2020.09.13 | Defund Horse and Rider
“Defund Horse and Rider”
Rev. Marvin Lance Wiser
“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and my might,
and has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him. . .” — Exod. 15:1-2b
Deliverance. Something that started, as we saw in my previous sermon on Exodus, with God seeing, hearing, and knowing our oppression, and initiates God coming down and partnering with creation to deliver and to rise up. But what happens when elements of creation are not cooperating as they should? When things are off kilter? When things created for good have run amok and are actually now more like chaos? Who is this Horse and Rider and why are they thrown into the sea?
Taking a step back, let’s recap what is going on here in this passage. An ‘erev rav an ethnically mixed multitude of migrant laborers, known as “the Hebrews” had decided that they had had enough of deplorable working conditions, being stripped of their human dignity. A transnational and bicultural leader, a Hebrew but raised in the royal Egyptian Court, called by God reluctantly took the road less travelled: “Don’t mourn, organize!” Rather than continuing to catch the babies downstream, he with the help of his strategy team decided to go upstream to find the source of their oppression.
Moses encounters Pharoah. The Horse and Rider par excellence. Take a look at this 13th century Ancient Egyptian relief found inside Ramesses II Abu Simbel temple in Nubia. You probably will recognize the temple. The relief depicts Ramesses II, who may just be the unnamed Pharaoh of the time of the Exodus, and his chariot at the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites, around 1274 BCE, probably a few decades before the Exodus. It arguably became the best known battle in ancient history and was the largest display of military technology of Horse and Rider the world had yet seen, with more than 6,000 chariots. The battle claimed thousands of lives, and both sides claimed victory. The Egyptian army totaled about 100,000 men. In ironic fashion, understood in the Hebrew, Moses tells the great commander of this army, Pharaoh, to P’aro; that is, Mr. Let Go, let my people go! The play on words foreshadows what this Horse and Rider will eventually do, submit to the will of the Creator.
Horse and Rider was the greatest military technology during the Iron Age period. At the time, the machinery existed for one purpose and one purpose only: to ruthlessly subdue entire populations, to instill learned helplessness, and to exterminate if necessary. We read of its advanced usage centuries after the Exodus in the annals of the Kings of Assyria, who ruled the first world empire violently and ruthlessly-- the 8th century biblical book of First Isaiah attests to this. Nightmarish imagery of this machinery of war and oppression can be read in the 7th century biblical book of Nahum, detailing Babylonian Horse and Rider pillaging the city of Nineveh:
“The chariots race madly through the streets,
they rush to and fro through the squares;
their appearance is like torches,
they dart like lightning. . .
Devastation, desolation, and destruction!” -- Nahum 2:4, 10a
How has Horse and Rider continued to evolve in the centuries after? Like Nahum decries, what is causing “Devastation, desolation, and destruction” in service of empire today? Notably, in the last century, tanks took the place of chariots, bombs and missiles soon displaced tanks, and now even the manipulation of creation itself in terms of bio-chemical agents rain down terror upon people. Our own police force finds its origins in the South with Horse and Rider capturing runaway slaves, and in the North controlling immigrants moving into cities. Today, our civilian police force even wields and employs chemical agents in our neighborhoods that are banned on battle fields. Budgets of these mechanisms and machinery of empire are burgeoning, bursting at the seams, while education and social programs for the well-being of the populace as a whole are continually being cannibalized. A mother who calls 911 to seek assistance does not need Horse and Rider to show up and kill her autistic son who is having a mental breakdown. How many non-Horse and Rider first responders like paramedics and nurses fire lead bullets into their patients to de-escalate the situation, and then justify it be saying “I was scared?”
What of industry that maintains empire’s hold on the periphery and the center, like fossil fuels that power its reach and control at the expense of creation itself? Jeremiah preaches of creation crying out, even dying, due to our actions. The 2018 Carbon Majors Report tells us that just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. “Devastation, desolation, and destruction.”
As with every empire in history, Horse and Rider may be running amok yet again. And like in Exodus and Jeremiah, Creation might be trying to tell us something about that imbalance.
If we notice carefully, in the preceding chapters of Exodus, the plagues are actually superfluous elements of creation itself. We can all handle a little of each of the plagues— even death— and a little is good for balance, actually part of life, but anything in extreme excess, run amok, is bad. Real bad. Horse and Rider in its place keeps order. Night is good, but not all day. What happens when we get too many locusts? The prophet Joel tells us, better yet look at East Africa just this year. Too much of one throws off the balance of the many and more death and the actual unraveling of Creation ensues.
Then God comes down. And offers the divine imperatives on behalf of all of Creation, “Come, deliver, Rise up.”
Viewing chapters 14 and 15 of Exodus closer, we can see that this whole episode of parting the Sea of Reeds and the safe passage of our mixed bunch of migrant laborers is to be understood as an act of creation. Just as with the ancient creation myths of Mesopotamia, the Babylonian, Enuma Elish, and the Ugaritic Ras Shamra, God is pulling back the chaotic waters that seek to inundate Good. Genesis terms them the Tohu wavohu, “the formless and void”. And God must subdue this chaos, Tohu wavohu, in this case Horse and Rider, in order to bring forth creation more fully, so that people can walk anew on dry land unabated by Flood or Horse and Rider. What is different from Genesis 1 though in this act of God’s creating, is that humans have brought about the chaos, and humans will help repair Creation.
Creation is messy. Chaos must be tamed, brought into check, defunded to allow Creation to truly flourish as God intends, so that all are free. As God continues to create, we must take our part in the partnership, answering the Exodus call to to rise up and liberate. We joke that looking outside is like determining which Exodus plague we are experiencing today, that 2020 is something that we must get out of, but in all seriousness, human-caused Climate Change has already turned many a rivers into the color of blood and blotted out the sun. While fire is good for forests, fire too is running amok all around us on our account. The same can be said of the spread of viruses due to destruction of habitat. How far are willing to let this narrative play out? Will we answer God’s call?
We should not be defunding the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, Social Security, or worker protections. We should be defunding that which is anit-thetical to God’s creation, the things that are now running amok. Who are we to prop up Horse and Rider, if God has already thrown him into the Sea?
May we partner with God in our deliverance through this chaos into a new creation so that we too can once again sing God’s praises together. Amen.