Sermon 01/20/08 (Ex. 6:1-13; 1 Cor. 12:12-13, 27)

“God’s Freedom”
Exodus 6:1-13; 1 Corinthians 12:12-13, 27
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 20 January, 2008
Second Sunday after Epiphany
Martin Luther King, Jr. Observance

 In Jewish tradition, Passover is the holiday that marks the Exodus, the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. It is a celebration of freedom marked, among other things, by a special meal called a Seder. (You may remember that the Last Supper, which we Christians celebrate, was a Passover Seder meal.) Passover is one of the most important, most joyful Jewish holidays.

Several weeks ago Ben and I watched a show on PBS about Jews in America. One segment of the show was about Jews during the American Civil War, and a certain Jew named Judah Benjamin was noted. He was somewhat of a rarity among Jews, in that he was a staunch Confederate and had, in fact, a high- ranking role in the Confederacy. Not surprisingly, he was a slave owner. The program noted that when he and his family would sit down to their Passover meal, they would be served by slaves. The irony of this is mind-boggling. He had slaves serving him a meal that was meant to be a celebration of an end to slavery.

Of course, Judah Benjamin was in good company as a Southern slave owner. He was, perhaps, unusual because he was a Jewish leader in the Confederacy, but slavery was a way of life. Wealthy landowners were expected to have slaves. That was that.

Slavery is assumed throughout much of our Bible too. While the Exodus is a central story of liberation, there are other portions of the Old Testament that mention slavery off-handedly, and Jesus sometimes uses the example of slaves in his teachings -- and doesn’t just speak against slavery. Indeed, the prevalence of slavery in our scriptures caused some people to believe that modern (19th century) slavery was justified and even God-ordained.

It is my hope that Jews and Christians today are appalled at the notion that human slavery could be remotely acceptable in the eyes of God. Jews -- and we, too, as descendants of the Israelites -- recall our liberation from Egyptian slavery as told in the story of the Exodus, part of which we have heard this morning. Christians proclaim, as we heard in 1 Corinthians this morning, that “there is no longer slave nor free.” Even if we didn’t have these scriptures, we should simply remember Jesus’ command that we are to love one another. Historically, slavery is one of the cruelest, least loving ways to treat one’s neighbors. I’m not even taking into account the torture and physical detention that slavery often involves.

In 2008 we are a long way from the enslavement of Africans by Euro-Americans that occurred through the middle of the 19th century. We’re a long way, too, from Jim Crow laws and the level of racism prevalent in this country before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. Still, as we observe the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tomorrow, and as we enter into African American History Month in February, I wonder how far we really have come.

The majority of people who ride the bus in Baltimore are African American. It is not uncommon for me to be the only white person on a crowded bus. I marvel, sometimes, at the knowledge that there was a time only a few short decades ago when I would be expected to sit at the front of the bus while all of the African Americans sat at the back. I think of this sometimes, when I take a seat at the back of the bus. Still, racial tensions abound in Baltimore, and a recent incident on a Baltimore bus is evidence of that. When a young white woman was beaten up by several black teenagers in December, accusations of racism were slung from both sides. The young woman accused the African Americans of refusing to let her sit where she wanted on the bus. The African Americans said she used the “n” word and spat on them. There was talk of calling the incident a hate crime.

I have heard people in this city speak of a neighborhood being “bad” simply because it is populated by African Americans. I have had people say to me, “I’m not a racist” when what they were just telling me certainly sounded like racism. Institutional racism abounds. African Americans continue to be denied the same opportunities as whites, and as a result poverty is rampant in African American communities.

Slavery continues too. Some say that there is more slavery in the world today than there was before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Modern slavery doesn’t usually involve Africans being torn from their homelands and dragged into servitude in the United States. Rather, women and girls from Europe and other places are promised a new life in a new country. Upon arriving in the United States, they find themselves forced into sexual slavery. As slaves they are not only sexually exploited by their “customers” -- they endure horrendous other abuses, including being chained in cages.

We hear from time to time about cheap American products being made by slave labor in third world countries. Even if they are not technically “enslaved,” people work for pennies a day in deplorable conditions so that wealthy Americans (and we are all wealthy by their standards) can have cheap goods.

Pieces of Martin Luther King’s “dream” have come to pass. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King expressed hope that one day his children would live in a nation where they were judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Today Baltimore city has an African American mayor, and an African American man is doing well in the Presidential race. People of color hold high positions in both public and private life.

Still, King’s dream is far from fully realized. And, of course, African Americans are not the only ones judged by their external appearance. After September 11th a seminary professor of mine (he happened to be African American) admitted that he was nervous when he saw people of Middle Eastern descent standing next to him in the security line at the airport. He knew it was wrong to be afraid of them solely because of their dark skin and dress (goodness knows he had experienced such prejudice), but his knee jerk reaction was to fear them. He is not alone by far, and many people who see a Middle Easterner and think “terrorist” believe they are perfectly justified in their assumptions.

Illegal immigration is a particularly hot topic these days, and the furor over it has led to other forms of prejudice. When we hear a person speaking Spanish or see someone who “looks Hispanic,” we immediately wonder if they are “an illegal.” We forget the fact that many, many Latinos in this country came here legally, and indeed, some have been here for generations. We demand that they “speak American,” despite the fact that the language of this nation has always been in flux -- and the United States was populated by “illegal immigrants” who took over and destroyed the native peoples who lived here.

The truth is, we’re not there yet. In 1963, Dr. King proclaimed that “the Negro” was still not free, one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. While things have improved in the 45 years since King’s great speech, racism and oppression remain. And the truth is, as Gandhi once said, that “No one is free when others are oppressed.”

We are called to care about these things. Jesus calls us to reach out to the oppressed, and our job as Christians is not done when there remain oppressed people in the world. We need, also, to work on our own prejudices, which we all have.

May we share Martin Luther King’s dream. May we hear the word of God through the book of Exodus: “I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgement. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God.” Let us hear the words of St. Paul: “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

In the words of Dr. King:
“When...we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing.”

Now let us pray.