The Spiritual Practice of Heroism
Film Reference: Harriet
Exodus 14:5-21 (The Message Bible)
August 9, 2020
When the king of Egypt was told that the people were gone, he and his servants changed their minds. They said, “What have we done, letting Israel, our slave labor, go free?” So, he had his chariots harnessed up and got his army together. He took six hundred of his best chariots, with the rest of the Egyptian chariots and their drivers coming along.
God made Pharaoh, king of Egypt, stubborn, determined to chase the Israelites as they walked out on him without even looking back. The Egyptians gave chase and caught up with them where they had made camp by the sea—all Pharaoh’s horse-drawn chariots and their riders, all his foot soldiers there.
As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up and saw them—Egyptians! Coming at them!
They were totally afraid. They cried out in terror to God. They told Moses, “Weren’t the cemeteries large enough in Egypt so that you had to take us out here in the wilderness to die? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt? Back in Egypt didn’t we tell you this would happen? Didn’t we tell you, ‘Leave us alone here in Egypt—we’re better off as slaves in Egypt than as corpses in the wilderness.’”
Moses spoke to the people: “Don’t be afraid. Stand firm and watch God do his work of salvation for you today. Take a good look at the Egyptians today for you’re never going to see them again.
God will fight the battle for you.
And you? You keep your mouths shut!”
God said to Moses: “Why cry out to me? Speak to the Israelites. Order them to get moving. Hold your staff high and stretch your hand out over the sea: Split the sea! The Israelites will walk through the sea on dry ground.
“Meanwhile I’ll make sure the Egyptians keep up their stubborn chase—I’ll use Pharaoh and his entire army, his chariots and horsemen, to put my Glory on display so that the Egyptians will realize that I am God.”
The angel of God that had been leading the camp of Israel now shifted and got behind them. And the Pillar of Cloud that had been in front also shifted to the rear. The Cloud was now between the camp of Egypt and the camp of Israel. The Cloud enshrouded one camp in darkness and flooded the other with light. The two camps didn’t come near each other all night.
Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and God, with a terrific east wind all night long, made the sea go back. He made the sea dry ground. The seawaters split.
Video-Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments”
Charlton Heston, in the 1956 classic, “The Ten Commandments,” IS the quintessential Moses of my childhood. I suspect that if you were born before or around this date, you grew up with Cecil B. DeMille’s vision of what Moses, hero of the Hebrew people, was like.
Note the strong features of the protagonist: finely-toned muscles, dazzling red cloak, perfectly flowing gray hair and beard. He is tall, lean and commanding—everything we want our heroes to be. This is Moses. Moses needs to be larger than life, because God is busy commanding big bang miracles in the world through him. God, in the Hebrew stories, does not “play small.”
In the Old Testament—the Hebrew Bible—we are used to visioning God with sweeping, universal majesty:
Genesis 1: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light’; and there was light.”
Genesis 1 continues: “Then God said, let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…So, God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
God of the Old Testament actively commands his creation. We were probably raised in that era to think of the Charlton Heston “Moses” as an extension of what God probably looks like. Imagery was very important. Genesis is full of full-screen stories of God’s enormous power and hands-on manipulation of the events of the world:
The Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve;
The Great Flood and Noah, the rainbow a symbol of reconciliation;
The Destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah, as God is once again forgotten by the people and God again acts out of Divine Anger;
The Dream sent to the boy, Joseph, raised up by God as the next great Hebrew hero;
And then we get to Moses and the book of Exodus.
I asked Jan to read to you today the fantastic story from Exodus of how God uses Moses to part the enormous, raging Red Sea, thereby freeing the captive Israelites from the evil grip of Rameses, Pharaoh of Egypt. It took a BIG hero, a hero larger than life, confident beyond measure, to pull off that stunt. God and Moses, Moses and God—it was an unbeatable team and just what the hapless people of God needed at the time.
