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The Road to Freedom: Deliverance |
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Carolyn L Roberts God plants the yearning for freedom within our hearts, and walks with us on our journey. *** Whatever archaeologists and historians may say about the evidence of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, whatever they may say about the evidence of Israel’s leaving of Egypt, Israel’s own story is very clear: it left Egypt physically, bodily, geographically. Israel is equally clear that they leave, not of their own volition, but because God causes them to do so. God is the One who propels them from slavery to the wilderness; God is the One who shields them from danger. But if we can get any version of the Hollywood telling out of our minds, the story we heard today it is not a story of faithful people moving from strength to strength. Right there on the water’s edge, as Pharoah’s army is drawing near, the Hebrew people lose confidence in God’s ability to save them. And the part that makes them really desperate is that they know there is no turning back. In great fear they cry out to the Lord. In their unbridled anxiety they play “I told you so” with Moses: You had to bring us here to die? Didn’t we have graves in Egypt? Didn’t we tell you we were better off serving the Egyptians than dying in the desert? And Moses tells them not to panic, that the God who has brought them safely thus far will continue to lead them on. I’m of the generation that can’t read that story without seeing Charlton Heston thundering to Israel, conveying a strength that would have made Superman green with envy. But years ago, I came across the opinion that Cecil B. DeMille had it all wrong. Yes, he did the walls of water bit and it communicated a sense of power, a sense of miracle. But he never should have cast Charlton Heston. He was too strong. Too sure of himself. Danny DeVito would have been better. Danny DeVito would have made it clear that God is working through him, not the other way around.[1] A man who was neither Heston nor DeVito,a man whose faith was as real and as plagued with doubts as that of Moses, helped lead a different exodus, an exodus much closer to home and to our time. Early 1963 sees a depressed Martin Luther King, Jr. After more than a year of organizing in Albany, Georgia to integrate the city’s public facilities, the most they accomplish is access to the public libraries–after all of the chairs have been removed. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) are invited to Birmingham–nicknamed “Bombingham” for the multiple unsolved bombings in Black neighborhoods–and they badly need a victory. On April 3, just before Palm Sunday, King and other Civil Rights leaders launch a series of sit-ins and demonstrations–with the predictable results. In short order, King is in solitary confinement. White ministers take out an ad in the local paper calling King a troublemaker, opining that his actions are unwise and untimely. Pharoah’s army is not about to let Israel leave their service. On May 2, SCLC launches a new front. Children ranging in age from six to eighteen, gather across the street from Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church. Fifty teenagers from the group leave the church, heading downtown, singing We Shall Overcome. They are arrested. Then another group leaves. They are arrested. And another. And another. Police vans are filled to capacity. The youth are put into school buses. They are filled to capacity. Within three hours, 959 children are in jail; the jails are absolutely packed. The next day, more than a thousand children stay out of school. Bull Connor, the commissioner for public safety, is determined not to let them get downtown, but he has no space left in his jails. He brings firefighters out and orders them to turn hoses on the children. Most run away, but one group refuses to budge. The firefighters shoot them with streams of water strong enough to break bones. The force of the water rolls the children down the street. Connor mobilizes K-9 forces; they attack children trying to enter the church. Still the demonstrations escalate. The jails are filled; the police don’t know what to do. Finally, it is the Birmingham business community, fearing damage to downtown stores, who agrees to integrate lunch counters and hire more Blacks.[2] For those in the Black community, there is no question that this is an exodus story...with a difference. The exodus is mental and emotional and spiritual. It tells of physical presence as opposed to physical removal. But the results are just as devastating to Pharoah’s army. The walls of Pharoah’s own business community finally come crashing down. It is more than the story of David and Goliath—great strength being toppled by less superior force. Certainly, it is that. Only it is more than that. The exodus is a story on the grand scale, on a political scale. Israel and Egypt. Disenfranchised African Americans and Jim Crow. Women and the right to vote. The exodus story resonates because it speaks to the yearning for freedom from oppression that God plants in every human heart. It resonates because it reminds us that our yearning is met with God’s own desire for right relationships between all peoples, that where there is injustice, God works within human history as a force for justice. And this is where the exodus story is at its most profound. This story is not some populist self-help manual on a grand scale. Moses. Sojourner Truth. Harriet Tubman. Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nelson Mandela. Every one of these giants is an exodus figure, confronting injustice and the powers of their time and place in partnership with God’s holy, liberating spirit. *** [1] Aha! September 15,1996, Bob Thompson, facilitator. |