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The Hebrew word that is used for Egypt is “Mitzra’yim”. Which translates roughly to The straits or narrows referring to the strip of land around the Nile that would flood every year until they built a dam to keep it from flooding every year. That was green and fertile in the midst of the desert. It also can be translated to the narrow place, which seems very different than the fertile strip of land in the middle of a desert. The narrow place sounds small and minimal and constraining, like there isn’t enough.
And it kind of makes sense. The story we catch up on to get here is one of a famine and distribution. And the one that gets us where we are. The story that brings us to the people be in slavery is one of scarcity of not enough. There came a time when a pharaoh who did not remember Joseph and the good that he had done and why there are all these people looked around and saw that Jacob who had 12 sons may have had children who had a whole bunch. More kids and their numbers had multiplied and this is a narrow space. What if they overrun Us. What if they outnumber us and we lose our power? What if they outnumber us and try to overthrow us? What if they continue to grow in numbers and there are not enough resources for us?
And so the only solution was to put the Hebrew people. The children of Jacob also named Israel in a situation where rising up and claiming power would not be possible. And so as our story goes they were forced into slavery and their numbers did not diminish. They grew and hundreds of years past and Pharaohs and leaders continue to be afraid of this group of people
We don’t know what they knew about God, the god of the patriarchs and the matriarchs. We don’t know if they knew the stories of The God Who had shown up in people’s lives or if they did and they had now just experienced 400 years of this God seemingly absent. And we don’t really know if they were groaning and crying out to anyone. Any God in particular if there were words that they said or if it was just the sound of groaning.
And God paid attention, brought back to mind or recalled or paid attention to or decided. It was time to follow through on the covenant and promises that God had made to Sarah and Abraham, to Rebecca and Isaac, to Leah, Rachel and Jacob. And God does one of those things that is unusual in a desert in an attempt to get Moses’s attention – a shrub on a mountain that was on fire and if you watch long enough, if you pay enough attention, you would notice isn’t consumed or destroyed–just continues to be on fire, seeming indefinitely.
And when God repeats the promises that had been given to Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca and Isaac, Leah, Rachel and Jacob, the promises are the same.
God reminds them that they will be a people and a people needs a place and God will take them back to the place that God that God had showed to Abraham this time. Depending on the translation, it’s named a broad place, a vast place, a spacious place filling with milk and honey which doesn’t mean that milk comes up from a geyser and flows like a river, but that it is green. It is a spacious green place for grazing animals and a place with fruit trees that bloom throughout the year and flowers for flavoring and remedy, that bees can swarm and make honey from this wide and spacious and vast and broadland would produce all that was unnecessary for a good and abundant Life. And that is what God had promised them hundreds and hundreds of years ago and was bringing them to soon.
Of course, a fast and broad and wide and spacious space strands and contrast to the narrow space, of the place of rise and fall of only seasonal growth of never feeling like there was enough for even the most powerful in Egypt
Because what if there isn’t enough. Have you when you were young or less young or young people in your life and had been asked to divide something among you and the other people around you. Perhaps it was the last large piece of cake left on the plate and you and your sibling both wanted. So you cut it in two pieces? Half might be unfair. Convinced your sibling won’t notice that they got a third of the size that you got. In case you were wondering, the solution is one person cuts it and the other one chooses the first piece.
But in this case the cake or the pie is a limited resource. Sure, you can go to Costco and get another one but that takes time. And if you’re a child making those decisions to divide things, that’s not really easy.
It comes up in adult siblings, too. How many families have been torn apart, or at least disrupted, when going through a parents belongings, settling estates after the death of a parent. There’s only one wedding band, one house, one whatever it is, the special thing that everyone wants to take home and remember.
But I think that we could say the same thing about some of the extreme politics of today: anyone who claims the great replacement, that some folks are “taking our jobs,” that some don’t deserve the same rights as others, that DEI and Affirmative Action is “taking” from those who deserve and are entitled to whatever it is–instead of giving opportunities for those who are historically and typically shut out.
