As
I was processing out of Church after this sermon, a disillusioned Viet Nam vet,
who said his heart is still “torn apart,” handed me a note that said,“I don’t’
know if God exists, but if so, I want it to be the God you spoke of this
morning.” Wanting God to exist is way better than just holding the opinion God
exists without it really mattering. I pray that the god Moses met on Horeb is a
god you want to exist and that such a god
does.
Today’s
lesson from Exodus is the biggest zinger
of a surprise in all religious
literature.
Everything in
the Bible turns on this.
But in order
for us to get it,
we need to do a little trick with
our minds.
We have to
forget about everything that happens in the Bible
leading up to this moment.
The reason is:
those beautiful and deeply true myths and legends
would not be written until hundreds
of years after the event
in today’s lesson.
This text
would do a lot more to shape those stories
than they could shape this event.
So forget
all that.
Let me tell
you another story instead – the story of religion
before Moses met God on Mt. Horeb.
Stone Age hunter-gatherers
had some primitive religion,
but we don’t know much about it,
except that it was a pretty
unstructured thing
done by guys out in the
bear caves.
Formal
structured religion was born with the invention of agriculture
around 10,000 BC.
Once we
started farming, small groups of people began to acquire
more and more land.
But to make
use of that land, they needed farmworkers.
So that’s
when we got forced labor,
kings with taskmasters to keep the
slaves in line,
and standing armies to protect royal
land claims
from greedy neighbors.
Religion grew
up in the context of agrarian tyranny.
It really
was, as Marx said, “the opiate of the masses.”
Religion
explained and defended the injustice of oppression.
The gods and
the kings, you see, were close friends, even relatives.
Some of the
kings actually were gods.
For poor
people, religion meant trying to buy a blessing
with a sacrifice, a tiny bit of
which was burned on an altar,
but the rest was kept by the rich
folks to sell.
The gods
helped the kings keep the poor folk in line.
In all of ancient
religion, there was no exception
-- not one -- until that day on Mt. Horeb.
A god Moses
did not worship, did not sacrifice to
-- a god he’d never head of and never spoken to –
out of nowhere that god spoke to him.
And God said
the strangest thing.
He said, “I
have heard my people’s cry.//
I have seen how they suffer under
their oppressors.”
Now those people
didn’t worship this god either.
They did not
sacrifice to this god, pray to this god, or believe in this god.
So what made
them his people?
Just this:
they suffered.
All of the
other gods of the ancient world were gods of the rich and powerful.
Pharaoh was
one of the gods himself and close kin to the others.
But the god
of Horeb was the god of the oppressed.
And he said,
“I have heard my people’s cry.
So Moses, go tell Pharaoh, go tell
that popinjay poser deity,
to let my people go.
My people. Let them go.”
This was a revolution
in religion on two counts.
First, we
now had a god on the other side of class struggle.
Second, up
to now, religion was not interested in morality.
It was about
sacrifices to buy blessings or prevent curses.
Religion was
a mix of cosmic graft and celestial protection money.
But this was
a god who cared – and cared mightily –
about right and wrong – cared about morality --
and the morality he cared about was social justice.
This god was
moved to act, not by bribery, but by his conscience,
which went hand in hand with his compassion.
So what had
these people done to earn God’s blessing?
Nothing.
They just needed him. So he showed up.
He didn’t
say,
“Moses, go tell the people I have
this 613 commandment law
and if they’ll keep it strictly for
three years,
I’ll have a word with Pharaoh.”
No, they
didn’t have to do a thing.
God just
acted out of his compassion to set them free.
After they
were free,
God gave them the law as a way to
respond to his action.
But even
then, the law wasn’t to meet his need.
It was to
help the people live into the freedom he’d bestowed.
The word for
law was halacha – the way of life.
“I set before
you life and death,” God said, “choose life.”
Some of the
law was still ancient ritual stuff
they probably got from their
neighbors.
But the
heart of the law was God teaching the people compassion,
teaching mercy for the down and out
– the widow, the orphan,
the laborer, the outcast
– and most of all the alien.
“Do not
oppress an alien,” God said, “for remember that
you were once aliens in Egypt.” Exodus
22: 21.
In a world
where religion was all about the right of the rich
to oppress the poor,
here was a god saying the way of
life is not land acquisition
-- not exploiting the labor of the landless.
-- not leading powerful armies against your weaker neighbor.
Real life is
found in simple acts of mercy.
When you
harvest your crop, leave some for the poor.
When you
hire a worker, pay a fair wage.
Loan money
and if the debtor cannot pay, forgive the debt.
I cannot
begin to express how utterly bizarre this religion was
in the Ancient World.
1,300 years
later, Jesus did not reverse that religion of Moses.
The kings of
Israel and their minions did that
when they turned into the Jewish equivalent of pharaohs.
But Jesus
reclaimed it.
Jesus spoke
with the same heart as that strange god of Horeb.
He led his people
up a mountainside, a place like the one
where Moses heard God’s voice.
And Jesus
said,
“Blessed are the poor.
Blessed are the bereaved.
Blessed are the hungry and thirsty.
Blessed are the merciful.”
God has
shown us his heart
and invites our hearts to beat in
sync with his.
That is the
way to life and true happiness.
So, where do
we stand this Lent? On Mt. Horeb.
Our God is
the one who hears people cry.
Do we hear
them?
The top 1
percent earn an average $6 million dollars per year
-- more than doubling their share of the national income in
my lifetime.
The bottom
90 percent average $33,000 per year, which means
a lot of them are earning way less.
We have the
highest incarceration rate in the world.
We lock up
dramatically more of our people than countries
we call totalitarian.
Latinos are
three times as likely as whites to be incarcerated.
Blacks are
six times as likely.
One out of
every 10 black men in his thirties is in prison.
And this is
not about the crime rate.
The crime
rate went down,
but the incarceration rate keeps
going up.
Others of
God’s people are imprisoned in addiction or domestic abuse.
And we do
have the alien in our land
-- the Salvadoran alien, the Mexican alien, the Syrian alien,
the Pakistani alien.
So brothers
and sisters, our feet this Lent are on Mt. Horeb
and God is speaking to us.
I do not
hear God saying,
“Give up Facebook for a few weeks
and lay off the lattes.”
No, God is saying,
“I have heard my people cry.
Do you not hear it? Are you deaf?
Go tell your American pharaohs
to let my people go.
My people. Let them go.”
