June 2, 2019
Several years ago we spent the summer studying the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis. So, for this summer, I was so pleased when in the competitive voting that took place as we decided what part of the Bible we would spend this summer focusing on, the Book of Exodus won out.
So…. here is a little introduction. The Book of Exodus follows where the first book ended. As you recall in Genesis there was a man named Jacob who had 12 sons, one of which was his father’s favorite. The brothers were a bit more than just jealous of Joseph, and sold him into slavery. He ended up in Egypt where he became a well trusted and powerful employee of the Pharaoh. He could interpret the pharaoh’s dreams. He enjoyed power and wealth and the admiration of the Pharaoh. When a famine swept through the land and people all over were starving, the Egyptians did not suffer the same plight as others people as the Pharaoh had stored grain and wheat at the counsel of Joseph….. His brother’s came begging to him for food and he forgave them and invited the whole family to move to Egypt where there was food and work. Genesis ends on a high note with all good with the people of Israel now living prosperously in their adopted country.
Time passed, Joseph died as did the Pharaoh for whom he worked and the 70 family members that originally came to Egypt have multiplied and grown exceedingly strong. And we know that nothing can be more dangerous for an immigrant population than to grow strong, to be fruitful, and prolific. Time and time again, we see what happens to populations when they fear they are losing their power, when they feel that their majority status and the benefits they have enjoyed as the privileged feels threatened and when they see another population that they can call ‘the other’ as taking their power and status from them.
We know that this was the fertile ground from which Hitler and the Nazi’s gained their power. There was an economic downturn. People were not living the same dream they had in just a generation before. The people in power saw a rise in a population that did not look like them or worship like them. Hitler was able to rise to power by using the psychological insecurities that the German people were feeling. He created hate in the hearts of people. Others, who were not them, were taking away what was rightfully theirs. An enemy was made. And once the hate was instilled in the ‘other’, the next thing was to make the ‘other’ not as human as the blonde blue eyed Arian race from which Germans felt they descended. It is the purpose and work of the German Government to provide for and develop the higher race. So they eliminated those who were not like them…the handicapped, the gays, the Jews. The ‘other’ needed to be controlled. The ‘other’ was taking over what was right and good about their country. And as we know, atrocities occurred. They are well documented. And they have occurred throughout history. And we need to remind ourselves that these things were done by humans just like us to one another and that they can happen again.
Well the same thing happened in the beginning chapters of Exodus. Listen now for God’s message to us in the first chapter of Exodus verses 7-22.
. 7 But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them. 8 Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. 9 He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. 10 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.” 11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. 13 The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, 14 and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them. 15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 16 “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” 17 But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. 18 So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?” 19 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.” 20 So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. 21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. 22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews[a] you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.”
In the book ‘Requiem for a Nun’ by William Faulkner, there is a great line that fits well here. Faulkner writes, ‘the past is not history; it isn’t even the past’. This story from Exodus, this attempt at killing off a people we know is not a once, or twice, or even three times in history event. It happens all the time.
As I have told you before, I grew up as a very Midwestern kid who learned in school, at home, and at church that I was indeed blessed by God to be brought up in our country. I don’t know if it was ever said out loud to us, but it was definitely implied, that we were God’s chosen. We were the moral standard for the rest of the world. We Americans had integrity and we always took the moral high ground. And, my education definitely supported it. And since I was a Northern girl growing up in the Northern Presbyterian church which split off from the southern church over slavery, I have to say that I thought that I even came from morally higher ground than you who grew up in the south. AND, in school we studied a form of history that supported this.
And then I went to college…. And I studied a fuller and more open American history than I had before. My idealization was shattered. I learned that our history was just as smeared with dirt and hate and immorality as all the others. It seems to be a sin of the human condition of which we are no exception. I learned that even before the Nazis tried for their ideal race, we had been doing it in our country for almost a century. The horror in which we read the story of the Egyptians controlling and eliminating the Jewish population by killing the baby boys could be our horror at our own behavior as well. In the late 19th century and through the 1970’s our country participated in a movement now called American Eugenics. Its purpose was the same as those Egyptians killing off the male Jews and the Nazi’s protecting their ‘higher race’. We used forced sterilization as a method of preserving and improving the dominant group. Funded in part by the Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Kellogg Foundation, scientists studied the upper class in Britain and arrived at the conclusions that their social positions were due to superior genetic make-up. Once you establish such a thing as true, it is easy to jump to selective breeding so that our country could direct its own evolution. And this was not just the White Americans that believed this. African American intellectuals such as W.E.B DuBois believed that the best Blacks are as good as the best Whites and that what they called the ‘talented tenth’ of all races should mix.
The outcome of this American Eugenics was forced sterilization of thousands and thousands of people. It is thought that just in the state of California over 20,000 sterilizations were performed. In 1963 the number of sterilizations reached over 80,000 as our country singled out minority groups and wrote that the sterilizations would save the tax payers money. Virginia did not repeal its sterilization laws until 1974 and in 2013 it was reported that 148 female prisoners in two California prisons were sterilized without their consent between 2006 and 2010.
Another page from the history book I did not get to read in High School was the Immigration Restriction League which started in 1894 for the purpose of barring what it considered inferior races from entering our country and diluting what it saw as superior racial stock (meaning upper class WASPs). This society whose members included the presidents of Harvard, Bowdoin College, and Stanford University believed that social and sexual involvement with less-evolves and less-civilized races would pose a biological threat. AND they lobbied for literary tests for immigration into our country.
Now…… doesn’t that sound all too familiar! A great quote from Mark Twain that is often repeated is; History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Well…. friends, we know this rhyming poem all too well.
I tell you all this because I believe the story of the Egyptians treatment of the Jews is our story as well….. And it will continue to be our story until we recognize it as so. Buried somewhere in our human condition is the sense of threat of the other. When we lose status as the dominate, when we feel that another group has grown too great in population, in economic health, or is taking something away from us that we feel is inherently ours, we eliminate them. Instead of seeing humanity as one, we separate and want what is best only for our tribe.
But, we here at this church believe that God is the God of all creation. We believe that God loves unconditionally all people regardless of their differences…. And we believe that as God’s own, we are called to live out and emulate our just and loving Creator.
And the end of Chapter Two of Exodus, after the baby Moses in the bulrushes story that I told the kids…. After Moses recognizes his place as a Jew and not a part of the oppressive regime of the Pharaoh, God enters the scene. It says God heard the groaning of God’s people…. and God remembered the Covenant made with the ancestors of these children, and God took notice of them.
And dear friends, God is asking us to take notice as well. We are not to be silent but are to speak out and witness to any breach of justice that places one group of people as inferior to another. Amen.