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Sermon du Jour: Let My People Go
We had two stories from the Old Testament to choose from this morning. The first, and most fabulous, was about Moses leading the Israelites down the dry, if temporary, avenue God miraculously made for them through the waters of the Red Sea. The story holds so many marvelous images — the parting of the sea, the pillar of fire … when I was a kid, I imagined walking down a sort of hallway, with a muddy floor and the sky for a ceiling and walls of water on either side through which I could see the fish, twitching their fins and gaping in astonishment through the glassy water walls.
The other story is that of Joseph, of coat-of-many-colors fame, forgiving his brothers for selling him into slavery in Egypt. His brothers aren’t particularly forgivable — even as they grovel before him, they’re lying about the true extent of their perfidy … but Joseph does let it go.
As I said the last time I was in this pulpit, each of us is fated to move and breathe, work within, or press against, the boundaries set for us by time and place and luck. It is in and from our here-and-now that each of us is called into relationship with God. Upon consideration of our circumstances, we are to ask ourselves “Okay, here I am. What does love look like today?”
Today is our time and place, and I, at least, count myself lucky to be here.
What did love look like to the Israelites — the ones who appear as characters in our Biblical drama — Joseph, his brothers, Pharaoh, Moses — and the ones who first heard and told these stories long ago?
What did love look like to the Founding Fathers, those imperfect men wielding their imperfect pens to produce a document and a government the likes of which the world had never seen?
God meets us where we are (thank God!) which means that though all these imperfect persons participated in what we now recognize to be an egregious sin, the sin of slavery, yet God nonetheless was calling them exactly as God is calling us: to love.
How well did they do?
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain, unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s a great line, isn’t it?
It’s like that line in Genesis: And God created man in God’s own image, male and female created he them…”
It explains everything.
It’s so obvious, so smack-you-in-the-kisser clear: if all men and women are created in God’s own image, if all are created equal…if that is the foundational principle, the lithology of God’s creation and of our own American nation…
Umm … what about slavery?
To enquire as to why the United States had slavery is, in a real sense, to ask why Bible has slavery, why the God thereof — our God — tolerated and even appeared to encourage one human being made in his image to enslave another made in that same image.
As any atheist worth his or her salt can tell you, there is plenty of evidence in the Bible that God does not object to slavery and the slaveowners of the Antebellum south would cite the same verses.
At best, it can be said that for His own reasons, God chose to regulate slavery rather than to ban it outright.
Yes, he commanded that slaves be set free after a certain amount of time.
Yes, he forbade excessive cruelty to slaves.
And yes, he commanded that slaves be granted a certain level of access to the ceremonies of Judaism. [See Deuteronomy 23:15, Leviticus 25:14] Slaves, too, must have their Sabbath.
Christians can comfort ourselves with the idea that of course, Jesus never owned slaves … But Jesus never condemns slave owning, and it wasn’t as if he lacked opportunity. Slavery was a massive institution in the Hellenistic world: as many as half of all the people in Roman-occupied Palestine could have been slaves of one kind or another. So, slavery was at least as common as the sins — adultery, say—that Jesus did exert himself to remark upon.
Apologists might say oh, but slavery was different then than it would later be in the Americas. This is doubtless true, but — again — it’s always true: slavery is a highly variable human arrangement. There are variations and degrees, stages and forms that can found in Biblical accounts and in the history of slavery in America, the Caribbean, Brazil or, for that matter, the world.
One sort of slave to be found in the Bible was the indentured servant, his labor owned by a master for a set period of time (see Exodus 21:2). Generally, this was the means by which a man could obtain a loan by using as collateral the only asset he possessed, namely his own labor. An indentured servant could be set free before the time agreed to was up — the Hebrew God specified that seven years was the maximum allowable, and if a Jubilee Year happened to come first … freedom came sooner. And/or the servant/slave could also purchase his own freedom early.
Then there was the arrangement wherein one man would sell his son or daughter into servitude … as far as the daughter went, this generally included the understanding that the young woman could end up married to her new master or one of his sons. (Exodus 21:7-11).
And if it comes to that, given that women were considered to be more or less the property of their husbands, one could argue that for all practical purposes just about any man’s wife could have been described as a slave, if — one hopes, anyway — a well-treated one. As John Lennon and Yoko Ono would so charmingly explain, millennia hence, “woman is the [n-word] of the world.”