But was Moses born a hero? Did he know from his little boy years that he would grow up to be the eventual icon of an entire faith tradition—Judaism, and the first superhero of our two-testament Bible? The scriptures suggest otherwise:
God appears to the young man Moses in a burning bush. Now this bush, we are told, is no little one sitting forgotten by the side of the road in the land of Midian. Moses, a shepherd, is drawn to magnificent Mt. Horeb, the “MOUNTAIN OF GOD” where an angel of the Lord beckons to him to draw near. God announces to Moses the breadth and depth of God’s history with his forebearers: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” There, God calls Moses to take up the hero’s mantle, to be God’s hands and feet in the world. He will go to Pharaoh and tell him, “Let my people go!”
But Moses doesn’t see himself as any sort of hero. He balks repeatedly at the suggestion that he can do this thing that God commands of him. “Who am I,” he protests, “that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” God has to work really hard to get Moses to accept his commission! God has to perform miracles for Moses right there on the spot and even this showing of God’s power does not convince the young and inexperienced shepherd.
“O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to our servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue. O my Lord, please send someone else!”
God loses patience with Moses at this point, capitulating that Aaron, the brother of Moses, can speak in his place before the people, using words that God will feed him through Moses. It’s a rather complicated proposition, not at all hero-like.
Folks called the person who was freeing the slaves of the 1850s, “Moses.” Whoever it was, he seemed to fear nothing. He appeared on farms and plantations in the middle of the night, convincing slaves to follow him to freedom. He defied all odds of getting caught. If captured, the end would not be pretty for him; he would be made an example of by torture and public execution. The slaveowners were as ground in as Pharaoh; their wealth and livelihood depended almost entirely on their enslaved labor. The bounty for the head of Moses kept gaining momentum, attracting greedy hunters to try their hand at snaring the one who threatened the very social fabric of the South.
Little did they know that “Moses” was a woman, a young girl barely standing 5 feet tall, a woman with no training in survival skills, who could neither read nor write, lacking a cache of weapons, horses, or other supplies. She had one weapon- a knife, later a pistol, and a big inspiration.
God speaks to Arminta Ross— “Minty”—in dreams and spells, showing her the future, warning her of danger, pointing out the way through danger to safety, assuring her that she did not work alone, even though she is meant to do God’s bidding mostly on her own.
She has a few angels:
Rev. Green who publicly supports the institution of slavery, but is really a secret agent for the underground Railroad, a connection of both blacks and whites seeking to find and free slaves. “fear is your enemy,” he counsels her, “trust in God.” He warns her that she has “about a hare’s chance in a fox grove” of evading capture, but she should follow the North Star and the river to Pennsylvania;
Black Boatsmen who wrap her in a towel after she nearly dies in the river and direct her on her way;
Thomas Garrett, a Quaker who hides her in his wagon and takes her to the Pennsylvania border, where she literally jumps across the state line to freedom;
William Still of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society who finds her a safe place to live and provides her with resources and a connection to Marie Buchanon, a free black woman who teaches her how to live in white society.
In a particularly potent exchange between the two women, Minty—now taking her Free Name—Harriet Tubman—describes her relationship with God:
Marie: you say that God’s voice guides you. What’s that like?
Harriett: Sometime it sting. Like a smack in the face. Other time it’s soft. Like a dream. Fly off soon as you woke. Seem like I learned to see and hear God like some learn to read a book. I put all my attention on it. Act without question. Fore I can wonder, if I even heard it at all. Fore I can understand what it mean. I thought God wanted me to go get my husband. John was just a way to steer me to where I was needed.
Harriet Tubman was a hero. She led her raids, back and forth, north as far as Canada to South and back again continuously from 1850- 1860 and the start of the Civil War, bringing her family and then scores of others out of their enslavement to their freedom.
Then she joined the Union war effort. On June 2, 1863, Harriet, under the command of Union Colonel James Montgomery, became the first woman to lead a major military operation in the United States when she and 150 African American Union soldiers rescued more than 700 slaves in the Combahee Ferry Raid in South Carolina.
