“Let
My People Go”
Exodus
6:1-9
Beechmont
Presbyterian Church
Louisville,
KY
Feb.
22, 2015
Rev. Debbie Blane
You know, the thing of it is that we are
all held in captivity. Captive to
something.
Pharaoh goes by many, many names. Pharaoh is addiction. Pharaoh is a seeming inability to leave an
abusive marriage. Pharaoh is the belief
that God intends men to act as if THEY are God in the lives of their wives and
daughters. Pharaoh is the belief between
two men that they have the right to drag an entire country into their private
power struggle, as is happening right now in South Sudan.
Being human is to be held captive to
something.
Being God, which WE are not, is to desire
to free the captives and heal the prisoners.
In Exodus 6:6-9 God reveals the actions
that would free the slaves in Egypt.
They are actions that also would free the slaves now, today and in the
future. Because Exodus speaks to us, you
and me, just as much as it did to the Hebrews in Egypt.
God will:
1.
Take us out from under the yoke of captivity.
2.
Free us from being slaves to the captors.
3.
Redeem us with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.
4.
Take us as God’s own people.
5. GOD
will be our God. GOD will be our
God. The abuser will not be our God.
6.
We will know that God is God, the One who freed us from captivity to the
yoke of bondage. The yoke of bondage to
someone, something or someplace.
When God speaks of possessing the lands
that were promised to our spiritual ancestors, we can know that this is a
promise to us as well. God will care for
our physical and spiritual needs. We
will possess a home that is safe and we will know that we are cared for.
This does NOT mean that the original land
of Israel is the promise. It is NOT the
promise. But it does mean that God
promises to take us from captivity and bring us to a place of love and safety.
Verse 9 tells us that when Moses spoke to
God’s people, to the people whose care was given into Moses’ hands, they did
not listen to him because of their discouragement and harsh labor.
Imagine what captivity would have been like
for the Israelites. They were in a
foreign land. In the beginning in that
land they had been treated with respect and love. They had been welcomed as a part of the people
who already lived in Egypt.
As Pharaohs were born, ruled and died and
new ones were born and rose to power the royal memory of the first Israelites
that had come to Egypt faded. A fear
developed and grew that the numerous Israelites would swell in number to a
greater population than that of the indigenous population.
And so the Pharaoh who was Moses’ adopted
grandfather made the Israelite’s slaves.
The Israelites did the heavy lifting.
They made bricks, they built the buildings. They sweated and heaved and endured harsh
labor. And they cried out to the
Lord.
Do you do someone else’s heavy
lifting? Do you sweat and heave and
endure harsh labor? Are you a victim in
your own home, or do you know someone else who is?
Despite the thousands of years that separate
us today, here in Louisville, in the United States, from the Egypt of the Pharaohs
and the Israelites, despite the differences in cultures and language: God speaks to us today through this Scripture
passage just as God spoke through Moses to the Israelites all of those many,
many centuries ago.
When we are in pain and when we are
burdened. When we are in prison, whether
a real prison or a psychological or spiritual prison, when we are held captive
to something in our lives that is not GOD, we can cry out to God. And God will tell that Pharaoh, that slave
driver who keeps us in prison to let us go.
God will tell that person to let God’s child go!
It may not happen automatically or
quickly. It may be a process of our healing
and being transformed by God into new people, as it was for the Hebrew people
of Exodus. It may be that God will give
us a new life and new people in our new life.
But we can know that just as God took the
Israelites as God’s own people and brought them out of the yoke of slavery in
Egypt, God will bring us out of our own particular slavery, our own particular
prisons.
When we despair, when we are frightened and
we feel alone, when our burdens are too heavy and threaten to crush us, we can
call on God for help. And God will
answer.
God will say to the demons: LET MY PEOPLE GO!!! And God will transform us so that the demons
will have nothing to hold onto. They
WILL let go.
The God of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and
Rebecca and Jacob and Leah and Rachel is our God too. We know God through God’s child, Jesus. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Leah
and Rachel knew God in a different way, but they did know God. And so did Moses.
And guess what? SO DO WE!!!!!
We also need to remember that God is not
the God only of individual people and families, God is the God of economic
systems that display and practice systemic injustice, and of countries where
the leadership seeks to possess the power and control over other people that
should rightfully belong to God.
About a year ago in Nigeria the Nigerian
government responded ineptly and weakly to the kidnapping of almost 300 young
women and girls by a terrorist group which was able to take these females at
gunpoint from a boarding school in a remote area of the country. It was only after the parents somehow made
this issue known to the international community that the government began to
ask for international help in finding the girls. Power and control did not want to admit to
weakness and was willing to sacrifice these girls and their families on the
altar of their desire to play God.
