Moses was taking care of the flock for his father-in-law Jethro, Midian’s priest. He led his flock out to the edge of the desert, and he came to God’s mountain called Horeb. 2 The Lord’s messenger appeared to him in a flame of fire in the middle of a bush. Moses saw that the bush was in flames, but it didn’t burn up. 3 Then Moses said to himself, Let me check out this amazing sight and find out why the bush isn’t burning up.
4 When the Lord saw that he was coming to look, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”
Moses said, “I’m here.”
5 Then the Lord said, “Don’t come any closer! Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground.” 6 He continued, “I am the God of your father, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God.” Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said, “I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain. 8 I’ve come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live. 9 Now the Israelites’ cries of injustice have reached me. I’ve seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them. 10 So get going. I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” (Common English Bible)
“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Two
If you ever want a ridiculously labor-intensive way of forcing yourself to revisit books you have not read in years, I cannot recommend highly enough a cross-country move. The task of packing and unpacking our dozens of boxes of books put in my hands volumes that have lived a decade or more on my shelf, yet had not seen my eyes in many years. One of those books, Living Justice, is a memoir by a husband-and-wife pair of playwrights, Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen, about their writing of the play The Exonerated, which tells the real-life stories of five men and one woman who were wrongfully sentenced to death and imprisoned on death row for murders they never committed.
Because of the geographic nature of states with the death penalty compared to states without it—or that impose it rarely—much of the stories Blank and Jensen collected came from here, in the Deep South, and they write movingly and humorously about being New Yorkers immersing themselves—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—in the cultures of Georgia, Mississippi, and here in Birmingham, where one of their interviewees, Bo Cochran, was born, raised, and lived until he died four years ago.
Blank and Jensen’s story gave me some succor as I began my life here with all of you, thinking that if a pair of Yankees can hack it here in Alabama, I should be just fine, because Kansas sure isn’t New York City either. Revisiting their story prompted me to also pick up my copy of The Exonerated, which begins and ends with the words of Delbert Tibbs, a seminary-educated writer and activist who spent three years on Florida’s death row for a rape and murder he had nothing to do with. He says:
This is not the place for thoughts that do not end in concreteness.
It is not easy to be open or too curious.
It is dangerous to dwell too much on things.
To wonder who or why or when, to wonder how is dangerous.
How do we, the people, get outta this hole, what’s the way to fight.
Might I do what Richard and Ralph and Langston’n them did?
It is not easy to be a poet here. Yet I sing. I sing.
Delbert revisits this thought as the final words of the play, and see if you can hear what shifted:
This is the place for thoughts that do not end in concreteness.
It is necessary to be curious.
And dangerous to dwell here, to wonder why and how and when is dangerous.
But that’s how we get out of this hole.
It is not easy to be a poet here. Yet I sing. We sing.
Do you hear it? It may not be easy to be open or curious, to have open-ended thoughts, but it is necessary. It is dangerous to dwell on the who or why or when or how, but it is necessary—it is the way we get out of the holes that we find ourselves in—sometimes, not as a result of our own doing, but as a result of an unjust world occupied by an unjust society. And throughout the entirety of Scripture, we can hear a God calling us to rise up to it.
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.
This week’s question is, “What about injustice?” It is a question that covers a multitude of smaller questions. What about injustices done by, or endorsed by, the church? What about injustices the church has failed to stop? What about injustices that God has not stopped? And especially if God is “big” (like all-present, all-knowing, or all-powerful), what about injustices that God has not stopped?
If it makes you feel any better, these questions have confounded the faithful for literally millennia, even in a story like this one from Exodus that is all about God responding to injustice. Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish thinker contemporaneous with Jesus, understood God to be all-present and so, as the modern Bible scholar James Kugel writes, “What need was there for (God) to lead Moses to one spot or another?...What was the purpose of this burning bush? Why did not God speak to Moses back in his own house, or in a dream at night, and tell him what (God) wanted?”
Why an all-present (or all-anything, for that matter) God would seemingly take on such restrictions can matter a great deal in the middle of an experience that harms us directly, sometimes profoundly, and that we think God could, would, or should prevent. Yet where God might have had the power to create puppets and chose to create people, God becomes far less of an absentee landlord and much more of someone who experiences injustice by right of witnessing it and being affected by it.
That’s why God finally commissions Moses. God says, “I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain.” Whether God is most present in a burning bush, or in a Jerusalem temple, or anywhere else, God remains fully capable of witnessing. God sees what we do to one another, and God hears the cries that ensue. When we perpetrate an injustice, we are impacting God as well as God’s children.
That connection between God and humanity is one of our strongest sources of strength in the face of injustice, and we see it expressed across Scripture. At the other end of the exodus story, after the parting of the Red Sea, Moses’s sister Miriam sings in praise of God. Delbert Tibbs repeats, at both the beginning and end of The Exonerated, “Yet I sing.” Praise of God during or after experiencing injustice is common because of this connection, this understanding that when we are harmed, God is impacted by witnessing that harm. It means we have a shared experience with our maker, and that gives us a way to rise to meet the injustice with dignity, integrity, and resolve.
Recall how Paul likens faith to the “armor of God” in Ephesians 6:11. Armor is protective, but it doesn’t make someone invincible, either—it cushions blows and takes a potentially devastating blow and makes it easier to withstand. Faith can function similarly, to give you a bit of cushion to fall back on, even as the world might deal us a deeply painful blow of injustice. Our faith in God as revealed through Jesus Christ was never meant to be a fair-weather faith, only for when times were good. Faith was always meant to give us a way to keep our humanity intact no matter how we are treated.
Finally, God does not want us to merely survive or endure injustice but also to resist it. My great-grandparents survived the injustice of genocide when so many Armenians did not; I cannot simply go on living my life when my life, and that of my family and relatives were so unlikely to begin with. My ancestors survived injustice so that I could resist injustice.
God did not want Moses to simply go on living his life either; there would have been no need to appear to him. God wanted Moses to take apart, with God’s help, the injustice God had seen. Moses, understandably, was reluctant, going so far as to say in the next chapter, “God, please send someone else.” That may well be the response on your lips if you worry about being too divisive in opposing injustice, but it is not the rebuking of injustice that is divisive—it is the injustice itself.
So, what about injustice? God does not want us to be divisive, yet the divisiveness is already there, it is created by injustice. God does not want injustice, in part because injustice inherently creates division. And injustice is an especially persistent poison, one that has afflicted just about every society in recorded history. Still, God calls us to administer the antidotes to divisiveness and injustice, which are unity and reconciliation. To have the strength to bring forth these antidotes, we rely on our faith, on our shared experience with God as experiencers of, and witnesses to, injustice.
That, to borrow Delbert Tibbs’s phrase, is how we get out of this hole. By relying on a God who sees all things and hears all cries, by placing our faith in a God who witnesses pain and hurt alongside us and then shouts to us, whether from a burning bush or from a theater play or from the lips of a child to do something about it! God may be sovereign, but that does not make us helpless.
The God who was Moses’s help is your help too. And that God is beckoning you forth, like a flame alight in a creosote bush, to something far bigger than complacency or indifference. A big God does not call us to such small things. God has always, and will always, call us to be good—just as God is.
Thanks be to that good God. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
September 20, 2020