DADDY ISSUES, a lesson from Moses' childhood

blogging Exodus 2

Moses was born into the tribe of Levi, the clan that would become the hereditary priesthood of Israel; but when Moses was born, the Levites weren’t priests.  They were the minor clan descended from a disgraced ancestor (Genesis 49:5-7) among a community of slaves.  Moses and his siblings were spiritually anointed.  The eldest, Miriam, became a prophetess; Aaron, the middle child, became the first high priest of Israel; and Moses, the baby, was . . . well, Moses! 

But family life wasn’t all prayer meetings and praise services. 

First, they were all slaves.  And,  on top of that, Daddy was basically an absentee father. 

Moses’ MOTHER hid him from Pharaoh’s death squads.  Moses’ SISTER followed the basket floating down the Nile.  They arranged to keep Moses until he was weaned.   But Daddy?  Amram, Moses’ father, didn’t fight Pharaoh’s guards when they came to investigate reports of an infant birth.  He didn’t help hide the baby.  From the information in Scripture, Amram didn’t do anything.

Maybe he was emotionally disconnected.  Maybe he was worked so hard by his Egyptian overseers that he couldn’t participate in home life.  And maybe slavery broke him.  Maybe they so completely whipped away his hope that he couldn’t even find inspiration in the lives of his children. 

Does this sound familiar?

Don’t believe the lie that broken families is something new to to our times or unique to our ethnicity.

The Bible reports that enslavement and ethnic oppression are designed to breaks men.     When the spirits of the men are broken, women HAVE to step up.  Matriarchy isn’t a new  or progressive paradigm for the family.  Matriarchy is basic survival for oppressed peoples.  

Despite all of this, Miriam, Aaron, and Moses became the leaders of a movement that emancipated a nation of slaves and composed the foundational texts of the Gospel.  Moses’ story proves that the children of brokenness don’t have to become the parents of brokenness. 

To overcome the brokenness you inherited, you have to acknowledge your parents’ sins as sins.     

Exodus 6: 20 states that Moses’ father and mother were nephew and auntie.  

Now Amram took for himself Jochebed, his father’s sister, as wife; and she bore him Aaron and Moses. And the years of the life of Amram were one hundred and thirty-seven (Exodus 6:20).

Up to this point in the Old Testament, marrying such close relatives was uncommon.  Jacob and Isaac married cousins.   Abraham and Sarah were half-brother and sister. 

Yeah, I know.  Eww.

At one point, while dictating the Law to the children of Israel in the wilderness, Moses the great prophet said: 

 The nakedness of your sister, the daughter of your father, or the daughter of your mother, whether born at home or elsewhere, their nakedness you shall not uncover. . .   You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s sister; she is near of kin to your father. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother’s sister, for she is near of kin to your mother (Leviticus 18:9, 12-13).

That's a euphemistic way of saying:  God doesn’t want men  hooking up with their aunties. 

Moses looked at his family, listened to God, and said to his people:  God made my sister, and my brother, and me in His image.  He protected us, filled us with His anointing, and called us to leadership.  We are not mistakes.  But the way our parents got together, the structure of their relationship?  That wasn’t right.   The founders of our nation did great things and were mightily blessed.  But the structure of their relationship?   That was sinful. 

Good things came from it.  Great people came from it, but that doesn’t make it right.     

God freed Israel from slavery and said to them, “Now that you’re free be better than your ancestors were.”

This was a hard truth for Moses to speak.  A hard truth for me to speak.  You see, my daddy didn’t always do right, but the Lord says that my siblings and I are not mistakes.  He loves us.  He blessed us.  He brought us thus far along the way, but He does  want us perpetuate the same dysfunction in which our forefathers lived.

It’s a difficult thing:  to confess that you, your family, or maybe even your entire nation was conceived in sin and shaped in iniquity. 

Difficult but necessary. 

Moses’ story shows us that generational greatness requires us to learn our my fathers’ sins, not repeat our fathers’ sins.  We need to stop encouraging our children in lifestyles that political pharaoh and spiritual pharaoh designed to break our people. 

We celebrate survivors.  We honor the  strength of our sisters who did what had to be done when their man wouldn’t.  We glory in the beauty and potential of our children, regardless how they became our children.  And we teach our children the truth so they and all our descendants can walk into their best lives because of the kinds of families they built not despite the kinds of families they built.    

--Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama. He writes a blog called A Word to the Wise at www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves 

Click here to support this ministry with a donation.  Or go to andersontgraves.blogspot.com and click on the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 

Miles Chapel CME Church

P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064

CROSSED LINES & COURSE CORRECTION

Blogging Genesis 35:21-22

Then Israel journeyed and pitched his tent beyond the tower of Eder.

And it happened, when Israel dwelt in that land, that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father’s concubine; and Israel heard about it (Genesis 35: 21-22).

In every family, there are lines that must never be crossed.   So what happens when EVERYBODY in the family crosses EVERY line?   Let’s see.

Back in Genesis 29-30, Jacob, aka Israel, married Leah, thinking he was marrying her sister Rachel.  Then he married Rachel, too.  As part of their dowries and the custom of the wealthy classes at the time, each of the brides had a handmaiden.  A handmaiden, or maid, was a lifetime servant like the ladies in waiting of European royalty.  Leah’s maid was named Zilpah.  Rachel’s maid was Bilhah. To provide their husband with more children, Rachel and Leah made Jacob marry their maids, too. 