In Leviticus, we are informed that while one Hebrew must not own another outright, God was okay with purchasing foreigners to be true chattel, property to be used and abused as the Israelite owner saw fit.
And of course, after a battle, women and kids were simply taken as spoils of war, sometimes to be wives or as forced labor or … whatever.
All of these varieties of slavery, as described in the Bible, existed throughout the ancient world and well into the modern one but, more to the point, they are recognizable in all the ways human beings were owned, employed, freed or held in bondage in the American colonies and, later, in the new United States.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — like Jesus, like Moses and Pharoah — were born into a world and a society in which slavery was a given. If you think about it that way — that there has always been slavery, in virtually every culture and at every point in history up until the recent past — the strange thing is not that the United States had slavery. Of course it did. The strange thing — the really miraculous thing — is that we ever stopped having slavery.
Visible throughout the Bible—in the rules God imposes about the proper care and handling of slaves, but also and especially in the story of Moses and the Exodus, it is made abundantly clear that human beings made in the image of God do not want to be slaves. We want to be free. That, too, is evident throughout the world and throughout human history.
Though human beings are empathetic animals, you wouldn’t have to have much in the way of moral imagination to realize this: slaves of whatever variety have always cried out, one way or another, “let my people go.”
So, we know that other human beings, like us, also want to be free, and that keeping our brothers and sisters in bondage is sinful. It is a violation of the nature of humankind, and so any story that begins in slavery will end, eventually, in locusts, plagues, the deaths of firstborn sons and whole armies drowned, violence and devastation.
“Slavery is an abomination and must be loudly proclaimed as such,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “but I own that neither I nor any other man has any immediate solution to the problem.”
“The problem” was complicated — genuinely complicated.
When the British eventually abolished slavery — their formerly-African slaves weren’t dwelling among them in England, recall, but in the British Virgin Islands — they tried to do it gradually and rationally … with some success, I guess. Of course, the owners of sugar plantations eventually found other ways to take advantage of former slaves. The slaves were free, but they were also homeless, unprotected … and thus extremely vulnerable. As we will hear next week, being a former slave wandering in the wilderness is no picnic (well, until God provides a picnic).
My husband Siem and I were trying to think of something analogous to the problem faced by Pharaoh and by the Founding Fathers: how do you abolish something that is built into the fabric of a culture, upon which, one way or another, the livelihoods and well-being of just about everyone depends?
This is the closest we could get: My sister and brother-in-law are both professional environmentalists. They make their living attempting to persuade people that anthropogenic global climate change is happening and it will irreparably alter — for the worse — human life on earth within the next few decades unless we radically reduce our collective carbon footprint.
So we all have to give up our cars.
Now. Today.
Not gonna happen, is it?
“Oh, but my car gets good gas mileage! 35 mph!”
Right: and George Washington treated his slaves pretty well: Is it enough to tinker around the edges when confronting a great moral evil? Even when — as my sister would say — the plagues are already visiting us, the waters of the Nile are already turning to blood?
My sister and brother-in-law continue to drive. Heck, they just purchased a house in Maine so they’ll be driving even more, back and forth from DC, not to mention flying around the world to their various environmental conferences. My brother in law is planning to buy a truck.
Five years ago, the prophet Al Gore predicted that the North Pole’s ice cap would be gone by now, and sea levels were going to rise 20 feet. Gore just bought another California mansion … on the beach.
How can we make the sea flee, the rivers flow backward, the mountains leap like goats and the hills like lambs?
How can we stop being what we are? This is the world we were given, and we don’t know how to live in any other.
For his part, when it came to the baleful inheritance of slavery, Thomas Jefferson was angry. In an original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson included in his indictment of King George this charge, made with a passion that leaps from the page:
“He [King George] — has waged cruel war against nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur a miserable death on their transportation thither. This practical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the work of Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”
The passage did not make the final cut. For the sake of uniting the fledgling country, compromises were made, and keeping slavery going was one of them. Thomas Jefferson was unable to solve the problem.
In spite of leading an army in which many black American soldiers, both free men and slaves, fought bravely for liberty — at one point, as many as one in six soldiers in the integrated Continental Army was black — George Washington couldn’t solve the problem either.
