Out of Egypt: Introduction - Rev. Donnell T. Wyche - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch Summary: This sermon opens the fall series Out of Egypt, in which we read Exodus alongside Acts. Exodus is the story of God freeing a people from empire and teaching them to trust; Acts is the story of that same God pouring out the Spirit and forming a new family that crosses every border. Why tell the story of a people held in captivity? Because getting out of Egypt is one thing; getting Egypt out of you is the work of a lifetime. Pharaoh, who is never named in the story, represents the powers of empire: fear, greed, violence, material wealth, and scarcity, and everyone in the story is confronted with the same choice, empire or God. Every week this fall we will return to one invitation: Name your Egypt. Trust the God who brings you out. And take another step toward becoming the people God is forming. The heart of the sermon is Exodus 1:1-14, read slowly as a plan that unfolds in four phases. First, Pharaoh attacks the nation’s memory: a new king comes to power “to whom Joseph meant nothing,” refusing to remember that Egypt is standing because of a refugee, which is exactly where Stephen begins his own retelling in Acts 7. Second, he misrepresents the Hebrews to exploit social divisions, teaching his people to “look” at their neighbors as a threat over a betrayal that had not happened. Third, he enforces division through forced labor, building store cities for a king who had all the grain in the world and still believed there was not enough. Fourth, he institutionalizes it as a caste system, bitter labor in brick and mortar with no rest for anyone, not even for Pharaoh. God is not named anywhere in these fourteen verses, and yet “be fruitful and multiply” is still running underneath Pharaoh’s feet: the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied. The sermon closes by looking at the fear behind the plan. Pharaoh’s anxiety is fear of the future, and it asks him to partner with evil today to prevent tomorrow’s evil, what the sermon calls a demonic imagination, against which God invites us to a prophetic imagination of liberation, peace, healing, and jubilee. Then the text turns and looks at us: forget the ones who saved you, teach the people to see their neighbor as a threat, build the warehouses. It is read from the good book, not the newspaper, but the pharaohs are not only out there. There is a pharaoh of fear, of scarcity, and of exclusion in each of us. The invitation stands: name your Egypt, trust the God who brings you out, and take another step. God is not named in these verses, but God is not absent. God is in the “And.” God is in the multiplying. And next Sunday the story reaches the delivery stool, where God is finally named in the hands of two women who decided they were not afraid of Pharaoh.
