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Whenever I hear this story, the story of the Israelites crossing the sea, I always find
myself thinking about something that I don’t think the author wanted me to think
about. As the waters rush back in, after the Israelites have crossed through, and the
sea returns to its place, and as the Egyptian army is swallowed up by the mighty
power of the Israelite God, I always find myself wondering, did those Egyptian
soldiers have families? Did they have hometowns, did they have mothers, did they
have dreams for the future, and as the sea rushed in around them, did they think of
their children, back home in Egypt, who were going to be left fatherless? There in
that swirling water, in other words, I always think about whether those Egyptians
were human beings, or not?
I don’t think that’s what the author had in mind for readers of this story. I don’t
think the author meant for us to read “Egyptians” and think of human beings. I think
the author probably meant us to see those Egyptians, and think, “bad guys.” They
aren’t supposed to be human to us, because we are supposed to see them and
recognize that they are on the wrong side of history, that they are on the wrong side
of the sea, that they are on the wrong side of God. These were, after all, the
oppressors; they were the slaveholders and the taskmasters, the ones the Israelites
were fleeing from. We aren’t supposed to care if they drown in the sea; we aren’t
supposed to wonder what their names are. But stories can be complicated, stories
can be messy, and this story is complicated and messy and both satisfying and
disturbing all at once.
The story of the exodus, the story of Israel’s flight out of Egypt and into the
wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, is probably the foundational story of the bible.
This is the central narrative that says who Israel is; this is the story that defines a
people. This story is recited, again and again, all through the Old Testament. It is told
almost any time God addresses the people: “I am the Lord your God who brought
you out of Egypt.” It is recounted in poetry in the Psalms and it is alluded to in the
prophets. The story of the exodus is what makes Israel Israel. And even in the New
Testament, even in the Gospel of Matthew, echoes of this story reverberate in the
life of Jesus. Read the story of Jesus’ life in Matthew, and see how it is patterned on
the life of Moses, how murderous leaders and bodies of water and wildernesses and
mountaintops shape the story. The story of the exodus is the pivot point of this
history, it is the fulcrum of these people, it is the place from which the people of God
proceed.
And it is all on the backs of drowned Egyptians. And I always wonder: were they all
loyal pharaoh-ists? Did they all agree with his policies? If there had been an election,
for Pharaoh, would they have voted for him? Did they like him, did they agree with
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him? How bad, in other words, were the bad guys? Were they all equally to blame in
the oppression of Israel, or were some of them just following orders? And does just
following orders make you just as guilty as the pharaoh?
To me, the question of that story boils down to this: did God take sides? Did God
judge between the two parties, seeing victims on one side and oppressors on the
other, and take the side of the victims? That’s certainly what it looks like. That’s
certainly how the story gets told. And on the one hand I like that: I like the idea that
God is just, that God recognizes oppression and intervenes to stop it. I wish God did
more of that, truth be told. But on the other hand seeing what it looks like when God
does intervene makes me uncomfortable. Those Egyptian soldiers, drowned there in
the sea, they were guilty, in a way. They were part of a system of enslavement and
oppression. But to see them dead—at the hands of a righteous God—that doesn’t
seem quite right either. It’s a complicated story, and a messy one, and there’s no way
out of that.
To my mind one of the most vital and important things to happen in Christianity in
the past hundred years is the rise of something called Liberation Theology.
Liberation Theology, if you don’t know about it, came out of Central and South
America in the 60s and 70s and 80s, out of groups of Catholic laypeople, mostly, who
felt like their lives and their experiences weren’t really accounted for by traditional
Christian theology. These were oppressed people, not unlike the Israelites,
oppressed by economic injustice and violence and the slow-burning skirmishes in
the cold war that were being fought in that region in that time. These were people
who felt that, like the Israelites in Egypt, they were overlooked and exploited at
every turn, denied basic human rights, and kept in a permanent state of poverty and
servitude. And they wondered, and they asked: where is God in this? Where is God
in the midst of our suffering. Is God neutral? Does God care? Does God take notice of
us? Or, is God on the side of the powerful? Or could it be that God is on our side, the
side of the oppressed? And for many of them, they looked to this story from Exodus
for answers.
When I read the story of the exodus, the story of the Egyptian army being swallowed
up in the sea, I am conflicted. I am conflicted because while I like to believe that God
is just, and while I like to see evidence of God’s justice in the world, I also happen to
have more in common with the Egyptians than the Israelites. I am a man, and white,
and straight, and I am a middle-class professional, and generally comfortable in my
life. In some ways the world is built for people like me, people like me are often on
top. I occupy a seat of privilege in part just because of who I am. And so this story
bothers me. This messy story bothers me. It concerns me in a way I can’t completely
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articulate, because it makes me ask: if this is a story about which side God is on, then
which side am I on?
