8/23/20 “Are you there, God?” by Nancy E. Petty
“Are you there, God?”
Exodus 1:8-14
A sea of confusion swept over me. I couldn’t believe my ears. Was I actually reading the Bible – a narrative written thousands of years ago? Or was I reading an unedited script for a movie titled America 2020 set to be released next month. Listen again to Exodus 1:8-14.
A new leader rose to power who didn’t know the people and story of America. He said to the citizens: Look, these immigrants and black people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Let us deal shrewdly with them or they will take over our country. And in the event of racial injustice and unrest, they will join our enemies and fight against us in a movement called Black Lives Matter, and escape from our dominance.
Therefore, let us legislate policies and laws to criminalize them and build prisons to oppress them with forced labor. So they built Central Prison and Butner and Women’s Prison and Farmville Detention Center and they erected cages to house their children. But the more they were oppressed, the more resilient they became. So that the systems of oppression, systemic racism, came to dread the protestors.
The white supremacists became ruthless in their attacks on those who didn’t hold their views. And they murdered them in the streets, and they made their lives difficult with minimum wage, redlining to create ghettos, withholding affordable healthcare, gutted voting rights, and they doubled down on the war on drugs. They were ruthless in all the injustices they imposed on them.
If you have ever thought that the Bible is just an old book that has nothing relevant to say about our times, Exodus 1:8-14 offers you a chance to rethink that position. It is true: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Or, as this quote by George Santayana in its original form says: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Here we are in the year 2020 and we are repeating the horrors of this ancient story of oppression as if we were putting on a Broadway production. It’s a bit chilling to realize how these stories manifest and repeat themselves from generation to generation. The names of the oppressors change. The identities of the people oppressed are different. The movements that rise up carry different labels. But the storyline is the same. And through it all, the faithful who seek justice ponder the question, “Are you there, God?” Or more explicitly, “Where are you, God?” Where are you, God, when such injustices are being heaped upon your beloved children?
At best, we answer that question with a hope and a promise derived from the same sacred scriptures that hold these stories of violence and oppression and injustice: God is with us. We say that God is with us in our suffering, enduring our pain and sorrow. God is with us in our cries for mercy and justice. God is with George Floyd as the knee on his neck cuts off the airflow and extinguishes life. God is with the workers as they toil in sweat shops and meat packaging plants working for less than minimum wage. God is with black men as they are hunted down and shot like animals on suburban streets in neighbors where they are not welcome. God is with poor families as they drink poison water. God is with the little ones living in cages separated from their parents as they cry themselves to sleep at night. God is with them in the inhumane institutions where forced labor is required and dignity is stripped. That has become our answer: God is with us.
I wonder if the Israelites felt God with them as Pharaoh put his knee on their necks. I wonder if Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery and Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd felt God with them as police violence ended their lives. I wonder if Oscar Alberto Martinez and his daughter, Angie Valeria Martinez felt God with them as the currents of the Rio Grande swept them under drowning both as they tried to slip into the United States for safety and a better life. God I hope so. I want to believe that God was with them – all of them. I want to believe that as their body left this world they were each welcomed into the other world where no more violence or prejudice or oppression or a callous tyrant could ever again touch them. A place where the words “Give me your tired, your poor,/your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempeset-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” welcomed them. God I pray so. God with them is my prayer.
But I must confess to you this morning, I am tired of placing my faith in this one affirmation in the face of the pain and suffering and violence that black and brown and low-income families are suffering in our nation and in our own backyard. While the faith affirmation that “God is with us in all things” offers comfort, it is not enough. It is not enough! It is not enough, especially when God being with us is pretty safe for white folks, and God being with them is a hollow prayer because “us” ain’t doing everything we can to protect “them!”
God is with us cannot be our fallback plan. In the presence of systemic oppression the question “Are you there, God?” deserves more than a perfunctory/obligatory faith affirmation like “God is with us in our suffering.” Such an affirmation must be followed by action – actions that show the oppressed that indeed God is with them and with us.
