Exodus 14:21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and turned the sea into dry land; and the waters were divided. 22 The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. 23 The Egyptians pursued, and went into the sea after them, all of Pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and chariot drivers. 24 At the morning watch the Lord in the pillar of fire and cloud looked down upon the Egyptian army, and threw the Egyptian army into panic. 25 He clogged[a] their chariot wheels so that they turned with difficulty. The Egyptians said, ‘Let us flee from the Israelites, for the Lord is fighting for them against Egypt.’ 26 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over the sea, so that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots and chariot drivers.’ 27 So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at dawn the sea returned to its normal depth. As the Egyptians fled before it, the Lord tossed the Egyptians into the sea. 28 The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. 29 But the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. 30 Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. 31 Israel saw the great work that the Lord did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.
So we’re spending a few weeks talking through our statements of faith, our starting points as a community. We started by talking about how God is Jesus, we don’t start from an idea of greatness or power and then fit Jesus into that to say he’s God—we start with this dark skinned, working class, Jewish guy living in occupied Palestine and learn the truth about who God is from the way he heals and feeds people and confronts the powers that run this world.
Then, last week we talked about how the God who we know through Jesus is actually the one who created everything and called it good—this environment, this earth, literally makes food and shelter, and there’s enough here for everyone to share—but instead of sharing people have grasped and taken and seized as property what God intended for everyone, and so people organized creation into a devastated world, where a small group has far more than they’ll ever need and most of us don’t have enough, and so we subdivide and blame our neighbors and create ever more intricate and cruel hierarchies to step over each other to get whatever scraps we can.
This situation is the context in which we talk about “salvation.” The story we tell never has been and never will be that you are inherently terrible, wormlike even, and deserve any manner of suffering that this world heaps upon you. In the story we tell, creation, including you and me, is inherently good, you bear the image of God, you are a being of infinite dignity and worth, annnnnnnd we find ourselves trapped inside these systems that don’t treat us that way, and also many of us don’t treat each other that way. We bear the image of God and yet we also have a tendency to be real jerks, sometimes when we think we’re being righteous. This stuckness, the pettiness and cruelty we can show each other despite our best desires, and the larger systems that capitalize off of us treating each other this way, all of this is what we’re talking about when we talk about “sin,” which is what we need saving from.
To say that we’re sinners, again, isn’t to say that we’re inherently wormlike. It is to say that we’re implicated in the world as it is. Sometimes people critique the doctrine of original sin, the idea that we’re born sinners, and like, I get it…It’s a hard sell that babies are sinners (until you’ve had to like, live with one). But then you hear people talk about why it’s so messed up and they’re like “What you’re supposed to be responsible for things that happened before you were even born? Like, I didn’t do anything wrong, what does the behavior of my ancestors have to do with me now?” Which is an especially funny argument when it comes from white liberals because it’s like, “Uh yeah, we are born into histories that implicate us in longstanding injustices as we continue to benefit from them.” And so salvation refers to the way in which God writes new histories and creates new senses of self so that we no longer have to identify with the powers that run this world.
I think that’s some of what’s going on in our story this morning. The Lord brought the people through the waters and sent the waters crashing down on Pharaoh and his soldiers and the story says, “The Lord saved Israel that day.” This is the first reference to salvation in the Bible (it’s also the founding of a new people out of this collection of families). Salvation is liberation. The people have been oppressed, they’ve been forced to make more and more bricks with less and less straw until they cry out to the Lord, and the Lord liberates them. God frees them from Pharaoh by pouring out wrath on Pharaoh through the plagues and ultimately by letting the waters fall on Pharaoh’s soldiers who are chasing the children of Israel. The children of Israel are not just saved from Pharaoh ‘in their hearts.’ God actually saves them. God intervenes materially in their situation and creates a new situation. They were exploited, they were enslaved, now they are not, that’s the first part of what salvation looks like.
