7 September 2008

Exodus 12:1-14

My friend Marilyn often asks me, usually on Friday or Saturday, what the scripture is that I’m preaching on this week. Our conversation typically goes on to how I am going to treat the passage in my sermon. We sometimes have discussions about the passage that typically help me to clarify what I’m trying to get across. Time and again, naturally, this all occurs before I have actually plied pen to paper or, truthfully, pressed fingers to keyboard.

This week was no different. We had that conversation late in the week. But actually there was a difference this time. She couldn’t quite understand why I would want to preach from the Exodus passage for this morning from the lectionary; especially as I summed it up to her as being about the last of the plagues to be sent on Egypt, the one that killed all the first-born among the Egyptians, leaving out the majority of the passage which described the instructions about eating a lamb and having unleavened bread.
For some reason, this passage grabbed me though. And I wasn’t sure why; I couldn’t quite articulate it. Yes, it is the first celebration and instructions for that great Jewish festival of Passover which is celebrated every year with seders to this very day. And yes, it is the very edge of liberation and exodus for the Hebrew people, who had been enslaved in Egypt for decades and decades. But there was something more in those verses that was vying for my attention.

And then I realized that that something was possibly a something from my past; my distant past. I ruminated and figured out that I was remembering the scene from the 1956 movie, “The Ten Commandments” that recounts this very event that we just heard. The whole thing has been stuck in my head for all these years, ever since I saw it, undoubtedly on our black and white tv when the silver screen made it to the little screen and ended up in the Brague living room in the 60s.

Now of course, Cecil B. DeMille really drove home a point in this scene. If you remember, it was dramatically set. (Well, duh! DeMille and ‘dramatically set’ go together like horse & carriage, love & marriage, etc.) I recall especially the eerie mood with which he set up the scene. The Hebrew people had all received their instructions to put the lamb’s blood on their doorposts so the Angel of Death would avoid their homes.

Unless my memory is faulty, which we all know is an ever-growing possibility, there were shots of empty, shadowed streets with a mist or fog roaming ominously about, implying that this Angel of Death was on its route to do its job. The Hebrews were all in their homes, anxious but, finally, safe because they had done what they were told to do.

But, and this is the big but, in the background you could hear cries and shrieks in an ever-growing chorus; cries and shrieks of shocked and grieving Egyptian parents. Eventually, we saw Pharaoh, who had to this point been hard-hearted and immovable in the pleas of Moses to set the people free. But now we saw Pharaoh in pain, bent over the lifeless body of his eldest son, a young boy.

The formidable Yul Brenner (who was the Pharaoh to end all Pharaohs) gave way at this last plague and allowed Charlton Heston and the NRA, I mean, the Hebrew people, to go; which they did, but that is another reading from Exodus and another several scenes in the movie.

But those cries and shrieks; they live with me to this day. The cries of those broken-hearted Egyptian parents still ring in my ears. And, as a young boy, I undoubtedly found myself in Pharaoh’s son’s place: blameless except for the place of birth. (Of course, I was neither the oldest nor even the oldest son in my family, but that doesn’t stop me from empathizing.) But the pain portrayed in that eerie scene lives on. Why should these Egyptians suffer the most difficult thing that there is to suffer, the death of their child? In those days, of course, first-born sons were held in even higher esteem than they are today. So the grief would have been that much greater, though not for reasons we might want to acknowledge today.

And the worst of it is that God caused this to happen. God didn’t let this happen. God didn’t watch this happen. God, we’re told, made this happen. And yes, the liberation of God’s chosen people was at stake and this very event was the initial incident that, in succession, brought the people to the land that was promised to them and their ancestors.

But I’m stuck on that disturbing fact that God God’s-very-self came and caused the deaths of all those people, many of them innocent and likewise blameless and caused the grief that would have to be born. And frankly, I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t actually know where to go from here.

There are many lectionary preachers today who just ignored this passage, I’m sure. If it was even read, they just let it pass by, uncommented on. But for some reason, God help us, I can’t.
And God does indeed need to help us, because you’re along for the ride too, as it were. If you’re expecting me to tie this narrative up and explain it away in a satisfying and neat conclusion, you don’t know me as well as you thought. Because I can’t do that. And I can’t ignore it. And I can’t make it all better and soothe the pain of those guiltless Egyptian parents millennia ago. And another thing: don’t we believe that they are God’s people too? (Well, that’s actually a modern-day concept that really shouldn’t be applied in this situation, but I’m a modern-day preacher with all my concepts nicely intact and in place, right or wrong.)

So I struggle; right here, right now, right in front of you. What am I to do? Do I reject God because of this incident of which I disapprove? Do I try to convince myself that the God of the Israelites is different from the God of my faith? Do I focus on the liberation aspects of this tale, knowing that God’s ends finally did come about because of this, knowing how important liberation is to my theology? Do I wiggle out and put the blame on Pharaoh? He could have averted this tragedy which struck his people and his own family had he not been so hard-hearted and stubborn, you know.

Maybe, I’m not giving God enough credit though. Through the tears and cries and shrieks of those grieving parents, right up to and including the unsettled feelings and thoughts experienced by a young boy on the floor of the living room watching actors play their parts on the television and who grows up to be someone who, from time to time at the least, wrestles with this God; maybe, just maybe, through all of that pain and time, God was grieving and crying and wondering “why, oh why?” too. Perhaps God wanted to find a way around the stubbornness of humanity as brought to fruition in a ruler whose name is forgotten by most if not all of us and God truly desired to avoid all this. Perhaps God, having given God’s creation free will, recognized that things would go badly at times and wept at the very thought.

Because a small band of oppressed people received their freedom after years of toil remembered to tell their children and grandchildren about how God saved them; and because those children and grandchildren kept telling that story, over and over and over, year after year after year, generation to generation to generation; and because someone, somewhere along the span of history, had actually learned to write and decided that this story was vital enough to be painstakingly captured word by word; because of all of that and more, we today ponder the workings of God not only in history but also in our midst.

Because God still weeps, I think. God weeps at the hard-heartedness of our leaders and wonders what next to do. God, from an incomprehensible vantage point of eternity, looks at us and remembers ancient, oppressive Egyptians and wonders if anything has really changed. But I believe, if I may be so presumptuous as to try to fathom God’s mind, that God still remembers those cries and shrieks of grief-torn families. God remembers, I pray, and says “no more; I can’t do that again.”