Well, I have certainly enjoyed the Olympic Games the last two weeks, and like many I have watched a lot more TV than normal.  The USA has faired very well, and who hasn’t become fascinated with the great Michael Phelps, perhaps the greatest Olympian of all time.  Eight gold medals is a feat that may never be surpassed by one single homo sapien.   I am not sure if even Flipper could have won more than eight swimming events.  Phelps accounted for a substantial portion of the Gold that Americans brought home.  Had he not shown up, our Gold medal count would have been lower than Bush’s approval ratings.  But he did show up.  Man, did he show up.

I am amazed at some Olympic sports.  I watched some of the BMX bicycling the other night; it was reminiscent of ESPN’s X-games.  Men and Women rode small bikes at break-neck speed around a dirt bike track one time and the winner was awarded a gold medal.  It was entertaining, but an Olympic sport? Good grief, they are dropping women’s softball after this Olympics, but they are keeping grown men riding little bitty bikes that clowns ride in circuses around a dirt track.  Or how about that one where they jump on the trampolines, up to about the height of a four story building?  Did you see that?  Seems more like reality television than a competitive sport. 

There are many strange sports in the Olympics.  We all learned about Curling a few winter Olympics ago, and while it seems strange to us here in the humidity belt, it is evidently a big deal in places like Iceland and Greenland and Norway.  It is weird, but there is at least teamwork involved to some degree. 

So softball will give way to something else, maybe extreme fighting, who knows.  Other sports have gone by the wayside.  Live Pigeon shooting was over by 1900 in the Paris Olympics.  300 birds were sacrificed, and some man from Belgium won the gold by bagging 21 of the city park icons.  Now surely we Arkies would have had a chance in a contest where moving varmits were shot with rifles.  If we could just hit them with the F-150 then we could produce a gold medalist for sure.  Those medals might be swept by people from Cabot, Sheridan or maybe Rison.  Or what about the sport of solo synchronized swimming which last saw its Olympic competition in 1992?  I mean, how hard is it really to synchronize with yourself?  Never mind, as a former klutz it can be hard. 

I do wonder why they quit some of the other discontinued sports. In 1896 there was one-handed weight lifting, and from 1900 – 1920 there was the eight man tug-o-war.   In 1900 there was the underwater swimming where swimmers were awarded points based on how far they could swim underwater.  I would bet on Phelps in such a competition, or maybe Jimmy Hoffa.   And of course, who could forget in 1906 (other than the fact that the only people still alive from 1906 were only about two years old at the time) the dueling pistols competition, where athletes fired pistols at mannequins dressed up like people with a bulls-eye painted on their chest.  Us Little Rockers might do well at that one. Especially if they let us shoot from a moving car.

But alas, more normal sports prevailed for the most part.  However, this Olympics was not without controversy.  How about the Chinese gymnasts who looked like they were 11 years old, but were purportedly 16 as per Olympic rules.  But maybe the real controversy was the fact that they were in China at all. In what is now surely a footnote in the news, there were those advocates in advance who thought that China’s record on human rights was abysmal at best, and the Olympics might somehow sanction China’s policies as acceptable to the rest of the world.  China has a record of restricting freedoms of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of religious expression, they have lack due process in judicial proceedings, have been involved in torture of prisoners and dissidents and have discriminated against women and others in a variety of very disagreeable ways.  So some thought that letting them slap the silly out of us in platform diving might be some form of endorsement of them politically.  But since the Chinese now own our country, it is a moot point.

            It is surely true that in many places in the world people are exploited and oppressed, and the freedoms that we take for granted here are non-existent or very precious.  The Olympics are a venue that brings us together as a planet in a way as to suggest that all is right with the world, and certainly that is not the case. In some parts of the world truly people are still exploited in unimaginable and unacceptable ways.  There are still places where widespread abuse, oppression, human trafficking, slavery, and even genocide occur.  And to our modern Christian sensibilities, this seems so very anachronistic at best, at least when we pause long enough to really ponder the implications of it all.

