The
Egyptians persecution of the Israelites grew to an epidemic of
infanticide. Yesterday we read about
Pharaoh’s command that Israelite baby boys be drowned in the Nile. When Moses is finally ‘thrown into the river’
it is in a basket made of papyrus reeds, covered in tar and pitch. Now, if you read the footnotes in your Bible,
you realize that the word translated as ‘basket’ is actually the same word as
is translated ‘ark’ in other places. The
words for tar and pitch are different than the ones in Genesis 6, but the
allusion is there. Clearly we are meant
to think about Noah and his ark and the way that God saved him from deadly
waters in order to keep His promises intact and moving towards fulfillment.
A second
interesting wrinkle—and this one anticipates tomorrow’s reading—is that Moses
is saved for a purpose, namely, to save Israel from the oppression of the
Egyptians. Now, in his youth, Moses
kills a man who was beating a fellow Hebrew.
Notice that Moses has no word from God about his own role as Israel’s
savior; that act of violence is completely on his own. He tries to be a deliverer in the ways of the
world, trading violence for violence, and he ends up in exile. In tomorrow’s reading, the Lord calls Moses
to deliver His people Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Moses does
everything he can think of to get out it.
Having tried it his own way once and having paid the price, Moses is
unwilling to try it God’s way (a way, incidentally, in which Moses has no
violent role to play).
So, it’s a
pretty obvious move to see in the Flood and in Moses’ rescue on the Nile, an
adumbration, a foreshadowing, of Baptism.
In that Sacrament, we ‘float’ on destructive waters, since the water of
Baptism drowns the old man and yet produces a new life in us. (I’m not just making that up; St. Peter makes
the connection between the Flood and Baptism in 1 Peter 3). We have this ‘being saved’ in common with
Moses. And, while we are not called to
such an extraordinary purpose as Moses, we are called for God’s purposes—to be
a light to the world, to make His grace known in word and deed.
Like Moses,
I think that sometimes we’d rather serve God’s purposes in our own ways, rather
than in the Lord’s ways. Unfortunately,
our ways are too often just like the ways of the world. We don’t mind serving Him as long as we don’t
have to learn whole new ways of being.
But to serve God’s purposes means just that, learning new ways to
live. The world teaches us to value
independence and strength; the Lord teaches us to value dependence on Him and
on each other and to value humility and weakness. Those things call for a colossal realignment
of our ways of thinking about God’s world and our place in it.
I struggle
with this constantly because I am constantly measuring my efforts by the lights
of the world. As a pastor, I really want
to lead a growing church, and it aggravates and vexes me when we’re not
‘powerful.’ I want to lead a church of
influence in the world, and when the world rejects the ways that we’re trying
to influence it or when members aren’t committed enough to how I think that
influence ought to be exerted or a bunch of other factors remind me that God’s
people are strangers and pilgrims in a foreign land, I struggle to accept that. But there’s the core challenge: will you be God’s kind of people, operating
from apparent weakness yet trusting in a God who demonstrates His strength in
that weakness, or will you be your own kind of people, grasping for power and
trying to solve the world’s problems in your own kind of way?
The rescue
that Baptism works addresses this challenge.
It reminds us, first, that we have been saved to be God’s kind of
people. As a matter of fact, it drowns
our old tendencies and creates God’s new and gentle life within us. And, second, it reminds us of the forgiveness
and new beginning that the Lord gives us every day—especially when we’ve tried
to go our own way and ended up in trouble on account of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.