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Hebrew Scripture Reading-Exodus 2: 1-10
For those of you who are new to our church, we share our building space with a Jewish congregation called Kol Ami which means “voice of my people.” A few months ago I heard their Rabbi Elizabeth Dunsker speak at a community event on Martin Luther King, Jr., day. She was talking about the kind of work that King did, and she told a story that evokes the imagery of our scripture for today. The story essentially goes as follows…Once upon a time, there was a village along the banks of a river. One day a villager was at the river when he noticed what appeared to be a baby floating in the water. Quickly, he jumped into the river to swim to the infant child and bring it safely back to shore.
The next day he came back, and this time he saw two babies floating down the river. Quickly, he called for help, and soon the babies were saved. The next day four babies were floating down the river. This time he called for more villagers to come and help. The next day there were eight babies. The next day: sixteen. Every day there were more and more. Soon the village had teams of trained swimmers as well as lines of people standing by the shore passing the babies to safety. Watchtowers were built to look for the floating babies coming down the river, but soon the babies became too numerous to save them all. Day after day they worked to save as many as they could. For all of their great work, they were blessed by the village priest. Eventually, however, a woman in the crowd raised the question, “”But where are all these babies coming from?” She then said, “We need to organize a team of people to head upstream and find out who’s throwing all of these babies into the river in the first place!”
This story serves as a useful parable for how we often address problems today. For example, it is great that we have people braving the waters to address problems like homelessness. We need people setting up shelters and running soup kitchens. That is work that deserves to be blessed, but at some point, we have to organize a team of people who will go upriver and address the causes of homelessness. This is work that deserves to be blessed also, and this is the kind of work that we will be seeking to do in “The Moses Project.” Our church has shown that we are great at the praiseworthy tasks of making meals at the Share House, collecting soup cans, raising charitable money month after month, donating vegetables from our garden, staffing the WHO shelter, and so on. Our church has truly done a lot, and that is to be celebrated unconditionally. At the same time, I am also of the belief that our church has the capacity and the gumption to head upriver.
To address the problems upriver, it is going to take something different than social service or education. It is going to take a special effort to organize ourselves in a thoughtful and reflective way for the task of taking social action. Two months ago our Council voted to call for a year-long project that will culminate in such an action. Since then I have been working with our Mission and Outreach Ministry to develop what I think is a well-laid out plan. This will be spelled out in detail later, but for now let me give you a preview. After church on the first Sunday of May, each of you will receive a packet of information that not only explains the project, but also provides information about a select group of five social action organizations. We don’t want to be lone rangers out their trying to figure out how to reinvent the wheel. We want to be teamed up with a partner who has experience and can prepare us for action, so we have developed a list of five carefully vetted organizations who we are confident would make great potential partners for our congregation. We had a set of criteria for selecting these organizations. For instance, they had to have an annual action event that they planned in advance. We also wanted organizations that represented causes around which our church could be unified. Later this year, a big action event might be planned by the Tea Party, but we thought that might not unify our congregation. We were looking for a common denominator organization that could help inspire all of us.
Once you get your information packet in the beginning of May, we invite you to read it and then come to a house party where we will do some community building and where everyone will have an opportunity to talk with others about what you yourself have a passion far, about whatever issue of justice you believe God is calling you to. We are calling these house parties “Burning Bush Parties” because it was the moment of the burning bush when Moses was first called by God to lead his people out of Egypt. To entice and lure you to these parties, I have even created a special treat that I am unveiling for the first time today: burning bush marshmallow cookies. Trust me they are good. They are the same recipe my family uses every year to make green Christmas wreaths. The only difference is the food coloring. The main ingredients are corn flakes, marshmallows, and butter. On top, three red hots have also been sprinkled on. I challenge any cook out there to come up with a burning bush desert as good as this.
The idea at the burning bush parties is that by sharing our own sense of calling as individuals we will be better able to discern our calling as a congregation, because at the end of three special worship services in May, we will be asking you to vote for the partner organization you think our congregation should select. On that same day, we will also be inviting you to find a way in which you can participate in the project yourself. In the months leading up to the day of action, we will have teams of members who organize things like an art contest, a dramatic performance during worship, a movie night, a book group, etc. We are inviting you to be on a team that will help prepare us for our action by doing something fun and enriching.
Our action will then take place in the first few months of 2011. After the action, we will have a giant party to celebrate our successes. Additionally, we will provide a means to intentionally reflect in theological and practical terms about the experience you had participating in the project. We expect this to be a significant opportunity for spiritual growth.
I just threw a lot of information at you. I don’t expect you to be able to process it all at once, but I wanted to give you a general sense of the direction in which we are headed. You will get everything in print later. The main thing I want you to take away from this morning is why we are doing this. You have heard me talk already about the need to go upriver to address the source of the problem. But I think there is something deeper happening here that speaks to the way in which God operates in our lives.
In our scripture, Moses is saved by an unlikely source. Pharaoh’s daughter was, as one scholar put it, “a pampered and privileged young woman, the daughter of a king who was regarded as a god, a highborn woman who was surrounded, day and night, by a small army of courtiers who attended to her every need and her every whim.” If anyone was to be brainwashed by her father, you would think it might be her. She had everything to gain from maintaining the status quo and not giving the slightest bit of decency to that baby floating down the river. After all, in extreme circumstances of oppression, that’s what oppressors do. They deny the humanity of the oppressed, even their children, who become seen as cockroaches to be crushed. Indeed, the text tells us that the children were precisely the ones targeted by the Pharaoh. Baby boys were the ones to be thrown into the river and killed in a genocidal fashion because the Pharaoh was afraid of the high birth rates of the Israelites and their threat to the future security of the Egyptians. Some scholars also speculate that he had heard it prophesied that one of them would overthrow him. Whatever the case, we cannot assume that his daughter would have been predisposed to rescuing the baby.
Still, our Bible tells us that the young princess looked at the baby and felt compassion. Here we can see the God of love at work, but something else must have also been at play because compassion would not have been enough for what she did. Compassion by itself would have led her to pick up the baby, but she does more than that. She adopts the baby leading one commentator to say that she had a “high ambition” for the child’s life. At first, “ambition” struck me as an odd word to use. Perhaps, I normally associate ambition with some young entrepreneur seeking to make millions, but then it occurred to me that ambition is an ethically neutral term. One can be ambitiously greedy, but one can also be ambitiously compassionate.
This upcoming year let’s be ambitiously compassionate. Let’s dare to raise the question of what’s happening upstream. Let’s dare to organize an expedition to the source of the problem. Let’s dare to envision what we can accomplish as a church. Let’s dare to have a heart bold enough to dream of saving all those children floating down the river because in the end we know each one is precious in the eyes of God, each one deserves to be drawn up from the water, each one deserves to feel the compassion of God made real through human hands. Amen.