She was a hero for others, but first, FIRST, she had to be a hero for herself. She was aptly known as “Moses,” not only for leading her people out of their bondage, but also because just like the Israelite-would-be-unlikely-hero, she had no special attributes that qualified her for the job. She was simple, unskilled, ill-suited and afraid. She ran. She ran from her master to avoid being “sold down the river.” (Have you ever heard that phrase before? Well it comes out of the annals of the scourge that was slavery, where unwanted, unruly, or particularly valuable enslaved people were literally sold down the river to slaveowners deep in the South.)
She ran to avoid being caught, hobbled, beaten or even killed. She followed the North Star, as Rev. Green told her, survived a jump from a high bridge into a raging river, caught muskrats with her bare hands for food, and took chances on strangers who helped her, but who could just as easily turned her in and collected a reward, all because God told her to do so. Deeply spiritual and faithful, Harriett learned to rely on the truth of her spells and visions which started after she was clubbed in the head while enslaved.
Once she freed herself, she didn’t hesitate. She had to go back for her people. She knew God would be with her the whole way. When she has freed several enslaved people, she leads them to the water, to the river that looks impassable. He faith causes her to wade in. Her destiny causes her not to drown, but instead, to show them the way to safety, hounds and gunmen right on their heels. Hence, she is named “Moses” in popular culture of the day.
This is the message of the movie for us today. We have to be our own hero before we can be the hero for others. We don’t need special skills-God will provide those; we just need to listen and follow the Spirit’s call to action. Moses was a commoner; Harriett was not even considered a full human being by her captors.
But where is God of our ancient stories? Where is the Cecil B. DeMille of Creation, God who moves mountains and parts vast, angry seas? Where do we find God who sends the plagues on Pharaoh, floods the entire earth, but saves just enough of human and animal kind to start over, God who raises up prophets and kings? Once the New Testament comes into being, God is demoted to Best Supporting Actor to the star of the Gospels, Jesus, and by the end of the New Testament epistles and letters, God is reduced to a bit player in the faith docudrama. By Paul’s reckoning as well as other early evangelists, Jesus is the character who has the power to save, the power to transform the world, the Way, the Truth and the Life.
I find this troubling, even though I am Christian. Right about now, The Big Bang God would be welcome to come and wipe out Covid-19, to fix the social ills of our country, to call up a hero undisputed who could stand before Pharaoh and command, “Let my people go!”
I am decidedly Christian, but I need God’s bigness. I need definition, not innuendo, not division, not unbelief. I needed this week the powerful witness of Harriett Tubman. I hope you found her enlightening and inspiring also. If you haven’t studied her, either in film or in books about her, I hope you do so. As a parishioner texted me after she and her extended family watched the film together, “Another wonderful movie, in fact the BEST.”
Be the hero of your own story. You have a unique opportunity in these stay-at-home times. I quit eating junk food and drinking diet sodas (I know, 5th time’s a charm) and in so doing, have lost 20 pounds so far. I decided to stop being down in the dumps about what I couldn’t do and to be the hero of my own story instead. I feel so much better now that I am eating healthy food and only 1200 calories a day, knowing now that’s really all I need.
Where can you be your own hero? Where in your body do you need healing? Do you need to get your mind around some history you have been avoiding? Do you need to get your heart right about someone with whom you have been at odds and written off as not worth your effort? Do you need to tend to your gut and rid it of toxins, fears and unhealthy habits? Or do you need to find your feet again, get out and walk the neighborhood or exercise your muscles some other way? Perhaps you need to connect with your voice and speak a truth that you have been suppressing either within yourself or in the presence of others?
“God doesn’t need you to play small.” Those words were never truer. Be your own hero. Listen for God’s call on your life and trust what you hear. Free others once you free yourself. You might be the one holding others in bondage for past mistakes, misunderstandings, and misfires. You’ll never know your strength and you’ll never fully trust God until you get to the water’s edge and step into the flow of the river of life and faith.
May It Be So.