them. Sometimes the separation is racial – up until 1968 it was legal to discriminate in this country based on race, and even after it wasn’t people still found ways.

North View used to be the only place Italians could buy property here, and that wasn’t very long ago. Other times the separation was more classist – “Those people who don’t talk or act right, they’re too low class for us, they shouldn’t be in this part of town.” It is the easiest thing in the world to hate a group of people, as long as we are told they are the real cause of all our problems. Think of your media diet – songs, social media, shows, and news broadcasts – oftentimes the quest they embark upon is to name society’s problems and its villains.

I grew up listening to country, and I tell you that I hate how much of it is just about how evil city people are. “Those people don’t know what America really is.,” sings the rhinestone cowboys of our day. Most recently, another song surges in popularity (because of aggressive funding from political marketing,) and cries out that the working man would be fine, if not for all the welfare queens. A tired old narrative, but one playing on radios all over. There are people really causing harm in this world, believe me, but they are not poor or urban, or any other class of person we ever deal with regularly. No, the rich and the powerful are often the source of our troubles, but we are not willing to admit that very often. Instead, we pick our favorite powerful people and say that it is all the other ones that are the problem.

Want for power and money is what more often than not feeds into evil. Why are so many people working three or four jobs just to pay for rent? Because industry demands that they be paid as little as possible or else the executives might lose a few million dollars of their raise that year. Why are we told that the problems in our town are the poor who seek shelter and food? Because if it’s their fault, then we do not have to ask what kind of world we live in where someone can miss one month’s rent and end up on the street. You and I do not benefit from a world like that, but the people who turn us against each other sure do. The people who wish to divide people, to keep them fighting, are not revolutionaries- instead, they are defenders of the status quo, of a world where might makes right and money talks.

Most powerful of all, when someone points out the world is broken, it’s easy to shift blame onto them. “The system works fine for me,” says the ones in power, “So, you talking about racism, or sexism, or bigotry, must really be the problem. I mean, just think of the children!” Worse than that, we will often go along with this shift, blaming people fighting to be heard as though they are the villains.  The biggest ally to those who support the status quo is the well-meaning moderate who defends them because it seems like the nice thing to do. Martin Luther King Jr. said he was afraid of White Moderate Christians more than he was the Klan, because while everyone knew the Klan wanted black people dead, the moderate would do nothing to stop them till the next election cycle, and only then if the platform of the opposition was better for their 401k.[1]

It is the easiest thing in the world to hate other people, because hate is easily disguised as us just being reasonable. When Pharoah told the Egyptians to kill the Hebrew, I’m sure every Egyptian that participated in the program told themselves it was just the sensible thing to do. Just like every pioneer said of the Indian, every Nazi of every Jew, every protestor of integration of children on their way to school, and every other bigot of every other generation. God’s people are not immune to the lure of hate. Hate breeds so easily in our hearts. It is the easiest place for evil to leak into our souls – why else would Jesus tell us that hate, and murder might as well be the same thing?

Today, I offer a warning, much more than I offer a benediction. We must be careful, especially entering an election year, to legitimately pursue love, and consciously reject hate. If we cannot do that, then there is no point in us gathering here. We, the children of God, must be better than the world around us. We can only do that, if we embrace a love like Christ’s, taking that long and narrow road that leads to salvation, and not the wide road of hate that leads to damnation. – Amen.

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[1] This is my elaboration of King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. King asks that true allies act in the face of oppression., “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”