This sermon was preached at First Congregational Church of Battle Creek on September 13th, 2020.
Text: Exodus 6.28-7.3, 7.14-24

I speak in the name of the Crucified and Risen One. Amen.

The river Nile had already run red once, with the blood of Hebrew infants, victims of a cold and calculating power focused only on The Greater Good. But then the river Nile ran red for the second time at Moses’ word. Thousands, tens of thousands of fish, died and floated to the top, pooling into clumps of sour-stinking fish flesh in the tide pools, where children once played and mothers gossipped as they gathered water. 

Before long, the frogs fled the river. Climate refugees themselves, they tried to hide out on land but found it a harsh habitat. The plague took them out too, in great heaps. Flies swept in to clean up the mess—flies and gnats who needed blood meals to be able to lay their eggs, which they found in the ready flesh of Egyptian and Hebrew alike, spreading diseases to humans and animals. Then the storms came, and then darkness, and then death. 

And still Pharaoh would not let Moses’ people go. Despite having a front-row seat to the ecological disaster unfolding in his land, Pharaoh’s heart remained stone-cold.

The writer Charles Eisenstein tells the following story of how he first broke open to the world’s great sickness and became an environmentalist. He writes:

“I was seven or eight years old, standing outside with my father watching a large flock of starlings fly past. “That’s a big flock of birds,” I said.

My father told me then about the passenger pigeon, whose flocks once filled the skies, so vast that they stretched from horizon to horizon for hours on end. “They are extinct now,” he told me. “People would just point their guns to the sky and shoot randomly, and the pigeons would fall. Now there aren’t any left.” I’d known about the dinosaurs before then, but that was the first time I really understood the meaning of the word “extinct.”

I cried in my bed that night, and many nights thereafter. That was when I still knew how to cry—a capacity that, once extinguished through the brutality of teenage boyhood in the 1980s, was nearly as hard to resuscitate as it would be to bring the passenger pigeon back to earth.[1]

These two kinds of extinction are related. From what state of being do we extinguish other species, ruin earth and sea, and treat nature as a collection of resources to be allocated for maximum short-term benefit? It can come only from the constriction, numbing, and diversion of our capacity to feel empathy and love. No mere personal failing, this numbing is inseparable from the deep narratives that run our civilization, and the social systems that those narratives support.” (Climate: A New Story)

From what state of being does Pharaoh look to the Nile river, this entity that was holy to the Egyptian people, which was also holy for the Hebrews too as a gift of God’s creation, and refuse to let the Hebrews go? 

Instead of seeing the unfolding climate catastrophe as a symptom of a much larger issue, instead of recognizing his role in the disaster, as the storytellers of Exodus hand it to us, we can imagine him shrugging it off and passing an ordinance to fund the digging of wells along the banks of the Nile, putting a state-sponsored band-aid on the problem that the state caused in the first place.

Pharaoh was living in the narrative of “too big to fail.” In his view, the world depended on his running it. It’s the same narrative that so many of those in power occupy today: that no matter what problem they might face, they have the power, privileges, and resources to engineer their way around it. Meanwhile, those without those powers and privileges take the hit. Bloody river? Not his problem. Go dig a well.

A nagging thought continues to catch my attention as we plunge further into the chaos of our election season. What if the real challenge we’re facing as a species isn’t primarily an ecological one? What if the actual challenge we’re facing is a human one? What if the crisis is actually our assumption that “someone must be stopped,” that this is someone else’s fault, full stop?

The problem is the same problem that Pharaoh faced, and for which both Egyptian and Hebrew alike, animal and plant and human alike all suffered. It’s the same story that drives us into the comforting arms of our favorite addictions, whether that addiction is an addiction to alcohol, or consumption of resources, or an ideology, whatever we can get our hands on to ease the pain.

I believe the story we’re actually living is the false narrative that we are separate from the world. That we are separate from each other. That our actions have no impact on others, or on the planet, and that our suffering is not intertwined. I’ve made this point before, and I believe it stands. The storytellers of Exodus say that Pharaoh’s heart is hardened. Charles Eisenstein had tenderness beaten and bullied out of him as a teenager in the 1980s. And I know as someone socialized as a man, that harshness and hardness is still there: other folks don’t matter. Compassion doesn’t matter. You have to win at all costs.

