More than 160 years ago, in the middle of a civil war, Abraham Lincoln stood before a divided nation and said something startlingly honest: both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. The prayers of both could not be answered, he said, and that of neither has been answered fully. It is a rare thing to hear a leader admit that our enemies presume divine favor exactly as we do. Far more often you hear the opposite, that God has blessed us in particular, that God sanctions our violence while condemning the violence of others.
This morning’s passage from Exodus is a vivid example of the very claim Lincoln was pushing back against. An angel goes ahead of the people, a pillar of cloud takes up the rear guard, the sea is driven back, the chariot wheels are clogged, and the Egyptians are tossed into the water and drowned. It is one of the most dramatic scenes in scripture, and one of the most powerful stories of God’s presence.
Yet you may find yourself wondering about those Egyptian foot soldiers swirling down to the bottom of the sea, whether they all bore equal responsibility for Pharaoh’s actions, whether they all equally deserved to die. That wondering is not faithlessness. It is what happens when you remember what the Bible actually is: not a history book, not an exercise in impartial detachment, but a library of the many and various ways ancient people experienced God and tried to make sense of their lives in light of that belief.
The author of Exodus took the flight from Egypt, reflected on it, and concluded that God must have been fighting alongside them. We are living in a season when that same conclusion is surging again, in Russia and China and India and Hungary and Germany, and here at home in the Christian nationalism and white nationalism now making open inroads into culture and government.
“God is not a combatant in history, but God is an abiding presence in this world, comforting the afflicted, as the old saying goes, and afflicting the comfortable, leading us all toward wholeness and flourishing through the deep and swirling waters of our own experiences.”
There is another way to read the crossing of the sea. Not as a militant God taking up arms for a favorite people, but as a God who loves freedom and travels with anyone seeking it. If you are looking for justice, God goes with you. If you are on the side of liberation, God leads the way. Heard from the other shore, God was speaking to the Egyptians too, asking them to reconsider, asking them to imagine the humanity of the people they had subjugated.
Our task is not to recruit God into our wars but to become the kind of people, and the kind of nation, that moves so resolutely toward justice that we find God already traveling beside us and calling us forward. That is the work First Plymouth takes up together, a community bound not by whose side we are on but by love, justice, compassion, and hope.
