Speaker 1: Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: Last week, we covered Exodus three and four, looking primarily at the theophany where the divine appears in a bush that does not burn up on the edge of a wilderness. Reading the stories with ancient sensibilities alerts us to notice that the tree on fire is an ancient way to talk about the appearance of a deity. And Moses being this pretty curious guy, would seem, moves toward the strange sight. And it's when he moves toward the unknown that God addresses him. And in the longest conversation in the Torah, yeah, you can put that in your bible trivia bucket.
In the longest conversation in the Torah, this divine voice and Moses go back and forth, back and forth about who God is and what God is up to. God is I am who I am, never ending being. God hears the cry of the Israelites in slavery and is ready to act. God chooses a spokesperson in Moses, and that spokesperson will need other spokespersons like Zipporah, his wife, Aaron, his brother, and Miriam, his sister in the chapters to come. Exodus is the story of liberation, and it tackles two of the most fundamental questions of what it means to be human.
Who are we? And is anyone looking out for us down here? You're in luck today. We're talking blood, frogs, gnats, sick cows, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and death. It's plague Sunday.
Put that on your liturgical calendar and smoke it. Before we tackle the plagues, let us pray. Today, we face a great confrontation in the text between Yahweh and Pharaoh. And the tensions can call attention to our confrontations or to calamities in our lives and absolutely in the world. And so as we settle into some stillness here and notice our body's belonging in this place, We bring our attention to our hearts.
In Jewish tradition, the heart is the center of our being. And so we ask, loving God, that you remind us of your presence at the center of all that we are, the center of our stories, our relationships, our meaning making, our faith. May we have some fun today, and may we sense spirit drawing us toward wholeness where everything broken is confronted with the truth of what could one day be restored. We thank you for liberation, and we thank you for love. Amen.
So today, we'll touch down in Exodus chapter seven to 12. We'll talk about plagues one to nine, the death blow, snatched from danger, and rituals. We begin with plagues one to nine. Here's the setup. The Lord says to Moses that Moses will be like God to Pharaoh, which is subversive stuff because Pharaoh is revered as a god over the land where the Hebrew people are slaves.
Then the two brothers, Aaron and Moses, head over to Pharaoh's palace where there's a face off of magicians. And each side throws down a staff, and each staff becomes a snake. But Aaron's snake devours the Egyptians' snakes. Great beginning. Right?
The next day, Aaron and Moses meet Pharaoh and the plagues start to rain down. Take note, the Hebrew word for plagues here is nagaf, and it means to smite, to strike, to slay. Exodus seven beginning in verse 14. Then the Lord said to Moses, Pharaoh's heart is unyielding. He refuses to let the people go.
Go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes out to the river. Confront him on the bank of the Nile and take in your hand the staff that was changed into a snake. Then he said to them, the Lord, the God of the Hebrews has sent me to say to you, let my people go so that they may worship me in the wilderness. But until now, you have not listened. So Aaron follows Moses who follows Yahweh's instructions.
Aaron raises his staff in the presence of Pharaoh, strikes the Nile, and the water turns to blood. Verse 21. The fish in the Nile died, and the river smelled so bad that the Egyptians could not drink its water. Blood was everywhere in Egypt. But Pharaoh's heart is hard, and he turns and walks back into his palace.
This is chaos for the people of Egypt who are left to dig along the side of the Nile to find safe drinking water, and the horror show is just beginning. The nine plagues have literary artistry to them. Maybe you could say there's a bit of beauty in horror. The plagues map onto three cycles, three in each cycle. And each cycle begins with Moses warning Pharaoh down by the Nile.
That's the first, fourth, and seventh plagues. For the second plague in each of the cycles, Moses and Aaron confront pharaoh in his palace. That's the second, fifth, and eighth plagues. For the third plague in each of the cycle, there's no warning. They just happen.
That's the sixth the third sorry, the sixth and the ninth plagues. By now, you're thinking, enough counting. Bobby, speak to us, the horror. Can you tell I had some fun this week? Happily.
So plague one, the Nile turns to blood. Plague two, that same river teems with frogs. Frogs take over the palace. The palace of all the places where people sleep. They're in the ovens.
They're in the kneading troughs. Plague three, Aaron strikes the dust on the ground, and the dust becomes gnats. The gnats cover people and animals both. And after the first cycle, we're told Israelite bodies and homes and animals will be spared. Next cycle, plague four, dense swarms of flies pour into the palace and into the homes and ruin the land.
Plague five, the plague of livestock kills the horses, donkeys, camels, sheep, goats, and cattle, but not a single of the animals of the Israelites was harmed. Plague six boils. Let's skip the details because it's disgusting. Final plague, final cycle of the plagues. Plague seven.
Hail beats down from everywhere and gets everything in its path. Person, animal, every leaf on every tree. Plague eight, locusts that cover the face of the ground, devour what little is left after the hail. Plague nine is darkness, the kind of darkness that can be felt. And still, Pharaoh is unmoved.