Just over half a century later, Robert E. Lee wrote “In this enlightened age there are few, I believe, but will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.” But he couldn’t fix it, and in the end Lee found himself unhappily fighting for the slavery side.
The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen—the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea…
Eight hundred thousand dead Americans later, Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy had been defeated and slavery had finally come to an end.
The Bible doesn’t tell us, but we can probably imagine that Pharaoh’s punishment for the sin of slavery did not end with the departure of the Israelites, nor even with the wholesale destruction of his army, with its attendant suffering, the wailing of widows, the cries of the orphaned.
Like the British who ended slavery in their colonies, like the Americans after a war that claimed more American lives than all our other conflicts combined, Pharaoh had to somehow come up with something wholly new; an economy not based on the forced labor of slaves.
We aren’t told how he managed this. Not well, would be my guess, and not quickly.
If we can still, in various ways, see the negative effects upon this country both of the existence of slavery and its means of abolition … is it reassuring to consider that this is always the way. How on earth could it be otherwise?
Again, we might consider that, given the ubiquity, the omnipresence of slavery in its various forms throughout human history, the astonishing thing, the true miracle is not that slavery existed but that it ever ceased to exist, and that it was the whole and holy truth contained in those two phrases — and God created man in his own image … all men, created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…” that both encouraged the enslaved and in the long (long!) run brought slavery to its end.
Like the brothers of Joseph with their faltering and insincere apologies, in the name of the God that was theirs and remains ours, the American past throws itself at the feet of the American present. The men and women of history are at our mercy. Shall we judge our forebears according to a standard that we could not, ourselves, be able to meet? Shall we cling angrily to our grievance against them or shall we, as a people, let it go?
Here and now. What does love look like today?
Amen.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Well said. One cannot extract the pre-Civil War Americans’ restlessness about slavery from its religious context and see it fully.
When Netanyahu spoke to Congress a few years ago, he pointed to the relief marble portrait of Moses that adorns the House chamber. For good reason–the story of Moses is part of what made us who we are.
I read somewhere a while ago that in a strange kind of perversity, today’s environmentalists haven’t actually spent a lot of time outside in the company of the wild animals they are worried about. “Look at that cute little wolf. Won’t he be a nice pet in our Manhattan apartment?”
I think the same is true of people living in our newly secular society. It is hard for them to imagine what life was like when religion surrounded us all the time, in almost all of our individual environments.
And you bring up a significant contradiction in the Bible–a contradiction that bled through into our own founding documents, which were inspired by the Bible. Yes, God seems to be okay with slavery, yet the number one most dramatic story in the entire Bible is about the plagues God visited upon the pharaoh and the parting of the Red Sea and the command to “Let my people go.” How are we to interpret that? That God wants only Jews to not be slaves? Of course not. God condemned slavery. Period.
The Congregationalist in me, who does not read the Bible as literally as some people do, suspects a lot of the writing in the Bible that seems to say that Christ approved of slavery may be a human misinterpretation of language.
Or it may be that Christ had to deal with what was in front of him and slavery was a fact of ancient life. He did not exclude those who were in slavery from his sight. That’s important because in the Indian caste system, the lower castes historically were not ever acknowledged by the higher castes. Their very existence was ignored. If you are invisible, you really don’t exist. Christ did not do that, and that may explain the many references to slaves in the Bible. I don’t know how else he could have fixed this in the Darwinian world that existed in ancient times–a slightly better weapon, a meaner or more aggressive temperament might result in a strong person’s enslaving a weaker person. My point is that Christ did not attempt to fix everything that was un-Christian. This was one of the things he didn’t fix except very broadly to explain who exactly our neighbors were and how we should treat them. And those neighbors included the slaves.
Anyway, you’ve sent my mind wandering. Thank you for a sharing this wonderful sermon with us. I think it is a work of art. Very well done.
Yes—nicely put, Marci! Thank you!
As ever, Kate, a call to contemplation – and action…Mindful of the fact that humans are contradictory creatures, can we acknowledge that institutional paternalism and “the soft bigotry of low expectations” are still at work; without respect to one’s pigmentation? Peace to you and yours, dear colleague and friend!
Amen.
Loved your conclusion Kate. This sermon should be given to Congress.
Brilliant!
Autres temps, autres moeurs.
