Native Americans, The Mainline Church, and the Quest for Interracial Justice by Hansen David Phillips;

Author:Hansen, David Phillips;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chalice Press

Defining Our Identity Story

The late Marcus Borg, an influential religious scholar and interpreter of scripture in the mainline church, calls the Exodus Israel’s “story of sacred origins.…It not only told the story of Israel’s creation but shaped the world in which she lived.”5 Memory of the Exodus continues to shape Jewish identity. This story of the flight to freedom is retold annually in the celebration of Passover during which Jews remember the events surrounding the journey to freedom and claim this ancient story as their own. Many mainline Christian congregations enact a symbolic Seder meal during the Christian holy season of Lent. Participating congregations recount Israel’s dramatic flight to freedom as they eat bitter herbs and other foods, and in so doing make Israel’s birth story part of their own narrative.

Borg identifies the Exodus as Israel’s “primal narrative,” by “primal” meaning that it is Israel’s most important story, its story of origins, and its archetypal story, the story that “narrates the perennial struggle between the world of empire and the liberating will of God, between the lordship of Pharaoh and the lordship of God.”6 He points out that the exodus is fundamentally a story of promise and fulfillment that has two main parts: conquest of the land of Canaan and the promise of a multitude of generations. The third part is a series of specific threats to the promise.

The drama begins to unfold when God promises Abraham and Sarah: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make you a great nation” (Gen. 12:1–2a). We soon learn that Israel’s matriarchs—Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel—are barren women whose inability to bear children puts the future of Israel at risk. Although there is no virgin birth in these stories, time and again God faithfully intervenes to keep alive the promise of a multitude of generations.

A new threat to the promise looms when the sons of Jacob (the grandson of Abraham and the son of Isaac) sell their brother Joseph to human traffickers who take him to Egypt. After numerous trials, Joseph establishes himself in a key post in the pharaoh’s government. When famine in the land of Israel drives Joseph’s brothers to Egypt in hopes of finding food, Joseph is there to welcome them. The brothers’ betrayal is turned into a life-saving blessing.

The Hebrew people settle in Egypt and prosper. Their population grows. The pharaoh sees what is happening and becomes concerned that the Hebrews are too numerous. In order to control them, he enslaves them. Through this long series of events, the pattern of promise-threat-fulfillment is firmly established, and we are ready for Israel’s flight to freedom, which Marcus Borg identifies as “a paradigmatic story of God’s character and will,” and “Israel’s decisive and constitutive ‘identity story,’”7 which unfolds in four episodes: (1) deliverance, (2) rebellion, (3) subjugation, and (4) conquest of the Promised Land.

Deliverance

The story of Israel’s deliverance begins with groans of hope rising from the lips of oppressed Hebrew slaves.

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