08/23/2026
Scripture: Exodus 1:8-14
Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians subjected the Israelites to hard servitude and made their lives bitter with hard servitude in mortar and bricks and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.
Sermon: “We’ve Heard This Story Before”
The stories of the Bible are true, not because they happened at some point in history, but because they continue to happen today.
That’s something that I say often as a pastor, and I’ll say it once more: the stories of the Bible are true, not because they happened at some point in history, but because they continue to happen today.
What I mean is that the truth of Biblical stories is not dependent upon their factuality or their historical accuracy. These stories, thousands of years old, remain true, remain relevant, because they continue to speak to our humanity.
Because, in some ways, human beings really haven’t changed all that much.
Think about Jonah. People sometimes get hung up on the question of whether a human being could really survive for three days inside a giant fish. But the fish isn’t the point of the story.
Jonah is a story about a man who runs away from his responsibilities, only to discover that running away has consequences. It’s about a man who receives grace and a second chance when he needs one, and then gets angry when God offers that same grace to people he doesn’t like.
Does that still happen today? Of course it does.
The stories of the Bible are true, not because they happened at some point in history, but because they continue to happen today.
And this morning’s story from the book of Exodus is an especially uncomfortable example of history repeating itself.
Our story begins, “Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.”
If you remember the story of Joseph, Joseph had risen to become the second most powerful person in Egypt. When a terrible famine came, Joseph helped Egypt prepare for it. He gathered and stored grain so that when the crops failed, there would still be food to eat.
Joseph and his people — the Israelites — had helped Egypt prosper. They had lived there for generations. They had homes there. They had families there. Egypt had become the place they called home.
But then a new king comes to power who does not know Joseph, who doesn’t remember, or who chooses not to remember, all that the Israelites have done for Egypt. And this new Pharaoh looks at the Israelites and doesn’t see neighbors. He sees a threat.
“Look,” Pharaoh says, “the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them.”
I want you to notice something about Pharaoh’s fear. The Israelites haven’t actually done anything except live their lives. They haven’t attacked Egypt. They haven’t started a rebellion. They haven’t committed some terrible crime against the Egyptian people. All they’ve done is move to this new country and build lives and have families.
But Pharoah sees that as a threat. There are too many of them, he thinks. What if their numbers keep growing? What if we reach the point where Egyptians are no longer the racial majority? What if, someday, these people who are different from us become powerful enough to threaten us?
And that’s how it starts.
Difference becomes demographic anxiety. Demographic anxiety becomes fear. Fear imagines that difference is a threat. And once we convince ourselves that someone is a threat, almost anything we do to them can be justified as self-defense.
I think that’s important, because Pharaoh probably didn’t think of himself as the bad guy in this story. Pharaoh thought he was protecting Egypt. He thought he was defending his people. He thought he was preserving their way of life.
In his mind, he was putting Egypt first; keeping Egypt for Egyptians.
And because Pharaoh was afraid, the same actions that the Bible calls “oppression,” Pharaoh called “protection.” The Egyptians enslaved the Israelites and forced them into hard labor. But that still didn’t stop their population from growing.
So Pharaoh became even more afraid. And eventually his fear led him to order that Israelite baby boys be killed.
That’s what fear can do to us. It can take people who have done us no actual harm and turn them into enemies. It can take cruelty and call it national security. It can convince otherwise decent people that terrible things might be terrible, but they’re necessary because those people are dangerous, and if we don’t do something now, someday there might be too many of them.
Putting people into camps. Taking children from their mothers. The deaths of a few prisoners here, the killing of a few civilians by soldiers there. All these things are done, not in the name of cruelty, but in the name of security.
Because foreigners are scary.
Because if there are too many of them, they might one day replace us.
The stories of the Bible are true, not because they happened at some point in history, but because they continue to happen today.
Last year, the United States essentially closed its refugee program.
For decades, that program has allowed people fleeing war, religious persecution, political violence, and other forms of oppression to apply for refuge in our country.
And taking in refugees has, from our country’s very beginning, has been a central part of our national identity. How many of us know the words by heart?
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
But the golden door is closed. The Trump administration suspended America’s program completely.
But then it made an exception. For white South Africans. More specifically, for Afrikaners, the white ethnic group that historically dominated South African politics and whose government created the system of apartheid — the system of legally enforced white supremacy that governed South Africa until 1994.
The administration declared that Afrikaners were victims of racial persecution and gave them extraordinary preference for admission as refugees. How extraordinary? As of late May, the United States had admitted just 6,069 refugees so far this year — and all but three were white South Africans.
Now I want to be very clear about something. I don’t begrudge a single refugee family — Afrikaner or otherwise — who comes here genuinely seeking safety. Welcome them. Help them. Give them somewhere to live. Help them find work. Enroll their children in school. Help them build a new life.
That’s exactly what I think we should do for all refugees who have a genuine need.
But the claims that white South Africans are facing widespread, systematic racial persecution have just not been supported by the evidence. The South African government has rejected them. The United Nations has rejected them. Independent reporting has repeatedly found that the stories being used to portray white South Africans as victims of some organized campaign of racial violence are, at best, greatly exaggerated — and primarily promoted in white supremacist circles.
But even if we set that argument completely aside, there is still an obvious question, staring us right in the face.
Why them? Why ONLY them?
Why, when refugees from other parts of Africa are fleeing civil wars, dictatorships, religious persecution, and desperate poverty, is our door closed to them?
Why, when families from the Middle East are fleeing violence we all know is very real, is our door closed to them?
Why, when people from Central and South America are fleeing drug cartels and political instability and poverty, are we so afraid that letting them into our country will somehow threaten us?
But when the refugees are white South Africans, suddenly we find room?
