Moses and deciding that other people are your business

I really, really love this Exodus story. A reconciled relationship between the Israelites and the Egyptians at the end of the book of Genesis, under the leadership of Joseph, as they weather a famine, turns sour when a new Pharoah comes in and looks around at the growing number of Israelites in their midst and fear takes him over.

At the core of it is a nationalistic problem - how do the Egyptians relate to the Israelites? What does it mean that the people who are in power- the Egyptians- are outnumbered by the people who are not in power- the Israelites? What does it mean that Shiprah and Puah and Pharoah's daughter all hold within their bodies, a sympathy that is outlawed by the people who lead them. What does it mean to be asked to do something heinous by the people who rule over you? Is this not a perennial problem for blended societies full of people who are different from one another and who are beset by the human conditions of greed, envy, fear? Is this not a question that every generation has had to ask and answer for themselves all the way back to Pharoah and Moses?

It is one of the central questions of the religious life: who are other people to me? What do my neighbors have to do with me? To what extent are they my responsibility? Am I my siblings' keeper? It is a really really big question, that we don't always slow down and zoom out long enough to center these questions in religious communities. I feel so caught up in the other stuff at the start of a semester- we gotta get the signupgenius put together and the email newsletters and what's the bible study theme going to be and I need to get a new banner printed and I need to edit the email newsletter template and and and.... and all of this stuff that we do here at a church or a campus ministry, day to day, and week to week, it all points to a couple of big central questions: who are we to each other? How do we live in a society without killing each other? To what extent are other people my responsibility?

Scripture is full of examples of this tension:

• Remember in Genesis chapter 4 when Cain kills his brother Abel, God goes looking for Abel and asks Cain who replies, "Am I my brother's keeper?" the reply from God being, like, YES, you are!

• Remember the story of the Rich Man who everyday stepped over the poor man, Lazarus, who lived at his gate, and after they both die, the Rich Man and Abraham have a dialogue across the chasm about how the Rich Man really fell down on the job of caring for Lazarus, out of his excess?

• Remember in last week's Gospel reading how Jesus articulated sort of plainly, and maybe surprisingly, "I am not here for you, I am here only for the lost sheep of Israel" and how when challenged, he relented and said, you know what, I can be here for you too.

• Remember in the Gospel of Luke when Jesus is asked "Who is my neighbor?" and he answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan, pretty thoroughly and patiently explaining that what it means to have a neighbor is to have mercy on whomever you come across? It is a tall order.

Scripture is full of this question, it is asked from the beginning of the bible to the very end of it: what is my responsibility to other people? And when you live in a society, like Shiprah and Puah, that is organized around the idea that nobody owes anybody anything, or worse maybe that the only people you owe anything to are your own kind, this question becomes all the more urgent to ask and answer. I don't want you to hear me saying that you all need to go to the river bank and pull a baby out of a basket, but scripture is that serious that that is what we are called to do. Scripture is consistently clear- in the Good Samaritan, in Exodus, in the Rich Man and Lazarus, that we are supposed to give and care to the point of disruption, that we're going for broke.

I'm not telling you to go for broke- I come before you to simply to say that scripture - in it's commands and instruction to care for our neighbor - asks of us something tremendous, and I wonder too how we take that seriously and follow in the footsteps of Shiprah and Puah and the Samaritan and Jesus [without just tearing our lives apart?]. I come before you simply to wonder what it would be like if the 200 million Christians in our country went all in, took the call as seriously as Pharoah's daughter did? How different would it feel out there? You don't have to do it all, I don't have to do it all, we don't have to do it all. But we each have a piece to do- what would it feel like out there if everybody, if every Christian, did their piece?

This is a big, big tall order and if you takes you your entire life to solve it, you'd be ahead of the game. But on a week like this one, my immediate concern is that our Mary Washington students have all just moved back to campus - or moved to campus for the first time! - for the fall semester. We've got this good group of students, and a new campus ministry building that we're working with in addition to The House, and my job is to figure out how to hold these people together, to arrange meals and make the space for friendships and walk with them through some big complicated wonderful years of their lives. And every year, on the cusp of a new semester, I wonder who is going to present themselves as a new member of our campus ministry community, not quite in a basket on the bank of a river, but vulnerably all the same, and I wonder how it is that I will be called and blessed with the opportunity to show them care and fellowship. I'm still learning how to do it well.

For us, there is perhaps no more literal definition of neighbor than the people who live next door. And so at the start of this school year, I want to challenge you, Trinity, to wonder not just this week, not just at the start of the semester, what does it mean to have the University of Mary Washington as your neighbor? Those Mary Wash kids outnumber Trinitarians thirty-to-one. There are so many people over there who could be looking for a gentle, loving, theologically rich community full of intergenerational relationships and care and companionship through these big complicated and wonderful years of their lives. Some of them have just left and miss churches just like this one, and others would be shocked and relieved to know that churches like this one exist. I know because I've met them. And I know that it's possible because I've met all of you. And I hope they get to meet you too. What do you want it mean when they meet you? Amen.