  

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/04/waity_katies_ladies.html

Why they did that involves a complex mix of ancient perceptions of a woman’s worth being tied to her ability to give her husband children, legal precedent for higher class women adopting/claiming/ abducting their servants’ children to tweak their fertility stats, and the timeless human tradition of ignoring and repeating the history of really bad ideas (see Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar).  From all that, Zilpah and Bilhah went from maids to concubines.  Concubines were kinda not full wives, but they were definitely fully off limits to any other man, which brings us to Reuben, the eldest son of Israel. 

Reuben did a very bad thing.

“And it happened, when Israel dwelt in that land, that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father’s concubine; and Israel heard about it.” (Genesis 35: 22)

Yep.  Reuben, first of the 12 patriarchs of the Jewish nation, slept with his stepmom who was also the mother of 2 of his brothers.¹ 

His dad found out and nothing.  Verse 23 moves on to a whole other subject and nobody mentions the affair until Israel brings it up on his deathbed 40 years later.   Yep. The oldest son and and his stepmom had sex, everybody knew, and for 40 years they acted like it hadn’t happened.

And this was just the latest line in a long line of lines that no one should ever cross, but they did.

The only sister in this family had been raped and Dad basically did nothing about it.  Her brothers responded by killing every male human remotely connected to the rapist, AND kidnapping all the women in their town.

Dad had 4 wives, but he only loved one, and he didn’t particularly care for the children of  his 3 baby-mamas.  That’s 11 out of 13 kids knowing their Dad who wants them to kick rocks.    And that’s 3 women whose husband has affection-less sex with them.

Now, none of this justifies an affair between a man’s third wife and first son; but in such a broken and ugly atmosphere, when the oldest unloved son and the youngest unloved concubine were likely part of the same generation, Reuben and Bilhah’s affair was not the most surprising development in the family’s history. 

 

Reuben and Bilhah made a choice: a wrong, wrong, eww, wrong choice.  Nobody made them do what they did.  But.  But the culture created by the head(s) of a household define the natural flow of decisions.  In Jacob’s house the current flowed in the wrong, wrong, eww, wrong direction. 

Parents matter.  The culture we create in our homes will push our children toward good or toward evil.   Yes, every child can use their free will to defy the odds either way.  But every statistic in history agrees that it is hard to swim upstream.  And that’s why God gives us rules.

The Law and its more perfect evolution, the Gospel, lay out guideposts for ordering the culture of our families and communities.   In a sense, the Bible is a really long manual for course correction. 

In Genesis, the Lord gave some individual revelations and a few prophetic nudges in the right direction, but for the most part God let people structure family and community according to the dictates of conscience and circumstance. 

Well, we see how well that worked.

Reuben and Bilhah’s affair was one of several relationships that caused so much damage and drama they inspired a whole set of course-corrections  in the Mosaic law:

·         Reuben and Bilhah’s Law.   Leviticus 18: ⁸ The nakedness of your father’s wife you shall not uncover; it is your father’s nakedness.

·         Lot and His Daughters’ Law.  Leviticus 18: ⁷ The nakedness of your father or the nakedness of your mother you shall not uncover. She is your mother; you shall not uncover her nakedness. Abraham and Sarah’s Law.   Leviticus 18: ⁹ The nakedness of your sister, the daughter of your father, or the daughter of your mother, whether born at home or elsewhere, their nakedness you shall not uncover.

·         Judah and Tamar’s Law.   Leviticus 18: ¹⁵ You shall not uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law—she is your son’s wife—you shall not uncover her nakedness.

·         Rachel and Leah’s Law.  Leviticus 18: ¹⁸ Nor shall you take a woman as a rival to her sister, to uncover her nakedness while the other is alive.

·         Amram and Jochebed (Moses’ parents) Law.  Leviticus 18: ¹² You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s sister; she is near of kin to your father. ¹³ You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother’s sister, for she is near of kin to your mother.

The children of the newly prohibited relationships often became wonderful, mightily anointed people.  Nevertheless, the relationships that produced them were terrible ideas that were now officially wrong, eww, wrong.   Leviticus 18 was God saying, “Don’t do that mess anymore.”

Now remember, God delivered the Law to the descendants of Jacob’s 4 wives and 13 kids. The Law was also God’s way of saying to the heirs of family dysfunction,  “You can be better.  Here’s how.”

We have the Law, the prophets, and the Gospel.  We have the full manual for correcting the course of our culture.  With the Bible as our guide, we can establish a fresh current that pulls our descendants toward good and not evil, toward happy families not dysfunctional ones.  And yes, each descendant may choose a different direction, but most of them will swim downstream.

¹  The phrasing in verse 22, contrasted to the report of Dinah’s sexual assault in chapter 34, indicates: (1) Reuben’s and Dinah’s hookup was consensual; and (2) they tried to be sneaky but Daddy found out.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama. He writes a blog called A Word to the Wise at www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves 

Click here to support this ministry with a donation.  Or go to andersontgraves.blogspot.com and click on the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 

Miles Chapel CME Church

P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064

A CONVERSION CONSPIRACY

A new look at the familiar story of Jesus, a well, and a woman.  The title of the message is A CONVERSION CONSPIRACY.

                  

Listen well

If you can’t get the audio on your device, visit the main podcast page at http://revandersongraves.podomatic.com/

The podcast is on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/anderson-graves-podcast/id918990482

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves  #Awordtothewise 

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 

Miles Chapel CME Church

P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064