Lake Edge United Church of Christ

The questions were not theoretical any longer. The people of Israel were about to find out what would happen if the pursuing armies of Pharaoh caught up with them. You’ll remember the chain of events that ended with them trapped between the tossing sea and the army of the world’s only superpower. It had begun with them as slaves to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. As slaves, they enjoyed a particular safety: they had economic value to the Empire, and they weren’t about to be tossed away lightly.
They had value, yes, but their value was chiefly economic. And so Pharaoh was only being a prudent capitalist when he began to turn up the pressure on them to perform, to become more and more productive. Assigned to make bricks for Egyptian infrastructure projects, the slaves found their quotas being increased on a regular basis. More and more was required of them in the interest of profit and productivity. When nothing more could be squeezed out of them by increasing their pace of work, a new strategy was employed: requiring them to make bricks without straw. This had them working harder than ever, Pharaoh grinding every last ounce of effort from them, never satisfied, always wanting more, more, more.
It was the insatiable appetite of the Empire for their labor that set them crying out for deliverance. They were caught in a true quandary: by their own hard work they’d made sure that they would be safe in Egypt: fed, clothed, housed. But the relentless pressure of Pharaoh had rendered them miserable. They were “safe” in a manner of speaking, but they were not free and they were not happy, and they saw with their own eyes that their masters would never be pleased with their efforts. Their work would never be enough. Thus trapped, they cried out.
And God heard them, we are told. God heard them and decided that enough was enough, that it was time to get them out, to bring them into freedom into a land of their own. And so God raised up Moses, a mighty prophet to go and be God’s spokesman, to bring the people out. God blessed Moses with some remarkable powers. Moses was given the ability to increasingly torment Pharaoh and his kingdom with plagues that began at annoying and eventually became literally lethal: bugs were sent, and frogs, the drinking water of the Nile was turned to blood, the Egyptians broke out in boils, pestilence reigned, and Egypt suffered.
Until at last the final plague descended, the one that broke at last the flint-hard heart of the Empire. The death of the first-born of every household in the Empire was simply too much to take. Who could hold onto a slave when the mysterious God of that slave brought death into every home? “Go!” the slaves were told, “be gone from this kingdom.” And so, in the night, they’d fled for their lives. They packed only what they could carry, marched into the wilderness with nothing much more than the inspiring vision of freedom to sustain them.
Now they hadn’t been gone long, hadn’t made much progress, before they realized that Pharaoh wasn’t going to take this lying down. The wiser heads among them must surely have known it was a possibility. Egypt had, after all, the world’s most powerful military force. Simply owning such an army is powerful incentive to use it, and when Pharaoh’s grief at the loss of his own son switched into anger, he called out that army and sent it, thoroughly equipped and ready, into the wilderness to bring back his slaves.
We can easily imagine, I think, how increasingly thin the vision of freedom, the promise of a land of their own, must have felt to the fleeing slaves. Egypt was coming with soldiers and with chariots, the tanks of the ancient world, so many of them that they literally shook the earth. The slaves traveled had only their own legs, and some of those legs belonged to children. They moved only at the pace of the slowest among them, and the army gained on them with relentless precision until at last before them they saw only the great Sea of Reeds, water stretching before them to every horizon.
How awful that night in camp must have been: the gentle lapping waves of the sea must have been little comfort. Were the Egyptians close enough even that night that the slaves could see the glow of their campfires? Could they hear the laughter of soldiers across the dark desert landscape? In any event their minds must have been in utter turmoil. They knew that Pharaoh hadn’t sent the army to bring back his slaves. They were of no positive value to Pharaoh now. Their presence had brought trouble to the Empire, and finally even death itself. The army had been sent not to bring them back but to annihilate them. We would forgive them if they wished that they’d never heard of Moses and this God he talked about. If they were wishing that they could just be slaves again, we would understand. How did the mothers comfort the children? A long night was surely ahead of them, and they dreaded the coming of the dawn. It was impossible for them to be any more vulnerable, any more exposed.
In the camp of Pharaoh, the mood was surely very different. Revenge was on the mind of every soldier. Around their campfires they must have laughed, secure in their unquestioned might. They must have delighted in the prospects of the morning: victory, plunder, glory. It was not going to be a fair fight.
And then, just when the hour was darkest, just when things seemed the most bleak, Moses stretched out his hand, and the wind stirred from the east and grew stronger and blew throughout the night, until at last there it was before their disbelieving eyes: a way out, a pathway, their deliverance. The waters stood, the author of Exodus tells us, as if a wall, leaving a pathway of dry land on which the trapped slaves could make their getaway. While the Egyptians slept and dreamt the dreams of Empire, their prize slipped unnoticed from their grasp, the final sign for all to see of the greatness and the grandeur of their God.
In the morning, the Empire awoke enraged. There they were, arrayed in all their soldierly glory, with no enemy to fight. There they were, their dreams of plunder still a pleasant memory that the new reality was turning to dust and ashes. And they did what enraged Empires do: they pushed ahead, pursuing according to the same strategy that they had set out with: to chase, to catch, to devour. And they missed the point. They missed that things were no longer as they had been, that the situation had been changed, had been transformed by God before they could finish their chosen task. They rushed into the changed situation and too late discovered that the hard packed sand of the desert highways was now a giant mud hole. The great fear-inspiring chariots were useless. Men and horses sank to their hips, the pursuing army bogged down in swamp with an ominous wall of water hovering oddly, weirdly, dangerously above them.
And then the waves crashed back down, and the reversal was complete. The vulnerable people who had trusted in the power of God stood on the dry land on the opposite side of the sea, and the mighty forces of Empire, the greatest military power on earth was utterly destroyed. “And the people of Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore.”
Now it is understandable if we wonder at how this could be so. For water does not stand up like walls in our experience. And we could spend hours pondering the powers of wind and attempting to discern how these events could transpire without violating every law of physics. Yes, we could do this if we want to.
But if we get caught up in the physics, we’ll miss the entire point of the story: that God fights for those who are most vulnerable. That at the darkest hour, the time when we are at our most vulnerable to the powers of Empire that would reduce human life to the status of mere commodity, or measures of productivity, it is then that God moves, and moves on behalf of the vulnerable. We are not slaves, not yet, anyway. We live in an Empire, whose morals are often in conflict with those we have learned from our God, and we are sometimes pursued by forces that would turn us into market shares and target demographics, and which would render us vulnerable to all sorts of trouble. And so we rightly hear this story not as a miracle of physics, but as a miracle of transformation. For when life is at its darkest, and we are at a loss as to what to do next, when we are feeling vulnerable and exposed to the predations of the Empire, our God moves and transforms matters entirely. The situation on the ground is altered, and we join our ancient sisters and brothers on the dry land, as the powers that would reduce human life to dollars are left dead on the seashore. All this because our God joins those who are feeling vulnerable and at risk. And when God is with us, nothing can be against us. Amen.