In a way such oppression is the oldest story in the book.  People suppressing other people.  It is also in our lectionary text today, and it is a very old story from the book of liberation, the book of Exodus.  Barry Robinson recounts the story for us this morning:

It has been about 400 years since we last left Joseph inviting his brothers and their families to come and live with him down in Egypt where, because of Joseph’s pre-eminence, the Hebrew tribes enjoyed all the privileged benefits of honored guests.  A lot has happened during that time and the author of Exodus takes only a few short verses to remind us.  A new king is on the throne in Egypt, a king “who did not know Joseph”, meaning a king who had no commitment to the kin of Joseph, at least not anything like Joseph’s original boss had had and no genuine concern for their welfare. To make things even more tense, that original family of “seventy” born to old Jacob had grown by leaps and bounds during their stay in Egypt “so that the land was filled with them.” More numerous even than “we are”, the new Pharaoh noticed.  And more powerful, too.  It’s important to remember that Egypt had not exactly had a peaceful time of it during these centuries.  Foreign invaders had occupied the eastern part of the empire for a time, forcing Egypt to take a more war-like stance than usual, conscripting captured invaders into forced labor camps.  In such a highly charged situation, the presence of an ever-burgeoning Hebrew populace, as well, was simply one more threat Pharaoh did not need on his mind.  That is why the Hebrews became slaves in the land of Egypt – because the new king of Egypt saw it as a way to keep them in their place.  “Better to have them in chains,” the new boss-man said, “than joining up with our enemies.”  Like most of the plans of tyrants, however, Pharaoh’s plan backfired in spades. “But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.” Until finally, starting to feel like he was trying to hold back the tide, Pharaoh came up with the brilliant plan (or so it seemed to him at the time) of shutting off the water supply.  He approached the two women who had been appointed as midwives to all those thousands of Hebrew women! and said to them, “Start killing all the boys of the Hebrews whenever you get the chance.” Apparently, it never occurred to this unnamed Pharaoh (whom we suspect was Ramses II) that, aside from being one of the worst kinds of pogroms imaginable, it was also a pretty dumb business move.  How was he going to keep building all those monuments to his ego without male slaves to do it!?  He was not only one of the most wicked of rulers of Egypt but one of the stupidest! Maybe it was that that finally convinced those two midwives, whose names we do know, by the way – Shiphrah and Puah – to put one over on the king. Clearly they were risking their lives to do the thing they did, which was to tell Pharaoh the whopper that they could never get there fast enough to give all those sturdy Hebrew women a hand before their babies just popped out on their own!  The way those two brave women figured it, they were dealing with a king who was two bricks short of a load; and, as things turned out, they were right.  Pharaoh bought their story hook, line and sinker. Now, the old maxim, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” may be nothing more than an excuse for pure stubbornness for people like you and me, let alone a recipe for failure, but for Pharaoh it was an addiction. To no one’s surprise, he then commanded all his own people to take every Hebrew baby boy and drown them in the Nile! Well, apparently this loser who called himself a king had gained about as much respect in his own household as he already enjoyed among the Hebrew population, for, when little Moses himself was born and was shipped down the Nile in that little ark his mother made for him, the daughter of Pharaoh found him and, realizing at once what kind of child he must have been, took him into her care. (Robinson, Barry, Keeping the Faith in Babylon)

In our passage of scripture we have a story of slavery, it is a story of oppression it is the continuing saga of the chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that God had made a great promise to. However things were not going well for our heroes at this point in the story.  Here the once favored of Pharaoh’s household are now made slaves, and are whipped into building the current Egyptian dynasty.  Life has become of little value, their taskmasters were very harsh, and their lives were not worth anymore than a beast of burden’s life.  They were the mules that felt the crack of the whip day after day after day.

So how did they get into this mess?  The text says that they started to get so numerous that that the mighty sun god Pharaoh feared them.  As a result, he reasoned it was better to enslave and control them lest they side with his many enemies and do him in. And that is how the heinous sin of enslaving other human beings gets its start.

The book of Exodus is a favorite of liberation theologians everywhere and for good reason: there are oppressed peoples everywhere, seeking the deliverance of a God who hears their heartfelt cries.  And lest we be too hard on the pagan Pharaoh, we are not that many years removed from the atrocity in our own country.  I believe that we are still feeling the effects of our own societal sin in America 140 or so years after the Civil War.  And yes, I know the south will rise again, but if it is for the same crime against humanity as slavery then may God also raise someone again to combat that evil.  In the meantime we will just have to settle for whipping the Yankees in football.