The question isn’t whether America is willing to welcome refugees. The question is which refugees we welcome, and which ones we call animals, or an invasion, or poison in the blood of our country.
The question is why our country treats refugees of different ethnicities so very differently.
And suddenly this story about an Egyptian Pharaoh, written thousands of years ago, doesn’t feel quite so ancient. Because Pharaoh wasn’t afraid simply because foreigners existed. Pharaoh looked at a particular ethnic group living in his country and worried that there were too many of them.
He worried that they were changing Egypt. He worried about what might happen if their numbers continued to grow. He looked at people who had done no harm to him or his country and imagined what they might someday do.
And then he used that imagined threat to justify what he did to them.
The stories of the Bible are true, not because they happened at some point in history, but because they continue to happen today.
We know how the story goes from here. Moses is born, and baby Moses survives Pharaoh’s attempt to kill the Hebrew children. He grows up. Eventually, God calls him to go back to Pharaoh and demand freedom for his people.
That’s an important part about the way Exodus tells that story. Pharaoh looks at the Israelites and sees a threat. God looks at those same people and hears their cries.
That is the difference.
Pharaoh asks, “What might these people do to us?” God asks, “What is being done, right now, to these people?”
Pharaoh sees their growing numbers and becomes afraid of losing power. God sees their suffering and takes their side.
And that becomes one of the great themes that runs throughout the entire Bible: God identifies with people who are oppressed, people who are powerless, people who are pushed to the margins.
God is not neutral. God takes sides, and God is always on the side of the little guy.
The God of Exodus is not neutral between Pharaoh and the people Pharaoh has enslaved. God hears their cries. God sees their suffering. And God says, “Let my people go.”
And eventually, of course, they do go. The Israelites escape from Egypt. They cross the Red Sea. They make their way through the wilderness. And this group of former slaves, former foreigners, former refugees, finally arrive in the Promised Land and begin the long process of becoming a nation of their own.
So. What happens when the people who were once powerless gain some power of their own? What happens when the foreigners finally have their own country? What happens when the outsiders become the insiders?
Because it would be very easy for Israel to forget. It would be easy, once they were safe, to forget what it felt like to be unsafe. It would be easy, once they belonged somewhere, to forget what it felt like to be the people who didn’t belong. It would be easy, once they had some power, to start looking at everybody else the way Pharaoh once looked at them.
And so God tells them: “You shall not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.”
God tells them to remember. Remember who you were. Remember where you came from. Remember what it was like when you were the foreigner. Remember what it was like when somebody else got to decide whether or not you belonged. Remember what it was like when powerful people looked at your family, just trying to live your lives, and saw a threat.
And when you finally find yourself on the other side of that relationship, DO NOT become Pharaoh.
“You shall not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.”
I think that's a command Americans ought to take particularly seriously. Because our history is complicated.
If your ancestors were indigenous to this land, they didn't immigrate here. And if your ancestors were brought to this land in chains, they didn't choose to come here. But for most of the rest of us, somewhere in our family history, somebody made the choice to leave home and come to this country, to come to the United States.
And if they did that, they probably had a reason.
People don't usually leave their homeland, their family, their community, their language, their culture, everything they've ever known, because everything is going wonderfully.
Maybe your ancestors were dirt-poor farmers who heard there was land and opportunity across the ocean. Maybe there wasn't enough food. Maybe there wasn't enough work. Maybe they were fleeing a war. Maybe they were Catholic in a Lutheran country, or Lutheran in a Catholic country, or an Anabaptist, or Jewish, or some other religious minority who wanted to practice their faith without persecution.
Maybe they lived under a government that oppressed them. Maybe they simply looked around at the life they had and decided that somewhere else might offer a better future for their children.
The point is, if your ancestors came to this country, they might not have been designated “refugees,” but there was a reason they left home. They were trying to get away from something. Or they were trying to get to something better.
And generations later, here we are.
Most of us don't remember what that felt like. We've been here too long. We’re generations removed from “the old country.” We're citizens now. We speak the language. We know the customs. This is our home. We belong here.
And that's exactly why God's command to Israel matters to us. Because God doesn't say, “Remember that you were foreigners until enough generations have passed that you don't have to think about it anymore.”
God makes memory a moral obligation. Don't let prosperity erase your memory of struggle. Don't let citizenship erase your memory of being a refugee. Don't let belonging erase your memory of what it was like when your family was looked down on as an outsider.
And don't pull the ladder up behind you just because your family already made it to the top.
“You shall not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.”
We need to remember who we were. We need to remember our personal history as descendants of immigrants. We need to remember our national history of opening a golden door for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
We need to remember that God’s people have been oppressed, so we must not oppress others when we are in power.
Because Pharaoh's temptation is still with us. There will always be someone willing to tell us that there are too many of "those" people. That they're changing our country. That they're too different from us to live among us. That they're going to replace us. That they're dangerous. That we have to protect ourselves before it's too late.
And if we become afraid enough, we can convince ourselves that almost anything is necessary. We can convince ourselves that cruelty is national security. We can convince ourselves that desperate refugee families are an invasion. We can convince ourselves that people fleeing violence are somehow the people we need to be afraid of.
We can even convince ourselves that refugees can come in — as long as the refugees are the right color, from the right country, and look enough like the people we already imagine belong here.
The stories of the Bible are true, not because they happened at some point in history, but because they continue to happen today.
Pharaoh is still very afraid. Pharaoh is still telling us that the foreigners among us are dangerous. That there are too many of them. That they might change our country. That we have to protect ourselves before it's too late.
But God is still saying what God said to the Israelites thousands of years ago, when they had finally become comfortable enough to forget: “You shall not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.”
Remember who you were. Remember where you cam from.
We’ve heard this story before. The question is whether or not we've learned anything from it.
Amen.
