July 26, 2020: The Forming Between
Exodus 2:11-25
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
July 26, 2020
One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” He answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh. He settled in the land of Midian, and sat down by a well. The priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. But some shepherds came and drove them away. Moses got up and came to their defense and watered their flock. When they returned to their father Reuel, he said, “How is it that you have come back so soon today?” They said, “An Egyptian helped us against the shepherds; he even drew water for us and watered the flock.” He said to his daughters, “Where is he? Why did you leave the man? Invite him to break bread.” Moses agreed to stay with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah in marriage. She bore a son, and he named him Gershom; for he said, “I have been an alien residing in a foreign land.” After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.
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He was a boy, maybe eight or nine-years-old, when he fell down into a forgotten well. Fortunate to remain uninjured from the long fall, young Bruce found himself at the bottom of the well shaft with no way out. But his accidental arrival in the well disrupted its residents—thousands of bats were awakened from their daytime slumber and attacked the young boy, flying, swarming around him. And though his father rescued him shortly after his fall, he was left traumatized—terrified of bats.
Fast forward days, perhaps months. Young Bruce is attending a play with his parents. In one of the scenes of the play, the actors are dressed in all black, flying around on ropes. Young Bruce is reminded of the bats that traumatized him, and he is about to have a panic attack. Fear in his eyes, he asks his parents if they can leave, so Bruce and his parents exit out the side door of the theater into a darkened alleyway where they run into a man, a thief, who takes his dad’s wallet and his mother’s pearls, and shoots them both, with young Bruce watching. His parents dead, Bruce is now an orphan.
So begins the story of Batman in Batman Begins. The little boy, of course, is Bruce Wayne. Batman Begins depicts the origin story of Batman. It offers viewers a psychological profile of Bruce Wayne; it helps us understand why he would eventually don a bat costume and become a vigilante crime fighter in Gotham City.
You see, experience forms us.
Bruce Wayne would grow up, and eventually go spelunking down into the same well shaft he fell into as a child. A self-imposed exposure therapy—facing bats in order to overcome his fear of bats. By day, Bruce Wayne presented as a billionaire playboy. By night, he would become Batman, singlehandedly taking care of Gotham’s criminals, like the one who shot his parents right in front of him.
Now, you realize Batman’s form of justice isn’t quite socially acceptable. Batman’s vigilante justice lacks legal authority. Batman, like most vigilantes, has his own sense of justice—what’s right and what’s wrong—whether it’s legal or not.
Today in our scripture lesson, we read about a man with his own sense of justice. His name is Moses. Our text today picks up with Moses all grown up, forty-years-old, seeing an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew. So he kills the Egyptian. Murders him. Out of his own sense of justice. Moses is a vigilante. And like Batman, we know enough of Moses’ story to begin to build a psychological profile for him.
In the preceding verses, we learn about some early trauma Moses experienced. Pharaoh was concerned about the population of Hebrew slaves. Since the time of Joseph, the Hebrews had grown so numerous as to pose a threat to Pharaoh. Pharaoh decided to slaughter all newborn boys as a means of population control. When Moses was born, his Hebrew mother hid him for three months. But when she could no longer hide him, she placed baby Moses in a basket and set him in some reeds on the bank of the river. (Early trauma #1). Pharaoh’s daughter went to the river to bathe and found the baby, deciding to keep him. Moses’ older sister, who had been watching from a distance, offered to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby. Pharaoh’s daughter agreed. So guess who the sister found to nurse baby Moses? His own mother! But when the baby was weaned, Pharaoh’s daughter reclaimed Moses (early trauma #2), bringing him to Pharaoh’s house, raising Moses as her own child.
A Hebrew growing up in Pharaoh’s house may not have fit in too well. Not exactly Egyptian, but more privileged than his own Hebrew people. Perhaps the only survivor among his male Hebrew peers from Pharaoh’s slaughter. How might all of these experiences have shaped a young Moses?
We don’t know if Moses interacted with his birth family or his Hebrew people during his childhood and young adult years. How does Moses know he’s a Hebrew? Maybe he sent a DNA sample to 23andMe. We just don’t know. All we know is that by the time he is 40-years-old, he is keenly aware of his Hebrew roots, he is angry about the oppression of his people, and he is ready to take the law into his own hands. So he kills an Egyptian he sees beating a Hebrew. Then, with his heightened sense of justice, Moses attempts to intervene between two Hebrew men fighting. And when they confront him, when he realizes his murder has been found out and that Pharaoh wants to kill him, he flees. The vigilante becomes a fugitive from the law. And once more, even as a fugitive, Moses’s sense of justice prompts him to intervene—to fight for the underdog—when some shepherds bother seven young ladies just trying to water their father’s flock. He ends up marrying one of those young ladies. And Moses, the vigilante, the fugitive, spends the next 40 years working for his father-in-law as a shepherd. Back home in Egypt, Moses is famous, even infamous. But here in Midian, he’s a nobody. A foreigner. A migrant. With a criminal past and a menial job. Moses in Midian isn’t exactly living up to his potential.