It is amazing to read of slavery in the south, and even in our own state.  The Old State House has had exhibits on the life of the slave, and the following is the account of one Arkansas slave, and sorry, it is a little uncomfortable:

“The first work I did was nursing and after that I was water toter. I recken I was about seven or eight when I first began to nurse. I could hardly lift the baby. I would have to drag them around. Then I toted water to the field. Then when I was put to plowing and chopping cotton, I don’t know exactly how old I was. But I know I was a young girl and it was a good while before the War. I had to do anything that come up — thrashing wheat, sawing logs with a wristband on, lifting logs, splitting rails. Women in them days wasn’t tender like they is now. They would call on you to work like men and better work too….   “I have worn a buck and gag in my mouth for three days for trying to run away. I couldn’t eat nor drink — couldn’t even catch the slobber that fell from my mouth and run down my chest till the files settled on it….   “I been whipped from sunup till sundown. Off and on, you know. They whip me till they got tired and then go and res’ and come out and start again. They kept a bowl filled with vinegar and salt and pepper settin’ nearby, and when they whipped me till the blood come, they would take the mop and sponge the cuts with this stuff so they would hurt more. They would whip me with the cowhide part of the time and with birch sprouts to the other part. There were splinters as long as my finger left in my back. A girl named Betty Jones come over and soaped the splinters to make them softer, and pulled them out….They jus’ whipped me ‘cause they could — ‘cause they had the privilege. It wasn’t nothin’ I done; they jus’ whipped me. My married young master, Joe, and his wife, Jennie, they was the ones that did the whipping…  “They had so many babies ‘round there I couldn’t keep up with all of them. I was jus’ a young girl and I couldn’t keep track of them chilen. While I was turned to one, another would be gone. Then they would whip me all day for it. They would whip you for anything and wouldn’t give you a bite of meat to eat to save your life, but they’d grease your mouth when company come.” (Sallie Crane, Them Dark Days, Arkansas Slave Narratives, oldstatehouse.com)

            In the annals of Arkansas history, there are much more disturbing stories than this one, stories that have a mature audience rating that I cannot begin to fathom or recount this morning.  And much of it was done by God fearing Christians who never missed services on Sunday.  How could this happen? 

In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a “necessary evil”. It was feared that emancipation would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. In 1820, one man wrote in a letter that with slavery “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”  That letter was from Thomas Jefferson.  And while he did a lot of preaching on the evils of slavery, he himself was a slave owner as was four of the first five U.S. Presidents.  George Washington owned some 300 slaves. 

So how did it happen that our forefathers enslaved other human beings created in the image of God?  In an article I found in the TIME magazine archives, I found some insight as to how anyone could justify such practices: 

“It was true that the South fiercely upheld the institution of slavery. The following were some of the arguments they often used in their justification of slavery:

* Biblical references show God approves slavery: e.g. Israelites, “God’s chosen people,” were slaveholders; Christ never condemned it; Paul supported it.

* All men are not created equal: the black race is inferior; thus, blacks are better off as property of superior whites who ensure their subsistence.  Even life as a slave was better than their life in Africa it was reasoned, as they lived as wild animals there.

* Slaves are content with slavery, for their masters ensure they’re fed, clothed and taught Christian values: comparatively, Southern slaves are better off than many of the immigrant workers in Northern factories who are confined in unhealthy workplaces for long hours.

* Slavery is the key to national prosperity-for both the North and the South: cotton produced in the South is a major U.S. export to Europe; thus, if the Southern economy is tampered with, the big industrial cities of the North would collapse.

* Slavery enabled the founding of the American Republic:

* Great civilizations from the past allowed slavery: e.g. Egypt, Greece, Rome.

            There were many sermons preached on how it was right to own slaves, and in fact that is why the Northern Baptist (now American Baptist) split from the Southern Baptist and led to the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, because Baptist in the south believed it right to own slaves.  Unbelievable! And we think the stuff coming out of the SBC now is crap.

            So how can good Christian people get to the place where such a sin is not only acceptable but justifiable?  It is hard to fathom.  And lest we be too hard on our dear great-great grandparents, almost everyone in the south was on the same page with slavery.  Had we been alive then, then we would have had about a 99% chance of believing that it was right as well.  And as I have said before, about the only way I could claim that I would have been otherwise different is if I am willing to stand up against unpopular causes now, if I am willing to be a counter-culture person and go against the grain of popular opinion if it seems someone is not being loved in Jesus name.  And if you think you love everyone great, but I can probably find someone that we probably don’t want worshipping here this morning.  Just ask our friends at the community church. Who do we exclude?  That is who we fear.

