Moses, Pharaoh, and lady Liberty
(Rutgers,
July 4, 1999; Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A; Independence Day)
(Exodus 1:6-14, 22: 2:1-10, OT, pp. 54-55; Matthew 11:28-30, NT, p. 12)
The
only superpower in the world of that day was Egypt, and the name of its head of
state was Pharaoh Seti I. The time:
around the year1300 B.C. The ruler:
a young, vigorous, divine warrior, the nation’s guarantor of stability in a
world of change + flux.
Seti’s
glory gave meaning and purpose to his subject’s lives.
So much so that the great Temple of Abydos, built during his reign, not
only had a chapel for each of the six greatest gods of Egypt, but also a 7th
chapel commemorated to Pharaoh Seti I.
Seti
undertook to build temples and monuments of every kind, and the remains of a
number of these are part of the cultural treasure we associate with ancient
Egypt. In the Delta, he erected
whole new cities, including the store city of Ramses – named after his father,
Ramses I. Despite the hardship and
suffering this imposed on citizens, they devoted energy to the grand enterprises
of the king.
The
citizens had some measure of choice about bearing these burdens.
But all the foreigners living in the land were pressed into slavery.
For the Yeno’amites, and Kadeshites, and Nomads of Shashu, for the
People of Amor, and Hamathites, and Hebrews, Seti’s burden was hard, and his
yoke was heavy.
As
we heard in our First Lesson, from the Book of Exodus:
“The Egyptians set taskmasters over the people of Israel to afflict
them with heavy burdens; and they built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and
Ramses…. The Egyptians made the
people of Israel serve with rigor and made their lives bitter with hard service,
in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field.”
But
God sent the Hebrews a deliverer. Our
lesson narrates the birth of Moses, a birth that took place under most
inauspicious circumstances – the killing of all the Hebrews; male children;
the hiding of baby Moses in the bulrushes along the Nile; the irony of Moses’s
being rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter and reared in Pharaoh’s very own court.
And
Moses grew up to become the leader who delivered Israel from the heavy yoke of
slavery, the leader who brought them to freedom and independence, so that they
could live as the people of God, liberated from the tyranny of the
slavemaster’s yoke.
Now
leap with me forward in time to a period some 1300 years later, a time when Jews
were again living under the whip of a tyrant, a time when a despot named Herod
was ruling over the people in the name of the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar.
This
was the time of the birth of Jesus, and the Gospel of Matthew paints the era of
Herod and Jesus, as the age of a new Pharaoh and of a new Moses.
At Jesus’s birth, Herod orders the slaying in Bethlehem of all the
Jewish male children 2 years of age + younger.
But Jesus is saved from that slaughter when his family takes flight.
Matthew
goes out of his way to tell us that the reign Jesus has come to establish is
totally different in kind from the reign of Herod and Caesar.
So Matthew tells us of words of comfort spoken by Jesus to his oppressed
and sorely afflicted people: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are
carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you Rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in
heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Today
is July 4th-
And
it’s a day for reflecting on our national heritage of freedom from tyranny and
for reflecting on our duty as disciples of Christ to model for the world, on
behalf of God, a light burden and an easy yoke.
So
this morning I want to reflect with you on 2 symbols of our nation consistent
with the messages we’ve heard in today’s lessons. I want to reflect with you on the Statue of Liberty and on
the poem that is inscribed on a plaque at its base, the poem entitled, “The
New Colossus.”
The
Statue of Liberty has stood tall in the harbor of our city since it was
assembled there and dedicated in 1886.
It
was designed by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi.
He bore an Italian family name; he spoke German; he was a citizen of
France, living in Alsace; and his religion was Protestant.
In
1856, Bartholdi had journeyed to Egypt. There
he had been inspired by the monumental architecture of the pharaohs, such as
Seti I and his son Ramses II.
Bartholdi
concluded that he wanted to deliver his own message for his own time and place
using that same medium of monumentality of scale.
Now,
in developing the message he wanted to deliver to his time and place through a
monumental sculpture, Bartholdi was influenced by French artists and essayists
who sought to reestablish the French Republic and liberte.
He was also influenced by the Book of Exodus, with its focus on God’s
gift of liberty to Israel through the leadership of Moses.
For
example, you’ve all noted the crown of rays on the statue’s head.
These rays are like those assigned to the figure of Moses in the
tradition of European art.
Many
art historians also suggest that Bartholdi’s sculpture was fashioned in
deliberate contrast to certain features of a painting by Ferdinand-Victor-Eugene
Delacroix – “Liberty Leading People to the Barricades,” in which Lady
Liberty is portrayed holding a rifle + flag, the tricolor.
In
contrast, Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty stands with a torch + book.
The torch: a symbol illumination. In
contrast to “Liberty Leading People to the Barricades” this is “Liberty
Enlightening the World,” and doing so not by military might, but by peaceful
and gentle example.
The
book: Moses is commonly represented
in European art holding in his hand the book of God’s law, the Torah.
Bartholdi here builds on that image, for he saw the law of the American
Constitution as rooted in the law of God taught by Moses.
I
hope you see how connected this inspiring statue is to the figures and themes of
this morning’s Old Testament Lesson.
