Sermon Transcript: September 29, 2024
We continue with our fall series on the God who loves us into loving. And we continue working our way through the readings in the Narrative Lectionary. Today, we leave the book of Genesis behind. We’ve so far been in the book of Genesis. And we move all the way to the second book of the Bible, the book of Exodus. But actually, quite a bit has happened. But there is also a string that connects our reading from last week and our reading this week, and that is Joseph.
You may remember from last week, we read the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph was kind of selected as the favorite among his siblings, and his siblings were very jealous of his place and the affection of their father for him. So they kind of plotted against him, and they ended up attacking him, and they were going to leave him for dead. But they decided it would be more profitable to sell him off to some slave traders, which they did.
And Joseph made his way to Egypt and then had a reversal of fortune. He climbed the ranks. He started off as a slave, ended up in Pharaoh’s court, and became a person of some power and influence. And lo and behold, back where his brothers were, there was a famine, and they ended up fleeing to Egypt, where they find that their plan for their brother had not worked out so well. And Joseph is there, and this wonderful reversal happens, where Joseph now has the upper hand, and he could say to his brothers, “Look, you’re getting what you deserve. You treated me horribly, and I’m now in a position to help you, but I’m not going to lift a finger.”
But of course, Joseph does not do that. Joseph welcomes his brothers back, he forgives them, he says, “What you intended for ill, God has intended for good, and God has brought us together again.” And he opens up his household to his brothers and to their families, and he saves them from the famine. But the book of Exodus begins with these ominous words: “There arose in Egypt a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph.”
So some time has gone on, and this connection between Pharaoh, Egypt, Joseph, and his people—the Israelites—has been severed. It’s been forgotten. And the Pharaoh looks around, and he sees all these Israelite people, and he says, “You know, we really need to keep these people in check. They could become too powerful, and I don’t want to have to deal with that.” And so, he enslaves the Israelite people and puts them to work. And God hears the cries of the Israelites in slavery in Egypt and is determined to do something about it. And so, this is before the Red Sea. God says, “I’m going to send ten plagues. And this will convince Pharaoh to let my people go.” And he calls Moses and he appoints Moses as the leader.
Moses is very reluctant to do this but nonetheless agrees to do it. And so our reading today comes as the nine other plagues have been visited upon Egypt and upon Pharaoh. They’ve had no effect whatsoever, and now the tenth plague has been announced, and that is the most severe of them all, which is the death of the firstborn. Not only sons, but all male living creatures in Egypt will be stricken dead, except for the households of the Israelites.
And they are to mark their homes so that the angel of death will pass over their homes and not visit their firstborn. And there are all of these rites and rituals around this holiday, which is still celebrated by our Jewish brothers and sisters today—Passover. And all of these rites and rituals are to remind the people that God has liberated them from their injustice, has liberated them from capture and slavery.
So that is where we find ourselves today in Exodus chapter 13. May we listen to these words of Holy Scripture, and may they speak to us today.
Exodus 13: 1-8:
Moses said to the people, “Remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, because the Lord brought you out from there by strength of hand. No leavened bread shall be eaten. Today, in the month of Abib, you are going out. When the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, which He swore to your ancestors to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, you shall keep this observance in this month. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a festival to the Lord. Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days. No leavened bread shall be seen in your possession, and no leaven shall be seen among you in all your territories. You shall tell your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’”
For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, for the word of God within us. Thanks be to God.
So, in our adult education this past month, we have been talking about compassion, and today, Laura led a very interesting class on the dark side of empathy. But we’ve been talking about this, and prior to today, we’ve been following a book by a man named Marshall Rosenberg called Nonviolent Communication. And it is this method of communicating with one another so that we can have compassion on one another. And it’s based on a very simple belief. And that belief is that we all have the same basic human needs. We all have the same basic human needs. We all need to be acknowledged, we need to be understood, we need to be valued.
And so, when we can get our communication to the level beyond emotion and figure out in conversation, “What are my needs? What are my basic human needs? And what might the other person’s basic human needs be that are underlying whatever else is going on?”—that is the level at which we can have understanding and compassion for one another. Because in some sense, even though in a particular situation it may be different, we all at least know that we have the same needs. And we will resonate, even if we’re experiencing things differently at the time, we’ll resonate with each other’s needs.
And I think, I think if you talk to members of the adult ed group, you’ll find out that this is a—it’s a really powerful method. It’s a really, really powerful thing just to connect with another person at the level of our, of our universal needs and understand maybe that the other person understands what my needs are, and maybe I get to understand what theirs are too.
In many ways, we’ve been talking about Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries for the past month. In many ways, his ministry is based upon this idea of universal human needs. He works with all these, particularly young men, but young women as well, in Los Angeles who have fallen somehow or other into gang life, and he understands that they do this not because they have some proclivity towards gang life or something like that, or because there’s something wrong with them, but because they have basic human needs that are not being met, have not been met, and that somehow the gangs supply those for them.
And that’s the hook of the gang. They provide community, they provide belonging, they provide maybe security in exchange for the deeds that they’re asked to do, whether that be running drugs or carrying a weapon to protect territory or whatever it might be. The gangs are filling in. They’re effective because they fill in at that level of the universal human need of the person who’s not received, has not had their needs met elsewhere.