I believe that that is the story that allowed our country to bungle its response to COVID-19 so disastrously. That’s the story that has us constantly treating the symptoms of our addiction to energy and growth and fossil fuels and progress instead of actually looking at the underlying cause. 

I believe that’s the story that is rearing its ugly head in white supremacist violence, in sexism and homphobia, in ecological catastrophe, and in our culture’s inability to deal with conflict in any way besides blowing up or shutting down. It’s the story of our own hardness of heart, and our inability—or unwillingness—to see that we are not separate from each other, from the other-than-human world, or from God. 

Last summer, youth from around the world led a rallying cry meant to agitate a real response to our current climate crisis:  “we have to do something before it’s too late!” As glad as I am to see young people leading the charge, I despair that there will never be a “too late” for the Pharaohs of this world. There will never be a “too late” for those who can afford a way out, those who can call up Elon Musk and go live on the Moon. Too late never came for Pharaoh, even after the death of Egypt’s firstborn. Not even that grief was enough to break his heart open.

The higher up we are on the food chain, the later that “too late” comes: for the ultra-rich it may never come; for us it may only come only when we reach our maximum tolerance for inconvenience. (Perhaps that’s why Jesus says, “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.”) But for those on the margins of society, for the poorest of the poor, for those whose land and whose livelihood are still the closest to the earth, “too late” may have already come.  The climate displacement has already begun. The extinctions have already begun.

But instead of addressing why the Nile is bloody in the first place, we just dig more wells. 

We put band-aids on bullet wounds. We outsource service to our neighbors to nonprofits. We pay a little more for police officers to have body cams instead of asking hard questions about whether policing is the right model of law enforcement. We indiscriminately build more wind farms and dams, heedless of the ecological cost of our hunger for energy. We make the Other the enemy, whether that Other is a person or group of people, or an ideology itself. 

The reality is that no ideology can save us. No corporation can save us. No technology can save us, nor can any Pharaoh save us. The only thing that can save us is a great breaking-open of our hearts. And I’m afraid that’s not something that we can do solely on our own. (That’s not a popular opinion.)

The cry of the planet in Exodus is that call to a better story. And not just a better story, but a true story: that the Hebrew people, and the Egyptians along with them, are made in the image of God, and each has a right to flourish and be free as one whole system, not as people versus people versus the world. There is no other human enemy. There is only our sickness. And that’s also not a popular opinion.

So what then? I wonder if we can’t begin to see this moment in history as something on the scale of the plagues that slammed Egypt, a cosmic call for us to soften our hearts, an initiation into the reality that we are all connected.  I wonder whether we can’t hear this as a call to a better story. I wonder whether we can’t begin to see in the broken body of the Planet and in the suffering of other humans and life-ways the broken and suffering body of Christ. I wonder whether we can’t begin to hear those cries as our own.

All of this together—COVID, the fires in the Pacific Coast, the hurricanes that slam the Carribean and the Gulf Coast with deeper severity every year, the polar vortices, climate change, all of it—might just be the planet conspiring with God for our liberation, calling out in “groans too deep for words,” to use St. Paul’s phrase, for us to wake up, to be set free. 

Set free from slavery to our ideologies. Set free from our addiction to being right. Set free from the intoxicating myth that the sickness is out there, that the problem is out there, that the pain in the world can be blamed on someone else. 

If Christ has made us free, then we are free indeed: free to love! And if we are free to love, to see that the only way to bring about the change we so desperately see in the world is to be cracked open to love, able to see the richness of God in Every Thing. And that is a much firmer footing on which to stand and say, “let my people and my planet go!”
Even if the hearts of this world’s Pharaohs are never softened, a revolution of love is still possible if a critical mass of ordinary folks, you and I, are so broken open. So St. Paul says, “all of creation cries out as in the pangs of childbirth” as it “waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.” Let any with ears to hear, listen. Amen.