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Let My People GO! Probably the line that made Charleton Heston’s career. I can never read this scripture without in my mind seeing ole Charleton Heston standing on a cliff holding his staff with the sun setting behind him and the wind blowing his long white hair, bellows “Let my people GO!” Then they flash to Yule, with his royal tunic and bald head and thick King and I accent who says “Who is this Lord that I should obey him… I do not know him and I will not let Israel go.” (OK, so impressions are not my thing….sorry)

Impressions or not, we all know how the story ends… Moses tries to get his people released, but it doesn’t work. Then Moses calls on God and before you know it a whole load of plagues, frogs and gnats and disease and hail falls on Egypt and then the first born are struck down, and finally -- Pharaoh let the people go. Well WHEW! Thank goodness! God forbid, there isn’t a happy ending. Pharaoh frees the Israelites, they go on their way and they lived happily ever after. (Happily ever after, of course, if you don’t read the paper).

Frankly, the reality is that nothing has really changed in this story. Thousands of years later, the Israelites are still enslaved – maybe not in the mud pits of Egypt, but through anti-Semitism and violence and war. But, then again, a lot of folks these days are still enslaved… some literally.

Now some of you may be thinking. How horrible. But, thank goodness, at least in this country for sure, that’s not true. Slavery was outlawed in 1865 with the thirteenth amendment and it is now a thing of the past. Really? Well think again.

Yes, chattel slavery was outlawed several hundred years ago. And to mark that occasion, we have invited members of Amistad America to be with us today. They will share the story of the Amistad incident and the future voyage of the freedom schooner Amistad. But the legacy of the Amistad is much broader than that. The Amistad legacy is about human rights and freedom--insuring that every single human being on this planet is free. And be clear, they are not.

I want to share two statements with you that you may find a bit shocking… first, slavery is alive and well in the 21st century, in the world, and in this country. And second, and hear this…Every single person in this sanctuary this morning is a supporter of slavery. Yeah, you heard me. Every single person in this sanctuary, including me, is in some way a supporter of modern day slavery.

Look at the first statement—slavery is alive and well. Today, after arms and drug dealing, you want to know the largest criminal activity in the world? Human trafficking. The selling of individuals for forced work--domestic servants, garment slaves, agricultural laborers, child soliders, sweat shops. Every year between 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold, or forced across the world's borders. The International Labor Office estimates that modern day slave trade generates $32 billion dollars annually. And you think those statistics are about “other parts of the world?” It is believed that nearly 200,000 people live enslaved at this moment in the United States, and an additional 50K people are trafficked into or transited through the United State annually. By far the largest category in this horror is sex slavery. Did you know that up to 1.2 million children a year are caught up in this modern horror? Young boys and girls, many age 12 or under, are sold or kidnapped into a life of prostitution. February 2002— Plainfield, NJ -- police raided a picket fence house in a sleepy little neighborhood and found stash house with 14 year old girls for an underground brothel. This is not Bangkok, this is New Jersey. Lord knows what is going on in Times Square and other parts of Manhattan. Slavery is alive and well in the 21st century.

How about the second statement—that we are all in some way supporters of slavery. Let’s go back to the story of Moses for a minute. Now we all love Moses and the Pharaoh… and our hearts go out to the Israelites… but there is another set of players in our scripture that we don’t always look to.

Sometimes when I am reading scripture, I try to find myself in the story. You ever do that? Well, this is how I personally see our scripture today. We’re not really Pharaoh or Moses, as most of us are not the ultimate high leaders political or cultural leaders. And we’re not one of the Israelites, as most of us here are living a pretty privileged life. But in between Moses and Pharoah and the Israelites, is another group… the foremen, the supervisors, the “people in the middle” who were Israelites, but now in a “privileged position” where they oversaw the workers.

Now remember what happens in the scripture? Pharaoh gets mad and says not only will he NOT let the people go, he will now make them go out and gather their own straw, yet keep their original quotas. So the supervisors are trying desperately to hang onto the status quo. But with this extra burden, the quotas aren’t met. And so because the slaves don’t produce, the supervisors are beaten, “hurt”, “impacted”… Then the supervisors turn around and go to Pharaoh and complain, they were shot down and sent back to the pits to produce even more.

These are the folks in the middle. They are not the actual slaves, nor are they the ones in total power. They are the middle ground. They are us. Yet, they are just as responsible for the slavery as Pharaoh.

Think about it, for example, in the realm of sweat shops. Numerous vendors of clothing—vendors WE buy clothes from – use sweat shop labor to create the products. Walmart, Nike, Disney, Reebok, Van Heusen, Liz Claiborne and Ralph Lauren have all been sited for violations. Like the supervisors, we drive the commerce. Yet, when the “slaves” don’t produce, we are “hurt” or impacted, because we can’t get our beloved cheap beach blanket at walmart. And if we complain to the leaders, we are shot down, maybe put in some risk and nothing happens. We’re the people in the middle, and like the Israelite supervisors, many times we tend to give up on voicing our complaints and just try to hang onto the status quo.

Dr. Martin Luther King said our greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is being “more devoted to “order” than to justice. You see in the bulletin, I added one of his famous lines from his Letter from Birmingham Jail. He said, "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men [and women] willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation..." Dr. King is warning us about the middle ground. The place where one turns from change and just prays for the status quo.

And the church is right in there. We tend to back off change and ride on the status quo because it is comfortable. But, here again, Dr. King warned in one of his most famous statements that “If the church today does not recapture [its] sacrificial sprit of the early church, it will … be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”

Here’s the problem. By taking a passive approach to the issue of slavery, or any wrong for that matter, we are just as guilty. The folks in the middle are as guilty as pharaoh. I did a little stint in criminal law when I was practicing. And in criminal law, there are several levels of guilt. There is a charge if you actually committed the crime yourself. Then there is a charge if you help someone committee a crime. You become an accomplice. Well, we are all accomplices in this crime of slavery. Any time we go to by a product, clothes, food, electronics, whatever, and we don’t ask, who made this and under what conditions… we are an accomplice…because we empower it. Slavery also comes in psychological forms: racism, sexism, prejudice over religious background or national origin… these are all forms of slavery too. They enslave people behind preconceived psychological barriers, they cut them off from economic and social opportunity, they beat people down. If we don’t ask questions, if we don’t raise our voices, if we don’t call out the injustices and racism and prejudice we see everyday—and we all see it – we are accomplices in this crime of slavery.

Exodus teaches us that we have to step out from beyond the middle ground and come front and center declaring Let my people go. And the word “my” is a critical part of that phrase. For it is MY people, your people for whom we need to demand justice and freedom. We talk about “family” a lot here at MABC. And what I am talking about is an act of family. These are our brothers and sisters that are suffering, these is suffering that we cause.

Slavery is alive and well in the 21st century… but it does not have to be. We are the middle ground—and while we have as much guilt as the main power structure, we also have as much influence. We can ask the hard questions, we can choose how we spend our money, we can speak up when injustice is done.

Ultimately, Moses called on the name of the Lord to help him free his people. And it is only through the power of the spirit that we too can free our selves from our fears, and prejudices … and thus free our family. Ultimately, when Moses called on God for help, this was God’s response… and these are the words I want to leave you with this morning.

'I am the LORD, and I will free you from the burdens … and deliver you from slavery ... I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. 7 I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the LORD your God, [the one who has freed you.”]