Texts: Exodus 1: 12-14, 22 – 2-10

A River of Humanity, and a Basket of Pitch

[Following Steve’s sermon is a beautiful rendition of the hymn

“Shall We Gather at the River”

Sung by Brian Cheney]

Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.”

Exodus 1:22

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            I want you to notice the basket first of all.  It’s made of sticks and reeds, coated with a sticky mixture of pitch and tar that binds it together.  It’s not pretty, but the ones who made it weren’t doing it for aesthetic reasons.  They did it to save a life, perhaps many lives.  Note the basket, made of whatever materials were at hand.  The basket is a life raft, upon which hope floats.

            Next, notice the child, floating in that basket upon the river.  He is placed there in an act of desperation, for hunters had come to find the child.  And so his mother makes a bargain only the devil could devise: face the certain death of her child, or to cast him onto the river, where he might drown, where he might starve, where he might become prey to some other creature, or…where he might be rescued, where he might just survive.  Consider the child, entrusted to the flow of the river.

            Now pay attention to the decree, and the one who made it.  The Pharaoh is the ruler of Egypt, and he has a problem on his hands.  For years, the Hebrew people had been a captive population, performing the labor the Egyptians wouldn’t do for themselves – building, cleaning, serving.  But they reproduced at a rate greater than the Egyptians themselves.  The captives would soon outnumber the captors, which has a way of making those maintaining brutal, or asymmetrical relations of power quite nervous.  Just ask the French in Saint-Domingue, what later became Haiti.  Ask the 18^th and 19^th century plantation owners in the Carolinas.  Ask the Israelis, now facing the same reality with Palestinians.  The Egyptians, in other words, confronted the problem of a surplus humanity, too many extra people, and so the Pharaoh devised a solution: Hebrew boys would simply not be permitted to live.  Every Hebrew boy born after the decree would be drowned in the Nile.  The girls, however, could live.  Consider the decree, a solution to the problem of a surplus humanity.

Shift your focus once more, this time toward the women in the story.  One is a Hebrew mother, desperate to save her child.  When the hunters come, she devises a plot, disobeying the Pharaoh’s decree for the sake of her child, for the sake of all children, for the sake of human life everywhere.  It is a woman burdened with concern who creates the basket that floats, a life raft for the child, shaped by pitch and tar, by prayers and by tears.

            But I want you to notice another woman as well.  She too is on the banks of the river, though far downstream from the Hebrew woman.  This second woman is the Pharaoh’s daughter.  And she is troubled in her heart and mind.  She lives in the seat of power.  She is the recipient of privileges and advantages that would have been unimaginable, certainly to the Hebrew women that serve her.  But she has heard the rumors – of children drowned, and of mothers bereft.  She is unsettled by it all, but she is paralyzed by her position, by her privilege, by the hand of fate, which placed her in the palace. 

Now consider the cry.  The cry is what interrupts the stasis and paralysis of Pharaoh’s daughter.  The cry is what quickens her conscience, what sets her in motion, what changes everything for her, but for the very course of history as well.  When she hears the cry coming from the basket of pitch and tar, she knows immediately what it must mean, and she knows what she must do.  She disobeys her father’s decree.  She saves the child’s life, using whatever means of deception and sleight of hand she can employ in order to keep the child safe.  In effect, she uses her position to shelter that life, floating in the basket of pitch and tar.  Because of that courageous decision, to obey her conscience rather than the norms and laws being enacted around her, the Pharaoh’s daughter set the stage for a great reckoning, one that restored a captive people to their full dignity and humanity.

Hold onto each of those elements – a basket and a river, a human life and an inhuman decree, a woman of tears and a woman of defiance.  And then hold onto the cry coming from the bulrushes, the catalyst that quickens the conscience, that alters the flow of history, that corrects a perennial imbalance that somehow, keeps on occurring.  Hold onto them all, for we’ll need them in the journey ahead.

            You know the rest of the story, I imagine.  How the child grows to become a man named Moses, who encounters a god without a name burning like a flame, a Presence that gives him the courage to defy the power of the Pharaoh, and to insist on the humanity, and thereafter the autonomy, of a population deemed extraneous.  The flame, the Presence, had been there all along – guiding a Hebrew mother, quickening the heart of an Egyptian woman – but it grows into a mighty conflagration, where those treated as the refuse of history are afforded their full humanity.  It’s a flame that continues to burn.

The power of the story – of the basket and the child, the women and the flame – does not reside in its historicity.  Its power resides in its universality, its capacity to name not only mythical realities, not only historical moments, but contemporary ones.  The power of the story resides in its capacity to unmask processes and dynamics that occur in all times and places, and to supply a set of alternative choices and possibilities for behaving otherwise within a dehumanizing narrative.  The story, together with all of its elements, is a window not into the past, but into the present.

            There has always been such a thing as surplus populations.  And there have always been techniques employed by the Pharaohs of the world for containing such a population, or for eliminating them altogether.  Several among us just returned from Mexico, where we were reminded that 90% of the indigenous population in that region were killed – through slaughter or disease – during the Spanish conquest.  The rest, like the Hebrews, were enslaved.  But the same has been true here, of course.  The process was different, though no less brutal.  An indigenous population was killed, or enslaved, or contained.  Likewise, a population of kidnapped Africans was put to work, building the infrastructure of the new world.  In time, both came to be regarded as surplus populations.  One strategy our country has used has been the reservation system for the indigenous.  It’s a policy of containment, a kind of spatial prophylactic that prevents contact with the world outside.  To put it crudely, a reservation is a kind of condom, preventing that population from touching the social body.  Another strategy has been mass incarceration.  After the US economy was deindustrialized in the 1970’s and 1980’s, whole swaths of urban dwellers who had migrated to industrial cities for work became human surplus, no longer necessary to the functioning of the economy.  Most, though not all, were black.  Prisons, in other words, have become a technique for warehousing extraneous populations.  The story of the Hebrews helps us to understand the dynamic of surplus populations, and how the Pharoahs of the world find ways to neuter their humanity.

            But the river helps us see something as well.  The river represents the means of escape, a place just beyond the control of the Pharaoh.  It is a place of movement, flowing through different geographies.  It has a current.  It has a flow.  And it is, therefore, a relay system, where those who embark upon it at one end come to be received by those in another location.  That’s what’s happening today among those who flow north from places like Honduras and Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico.  They too are a population deemed extraneous.  Indeed, it is, above all, that population that I’d like you to consider this morning.  Some are fleeing violence.  Some are fleeing poverty.  Some flee a future of servitude, indentured to drug cartels.  They leave parents, siblings, spouses, and children behind, all of whom fear for their safety on the river, but fear more for their safety at home.  And so they enter the flow of the current, submitting to its power, its force, its flow.  To enter that flow is an act of desperation, but also one of hope.  It is an act remarkably similar to what the Bible deems faith, setting out without knowing the way.  The river helps us to see the means of escape used by those deemed extraneous.  There are people on that river.  And there are hazards within that current. 

            But there are also baskets that are bearing those people along.  They’re made of whatever materials or elements lay near to hand.  The baskets represent the ingenuity, creativity, perseverance, and hope that keep everyone on that river afloat.  But the baskets also represent the provisions and prayers offered by those on the banks.  It’s the shelters, o