Exodus ten twenty seven. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he was not willing to let them go. Now attempts have been made to map the plagues onto natural or biological phenomena or to see each plague as this showdown with Egyptian gods like Hapi, the god of the Nile, or Hecate, the goddess of fertility. And both can be interesting endeavors, but there are two literary devices that speak even more to meaning. The first is that of amplification.
The plagues go from very bad to even worse. The point is intensity, more and more chaos across the progression, the kind of horror that hardly lets up. There are breaks in the intensity though. Pharaoh's sorcerers can match plague for plague the first two times around, but Pharaoh's team can never put a stop to the blows. Only Yahweh brings relief before the gavel of judgment drops again.
Now the second literary pattern, my favorite, is the cosmological significance to the order. Listen closely. What begins in the water, blood, frogs, moves onto the earth, gnats, flies, onto all living things, dead cows, blistery boils, and then lifts up to the heavens, hail and locusts, eventually making its way to the sun itself, darkness. It is a pattern, and it's the reverse of the days of creation. It's the unraveling of the Genesis order.
This is decreation. Confronting the plagues can make you ask, why? Why so violent? Why so cruel? But I suspect you don't have to look very far for decreation yourself, An abusive pattern that marks families for generations.
A careless mistake that shatters someone else's future. Heartbreak, betrayal, an accident. We know decreation. We know it in our bodies, in our relationships, and our politics. Things fall apart.
But where does the chaos come from? Let's talk about Pharaoh's hard heart, shall we? Did God harden it? Is Pharaoh responsible for his own hard heart? Are we talking divine power or human stubbornness?
Well, I'm of the mind that when asked to choose one or the other in the bible, the answer just might be a little bit of both. And there's an intriguing argument made by the scholar Leon Cass, and he examines the various Hebrew verbs that describe what happens to Pharaoh's heart. Chazak is to be made strong or to encourage. Strange. Right?
And it's used 12 times. And is to be heavy and weighty, and it's used six times. Is to be dense or to toughen, and it's used once. Different words speak to different traditions that are woven together to create exodus as we know it, but the words can also add up to something. The bottom line, Cass argues, is that for this to be a true challenge, like a great story between the God of Israel, who is on the side of the slaves, and the king of Egypt, who is seen as a god himself, well, this would mean that God makes sure Pharaoh does not cave.
In Cass's words, whatever or whoever is responsible for providing encouragement, the result is the same. Pharaoh is enabled to remain fully pharaoh, resolutely himself to the very end. He is written or remembered as this perfect anti hero. So pharaoh's heart is a part of his comeuppance? This is what it looks like when abuse and terror and depression falls in on itself.
But how much of the story really happened? That's the question of historicity, historical authenticity, and much has changed in scholarship over the centuries from believing the timelines and place names as they're laid out to scrapping all of it and promoting the story as 100% imagination. As I already said, I like a middle ground. Exodus belongs to Israel's origin tradition. It's a mix of fictional imagination and historical memory.
Something happened and shaped an artistic telling of events that defined an identity for millennia. The archaeologist and biblical scholar, Carol Meyers, pulls together the data to assert that, okay, no. There's no evidence in the archaeological record that a group this big confronted an empire this strong and then walked through the desert to freedom. However, there did come a time when a smaller group of people grew so tired of the injustices of the larger Canaanite communities and the ubiquitous influence of this empire Egypt that they fled to the hill country where they established more egalitarian settlements. And how does Torah's Exodus fit in?
It's a work of collective cultural memory. As Carol Meyers states, it teaches. It does not record. It teaches about the struggle for freedom and leadership that could care about you and new horizons and hope it teaches about divine encounter and ethical decisions about God being on the side of the oppressed. Try not to get too caught up in the question, but did this really happen?
I'm not saying you shouldn't question the text when it seems like justice roars a little too loudly or a story takes things what feels like a little too far. I'm just saying, try to imagine what it would feel like to have a story at the core of your identity that says God chooses you even when the powers at play in the world say you're not worth the choice. So next, we come to the final death blow. I just keep doing the voice. I'm just gonna keep doing it.
And after chapters of details about plagues, the last strike is surprisingly sparse. At midnight, the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt. From the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well. Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was loud wailing in Egypt. For there was not a house without someone dead.
Oof. Time's up for Pharaoh. This tenth plague strikes him down. During the night, Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron and says, get up, get out of here, go worship Yahweh as you have requested, take your flocks and herds and go, and by the way, bless me. This last plague has finally, at least momentarily humbled Pharaoh.
And then all the Egyptians urge the Israelites to leave. They say, if you don't get out of here, we'll all die. Enough is enough. So the people took their dough before the yeast was added and carried it on their shoulders in kneading troughs wrapped in clothing. The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and clothing.
God's people plunder their slave owners. Huzzah. This is the turn out of slavery. It's the time to put distance between what hurts and what heals, the chance to be something different. Important to God's identity is to see Yahweh as a deliverer.