What plan are they going to come up with to educate young women, AND
young men, when it is not safe to send them to boarding schools for their
education? The school had guards. That wasn’t enough. The terrorist group is known as Boko
Haram. The name literally means “Western
education is forbidden.”
What can protect human beings from the kind
of demonic power that believes that it can do whatever it wants to achieve its
own ends and force its beliefs on the world?
Boko Haram has continued to
kidnap and destroy and disrupt and cause terror.
What kind of response will be there to this
evil that will avoid generational ignorance and radical religious beliefs to be
passed on. Ignorance and poverty are
the birthplaces of this kind of terrorism.
This kind of captivity. This kind
of pharaoh.
In South Sudan the power mongering of two
men has set the entire country on fire with war, displacing over a million
people and leaving the country on the brink of famine as a civil war has raged
for over a year now.
There is Ukraine where the eyes of Russia’s
lust for empire have split and divided the ethnic populations one from another,
people who have lived together peaceably for generations and years of
time.
There is Syria where the inability of a
leader to let go of power and control and say, no more fighting, killing,
raping, bloodletting, do what is right for the well-being of my people.
There is, I believe, the newest incarnation
of evil that is invading American homes through the television set every day
and every night. It is named ISIS, this
particular pharaoh. This pharaoh burns
people alive, beheads innocent journalists and humanitarian workers and appears
to hold the global community hostage as it acts out its doctrine of self-righteous
justice.
There is Israel and Palestine where the
hidden desires of the Israelis to take the whole of the land that was originally
the home of the Palestinians are being revealed in due time and in due course
to the world. And the world is standing
by and allowing the occupation to take more and more land and destroy more and
more lives. The battle that was alive
and well in August of 2014 that took place in the context of the Gaza Strip
killed – murdered – a disproportionate number of people, primarily
civilians. Every life, Palestinian and Israeli is precious in God’s
eyes. This should not be happening.
What should our response as Christians be
to these atrocities that are being committed, sometimes in the name of
Christianity itself? Our response should
be, LET MY PEOPLE GO!!! Often because of
our own Pharaohs, our own captivity to the status quo, our response is to turn
a blind eye.
When we ourselves are healed we can cry LET
MY PEOPLE GO on behalf of the people who are still captive and are too weak to
be heard by the Pharaohs of this world.
I think that as part of the worldwide Christian community we also need
to be considering, besides trying to kill evil with guns, what is the response
that Christ would have us make to evil?
Remember that at the beginning of this
sermon I said that in our own individual lives when we cry out to God to free
us from our Pharaohs, God will respond.
We will be changed and evil will no longer have a place to grasp
us. And this may take time.
We cannot expect this global evil to be
eradicated tomorrow. At the same time we
cannot be defeated by what is happening.
Pharaoh is running loose in the world.
How can we dig up the roots that are the underlying cause for this evil,
this Pharaoh, to have a stronghold in God’s world? How we can be a part of the world being
transformed as we ourselves have been transformed?
I suggest that we look at the Gospel of
Luke for a start. In Luke 11:21-22 Jesus
says, “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his castle, his property is
safe. But when one stronger than he
attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and
divides his plunder.” Evil is the strong
man. How can the strong man be taken off
guard and unarmed? How do we find the
weak places in this evil? If we try to
kill the enemy there are only others to continue filling in the empty spaces in
the battle line.
In Luke 11:24-26 Jesus says further, “When
the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless
regions looking for a resting place, but not finding any, it says, ‘I will
return to my house from which I came.’
When it comes, it finds it swept and in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits
more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of
that person is worse than the first.”
What does it take for Christians to get at
the roots of the poverty and ignorance that cause such evil to multiply and
wreak such havoc?
As an alternative to war, to cleaning out
or destroying that may produce more evil instead of eradication, we must be
asking Christ, how do we show such love, your love, that this hate, this evil,
this Pharaoh will be transformed?
Let my people go, let our people go and
thanks be to God for being our, and their, liberator, redeemer and
sustainer. God opens wide God’s arms of
justice and mercy and welcomes us, bids us to enter an embrace that will free
us and make us whole.
We just have to cry out and then accept the
invitation.
May the God of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca,
Jacob, Leah and Rachel boldly be your God as well.
May you find the freedom in your own lives
from your own prisons, from your own Pharaohs.
May the God who promises redemption fulfil that promise in your own life
and in the lives of those who you love, and in the lives of the neighbors who
surround you and in the life of our global community.
May God bless you and be with you as you
embark on your own journey to wholeness. You know the saying, walk don’t run? Well in this case, out of prison into God’s
arms….run, do not walk!
And our God says: LET MY PEOPLE GO! And it is so.
Amen.
