August 4, 2019
Exodus 21-23
Exodus: A Story Of God’s Love for God’s People – The Book of the Covenant
The Rev. Martha M. Shiverick
My first call out of graduate schools was to Denison University in Granville Ohio. I moved to this small town, recently a dry Baptist town in central Ohio after receiving my Master of Science from Columbia University in New York City. I was in my 20’s… I was single…. and I had been just ordained. Prospects for a social life were not good.
In a small town you live differently. Everyone knows your business and will be happy to tell you what yours should be. I learned that if I kissed the Baptist minister on the cheek as I said good bye to him after having lunch together, my office manager would have already received several phone calls about it by the time I got up the hill to my office on campus. I learned that outside of the small campus community, agriculture was the number one business so I should not be surprised when the commercials on the television were about getting a greater yield and less volunteer corn in your soybean crop. And I learned that Ohio State Football and The Ohio State marching Band were sacred.
And I learned the joy of the harvest festivals. There was the Pumpkin Festival in Circleville (jokingly referred to as Round Town by the neighboring cities), the Corn Festival in Millersport, and so many others that you could celebrate God’s goodness and our bounty from the earth with people almost all year long. There are actually 1850 festival events in Ohio each year. And I loved each one I attended. They were joyful. The families together, children’s laughter, the teenagers experiencing their first kisses, the older couples walking and holding hands….
I only say all this because the killings in Gilroy California last Sunday which killed three people (two of which were children) and injured many more was at a festival just like the ones I went to while living in Granville. They are something the locals look forward to all year. This festival, which celebrates the Garlic harvest grown in Gilroy, was a three day celebration for families, for teenagers on dates, and of course an opportunity for the farmers to showcase their harvest. And an individual with an assault-style rifle turned it into a nightmare.
So we woke up last Monday morning to a news story about yet another multiple shooting incident and the reminder of the violence caused by these assault weapons. Sad news. And sadder are thoughts such as, ‘Only three deaths…it could have been worse.’ Killing sprees have become so common place that we are numb to them and no longer horrified. Something is wrong.
Then, less than 48 hours later, two Walmart employees were gunned down by another disgruntled employee in Southaven Mississippi. Thank goodness the police were able to apprehend him before he killed more people….. and because these killings have become so common place, and the Democratic debates took priority, little mention was made of it in the news.
And then like an highly contagious plague spreading though our country, yesterday a man filled with hatred and bigotry, went into another Walmart in El Paso and killed 20 people and wounded 26 others and hours later this violet disease infecting our country killed at least 9 people early this morning in Dayton Ohio. It is a sad time when we the news starts with the phrase, ‘the latest shooting’.
You are probably wondering what all this has to do with Chapters 21 and 22 of Exodus. Well, remember the past few weeks as we approached this section of Exodus, after the Israelites have fled slavery in Egypt, crossed the red sea, and walked through the dry desert to get to Mt Sinai, God gives them laws by which to live that will do two things. First, it invites the Israelites into community with God and each other and, second, it sets up civil laws by which they can live together. They needed survival skills and a military leader for the first part of Exodus, but now they need to set up rules of civility and establish what it means to be God’s people. This period of time at the foot of the mountain is to prepare them for God’s promised land..
This part of Exodus is referred as the Book of the Covenant. At first we might think this has no correlation to our world and time. It contains laws about personal conduct, business, slaves, alters and idols. It contains an early church calendar of Festivals that must be observed. But for those of you who are lawyers, you might find this very early ‘case law’ pertaining to slaves, personal injury, and property interesting. It is a series of IF this happens, THEN do this. ‘If a Hebrew buys a Hebrew servant, he must let him go after 6 years of service.’ ‘If someone digs a pit and makes a fire in it and another person’s ox or donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make restitution to the owner of the animal but be able to keep the dead animal.’ Why would God care about such events? Perhaps the laws about the idols and simple alters are to help the Hebrews identify their difference from the people they will encounter in the Promised Land? Perhaps the laws about slaves and restitution are to help the Israelites remember what is was like when they were slaves themselves in Egypt. To know the purpose of the laws helps us to see the relevancy to our lives as well. Do we need to be reminded of our privilege in a society with such a division between haves and have nots? Yes. In today’s culture of people of people who say they are nones, who have no religious base, we need to be reminded of our ethic which sets us apart from others? Yes, we need that as well.
This second part of Exodus, has God taking a more personal investment with God’s people. God reacts with emotions of anger and displeasure to individual people’s actions. God tells Moses that God’s anger will be aroused if someone takes advantage of a widow of orphan. God cares about each action and person. In these statements, the Lord shows that these personal behaviors are of concern to God because they create the community that is to be established. (As a side note, one commentary on this section of Exodus talked about the laws which might come across as a bit barbaric to us in our modern era. An ‘eye for an eye’ certainly is one. But, if you think that in an era where only the poor suffered such punishment and the rich were able to buy their way out of punishment, making a law like that brings fairness and equality to an ancient judicial system.
The bottom line is that God cares about God’s people. God is intimately tied up in our wellbeing. In the laws that are set up, God speaks to divine concern for those who are powerless, and to the alien, the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the needy. In the laws that are being set up, a community is being established that will model the values and ethics of our Lord. And this is tied up with being a people of the covenant, a people who will look forward to a time when they will live in God’s Promised Land.
And dear friends, the essence of those laws are our laws as well. And the same promises given to the ancient Israelites are our promises too. God is compassionate and concerned for the wellbeing of all God’s children. When we cry out to God, God listens. And God wants us to live in society with the the values and ethics that imitate that love.
God wants us to be faithful. We are to look at the idols and fancy alters in our society and know we are not to worship them. The worship of power and money, the worship of guns; and a society that promotes violence, racism, classism; a world that hurts God’s good creation, or allows human rights for one group but not another… all these are contrary to the rules by which our God has given us. And dear Lord, our society needs rules t protect us from ourselves. Something is amiss. We are living in a changed world. What 5 years ago was seen as prosperous and unethical is now common place. Sermons that I gave at the mainline moderate church in Cleveland where I used to serve, now sound outrageously left wing and political. When did preaching from the Bible become subversive? When did our ethic of love and justice brand the Christian as unpatriotic?
But we are called to be faithful. We follow a God who loves us and tells us to love others. So….. back to the beginning of my sermon and the killings by gunfire that happened just this week, as people of faith, we must decide how we are to respond because we are God’s people and we believe God hears the pain of God’s children and calls us to live in a way that prevents it. Those murders are not God’s plan. We need to find ways to prevent the mass killings. That is what our laws are for. Questioning what the possible need is for every day citizens to have assault and semi-automatic weapons designed for maximum damage in military use is a first step. Racism should be seen as unacceptable and rules protecting individual rights should be enforced. And today all this seems huge. But, talking openly about this evil in our society and ways to correct mass murders, racism, and other ethical issues of our day and tying it to our faith in a loving just God is a first step. And then, perhaps we can and will change a few laws and live in the manner to which God calls us. Amen.