But what does that look like? In Exodus, it's deliverance that starts at the bottom, showing up where the crushed ones are, hearing the groans of those with the boot of a system on their neck bending low to be near the forgotten. If you stand in the way of healing and wholeness for any of God's creatures, for any of God's creation. God will come for the harm that you cause. I happen to also believe that divine compassion will reach past harm to offer you healing.
Yeah. Even you, Pharaoh, can be blessed. But until then, at least we know that God starts by bending low. One of the key Hebrew verbs that carries Yahweh's action in Exodus is natsal, and it means snatched from danger. On one hand, I can see how much we need this picture of God who acts.
Maybe you can trace God's swift action in your life where God snatched you up and saved you. But more often, I hear people ask, why didn't God do something? Why didn't God snatch me out of this trouble or snatched my loved one out of theirs? All great questions. I was on a walk this week obsessing over exodus.
That's one of the eccentric parts about being a preacher. You just walk around thinking about stories that no one else is thinking about. I like it though, these weird weekly obsessions. So as I walked a loop I've been doing all spring from my house in Garrison Woods up over Crowchild into Curry Barracks and then back through Altador, a woman crossed the road to greet me. And I thought, oh, she must know who I am.
Maybe she's seen me preach or crush a wedding or watched me on YouTube because I'm on YouTube, mom. And when the woman and her big black dog got about five paces from me, she blurted out, you walk a lot. And I was like, yeah, I do a bit of a lube, and she cut me off. And she said, oh, wait. I realized that you aren't who I thought you were.
And I know. She went on. I see another woman, and she doesn't have your cute bob. And she walks this street, like, hundreds of times a week. And I wanna ask her if she's okay.
I wanna ask her if her home is safe. So I took off my sunglasses so that we could make eye contact, and as we resolved the mix up, I said, I really hope that you find her, and I really hope that she's okay. This woman was ready to snatch another woman out of danger, and then I got it. That's the divine Leaving the house with her friendly dog, noticing the people around her, looking out for someone who might not be safe. I have no doubt that this woman was ready to act, to say, come with me, let's get you help, I will not leave you.
We are never the exception to pain or to consequences and crudely distributed power in the world. But God is showing up for you much closer to the disaster than you think. Maybe walking a dog out looking for you. What should be the dramatic departure from Egypt is written in a section scholars call, wait for it, the ritual handbook. You'd think that the moment they leave Egypt would be highlighted with at least its own chapter, but it isn't.
The freedom walk out of Egypt is one of sparse details woven into rules about rituals. Chapter 12 begins with the time of year for repeating the annual celebration. Then it talks about the food for the feast and when to slaughter the lamb, and it talks about how to smear blood on the door frames, and bitter herbs and herb and bread without yeast eaten for seven days straight. And then it finally happens at the end of chapter 12. The Lord strikes down the firstborn, and during the night, the Israelites flee.
Then chapter 12 ends with more Passover restrictions about who can eat and who cannot. Chapter 13 talks about the consecration of the firstborn and more unleavened bread and rehearsing the story when you speak about it to your kids. And tucked into these sections on guidelines for Passover rituals is the freedom event itself, as if rehearsing freedom with rituals is what it means to be set free. The author and therapist, Vienna Farrin, says that when it comes to creating safety for yourself, so much of the work requires you to show your body what safety is instead of trying to think about it or trying to tell yourself what it is. In other words, after hard times, rituals help you recover.
They help you feel safe again. Rituals are acts of recreation, how you put yourself back together again. So every year at the start of Passover, the question is asked, why is this night different from other nights? And the answer could be this is where we join God in our deliverance. This is where we get up and go.
This is where we enact freedom through rituals in our bodies. This is how we preserve what matters to us from generation to generation. Freedom stories are enacted with rituals. I don't know what your relationship is to rituals. Are they empty?
A bit dusty? Kinda boring? Christians tuck the story of Jesus into rituals of our own. The Eucharist, baptism, going to church, getting married, sharing our grief. To take a chapter out of Exodus, I don't know if we can preserve the best parts of the Jesus story or pass it down to our kids without rituals.
Our bodies can be the home of the story of Christ. But I don't think the conventional rituals are the end either. Any ritual that puts you in touch with your most true self, that gives you a bigger perspective on your place in the universe, that renews the sense of spirit setting you free, any of those rituals are sacred. So find a fresh sense of the divine in ritual this week. Take a walk and just listen to the world around you.
Notice your inhale and your exhale. Contemplate all the love in your life. Try a new recipe. Connect with your beloved. Give something away.
Read a poem. Read an ancient prayer and trust. After the chaos, there is recreation forever and ever world without end. Let us pray. I am going to give you a moment to listen to your own thoughts, your heart, what stands out to you today?
Maybe it's the artistry of the narrative, the pattern of these chaotic plagues. Maybe it's the way oppression eventually falls in on itself. Maybe it's the hope of a God out looking for you, out looking for anyone in danger. Maybe a renewed imagination for personal and collective rituals. May the beauty of the Lord, our God, be upon us, establishing the work of our hands.
And may the spirit of the living God, this Pentecost Sunday, who is present with us now and always, Enter the places of chaos, decreation, and confusion, and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.