Who Am I That I Should Go to Pharaoh?

[Then the Lord said,] “…The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
(Exodus 3:9-11, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

What good can one person do opposing an authoritarian regime?

Moses didn’t much like his chances when God told him to take on Pharaoh and the Egyptian kingdom. “Nobody will listen to me,” he protested. “I have a slow mouth and a thick tongue. Please, my Lord, just send someone else.” (Exodus 4:1,10, and 13, drawing from the Common English Bible)

But God didn’t pick Moses for this mission because he could get the job done on his own. (His brother Aaron, in fact, had already been tapped to handle the public communications end of things.) No, God gave the job to Moses, despite an apparent lack of qualifications, to demonstrate what we can accomplish when we resist the demands of human empires and embrace the vision of the beloved community for which God created us. We can become, as Moses did, the means through which God works miracles in this world.

To step up to this task, the seventeenth-century Quaker minister James Nayler preached in The Lamb’s War Against the Man of Sin, required strong faith. “[God’s] kingdom in this world… is in the hearts of such as have believed in Him, and have answered His call out of the world,” and Friends who possessed such faith would “war against whatever is not of God”:

“Whatever the god of this world has begotten in men’s hearts to practice or contend for—yes, whatever God did not place there—all this the Lamb and His followers must war against, and they must be at enmity with it both in themselves and wherever they see it.”

As I read these words, my thoughts keep coming back to Bayard Rustin.

Though Rustin has become best known for his role as a central organizer in the civil rights movement’s March on Washington, he got to that point because he had already put in decades of work as an activist, including two years in prison as a conscientious objector to military service during the Second World War. Two years after his release, he was invited to give the annual William Penn Lecture to the Quaker community in Philadelphia.

Directly challenging the ethos of the emerging Cold War, Rustin called upon his audience to accept their “individual responsibility” in bringing about a peaceful world. “How can we begin?” he asked. “We can begin by opposing injustice wherever it appears in our daily lives.” People who demonstrate the courage to “behave with integrity” in their opposition to injustice, Rustin emphasized, could serve as role models, and “make it possible for [others] to see issues clearly enough to press for a more abundant economic, social, and political life.”

This makes me think of the lawsuit Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and other Friends—including New York Yearly Meeting, of which I am a member—have brought against the Department of Homeland Security, challenging the federal government’s plans to abandon a longstanding policy of not entering into hospitals, schools, and places of worship to detain individuals suspected of lacking legal status in the United States.

“Quakers believe that everyone has their own connection to spirit, or access to the divine,” according to the complaint filed by attorneys for the meetings. “Opening meetings to anyone who desires to attend is an important aspect of Quaker worship, because every individual who attends presents an opportunity for God to speak to worshippers through them.” Crucially, “everyone who attends worship meetings is participating in worship, whether they speak or not.”

Homeland Security’s aggressive agenda put that worship in jeopardy.

The newly announced policy had already frightened some immigrants from attending Quaker meetings—and that, the complaint argues, undermined the meetings’ efforts to receive messages from whomever God might choose as a conduit. It also created a burden on Friends’ ability to “gather in person for communal religious worship, an activity that is fundamental to their religious exercise.” (Furthermore, armed law enforcement personnel entering a meetinghouse to detain a suspect would violate Quaker testimonies of peace and nonviolence.)

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang found much of the complaint convincing and issued a limited temporary injunction preventing Homeland Security from implementing its new policy at the plaintiffs’ meetinghouses. (Meanwhile, Friends General Conference has joined several other religious organizations in filing a second federal lawsuit.)

We’ll see how this legal battle plays out—but it exists at all because of the leading felt by several Friends who were convinced through their faith that they could, with God’s help, turn back the forces of a modern-day Pharaoh.