Bricks, Bread, and Birds

Text  Exodus 1:1-22 & 16:1-8   Date:  October 9, 2011	rian
Bricks, bread &birds  by Travis Smith, Seminarian
“Then the new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power…” Such ominous words.  He goes on, “Look, the Israelites have become too numerous for us, we must oppress them so they won’t dare rebel.”  “They breed so fast!”  The narrator says the land was filled with Hebrews.  Right away we are presented with two worlds in one space.  Ancient texts record life in Pharaoh’s residence as full of everything good.  Ponds brimming with fish, and lakes with exotic birds.  Its meadows are lush with grass, trees full with dates and melons abundant on the sands. At a whim, one could eat anything imaginable.  But Pharaoh was not focused on the luxury surrounding him.  Perched high above in splendor, he is fixated on something much different… watching happy moms and dads enjoying the fruits of God’s labor.  Yahweh has given these fortunate parents a bounty in quick time.  God is in the mood to give in abundance.  From where he sits, there is little reason for Pharaoh to be happy.  He broods at the warped reality in his head.  Because the Israelites are abundant, Egypt must be in danger. “We do not make babies like they do.”  He only sees scarcity.  Those baby boys down there will take his kingdom away.  His stomach churns.  He has the throne but they have the power.  He’s a perfect protagonist.  For Pharaoh is a carnal man, lacking wisdom.  He knows only what eats him up inside. For “he did not know about Joseph.” The new king did not remember.  So he competed.   “It’s us or them.”  The question is, why?  Genesis ended so well. Joseph was an Egyptian hero.  Joseph saved not just one, but both nations. His name was celebrated.  Truth be told, the Egyptian people indentured themselves to Joseph.  The Egyptian people gladly gave their land and themselves in exchange for food in Genesis 47.  They cheered Joseph for saving them.  “You have saved our lives!” (47:25) they proclaimed.  Joseph’s Pharaoh in Genesis was a grateful king and gave the Hebrews the best land in northern Egypt.  And they were fruitful and multiplied.  Everyone was happy -- the Egyptians eating their own grain, the Israelites eating grain and multiplying, and Yahweh was with them all.  And then we turn the page.  The Hebrews kept multiplying!  And apparently the Egyptians had not.  The bonds of friendship were now glares of suspicion. Gone was any commonality.  Any gratitude for the foreigners….had worn thin.  With armies growing stronger all around him, Pharaoh’s heart grew weary.  He saw numbers, not souls.  ‘So let them make bricks!’  “Why bricks?” one should ask.  The storyteller is quite clever really.  The bricks bear resemblance to Pharaoh’s heart.  Hard labor for the Hebrews, to make hardened mud for hardened slave-masters who answered to a hard-hearted Pharaoh.  The irony drips from the pages:  dirty Hebrews doing back-breaking work for a man who looks down on them from on high, wishing he had what they have.  So what do they really have?  What is it that he sees?     Pharaoh hates his new slaves.  In another ancient text, called the Satire of the Trades, we are given a description of a brick maker…, “He is dirtier than…pigs from treading under the mud.  His clothes are stiff with clay; his leather belt is going to ruin…he is miserable…his sides ache, since he must be outside in a treacherous wind…His arms are destroyed with technical work…What he eats is the bread of his fingers, and he washes himself only once a season.  He is simply wretched through and through…” This misery is not enough in Pharaoh’s mind.  It is not enough to work them to exhaustion. He wants their spirits too.  His desperation drives him to the lowest depths of depravity. He wants their baby sons murdered at first breath. He is wicked. The problem with pure evil is that it’s bad, and epic stories rarely like the bad guy winning in the end.  These midwives, the ones Pharaoh confided in to carry out his horrific whim, were not evil like him; they feared God.  In what could have been Israel’s darkest hour we see where the real power lies…The women let the boys live.  The midwives are not afraid of Pharaoh.  Their fear is in the Lord!  They easily outwit the Egyptian king.  “The Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women.  They are vigorous birthers.”  What?  What kind of man accepts this as legit?  Well…a fool does.  God uses simple things to thwart the plans of simpletons.  If he were smart, Pharaoh would have seen this coming.  But Pharaoh didn’t know his Hebrew…  The two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, translate, in the Hebrew, as “beauty” and “fragrant blossom” respectively.  In the midst of so much misery and ugliness, God is near.  There is more to the story than what is on the page.  The root word for Puah is pa’ah… which can mean “to murmur” or “to gurgle.” Robert Alter mentions an ancient rabbi named, “Rashi, who suggests [this root is] the sound a nurturing woman makes to sooth an infant.” (The Five Books of Moses, 310) Where God is, evil cannot prevail. The very women the hapless king entrusts to his evil plan are, from the beginning, given to him by God.  Secret agents for Yahweh.  But we knew this, didn’t we?  For we remember our history.  We remember Joseph.  And we remember what Joseph told us on his death bed. (Gen. 50:24) “God will surely come to your aid.”  For those who do not forget, their gaze is not on what we don’t have, but what we have always had. For their bravery and valor, God gave the midwives families of their own.  The story will end God’s way even when everything points to the contrary.  Life is hard.  It’s full of moments rough and tumble, great and small, moments when God looks to be elsewhere.  But these are not to be the end of the story. This story in Exodus is not a single event, but rather one incarnation of a beautifully re-occurring cycle we read throughout the Bible.  And it is a cycle of which we find ourselves in the midst today.  As hard times seem constant in our lives, so too, are the times the Lord comes to our aid.  He is the God who loves in abundance.  He is the God who remembers.   But our reading is not over.  As pharaoh’s memory had failed, so does the collective memory of the Israelites in the wilderness.  Not sitting high above a slave encampment perched around lush gardens and eating bon bons.  They were knee deep in sand, hungry, thirsty and afraid.  Their hearts began to grumble. They were only two months removed from crossing the Red Sea and witnessing their evil slave master die under the mighty hand of God.  Their God led them from slavery to unimaginable freedom. The God who was leading them now.  And their present hunger pains seemed to have eclipsed all of it.  Stomachs growling…cotton mouthed and dirty all over again, they grumbled about what they did not have, losing sight of what they did have. “Egypt was so much better than this.  We ate and we drank…we didn’t even know how good we had it!”  At times, the distinction of who’s good and who’s bad is not so obvious.  No matter, this story is not essentially about us. …And God remembered his beloved, “I will rain down bread and birds from heaven for you.”  The Lord heard their grumbling.  The Lord remembered when his people did not.  It might not have ever crossed their minds that they were not much different from their hated foe, the king of Egypt.  But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. The same God who created the heavens and the earth in His abundance is the same God who created new life in the midst of a wretched existence and is the One who provided sweet bread and more quail than they could eat in the middle of the desert.  In the midst of nothing, He made more than they could ever handle.  Because that is who He is.  Regardless of how we are.  And the story continues…in our grumblings and in our distrust and anxieties…in our failures to remember…God never stops giving to us in abundance. Amen.