Reminds me of a story by a native of the Detroit area. Rosa Parks house was burglarized. Yes the Rosa Parks. The burglar asked is she was Rosa Parks and she said yes and then he beat her up. The Detroit fellow observed that Rosa Parks stood against the evil of her time but now there was a new evil that was destroying his city. The storyteller was Jay Nordlinger.
Kate,
When you talk about government the question of legitimacy is always asked. Moses sees the Egyptian beating the Jew. He kills the Egyptian and buries him in the sand. Then he comes across two Jews fighting. He breaks them apart. One turns to Moses and says, “Who are you that you rule over us? Will you kill us like the Egyptian?” Now Moses runs to Midian because his misdeed is known. There he meets Zipporah and Yitro. Tending their flocks he chases after the single stray sheep. Only then he encounters Gd at the burning bush.
Now Moses is ready to go back to Egypt and demand of Pharoh face to face, “Let my people go.” You must face the question “Who are you that you rule over us?” before any government can behave in a truly just manner. I think Gd will always be part of that self-analysis.
Regards,
Jim
Kate, pardon me for not commenting on the content of your wonderful essay right now, but I did want to say that you are one heck of a writer. Kent
I don’t think it’s right to say that God is exactly “okay with” slavery. Of course it depends on what we mean by “okay”, but he tolerates certain things that are on some level genuinely unjust, because we are fallen. It wasn’t as bad to be racist a few millennia ago as it is now, but it was still bad. Likewise treating women and offspring as property. Less damning than now, but still not good.
We do really have to try to judge history, because how else to learn from it? But, we should judge our forebears as modestly as possible, with fear and trembling for our own sins.
Rachel,
I must speak to the issue of women. Monogamy becomes enshrined as the moral marriage about 1,000 years ago for both Judaism and Christianity. Both religions have many protections built in for the women. The greatest of all is that she is now a wife! One woman for one man for a lifetime. This is a commitment that is not seen in other cultures. This exemplifies a respect for the individual that transcends sex. The enlightenment now can proceed from a society that has done some justice for women (not complete but some). Soon the injustices still present within the enlightenment society can’t be suppressed and women attain suffrage and rights in every way. No other society accomplished this. Most other societies are still without rights for women. Only multi-cultural extreme relativist idiocy prevents us from seeing this.
There are literally billions of women around the world that would be vastly better off with a Katubah (Jewish Marriage Contract) that has not changed in 900 years. Christian marriage is no different. We learned to crawl before we could walk and afford complete rights to women but other societies never even were able to crawl.
Regards,
Jim
What if, like Pharaoh, one sees oneself as G-d? Wondering…
Nanda,
I’ve always said that the most important thing to know is that Gd is Gd and you’re not.
Regards,
Jim
With you there and back, Jim! :-) Pharaoh’s self-analysis was perhaps closer to self-congratulation, then, I’d surmise…
G-d gave the Law to Moses.
The Law of Moses describes slavery. Under the Law of Moses, dignity and certain rights are owed to slaves. G-d said, when you have slaves, this is how you are to do slavery.
Slavery was tied to circumstances, not to race. A slave became a slave either to settle a debt (or bankruptcy), or as a criminal sentence. For example, the Law of Moses prescribes the maximum sentence for grand theft as seven years in slavery. That sounds better than my state, which prescribes ten years in the state penitentiary. Nomadic herders could not build prisons in the wilderness, so slavery was a suitable way to deal with crime. It was more humane than the laws of Egypt or of Babylon.
By the time of Jesus, Roman law applied. But Jews were still expected, by Jews, to treat their slaves according to the Law of Moses. Jesus did not address slavery, I think, because the Law of Moses is adequate for providing slavery as a humane way to deal with difficult circumstances.
Christians are sinners. We believe in the Doctrine of Original Sin, which says that, though G-d made mankind to be perfect and holy, our “first parents” chose disobedience, and thereby allowed sin in to corrupt the world. As sinners, we strive towards the goal of G-d-pleasing lives, but we fall short. We do not expect perfection of each other. In fact, we expect that others, like us, will fail.
The Christian west had converted slavery into serfdom, in which people were not slaves to other people, but were slaves to the land. That was also unsatisfactory, and was in great decline. By the time of Henry VIII both slavery and serfdom were practically unknown in England. But about that time, the English were fully embraced in the “Age of Exploration,” and they encountered something new.