Because many, many of the young people in Los Angeles, and many other places of the world, grew up in environments where their parents lack the ability, lack the resources, to care for them properly. And it’s a cycle, right? Probably because they are not having their needs met, so how are they possibly going to meet the needs of their children? And many of these also live with grandparents or aunts and uncles, and these grandparents or aunts and uncles maybe didn’t plan on their lives working out this way, where they would have someone else’s children living with them at this point in their lives, and so many receive this constant message that they’re not wanted, that they’re not loved, and that their mere existence is a burden.
And Father Boyle tells the story of one particular individual he came across whose name is Anthony. Half of Anthony’s life has been spent in jails and in detention facilities, and before coming to Homeboy Industries, Anthony developed an addiction to methamphetamines that crippled him, surely as much as his gang affiliation had. And Father Boyle recounts this time where he is speaking with Anthony in his office, and Anthony is telling him about being raised, about his household. He has a twin brother, and at the age of nine years old, Anthony and his twin were taken away from their parents because their house was filled with violence and abuse and sent to live with their grandmother. Anthony says of his grandmother, “She was the meanest human being I’ve ever known.” Every day after school and every weekend, Anthony and his twin, while they lived with her, had to go into the hallway where she would put duct tape over their mouths because she said, “I hate the sound of your voices.”
Would it be any surprise that a child raised in such an environment might display behavior issues at school? That he might be suspended or expelled? That he might find himself swept up into gang life, where others promise to connect him to community? Where he might turn to drugs to escape reality?
I know this amazing teacher. But I promised my wife I wouldn’t ever mention her by name in my sermons. So, we’ll call her “Annie.” How about that? Annie is an amazing teacher, and she has as her motto these three simple words: Seek to understand. Seek to understand. Did I get that right? Oh yeah, okay, good.
If a child has behavior issues in class, she doesn’t scold or punish. She gently redirects, but if the behavior is repeated, she seeks to understand. Why? What is it about this child, about their environment? Is something going on? Are the parents going through a divorce, a separation? Maybe the stress of that has the child feeling insecure, unsure? Or is it just something as simple as, is the child a grazer, used to eating throughout the day and not used to having these structured mealtimes and not eating in between, and around 10 do they get hangry? Does the behavior always pop up then? And do they just need to take a break and have a granola bar?
Seek to understand. But what’s amazing is, there is always a reason. There is always a reason, each and every time. And if you can be patient, and curious, and caring enough to discover that reason, you can address the behavior at its source.
God, the book of Exodus tells us, seeks to understand. God seeks to liberate us from that which binds us. Moses tells the people, “Remember. Remember who God is. And remember what God has done for us.” That’s what ritual is for. It’s like time travel. We come here every Sunday, and we go back in time to remember these formative experiences for our faith and for our communities that form us as God’s special people. They remind us that we are loved, and we are valued just as we are.
We live in a culture that’s constantly telling us we are not enough, that our value is external to us—that we must achieve, we must succeed, we must produce. The evidence of this is in the size of our bank accounts, or the clothes that we wear, or the cars that we drive, or the communities that we associate with. That make us valuable. That make us worthy. But ultimately, this way of living is unsatisfactory and it’s unsustainable. There’s never enough. There’s never enough that we can possess. Never enough that we can produce.
Keeping up with it all requires us to work harder, and harder, and harder, and longer. We begin to skip rest, and we skip days off, and we skip time with family or friends, in which we just simply have the chance to be and to relate to one another. And eventually, guess what? We realize we are in bondage. We’re not really free. And we may even feel like we don’t know how to get out. We don’t know how to escape.
And so we come here week after week to remember, to perform rituals that remind us who and whose we are. To travel through time, to visit our ancestors once again, and the experiences of God that they had. We come here just to be. Just to be. Just to be with others. Just to relate to one another. Not to prove anything. Not to win. To finally break free of the escalators of growth, and success, and production, and consumption.
And just rest. Just breathe. Just be. To know ourselves as individuals who are inherently valuable and worthy. Just as we are. Not because of something external. And to hear once again that we are loved, and as the bulletin cover says, to dwell in the vastness of that love.
It’s another one of Father Boyle’s great phrases: to dwell in the vastness of that love.
Anthony was telling Father Boyle about his grandmother. He was quaking with emotion. And he said to Father Boyle, “This is why. This is why I never…” Because I love the sound of their voices.
In fact, when the oldest one grabs a crayon and draws wildly on the living room wall and my wife says to me, “Do something.” Anthony says, “I crouch down and I put my arm around my daughter. The two of us look at the wall, and my cheek rests on hers. And I point at it and I say, ‘Now that is the most beautiful work of art ever seen.’”
Friends, here’s the good news. The God we most deeply want is the God we actually have. The God who frees us from bondage. The God who loves the sound of our voices. This God looks at us, resting His cheek on ours, and says, “You are a magnificent work of art.”
Isaiah says, “I have called you by name. You are mine. I love you.”
Amen.