Liberation theology has fewer qualms with this story. As a theology by and for
people who have been oppressed and overlooked, Liberation looks at the exodus
story and says “look, this is evidence, this is proof that God in on the side of the
oppressed.” This shows that God is on our side, that God is not neutral or apathetic,
or absent, that God is active and working for justice for the oppressed.
Now this makes a lot of people uncomfortable. This makes a lot of people nervous,
for a lot of reasons. The Catholic church got nervous about liberation theology
because it came from the bottom up and not the top down. Other Christians got
nervous because they didn’t think God takes sides on things like this, things like
economic or social status. Lots of people got nervous because it was right in the
middle of the Cold War, and some people said it sounded like Marxism. Lots of
people were uncomfortable with Liberation Theology, but for many people
Liberation Theology came as good news, good news to the poor, as Jesus read from
Isaiah in the synagogue of Galilee, good news to the captives, as it says, good news to
all those who had been oppressed. God takes sides, they said, and God takes the side
of the oppressed.
The funny thing about how controversial Liberation Theology is, is that it really
shouldn’t be controversial. A read through the bible reveals that the tradition has
always been about God being on the side of the downtrodden. There are very few
frontrunners in the bible; there are very few obvious candidates for greatness who
go on to claim that greatness. Instead, there is a steady stream of the oppressed, the
downtrodden, the nobodies, the outcasts and the untouchables who end up being
critical to the story of God. There are younger sons who turn out to lead the family.
There are women who seize the initiative and change their circumstances. There are
weaker nations that take on stronger nations; there are shepherds who become
kings. There are tricksters and charlatans and people with no prospects who end up
being key to the whole thing. And there at the edge of the sea, there, just steps ahead
of the Egyptian army, there was a man who was born into a genocide and put into a
basket by his own mother to be floated down a river. The biblical witness is pretty
clear on this: God does stand with the oppressed; God does seem to have a certain
fondness for the little people. The bible is subversive this way, and it’s that very
subversion that makes people nervous—that makes people look at things like
Liberation Theology with skepticism.
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The question for me—the question for us—is not whether God is on our side, but
whether we are on God’s side. It sounds trite to put it that way, it sounds like
bumper sticker theology, but I think it’s true. God has been clear about where God
stands. God has been clear about the kinds of persons who end up playing big roles
in the story of God’s people. God has been clear about how we ought to treat each
other. The question of whose side God is on has really been answered, pretty
thoroughly, through millennia of stories in which God stands with the downtrodden
and the oppressed. Today’s scripture is exhibit A, but there are a lot of other
exhibits.
The story of the exodus is the story of God shepherding slaves out from under the
burdens of their oppressors. It’s a story of how God stands not with the powerful
but with the weak, how God walks not with the pharaohs but with the common
people. And while I know that, intellectually, there is still something about those
Egyptian soldiers that bothers me. I still wonder whether it had to be that way. I still
wonder whether God is really the kind of God who causes a soldier to drown who is
just doing his job. I’m still disturbed, even though I like the idea that God is about in
the world doing justice, I am still disturbed by the thing I’m not supposed to notice,
that there as God’s people walk up into the desert on the far side of the sea, there are
dead Egyptians floating in the water.
This is the part of the sermon where preachers are supposed to wrap it up nicely,
and tell you what it all means. It’s the part where I’m supposed to resolve the
tension that I’ve built up, the tension between a just God who is on the side of the
little people on the one hand, and my discomfort at the specter of dead Egyptian
soldiers on the other. That’s what happens next. But I can’t do it. I don’t know how
to do it. I don’t know how to stand up and cheer when God delivers the oppressed
from the chains of bondage, but at the same time not like the way God does it. I don’t
know what to do with that.
So I will leave it there. I will leave the tension stretched thin; I will leave the conflict
unresolved. Sometimes I think that’s what the bible is meant to do anyway—it’s
meant to present us with so many contradictions that we can’t find easy answers to
any of our questions. All I can glean from this, the only moral I can find in this story,
is that God is on the side of the weak, that God is on the side of the oppressed, that
God is on the side of the poor and the homeless and the immigrant and the battered
partner and the clinically depressed; that God is on the side of the slave and the
child and the soldier with PTSD and all those who are discriminated against because
of their skin or their sexuality, that God is on their side, and that if I want to be on
God’s side, then I need to be on their side too. And even that is complicated, even
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that leaves me queasy about those Egyptian soldiers who got caught up in the
middle. But stories are complicated, and this is God’s story, and this is the story of
God’s people, who are the oppressed and the outcast and the downtrodden and the
half-forgotten, the weak and the strange and the ones nobody much thinks about.
These are God’s people, and this is their story. And the question to us is, are we on
their side?