Above the Law

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Above the Law

Lesson: Exodus 1:8 to 2:10

I was raised near Montreal in a culturally Danish household with a strong pietist Lutheran influence, and I attended a Presbyterian church.

So I grew up with a combined cultural and religious sense that following the rules, obeying the laws, and above all being honest, even when it hurt you personally, was what God expected of every Christian.

I grew up with the understanding that the police were my friends, a view not shared by some of my rougher friends who, as Anglo kids getting into trouble, had some unfriendly encounters with the mostly Francophone QPP (now called the SQ: Sûreté du Québec).

It was all presented to me as part of what God wanted; that the laws of the land represented an extension of the laws of God, at least in a democracy where the government was supposed to have the best interests of the people in mind.

And besides, telling the truth was part of the ten commandments: “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbour”!

So, reading about the oppression of the Hebrews by the Egyptians and then Moses going into the bulrushes of the Nile was baffling to me. Here were the Hebrew midwives disobeying the law and lying to the king. And God was pleased! God rewarded them!

Obviously, I wasn’t thinking in very subtle ways, but others had the same challenge: one teacher even suggested that their lies were permissible because the 10 commandments weren’t written yet, so they weren’t breaking any laws. But, the teacher pointed out, that option wasn’t open to us anymore. No lying!

There’s a lot of subtle thinking going on in this story: Moses being put into the Nile in a reed basked, waterproofed so it wouldn’t sink too quickly and hopefully would smell bad to crocodiles, is very subtle. It makes it look like someone obeyed the letter of the law, casting this Hebrew boy baby into the Nile and yet trying to give him the best chance of survival. There was a very subtle, very feminine scheme going on: his older sister keeping watch to protect him, making sure he was somewhere he would be found by some powerful women who might take pity on him. Besides, you can bet that wherever the princess was bathing, someone had gone ahead to chase off the crocodiles.

And it all worked perfectly, even to the point that Moses’ own mother was hired as his wet nurse, so he would get to know his birth family and feel kinship to his people even though he was raised in a palace and they had become forced labourers.

A series of untruths and deceptions combined with outright disobedience and lies all play out with God’s blessing!

The Bible carries a long history and for most of it, God’s people are a minority: first just a nomadic family; then a growing and feared minority in Egypt; then an enslaved people; and then a nomadic nation in the wilderness.

For a time they were conquerors and they were not subtle or gentle about it. But then they were broken up and displaced by the Assyrians, then the Babylonians and even when they were restored to their land they were under a series of other empires. By the time the Christians start writing, the empire was Roman. Even into the second century of the Christian Era, Christians and Jews were minorities and both were often under persecution.

So it is not surprising that there is a clear Biblical understanding that laws can be unjust; that it can be very much the will of God that an unjust law be subverted.

Open opposition can get you beaten or killed, which is why the Hebrew midwives were sneaky and came up with that ridiculous story about Hebrew women popping out babies in the field. Obviously Pharaoh had nothing to do with childbirth or he would have dismissed that in an instant.

But the midwives didn’t want to become baby murderers; they didn’t want to participate in genocide on their own people or be participants in this Government plan to make it look like all the Hebrew boys were stillborn. But they didn’t dare to oppose the king openly, so they found ways to disobey the law that were risky, and required courage and even required creativity which, in turn, inspired the king to create a law that was openly murderous: throw the boy babies into the river.

We, as Christians, have had a privileged position. We have been rulers since Emperor Constantine. We have been the majority, and if oppression was going to happen, we have been the ones to do it.

In terms of our attitude to laws, it means that we have emphasized the parts of the Bible that encourage obedience which is fine, as long as we also maintain that core of understanding that Paul called the Law of Love, where you love your neighbour as yourself and don’t enforce laws against them that you would not want to be subject to yourself.

For a time, most Christians didn’t question the laws of the various expanding European empires. As a result of this, we were complicit in a lot of really inappropriate actions against indigenous communities and the church became part of a process that regulated everything to the point that one sex position is called “missionary” because the missionaries taught that it was the only position that God approved of.

That is totally cultural. There is no valid religious basis for it. Frankly, it was a symbolic way to keep women in a submissive position and it was most enthusiastically promoted in Matriarchal cultures that had been colonized.

Later today there will be a Pride parade: one of our culture’s current spaces where laws are being challenged and moral and cultural assumptions are openly debated.

The most blatant prejudices being expressed today, too often by people who claim to represent the views of God, are against the Trans part of the community. It would not take much to tip that self-righteous hostility again into open expressions of hate against gays and lesbians. I would suggest that there is a “divide and conquer” approach being used against the whole community.

To my mind, this is another area where blind obedience to human law is a mistake and the biblical examples we are given about how to live with and subvert legal oppression should come back into our consciousness.

The idea of a pride parade would never have occurred to the Hebrews. The Egyptians would have sent out the army and suppressed them with brutality. So we have definitely made progress.

But the fact that so many people are afraid to be who they are in any kind of public way, even after so much progress, is a reminder that majorities still fear minorities and majorities have the power, through laws, or simple force of numbers, to make the lives of minorities hell on earth.

There are times when God calls us to be above the law. Not in an arrogant way, which is what “above the law” often suggests, but in a way that carefully and prayerfully looks at the real people in the real situation and asks: “Following God’s Law of Love – what is the right thing to do here?”. It might be as blatant as marching in a parade, or it might be subtle and underground for safety concerns.

But it always involves going beyond unquestioning obedience and looking with eyes of love to see who is at risk and to see what we can do to help them.

Amen.