And then the children of Israel go into the desert. God promises them that they’re on their way to a land of milk and honey, a promised land where the law will be to care for the orphan, the immigrant, and the widow, where they will worship the Lord who liberated them through love as justice and justice as love. And so salvation is not just liberation from but also liberation for. It’s a call to build a better world, again in a material sense, by sharing what we have so that our life together looks more like a new creation than whatever arrangements the powers of sin and death have offered us.
But in between these two events, Pharaoh’s defeat and the land of milk and honey, there’s a problem. The children of Israel have been in the desert for about 10 minutes before they start grumbling. And what they start saying is so interesting to me (because I recognize it so much in myself): they say that they want to go back to Egypt. They tell each other stories about how they sat around pots of meat, they always had enough, things there may not have been great, but they were good enough. On the way out of their captivity, they plundered their oppressors, they took a bunch of gold with them, and while they’re out in the desert grumbling, they melt down that gold and build themselves a god, a god who isn’t like this crazy God who wants them to walk through the wilderness.
God has freed these people from captivity and given them a vision of a utopian land—but there is still an element of salvation that has to be internalized. God has freed their bodies from Pharaoh’s grasp, but Pharaoh still has a hold on their minds, on their imaginations, on their affections. And so there is an internal, spiritual dimension to salvation, as well. I joked earlier about the Israelites not just being saved in their hearts, but their hearts do need saving, too. They would choose their own captivity if given the opportunity, and I think I understand that. It’s hard being a person. There’s something comforting about cocooning ourselves in the subjectivities already on offer in the world around us. People ask all the time of past atrocities, “What would I have done in that moment? Would I have appeased or resisted?” I think we might ask ourselves the same thing of past revolutions, past liberation movements? Even as the waters part, would I pine for imagined flesh pots?
This is part of why it’s so important that as we tell the story of salvation, we talk about the work of Jesus, which is exactly the kind of work that empowers his followers, empowers us, to be agents of liberation in our time. In Jesus, the God who parts waters meets us in the flesh. And the flesh of a regular guy, not a great warrior or strategist. A carpenter. A carpenter who from the very beginning gathers people around him saying “You will do greater signs than the ones I’m doing.”
And then when he comes into conflict with the powers of this world, he loses. I can’t think of anything more relatable. If Jesus rose up, defeated the Romans in battle, and established a kingdom in Jerusalem, I’d be like “That’s awesome, and I have no way whatsoever of relating to that. That’s like, not how my life tends to go.” But getting caught, having one of your best friends screw you over, and then being publicly embarrassed? If I was going to start a revolution, like, I think that’s probably best case scenario (worst case would be no one even notices), but I can aim for that.
And then, when he rises, he breathes his Spirit in the disciples and they start sharing all of their money. Again, whatever happens to me after I die is totally out of my hands and I’m good with that—but holding all things in common, that makes sense to me. It’s hard, but it’s tangible. And it’s something we can figure out together.
Jesus relives the Exodus story from the body of a regular brown, working class person. He brings God’s judgment on the Empire, he promises the Kingdom of God—but he does so in a way that extends the project of salvation to all of us. It’s not salvation if we’re not all caught up in it, invited to participate in it. It’s our work, too.
I know a lot of us come from a very specific tradition where “salvation” refers to our faith in the sacrifice Jesus offered on the cross. And I think the critique there is valid that in that case what Jesus is saving us from is the wrath of God. And so Jesus is like the nice face of God protecting us from the angry face of God. There’s a disjunction between the message of salvation and the content of salvation, and so salvation is really a form of advertising. And if that’s the case, if there’s a disjunction between the message and the content, then you can really do just about anything to further that message, even if the things you’re doing run directly counter to what that message would seem to demand.
But ultimately in the Exodus story and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God saves us by giving us God’s self, by entering into our lives with us, facing our oppressors alongside us, and setting our eyes toward a new world, which we’re supposed to start practicing for now, in the meantime. So we’re saved from sin and death by living in the Spirit, which means living as if a different world is possible together now, setting each other free from whatever holds us down and for whatever gifts we have to offer. Salvation isn’t some kind of transaction, it’s the very presence of God in our midst judging every oppressor and stirring up every possibility for love as justice and justice as love. Amen.
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