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.