            For the Children of Israel, the path to slavery was simple, it was based on fear.  It was fear that motivated pharaoh to oppress others.  It was fear that the children of Israel were becoming too powerful that motivated him to this course of action.  And it is still true today that fear is behind our prejudices and many evils.  We are afraid of others, we are afraid of different, we are afraid of change.  We are afraid of those not like us and those with differing views and values form us.  Intolerance is bred by the fear that your ways are a threat to my ways, and that always stems from insecurity.  I would suggest to you today that we still fear the black man in the south today.  We fear those night meetings down at the new CBF of Arkansas offices.  We fear places where we are the only whites, we feel like we do not belong.  I never thought this was true of me until I went to see my brother who was stationed at Langley in Virginia some years ago.  He took us to Black Beach (I am not kidding that was the name) and it was full of people and we were about the only whites.  It seemed strange, I found myself feeling unwelcomed even though there was no indication to the contrary.  We say it is not the blacks we are afraid of, it is the crime.  Is it?  We also fear the very poor, so we get double whammied driving through some Little Rock zip codes.

            I remember Bill Clinton once made a statement on race relations that I thought very insightful.  He said in order for the race relations to improve the white man had to understand the black man’s pain and the black man had to understand the white man’s fear.  Fear.  It is a powerful motivator; it causes us to justify crazy things.  We have all welcomed the Hispanics in this state because they are good neighbors (actually they probably are not really neighbors to any of us), we like their food, and they are hard workers at menial jobs that white people will no longer do.  Jobs that have to be done.  As my brother-in-law who works for Tyson Chicken says, “you just can’t find white people anymore who want to gut chickens for a living.” But all of the sudden we realize how many are here in this country and as a result we are building a wall between the US and Mexico.  In places like Danville and Rogers there will soon be more Hispanics than whites.  How do those white folk really feel about that?  I don’t know, but I promise you some are afraid.  Fear is behind anything different. It paralyses us, it motivates us in ungodly directions, it leads us to great evils, unbelievable evils that we contort in our minds to justify unbelievable wrongs. 

So Pharaoh was afraid, the sun god was after all just a man. But there were others in our story who were not afraid.  You see, I find it interesting that God is not mentioned in this story at all.  Nowhere, not once.  Sure, God is a key player in the Exodus, but not here.  There were three women who ironically saved Israel, the midwives Shiphrah and Puah and the daughter of Pharaoh himself.  These lowly midwives were commanded to kill every boy that was born as part of Pharaoh’s master plan to get a handle on the situation, yet they did not.  And when they had to answer to mighty Pharaoh, they stood their ground.  The other key player was Pharaoh’s own daughter who rescued Moses from the bulrushes and kept his true nationality hidden from Pharaoh, even though Moses was right under his nose.

You see, these women were surely afraid as well, but they did not let their fears consume them or from keeping them from doing the right thing.  They chose another path, a road less traveled, the right one that put the good of others before their own needs.  They undoubtedly risked a lot, and in the case of Shiphrah and Puah probably even risked their own lives.  They did not give into fear– they gave into what was right.

So many times we believe that God will do battle for us, and I suppose that is so, but I also think that these women teach us today that it is really up to us.  We have to make choices, we have to take a stand, we have to stand firm against our fears or our fears will ultimately own us in a way that we will look back on our lives and say how the heck did that happen?  We have to be willing to become counter-cultural people who take a stand even if unpopular.  We must always have the courage to do what is right, even if there is a price to pay.  We do have a choice–we always have a choice.  The mightiest man on the planet was afraid of the lowly Hebrew people, but these two midwives were not afraid of the Hebrews and more amazingly were not afraid of the one who was worshipped as the sun god come down to earth.  And because of their choice, the nation of Israel survived, and a critical link in the chain of our salvation history remained unbroken.  I would argue that we are here today because that chain was unbroken. 

I do not know what you are afraid of today; I don’t even know all of my fears because I tend to deny that they are there.  But I do know that we must stand against societal evils that we must speak up against wrongs that are based on fear, or on greed, or on power, or on envy or on any other self-serving motivation.  We must speak up and advocate for those who cannot advocate adequately for themselves.  We must look after the powerless and helpless, and we must always fight for the least, the lost, and the last.  Otherwise we might just find ourselves ruled by our fears and on the wrong side of God Almighty.  And that is a place in the end that even the mighty Pharaoh found foreboding.  For us who espouse allegiance and pledge our love to such a God, may it never be so.  Amen.