Of course, these are way more complicated than pie–they are part of interdependent systems that affect more than just one piece but a whole web of people, systems, and economics.
And I think we have this idea in churches. People are a limited resource and so we feel and act like we are in competition with other church–whether within our denomination or our communities. I have been guilty of such feelings. Money can feel like a limited resource, even everything costs and keeps costing more. Honestly, our time and energies that we are able to give to the church are limited. We’re busy, or we’re tired, or we’re burnt out.
So it’s easy to fall into the idea of this, this church, this country, our communities, our very lives as being a narrow place–a vast desert with a narrow bit of growth for all to take from.
But the promise of God’s liberation is a vast, spacious, and abundantness. God names all those people, those nomadic people who had settled there since Abraham was first given the promise, and if we didn’t know the rest of the story, if we were just reading what we have before us, it doesn’t say that they will conquer them, that they will go to battle with them, that they will wipe their cities from the earth. It says that they are these, and there is enough, that the land is spacious and abundant and all those people are there too.
What turns a group of people from hearing that there is abundance to needing to have it all from themselves? To the point of violence and destruction and genocide? They lost the image of abundance, they lost the abundance of hope, they lost the abundance of creativity, they lost the abundance of community. They were still in the mentality of Egypt, of the narrow space, of the limited space, of the idea where there isn’t enough.
Because there are some things that are limited. But sometimes even we, like the Egyptians, like those who entered the land of abundance and act like it isn’t enough, sometimes we live in that way of not enough, of scarcity, of narrowness, focusing on all that we don’t have, on all the limitations, and missing the abundance.
Our perspectives of, our theologies of, our philosophies of scarcity, of not enough, narrowness can easily become our focus. It can become the only way we look at the world, it can become the only way we see the world.
Because I think, if we focus on what we don’t have, on how there isn’t enough, how we aren’t enough, it’s hard to see the abundance.
Because there is abundance, there is spaciousness, there is enough. There is an abundance of hope and love–hope and love are not like pie or cake at all. In fact, the more you love, the more you hope, the more love there is around you and in the world. And there is an abundance of creativity and creation, there are ideas and options and beauty. There are endless ways to be in this world, to show and give love and grace. Grace which is also and always abundant.
The Spirit remains abundant, burning in the world calling us to liberation and abundance, burning in the world, calling the earth holy. And rooted in the abundance of resurrection, life after death, hope in sorrow, healing as we go.
Living in the mindset of the narrow, the limits, takes us to fear, to pointing fingers, to scapegoating, to violence. It pits groups against each other, causes factions, and wars. It names some enemies and adversaries, makes it easy to hate and wish badness upon them.
Living in the vast space suggests that maybe there is an option, a third way that isn’t the 2 well worn and marked paths our politics seem to tell us are the only choices.
Living in the expansive space helps us to see that the love of God reaches farther and beyond what we could imagine, to be inclusive of even… them, whoever “them” is to you, and that you are invited to see God’s face in each, to be a good neighbor to all.
Living in the broad space is to learn every day the way things are today does not limit our tomorrow. That there is more on this earth yet to be revealed. That the God who was with the matriarch and patriarchs, and was present with Moses, is and will always be, and cannot be contained by our expectations, our definitions. That the God in Burning Spirit and Resurrected Christ is endlessly creative, renewing, changing our well-laid plans, and leading us to imagine bigger, broader, wilder.
And that God, the God who was and is and is to come, the God of fire in shrubbery and God of resurrection is calling us to be part of the world of abundance. Calling us to that which we never knew, never considered, never would do on our own. Calling us to love and grace, forgiveness and hope abundantly. This whole earth is holy ground, waiting for us to see the signs of God calling us to be participants, to be God’s hands and feet, in the liberation of God’s people, in all of creation, that we might all learn to live in vast and broad, spacious, and wide, in abundance, together.