The new thing was that French and Spanish colonies were being worked by black African slaves that had been purchased from Muslim slavers on the coast of West Africa. A new thing was soon taken up as the way to make colonial plantations become profitable.
Christians rationalized. They adopted slaving practices from the people from whom they had bought the slaves. They adopted chattel slavery. They used Bible verses to rationalize their slaveholding, but they did not even try to practice slavery according to the Law of Moses. There was a perverse and dark difference between chattel slavery and Biblical slavery.
It took many generations to recognize and build a popular consensus that slavery had to be ended. The process of building a political solution was cut short in America by war.
G-d gave a Law that requires women and slaves to be treated with dignity, and accords to them certain rights, and enjoins men and slave owners to treat women and slaves and all people in righteousness. However much we may think we can improve on the Law of Moses, as near as I can tell, we have not become more humane nor more righteous.
This.
Your comments are always so erudite, MJB! And, in general, you’re reinforcing the point I was trying to make in my sermon, namely that God is working with what is. And that in Bible times, slavery not only was a given but was, in some ways, inevitable. What else did people have to exchange for the means of existence but themselves?
But…How about this bit from Leviticus?
However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)
I love this.
And, again, it was a time-and-place question: how do I love my neighbor (wife/husband) here and now? Not in some unimaginable future, but in Palestine circa 400 BCE or 30 CE or in Virginia circa 1640…
If we are not enslaving people today, that’s not a sign of our innate moral goodness, but rather that we have the unbelievable good fortune of being able to keep adding our bricks to an essentially sound structure already underway. God help us if we ever have to start again from scratch.
Not only should we—as @rachellu puts it so beautifully— judge our forebears as modestly as possible, we should at the same moment be deeply grateful to them for struggling to be as virtuous as they were, knowing humbly that we might not have been nearly as good.
I try to make a similar point when discussing domestic violence. Yes, violence against your wife (and kids) was acceptable in our culture as in pretty much all cultures. Yes, this is wrong. But if you wander through an old graveyard in New England, you won’t find a gravestone that says “HERE LIES SO-AND-SO: HECKUVAH GUY, EXCELLENT AT BEATING THE SNOT OUT OF THE MISSUS.” Wife-beating may have been tolerated, but it was never admired. Within the boundaries set by —again—time and place, Jewish and Christian cultures have valued kindness, probity, courage, patience, mercy, wisdom…
I see the story of Moses and the pharaoh and the slaves as such a strong statement against slavery that it overshadows anything else in the Bible that refers to slavery.
I agree, MarciN.
And, not at all coincidentally, the American founding documents work the same way.
Kate & Marci,
There are so many requirements for the proper treatment of slaves in Jewish Law that the Talmud has a saying, “He who has a slave also has a master.” This still isn’t ultimately what you’d like to hear but maybe it will help.
Regards,
Jim
G-d understands that we are corrupted by sin; this is why the Law of Moses makes provisions for both civil and criminal trials. The Law of Moses was intended for sinners like us, only in early iron age conditions.
Consider the alternatives. Do you kill prisoners of war or sell them into slavery?
Do you chop off the man’s hand or make him serve a term in slavery?
Slavery seems, considering the surrounding cultures who all practiced slavery, to be the most expeditious way to deal with some circumstances in a simple way that allowed for the preservation of a sense of humanity.
I like that—thank you. That is helpful.
For some reason (probably NOT PC!) it reminds me of C.S.Lewis describing being married (for a man): “The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church – read on – and give his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is – in her own mere nature – least lovable. For the Church has not beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.”
Or, in short: there is no power without responsibility and vice versa.
But I’ll bet that even the Talmud was really talking about Israelite slaves, not the foreign kind? Or not?
One of the most useful interpretive tools I ever got from a class on the Bible was pretty simple: assume that all rules and divine pre/proscriptions are intended to be limitations or modifications of existing behavior rather than permission for new behavior.
Thus, “an eye for an eye” (which “leaves the whole world blind”) is actually a modification of that norm that declares “take my eye, and I will cut off your head and murder your whole family.”
YES—see “Saving Private Ryan” for example.
That is… prisoners of war are a problem. Power… responsibility….
Good point.