Have you ever felt like Moses in Midian?
Maybe you experienced early trauma. Maybe you haven’t fit in. Maybe there’s something from your past that looms large in your life. Maybe you sense God calling you to something more, but you’re seemingly stuck in a dead-end job like Moses, or some life situation that chose you instead of vice versa.
I think we’re all experiencing the latter. We all find ourselves in a situation that chose us. We didn’t choose a pandemic and its accompanying loss of health, loss of life, loss of jobs and stock market stability. Not only the pandemic—but the cultural chaos, the polarization, the lack of trust of institutions and one other. Oh sure, we’ve all probably made some individual choices that have contributed to the greater chaos and disruption, but I doubt there are too many people who would choose the wide scale confusion and disorientation we’re experiencing in the year of our Lord 2020.
So hear me say this: be gentle with you right now. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you feel like you’re not living into your potential, or not accomplishing the things you set out to accomplish back in a day less fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. This is “The Summer Between.” These are liminal days, between the world as we knew it before the pandemic and whatever it is that comes next. We are Moses in Midian. I just hope we’re not in Midian for forty years!
But think about those forty years—about what Moses learned, how he grew, how God used the time “between” to form him. As a shepherd, Moses would take Jethro’s flocks to graze the land. He would learn where all the streams and rivers were. He would discover caves for shelter and wells for water. He would learn his way around the verdant fields of springtime, and the coolness of higher elevations during summer. He would learn where the fig trees and olive trees were located. The land served as the crucible—forming Moses unawares into a man who could lead two or three million Hebrews out of Egypt into this land “between” slavery and sovereignty.
Forty years in the land. Time to think. Time to pray. Time to grow. Time to become something more than a misfit vigilante fugitive. In the same way that Bruce Wayne would spend time in a foreign place learning martial arts so that one day he could become Batman, Moses would spend time in a foreign place learning the land so that one day he could become the leader of the Hebrew nation.
And then one day, out shepherding Jethro’s flocks in the land he knew like the back of his hand—the land where nothing surprising ever happened—where every fig tree bore fruit in spring and every stream yielded water on cue—he saw something he’d never seen: a bush, burning but not consumed. And a voice speaking to him from out of the bush, calling him from out of the “between” to the “beyond.” “Set my people free!”
You see, unbeknownst to Moses, those forty years in the crucible of the land was forming him for what God would call him to do.
I believe that we, you and me, we are being formed right now. We are Moses in Midian, biding our time, doing the that which we know how to do. We have our daily routines and our menial tasks; little surprises us in this land “between.” But God is forming us. God is preparing us for whatever comes next. Like Moses, we might not know what that’s going to look like. We can’t see into the future and know what God will ask of us.
But we do know what is required of us right now, so that we’ll be ready to say to God, “Here am I, Lord” when the time comes:
Stay alive. That was the primary reason why Moses was in Midian—to simply stay alive. Moses couldn’t lead the people out of Egypt as a dead man, so he fled to Midian, hid away from Pharaoh and certain death. Similarly, it’s hard to do God’s work from a hospital bed or a grave, so we hide away from a deadly virus, depending on our risk factors and risk tolerance. Stay alive, friends!
Grow deep. Moses spent forty years tending sheep, spending days on end alone in the desert. He had a lot of time to think. A lot of time to pray. A lot of time to contemplate. No 24-hour pseudo-news channels brainwashing him. No podcasts. No talk radio. No books on tape. No music, save for that which he made himself. We don’t leave room for the whispers of God when we fill our minds with all manner of talking heads. Too many people in our culture are a mile wide and an inch deep. Like Moses, we would do well to embrace some silence, that we might hear and heed the still, small voice of God. Grow deep, friends!
Be patient. Moses wasn’t in Midian forever, though 40 years may have felt like forever. We won’t always be in pandemic, though these 4-5 months have already felt like forever. We’re probably not even halfway through this thing. Moses “settled” in Midian, and we need to “settle” into this pandemic. We need to learn how to live here, to wait for God’s voice speaking to us through the wisdom and knowledge of the scientists. We’ll know when it’s time to leave our Midian. When it’s time to emerge from hiding to face whatever awaits us on the other side. In the meantime, we settle here. We live here. We breathe here. Be patient, friends!
Stay alive. Grow deep. Be patient. From one of my favorite songs in Hamilton:
Look around, look around
At how lucky we are to be alive right now. . .
The fact that you’re alive is a miracle.
Just stay alive, that would be enough.
That would be enough, friends. You ARE enough, friends. Be in this moment. Settle into this moment. Be patient, grow deep, stay alive. That will be enough.