Exodus 1:6-13 Common English Bible

Eventually, Joseph, his brothers, and everyone in his generation died. But the Israelites were fertile and became populous. They multiplied and grew dramatically, filling the whole land.

Now a new king came to power in Egypt who didn’t know Joseph. He said to his people, “The Israelite people are now larger in number and stronger than we are. Come on, let’s be smart and deal with them. Otherwise, they will only grow in number. And if war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and then escape from the land.” As a result, the Egyptians put foremen of forced work gangs over the Israelites to harass them with hard work. They had to build storage cities named Pithom and Rameses for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they grew and spread, so much so that the Egyptians started to look at the Israelites with disgust and dread. So the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites.

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Jacob and his family immigrated from Palestine to Egypt because of the Great Famine.

Because Jacob’s son Joseph, was a top government leader in Egypt, the immigrants were welcomed with open arms. Jacob’s family, numbering about 75, settled in the plains of Goshen, a place where they could care for their livestock and start again in the midst of the Great Famine .

Jacob’s family prospered in Goshen. Joseph prospered as the King’s second in command, the King of Egypt prospered as Joseph consolidated land and livestock in the King’s name as Egyptian citizens came to Joseph to acquire food to survive, Yhey had to sign over their livestock and their land as payment for the food

Joseph’s family, however, was able to keep their land and their livestock and so their wealth and standing in Egypt increased, even as Egyptian citizens’ lost theirs.

Eventually Jacob died,

and so did Joseph,

and so did the king of Egypt.

At some point, there was a new king who did not know Joseph. While he was surely aware of Joseph’s role in saving Egypt in the midst of the great famine, he didn’t seem to give credit to Joseph’s family for that.

Instead, the new king looked at the growing number of Hebrews in his country and was afraid.

While the Hebrews had been good citizens of Egypt, while they had taken care of their families, while they had built relationships with the Egyptians, while they were good neighbors, while they had succeeded in their transition to Egypt, still this new king was afraid of them.

He was afraid because their numbers were growing so large. He feared that they might become a threat to him and his political power.

Note that there’s no indication that the Hebrews had been any sort of threat in the past.

But the king was afraid - and he cast the Hebrews as Other. They spoke a different language. They had different customs. They had different religious practices. And the king feared them, or at least he claimed to fear them so that he might make them his scapegoats when things went wrong.

The king openly derided the Hebrews and made his distrust of these immigrants known to all, and before long his distrust became embedded in the people of Egypt. Perhaps built into the people’s instinct to distrust was the fact that the Hebrews had continued to prosper even as Egyptians were losing their land to the king. So, even though the people lost their livelihoods because of government policies, they came to blame the immigrants.

There was a fear that these Hebrews were taking over, taking their jobs, might one day outnumber them. None of these things appear to be true, but truth doesn’t seem to matter when you’re afraid.

All the king’s anti-immigrant talk translated into serous mistreatment of the Hebrews. The king passed edict after edict against them, making their lives more difficult.

The Egyptian People had been taught to fear them, to hate them, to shun them.

As time went on, The King became more obsessed with the immigrants in his kingdom. So much so that the king raided the homes of the Hebrews and rounded them up and forced them into work camps. They lost their freedom, they lost their properties, they lost their livelihoods. Even so, their numbers continued to grow.

And so the king made the temporary edicts permanent. He enslaved the Hebrew people fully intending to exterminate them.

Among the King’s most brutal tactics was the deadly practice of family separation, as his stooges began to separate all the male babies from their families. Upon instructions from the king, these baby boys were to be put to death by being thrown into the Nile River.

The Hebrews would remain as slaves, treated horribly and dishonorably until Moses came along. Scholars set the length of time that the Hebrews were enslaved from between 200 to 400 years.

I wonder how different the story might have been if the new king who didn’t know Joseph would’ve responded to the Hebrew people with kindness and justice, with a sense of shared humanity rather than with xenophobic hostility.

What positive influences might the Hebrews, the family and descendants of the renowned Joseph, have had on Egyptian society? What advancements might the Hebrews have brought to Egyptian culture if they had not been forced into the camps and pushed to the brink.

Unfortunately, that is not a story we can tell, because the story that is laid out for us in Scripture is a story of distrust, and fear, and hate, and bondage.

When the Hebrews later came into their own, when they established their own homeland in Palestine, the memory of their treatment as immigrants in Egypt remained a constant in their shared consciousness.

One is struck by the absolute humanity that was built into Jewish law in an effort to protect immigrants and strangers who found themselves in their midst.

Exodus 23:9 reads, “Don’t oppress an immigrant. You know what it’s like to be an immigrant, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt.”

Leviticus 19:33-34 admonishes, “When immigrants live in your land with you, you must not cheat them. Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens. You must love them as yourself, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”

Deuteronomy 10 describes God this way, “God enacts justice for orphans and widows, and God loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing. That means you must also love immigrants because you were immigrants in Egypt.”

Jeremiah tells the people that the way to experience God’s promise is found thusly, “if you truly reform your ways and your actions; if you treat each other justly; if you stop taking advantage of the immigrant, orphan, or widow; ...only then will I dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave long ago to your ancestors for all time.”

And Jesus teaches in the great parable of the sheep and the goats that when you have welcomed the stranger, the immigrant you have a welcomed Jesus, who himself was a refugee in the land of Egypt for a time.

Could Joseph ever have foreseen, even with his ability to dream about the future, that his people, immigrants in Egypt who had been welcomed with open arms, would be turned against, and mistreated, and hated by the very people who welcomed them. Probably, because such

is the immigrant story throughout history.

True, every immigrant story is different. The circumstances behind the need to move from their home to a strange new land, the situation into which they move, the support or lack of support they feel from their new homeland varies. Sadly, for many immigrants, though, their story involves separation from family and friends, a sadness to leave their home, a sense of isolation, mistreatment from strangers, xenophobic responses from their new community, hostile reactions from the government. In a multitude of ways, and through a multitude of voices, they hear “You are not welcome here,” “go back to where you come from.” It is heartbreaking to know that good, honest, caring people who are only looking for ways to provide for their families are treated with such disregard.

We, the church, as followers of Jesus, as human beings, have a responsibility to be a welcoming, engaging people, to insure that the stranger and the immigrant that we encounter feels welcomed, loved, and cared for, to join in community with our brothers and sisters, to be the hands and feet of Jesus.

Amen.

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Pastoral Prayer

Dear Jesus,

Our journey through life is long and hard. We cannot make this trip alone; we must walk together on the journey.

You promised to send us a helper, your Spirit. Help us to see your Spirit in those you send to journey with us.

In the refugee family, seeking safety from violence,

Let us see your Spirit.

In the migrant worker, bringing food to our tables,

Let us see your Spirit.

In the asylum-seeker, seeking justice for himself and his family,

Let us see your Spirit.

In the unaccompanied child, traveling in a dangerous world,

Let us see your Spirit.

Teach us to recognize that as we walk with each other, You are present.

Teach us oh Lord, that we are all immigrants as we sojourn this world.

Teach us to welcome not only the strangers in our midst but the gifts they bring as well: the invitation to conversion, communion, and solidarity.

This is the help you have sent: we are not alone.

We are together on the journey, and for this we give you thanks.

Amen.