Disturbing as those commercials might be, they do make a point. And the point is that to understand something in the present, we need to understand the past. A leads to B, and B depends upon A.
When we come to church and
hear the lessons, sometimes we tune out. They can seem boring because, taken out of
context, they have little value or meaning in today’s culture. I believe that the old stories still
have great value and meaning, but what is lacking is an understanding of the
first thing—the assumption, the bases of the stories.
The earliest stories in
Scripture are the ones about good and bad. The serpent disobeyed. Cain killed
his brother and then lied about it. God was irritable. And when God is irritable, your house explodes.
Another major story is about
Moses, a Hebrew, who led the Israelite people out of Egypt and across the Red
Sea in hopes of finding a promised land. If you are going to understand
the stories you hear in church on Sundays, you have got to understand the story
of Moses and the Exodus. Without it, nothing is going to make real sense.
Basically the story is this:
About 3000 years ago, a Hebrew nation had been growing in Egypt where they
worked alongside Egyptians. They were industrious, smart, hard-working, clever,
and happy. At the same time, they were becoming numerous. And this was upsetting to the
Egyptian leadership, who had been enjoying all the prosperity, innovation, and
forward thinking by the Hebrew people. And the leadership grew fearful
because the Hebrew people were outnumbering the Egyptian people. Rather than include them, the
Egyptians tried every way they knew to oppress them. They enslaved them, worked
them to death, and even murdered their babies.
So the Hebrew people in Egypt,
under the leadership of two brothers, Moses and his older brother Aaron, fought
hard to win freedom for the suppressed, enduring great hardships as they tried,
over and over again, to negotiate with Pharaoh and his ministers. When negotiations broke down,
Moses and Aaron led an exodus out of Egypt. And thus began a new era in
the ongoing story of the people of Israel.
The story of the Exodus is a
defining story. Whether or not it is true as an historical fact or not, it is
fundamental to everything that a Jewish person is, what he says, what she does,
how they think.
In a way, we are all
descendents of those early freedom seekers. And as their descendents, we are
defined by the Exodus story as well. Our constitution is based on
fundamental rights to life and liberty. We embrace freedom as the highest
ideal, and will die to protect and preserve it. The quest for freedom, equal
rights, and equal opportunity are fundamental and inalienable. That means they
cannot be taken away. By anybody!
The Rev. Martin Luther King,
Jr. was no stranger to the Exodus story. To understand him, to understand his
stirring speeches, to appreciate his leadership, we must see his words through
the lens of the Exodus.
All children, said Dr. King,
all men and women, regardless of skin color, …, all are God’s children. To
believe otherwise is silly and stupid, as silly, said Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
as classifying one’s worthiness by the size of his nose.
Freedom, the right to love and
marry the person you want to, the right to get a good education, earn enough
money to have a decent life, the right to live where you want to and go to
school there, to study, to learn, to grow—These are fundamental to our identity as citizens of the world.
The idea that you can be boxed
in by prejudice, hatred, deceptions—these are learned values. But we are born with certain
values. As King was to say, in a 1965 speech in Alabama, “the end we seek is a
society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.” And
we cannot do that when we are at unrest with our differences, when we know that
our cultural values are in conflict with our inward sense of truth.
When I visited the King
Memorial in Washington, DC over Christmas, I was struck by the images there.
The mountain of stone behind Dr. King’s massive form is split in two, with a
huge channel between the divided mountain. People were walking through this
rift, and all I could think of was the Exodus.
As one walks around the
monument, one gets a clear view of the Jefferson Memorial. That view reminds us
that we are all children of the ages, and that our past comes forward with us
through stories of courage and vision of people like Moses, and Jesus, and the
founding fathers of our nation, the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, and
the young people fighting for freedom and equal rights today in the Middle
East, Russia, Africa, Brazil, and everywhere that freedom is denied.
The third Monday of February is
a national holiday, a day when we are called to remember The Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. If I were writing to Dr. King today, I would say something like this:
Dear Dr. King,
Thank you for your dedication to the principles of freedom and liberty,
those same principles which brought the Hebrew people into the Promised Land,
and the same principles which gave birth to our nation. Your holiday gives us a
day to remember our history and ancestry, and your sacrifice teaches us never
to deny that we are marvelously made and that we are not free until everyone is
free.
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