Sermon on January 17, 2010
You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
Every Sunday morning I check the news. It’s part of a pre-worship routine that I do each week. I get up early, put on a pot of coffee, and then check in briefly with cnn.com. The thought is that something may have happened during the night—a death, a disaster, a conflict, some catastrophe—something may have happened during the night that has effectively rendered my prepared sermon irrelevant.
My plan has always been that I could write a new sermon—or at least change the one I’ve got—to address the situation, to comfort the congregation if need be, and to begin to develop a response that grows out of our Christian faith.
The earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday, so we’ve all had five days to ask “Why?” Five days to sift through pictures and news articles and to begin to face the true magnitude of the situation there in Port au Prince. And despite the extra time to think and prepare, I must say that in some ways I’m at a loss for words. Like many of you who are also glued to the news, I’m stunned by the horror of it all. So you and I and the whole world are scrambling to respond to Haiti—scrambling to respond not only with humanitarian aid, but also with words to even describe what has happened there.
I’ve watched more television than I usually do these days, and at one point, I heard a reporter, in reference to the post-earthquake devastation, say, “The tragedy here is one of biblical proportion.” Did you happen to catch that? I sat there on the couch and thought, “Thank you, random reporter, for that riveting theological assessment.” But I must confess it left me wondering.
What is biblical proportion? I was never very good at math, and I’m not even particularly good at reading recipes. So understanding proportions to begin with has always been a bit of a challenge for me. But biblical proportion? Supposedly it refers to something that happens on an enormous scale—so huge, in fact, that it could only be possible in the Bible.
And, proportionally speaking, when it comes to mass crises, the Bible has more than its fair share. A giant flood being the first, but moving into the stories from Exodus, we find a few more. The Hebrew people forced into slavery in Egypt. Pharaoh issues an order to kill infant Hebrew boys. And then in the following chapters, plagues: thunder and hail, water turning to blood, flies and gnats, disease, darkness, death. Tragic events of biblical proportion.
However, I’d like to suggest this morning that there are other biblical proportions worth paying attention to. We’re not going to hear about these on the 10 o’clock news, and that’s fine. But I do believe that they’re some of the best biblical proportions the Bible has to offer:
The first is 5,000 to 5 and 2: the feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fish. That's a biblical proportion.
The second is 99 to 1: the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep in search of the one that is lost. That's a biblical proportion.
The first will be last and the last will be first. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. These are true biblical proportions!
According to the laws of this world, they don’t always make sense, and certainly according to laws of scarcity, fear, and competition, they never make sense. But these are biblical proportions. And they beg this question of our nation and our world: will history measure our response to Haiti’s earthquake in biblical proportions? Will the outpouring of aid and efforts to heal and revitalize Haiti reflect loving biblical proportions?
Pondering those questions, we turn to this morning’s passage from the book of Exodus, where the voice of God is understood through Moses. God is giving Moses these lists of commandments, and tucked in there among them all is this one: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” Perhaps this command blends in with those around it, but you know, it’s interesting. In the entire Old Testament, there is one commandment to love your neighbor and no less than thirty-six commandments to love the stranger. And there’s a reason for that. After all, the people of Israel knew what being a stranger felt like. As slaves in Egypt and then later during Babylonian exile, the Israelites understood what it meant to be strangers in a strange land. Consequently, one of the foundational building blocks of our faith tradition is a commandment to make sure that the stranger has enough.
This is God’s heart in the book of Exodus! Remember that when the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness, they are strangers, and God provides manna for them to eat. And the thing about that manna is that it’s everywhere! So it’s distributed equally to everyone—everyone gathers as much as he or she needs. And because there is enough manna to go around, there is no market for surplus manna. Because it is so plentiful, it’s impossible for an enterprising person to try to corner the market and drive up the price with artificial shortages.
You can’t be poor when there’s manna on the ground, and when there’s manna on the ground, it doesn’t pay to be rich, because everyone simply has enough.
We haven’t yet seen this kind of manna in Haiti. Simply getting the resources there and where they’re needed has been difficult. But many Americans and folks from all over the world are mobilizing.
Here in Racine and in this church, we ask ourselves, “What can we do?” Did you know that Port au Prince, Haiti is closer to Racine than San Francisco or Seattle? It’s strange—watching the news, it’s easy to think that Haiti is such a far-distant place, but it’s in our yard. So perhaps it helps greatly to remember that when we reach out with love and care to the people of Haiti, we echo the commitments of our faith ancestors who could not be stopped from loving the strangers in their midst!
In a moment I’m going to ask Tim Lafond, our chair of finance and stewardship, to share a few words about our own congregation’s response to the situation in Haiti. Before I do, though, I’ll share some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that there are many hurting, displaced people in Haiti who are waiting for help. The good news is that there is enough—the world has enough food and water and resources to heal and rebuild Haiti (and a few other places where the human family is struggling!).
Tomorrow we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. And so as we prepare for our offering, I’ll close with my favorite King quote. This comes from an address he gave at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. just four days before his assassination. I think these words can and should fuel our own response to suffering in Haiti and in our world.
"Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood [or sisterhood]. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured."
(From "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," delivered by Martin Luther King at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968.)
Amen.
To contribute to relief efforts in Haiti through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, go to their web page and click "Give $"
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