And this is where the rest of the story in Exodus chapter 1 comes into play. The lectionary text for today actually includes verses 15-22 of chapter 1 and verses 1-10 of chapter 2. It is in these verses that we find the more complete answer to the question “Are you there, God?” Exodus 1:15-22 tells the story of Pharaoh instructing the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah to kill all the male babies born to the Israelite women. When the midwives resist the command of the king, he calls to them and asks why they are not doing as he has commanded them. In a subversive act they say to the king, “…the Hebrew woman are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” It is then that Pharaoh gives the command to all his people, “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews, you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.” The story continues in chapter 2 narrating the birth of Moses. There we read that after Moses was born his mother hid him for 3 months. When she could no longer hide him she put him in a basket and placed it among the reeds along the river bank. The next part of the story is often overlooked. Let me read to you what happens next.
His sister [Moses’ sister] stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him. The daughter of Pharaoh come down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
I will admit that there is a lot wrong with this part of the story. But there is a part of me that wonders if these two women – Pharaoh’s daughter and Moses’ sister – are members of the unspoken sisterhood who are quietly subverting the commands of the President, I mean king. It is doubtful that Pharaoh’s daughter intended to fuel a revolution; after all, for that time and that culture, she would have been considered above the rest of humanity as Pharoahic bloodlines were considered part god. But the humanity in her rose up at the sight of a baby in distress. Yes, there was selfishness in this act, but there was also compassion sufficient to compel her to disregard the edict of her father, her king, her god. Pharoah’s daughter’s act of civil disobedience gives us a hint to how God acts – God pricks at our human hearts to wake us up. Even when the power that rules your earthly life and your family life and gives a direct order, if your heart knows it is wrong, then you defy that order, and act on behalf of God’s justice love.
And what of Moses’ sister? It is tempting to minimize her role by thinking she acted under the safety of Pharoah’s daughter’s initiative. But we all know how untrue that is. That’s what systemic oppression lives for! If Pharoah found out about the scheme, it would not be his daughter who would be held accountable! No, it would be the expendable slave girl who would have paid the price. Yet Moses’ sister does not hesitate, and implicates herself in the act of civil disobedience, and she ups the ante of resistance by skillfully positioning her own heartbroken mother to be the “nursemaid” for Moses.
Again, the subversion of Moses’ sister isn’t strategic revolution. This isn’t a planned action coordinated by organizers. This is the human heart, picking up clear signals from a loving God who never stops calling us to be the embodiment of that love. We don’t have to wait until Jesus comes along a thousand years later to understand the incarnation. These women were the incarnation of God with us. In the flesh. Risking their very lives for love.
God is present when we are present. God is freeing the oppressed when we are putting our lives on the line to free the oppressed. God if present in the suffering of God’s people when God’s people are standing in solidarity suffering with one another. God is there, in our midst, when we become the incarnation of God’s love in the world. The answer to the question, “Are you there, God?” can only be answered in its fullness when we show up with our bodies for God – like Shiphrah and Puah, and Moses’s sister and Pharaoh’s daughter.
I am not disregarding the presence of God that moves and lives beyond us, for God is surely more than the collective humanity. The presence of God transcends our physical realm. But I am saying that if we want to know where God is in all the injustice of the world right now, we have to ask the follow-up question, “Where are we?” Where are we? Because where we stand might determine where and if we see God. These women in chapters 1 and 2 of Exodus are not asking “Are you there God?” No. They are making sure with their very bodies that God is there in the suffering and pain and injustice. By following the dictates of their hearts and a love that transcends hate they are building a revolution that will ultimately topple the dominant structures and systems of oppression and violence? They cut the path for Rosa Parks when she sat down on that bus and John Lewis when he walked across the Edmunds Pettus Bridge and those black young people who sat at the lunch counter in Greensboro and the first Moral Monday arrestees and all who have joined the Black Matter Lives movement? And for everyone who has risk embodying the words, “God is with us?” And Rosa and John and those who risked their lives during the civil rights movement and those who have gone to jail for justice since that time have continued to clear the path for us. Now we are the ones to keep clearing the path. We are the ones to put flesh on those words, “God with us.” Shiphrah, Puah, Moses’s sister, Pharaoh’s daughter – they taught us what it means to put flesh on the words, “God is with us.”
We cannot wait until November for a new leader to arise and magically and miraculously return our nation to our highest ideal of being a nation where all are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. When that new leader arises in November, please God, it will not be enough. It will not be enough. And so, the question is not, “Are you there, God?” The question is, “Are you there, Nancy?” “Are you there, Pullen?” “Are you there, America?”