The
building projects of the pharaohs may have been the inspiration for
Bartholdi’s monumentality of scale, but it was Moses, not pharaoh, who was the
model for the subject of his statue – which stands with Moses’s crown of
rays and his book of law, not with the whip and scepter typically held by
pharaohs not with the rifle + flag assigned Lady Liberty by Delacroix.
How
appropriate it is, therefore, that there was attached to the base of this Statue
of Liberty a plaque that has inscribed upon it a sonnet by one of the 19th
–century “daughters” of Moses, a Jewish poet named Emma Lazarus.
In
this poem, Lazarus contrasts the Statue of Liberty to the great statue of the
sun-god Helios that towered over a harbor of ancient Greece.
That statue – the Colossus of Rhodes – stood martial and masculine,
in contrast to the Statue of Liberty, standing feminine + welcoming.
The Colossus of Rhodes was a symbol of pomp, power, + might, but this new
Colossus, Lady Liberty, is a symbol of harboring refuge.
Lazarus’s
poem as a symbol of our nation’s independence strikes me as being remarkably
similar in spirit to the words of Jesus that are found in this morning’s
lesson from the Gospel of Matthew – gentle, welcoming, harboring, extending to
all the promise of a light burden and an easy yoke.
Listen
again to the words of “The New
Colossus: by Emma Lazarus: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame with
conquering limbs astride from land to land, here at our sea-washed sunset gates
shall stand a mighty woman with a torch whose flame is the imprisoned lightning
and her name, “Mother of Exiles.” From her beacon hand glows worldwide
welcome. Her mild eyes command the airbridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp,” cries she with silent lips.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe
free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
On
this July 4th, we may do homage to both our spiritual heritage and
our national heritage by asking ourselves if we as individuals and if we as a
nation are working to fulfill God’s will that all people should be free from
oppression and tyranny and that liberty should be spread not by war and weaponry
but by the light of gentle example.
One
of the most despairing of early 20th century authors was an Austrian
philosopher and novelist named Franz Kafka (b. 1883), who died in 1924.
In his posthumously published novels, Kafka created a nightmare world of
unrelieved despair in which humanity acts inhumanely and in which pride triumphs
over gentleness, violence, over peacefulness, oppression, over liberty.
In
reflecting on the democratic experiment of America, Kafka found occasion for yet
more cynicism, for he believed it would be but a matter of time before America,
too, would betray the ideals embodied in its Statue of Liberty.
In
1913 Kafka wrote the novel Amerika.
In it, he describes a boy on a boat sailing into New York harbor and , of
course, standing on deck to see the Statue of Liberty.
As the boy catches sight of the statue its upheld arm gleams with the
glare of the sun, and he thinks he sees the statue holding aloft not a torch but
a sword.
Kafka
intends this vision of a sword-wielding statue to stand as a symbol for the loss
of the American ideal, as the ideal of being hospitable gives a way to the
reality of defending our shores, + as the ideal of extending liberty through
peaceful means gives way to the reality of paths of war.
So,
on this July 4th it is appropriate for us to ask:
Which America is the America of today and of tomorrow?
Are we the America envisioned by Bartholdi and Lazarus, a nation
welcoming all strangers and establishing liberty through the light of wisdom,
law and gentleness? Or have we
become, at least in part, the America envisioned by Kakfa, an America of lost
ideal, a nation seeking to stave off foreigners, a nation wielding power through
weapons + warfare?
I
can’t help but wonder what the answer to my question really is when I witness
today’s overt hostility toward the immigrants and refugees coming from Latin
America, + Asia, + Africa – a hostility expressed from the strawberry fields
of California to the hospital emergency rooms of the Middle West, to the beaches
of Florida, to the police precincts of New York City. I have to wonder whether Lady Liberty’s torch has indeed
been replaced by Kafka’s sword.
And
I can’t help but wonder whether it was Bartholdi who was right, or whether it
was Delacroix who was right, when I pause to reflect on the events leading up to
the bombing of Yugoslavia, and on our nation’s failure during that critical
time to practice skillful peacemaking and diplomacy.
Why
is it that our nation is unwilling to spend as much on establishing an academy
of peacemaking and diplomacy as it is willing to spend on weapons of war?
Was Delacroix right – Liberty bears a rifle; or was Bartholdi –
Liberty carries a torch? Can
liberty be spread only by war and weapons, or can it be extended by the light of
wisdom + law + gentleness?
I
pray that on this July 4th , we and other Americans may renew in all
dimensions of our lives a personal commitment to the vision of Bartholdi and
Lazarus.
I
pray that we who are disciples of Christ will open wide our arms and proclaim,
in the name of Jesus, both to our own society and to the world: “Come to me,
all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in
heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Let
us prey.
O
Sovereign God, You led people to this land from all the continents on earth.
We have not been without our conflicts and our violence.
But you have created in us a love of peace and of liberty. Have mercy, O God, on the heart of this land.
Make us truly compassionate and just, both here at home and abroad.
Raise up in us a right patriotism that seeks good for all humankind and
foster liberty and justice for all. Through
Christ, we pray. Amen.
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