“I am the LORD”
Preaching on Exodus 5:1-9, 19-6:5
As we find ourselves living in interesting times, Moses’ leadership resonates with me – he isn’t particularly well-suited to it, but he tries to do the right thing, nonetheless.
His showdown with the pharaoh takes place after a long exile far away from the Jewish community, tending to sheep in the wilderness of the mountains. He’s been away for a long time. The vague memories that both the Israelites and Egyptians would have cast him in a peculiar double-life. He’s lived in the royal house, but doesn’t have royal blood. He’s a bit off-kilter wherever he goes. They aren’t sure what to make of him.
Even while he’s up in the mountains, and God miraculously appears to recruit him for a crucially necessary task, he turns down the request. Sorry – I don’t think of myself as much of a speaker, I’m not sure I’d have the confidence leading something like that.
He doesn’t have an overabundance of the necessary skills or the innate charisma, nor public or institutional supports.
And yet he pulls himself together, enters the throne room of the pharaoh, and describes the ways his people are hurting and his dream of a better world. I appreciate that.
Frankly, he seems to couch his request in the smallest possible terms, asking for only a fraction of what Yawheh has called him to fight for – just let us go out into the wilderness together to make a sacrifice – but the pharaoh refuses. Not only that, but he demands that the Israelites be responsible for even more work in even less time.
It’s a blow to Moses’ work, and along with it goes the fragile trust he’d built up with the rest of the Israelites. They’re the ones who end up carrying the extra labour that Pharoah demands, and blame Moses for it. He seems to have just made things worse, and lost a fair amount of respect in the process.
The Exodus journey into freedom doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a hard push, and there is backlash along the way.
Moses goes to God, pleading for a lesser task.
This one is too big for me. I’m not sure I’ve got the capacity. They’re asking for a specific plan from me, and I don’t think I’ve got one. More stuff just keeps on piling up. I’ve got to deal with eating and sleeping and making rent too. I’m tired. Is there something else I can do?
As we live through interesting times, it resonates with me.
*
We can all appreciate the anxiety of that throne-room altercation.
We know it is hard to express that things aren’t working, to be willing to admit that you’re in pain. We can imagine how hard it is when what you’re trying to express is complex and multifaceted and when you aren’t sure anyone wants to hear it.
We have talked, lately, about racism in Canada.
I don’t believe that when folks say I participate in systemic racism, that they’re claiming that I am a bigoted person. I hear that claim use a moral perspective on a larger scale than the virtue of a specific act or person's character. We've got to zoom out.
The average income of Black Canadians is 25 per cent less than that of Canadians who aren’t visible minorities. They are nearly twice as likely to be considered low income.
In a 2016 U of T study, Black job seekers that “whitened” their resumés by altering their name and extracurriculars were 2.5 times more likely to get an interview. Black women with a university degree are 1.5 times more likely to be unemployed than white women who’ve just finished high-school.
I owe a lot of these stats to Darren Thorne, the Vice-Chair of the Human Rights Commission of Ontario.
He cites the annual report of the federal Office of the Correction’s Investigator, which has consistently noted that the incarceration rate of Black Canadians is about three times their proportion of the Canadian population. He cites data that demonstrates that Black people are no more likely to commit a crime than any other racial group.
He quotes an in-depth CBC analysis that found that that more than 36% of the people killed in encounters with Toronto police were Black, between 2010 and 2017. As of the 2016 census, they were 9% of our population.
In 2018, the Ontario Human Rights Commission found that Black-Torontonians were 20 times more likely to die in a police shooting than white counterparts, and that, in fatal shooting cases, they were half as likely to be armed.
This is real, this is happening now, this is happening here.
Relative to that pain, the expressions of frustration we’ve heard are remarkable in their tenderness and clarity. We're being invited to participate in imagining something better. All of us, with the skills and the networks and the leadership that we each bring.
*
For me, at least, I will say it is good news that it wasn’t just Moses who leads the people out of Egypt.
What I think is wild about this story is the suggestion that, essentially, up to that moment in Biblical history, where Moses seeks the liberation of the Jewish people, God had simply been around.
When Moses complains about his mission and the clear lack of success he is having, God refers to Abraham, and to Isaac, to Jacob, and describes themself having appeared to the three of them, even having made covenants with them to give them a home. God refers to the interim history, the plight of the Israelites, having heard their cries, and having remembered the covenant they’d made with their ancestors.
Having appeared, and made covenants, and continuing to pay attention to the descendants of those they’d made covenants with, however, God acknowledges that they’d done so without every having let themself become known.
At no point, had God revealed their name (which, I’ll admit, is typically, the first thing that follows hello). Until this point.
‘I am Yahweh,’ God says, ‘I will bring you out from your burdens, and rid you of your bondage, and redeem you with my hand and take you to be my people. This is how you will know that I am Yawheh: your God, the one who brings you out from the burdens of your oppression.’
It is through the act of liberation that God becomes knowable to the world. That emancipatory event is integral to God’s name and identity. If we want to know and worship God, we should look to the experience of burdened, bound and oppressed
When Yahweh first appears to Moses, in the burning bush, the editor translates ‘Yahweh’ as ‘I am that I am.’ I hear the stress on the ‘that’ in ‘I am that I am’ – that is, I am what it is that you mean when you say ‘I am.’ I am that which it means to be. I am existence, as such.
In that theophany outside the throne-room, then, where God seems to have introduced themself properly for the first time, we hear God say ‘I am what it is to be’ and what that means is liberating those who are brought low.
This is where the Bible starts in earnest – an everyday prophet backed up by a God whose very nature equates existence and liberation.
*
Right now, we’re paying $1.2 billion a year for the Toronto Police Force, a quarter of the municipal budget. The average Toronto homeowner spends $700 a year on policing.
Of all of those who enter the Canadian prison system, according to a 2008 study, 70% haven’t finished high-school, 70% have unstable job histories, 80% have serious substance abuse problems, and over 99% live beneath the poverty line.
If we want to reduce crime, how much of your $700 would you choose to spend on education, employment or substance-abuse support? How much would you spend reducing poverty?
I think that’s a worthwhile question to ask.
I am at least partially excited to ask it because I am tired of focusing on myself and my own experiences for the last few months. I am grateful to be able to channel some of the negativity that brews in isolation into doing some good in the world.
This time, a month ago, I was literally preaching about the value of crouching in ravines, stuffing your backpack with weeds.
For me, what it means to be a resurrection-people is that we are invited to take the pain that we experience, feel it, learn from it, and to use it to fuel empathy with which to be a source of healing for others. I believe we have that opportunity here.
We’re working long hours, or not at all, we’re feeling anxious about the world. Our pain is real, but it’s not the end of our story. It doesn't destroy us. And we can reconfigure it's role in the narrative of our lives by using it to tell new stories of ourselves as healers and leaders.
Moses takes the throne-room disappointment into conversation with God, and returns having understood Yahweh’s name and nature as he returns to let his people go.
Having only a wife, a puppy and some plants, I don’t know much about fatherhood, but that resurrection-cycle of taking the frustrations of being a human-being, processing them, and using the empathy they generate as an integral component of care seems like an necessary part of being a parent.
We are ordinary people, with ordinary skills, seeking to worship God and live out the resurrection. We have that opportunity, in how we respond to Black leaders in Toronto and elsewhere inviting us to join them in the long arc of a journey into freedom.
