Show Notes
Exodus 1:8-2:10 | Psalm 124 | Romans 12:1-8 | Matthew 16:13-20
Chapters
- (00:00:02) - Led Zeppelin
- (00:08:26) - The Levy Breaks for Israel
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Boom crack, boom boom, crack boom, crack boom boom crack boom crack boom boom crack boom crack boom, boom. Back.
[00:00:25] Sam.
[00:00:54] In the winter of 1971, British Supergroup led Zeppelin descends upon an English manor house called Headley Grange.
[00:01:07] Along with arriving in this manor house comes Rolling Stones mobile recording station.
[00:01:16] And they set up to spend several months at Headley Grange and in order to record an album which eventually is referenced as Led Zeppelin 4.
[00:01:31] Though on the COVID of the album neither the group nor the album title is listed, it's just fans like us who call that album Led Zeppelin 4.
[00:01:44] The recording is going great.
[00:01:48] The band is tight and they're together except for one song, the last track on that album, which you just heard a little snippet of at the end of a good day of recording. Recording engineer Andy Jones grabs John Bonham by the arm as the band is leaving in order to go to dinner and in the local town. And he asked if Bonham is willing to remain behind to skip dinner in order to exercise an idea that Jones has.
[00:02:29] While the band has been getting ready for dinner, Jones has set up Bonham's drum set at the base of the stairs in the entry hall of Headley Grange.
[00:02:42] He knows that the struggle that the band is having is getting the drums right for this particular track. When the Levee Breaks and when Jones engages Bonham in that particular location in Headley Grange and sets up the microphones to record, something magical happens.
[00:03:07] There is a reverberation, an echo, where the drumbeat piles back up on itself and we get a rhythm that engages our hearts and begins to transport us back in time.
[00:03:24] If you have a sense of the history of this particular song of Led Zeppelin when the Levee Breaks, then you know that it is not an original tune from Led Zeppelin. It's a cover song. The British rockers, not unlike the Rolling Stones, have leaned in to American Southern blues.
[00:03:51] And the band has found a song that was recorded in 1929 by Memphis Minney and her husband, Kansas Joe.
[00:04:05] Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe record the song in 1929 in response to the Mississippi flood of 1927, late 1926. It begins to rain.
[00:04:24] It keeps on raining it rains and rains and rains and rains and rains and rains and rains and rains and rains.
[00:04:42] Until finally, in 1927, the levee breaks and the Mississippi Delta is. Is flooded.
[00:04:56] 27,000 square miles of Mississippi Delta floods.
[00:05:08] Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri are all severely affected by the flood that takes place in 1927.
[00:05:27] Depending upon which source you connect to either 249 or over 500 people drown in the Mississippi flood.
[00:05:40] 700,000 people are displaced by this catastrophic weather event of 1926 and 1927. The vast majority of the people displaced by the flood are African Americans, particularly African American sharecroppers working in the Mississippi Delta.
[00:06:10] Many of those sharecroppers displaced by the flood are relocated to refugee camps, where they are pressed into service to rebuild the levy system with no compensation.
[00:06:29] This begins another wave, not the first wave, but another significant wave of what we call in American history the Great Migration.
[00:06:44] African American, mostly rural living, mostly sharecropping farmers move from the American south into the northern industrial Midwest.
[00:06:59] They settle primarily in Chicago and in Detroit, and they take their music with them.
[00:07:13] In Chicago we have the development of what we call the electric blues.
[00:07:19] And in Detroit we have the evolution of American soul and the ultimate development of Motown.
[00:07:29] British rockers, in particular the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin can connect to Chicago's electric blues.
[00:07:40] And American music has an enormous, ever extending influence on the preferred side of the British rock and roll tree, if you know what I mean.
[00:07:59] The Stones and Led Zeppelin develop this genre of British rock and roll that has an enormously positive influence coming from music that is derived in the American south and then in the American industrial Midwest.
[00:08:26] Maybe some of you are scratching your heads and wondering why a guy like me in a place like this is talking about when the levy breaks.
[00:08:41] If you pay careful attention to this story that we have from the Hebrew scriptures today.
[00:08:48] This is a story of the levy breaking for Israel.
[00:08:54] We have one of the most profound and one of the most glossed over lines in all of scripture, from Genesis to the revelation to John.
[00:09:09] It reads like this in the King James Version.
[00:09:18] Along came a pharaoh who knew not Joseph.
[00:09:27] It is a turning point, a watershed moment. The levy breaking for Israel. If you were around this church last Sunday, then you know a snippet of the story of Joseph, one of the most north star oriented characters in all of scripture.
[00:09:50] A person who, in spite of test and trial and betrayal and frustration and being forgotten, a person who rises above, leads Egypt through an era of prosperity in spite of significant famine, who has been betrayed by his family and does not exact revenge or but engages in a curious and somewhat comical reconciliation. Eventually, as the story tells us, to gather them up and take them to live in the land of Goshen, which would sort of be like living in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the beautiful paradise that is Teton county, where the resources are abundant and deep and rich.
[00:10:48] And then we get this line, this Watershed moment.
[00:10:56] Along came a king which knew not Joseph.
[00:11:04] The tragedy that ensues is a dramatic and destructive weather system for the people of Israel that we can't really imagine. I mean, we know the story and we heard the story told again, but do we really listen to the dark consequences that are visited upon Israel in this, in the very first lines of the book of Exodus, first, this king, which knew not Joseph, becomes frustrated with the rise in population, the increase in population of the Hebrew people.
[00:11:52] He, from that political standpoint, gets nervous, gets scared. There are too many of them and not enough of us.
[00:12:02] And so he makes a strategic and somewhat military move to impress the Hebrew people, to impress Israel into slavery.
[00:12:15] Israel languishes in slavery, but they are prolific in having a population growth within the context of this particular time period. Pharaoh has his eyes on this continuing growth of the population of Israel and eventually goes to all the midwives and, and horrifically instructs them to engage in genocide.
[00:12:42] The instruction that the midwives are given, the direction that these women who have devoted their lives to helping birth babies, the direction that they're given is upon the birth of those babies, to throw the male children into the Nile.
[00:13:10] It is a horror story that happens right on the very end of the story of one of the most charismatic and successful leaders in the history of the people of Israel. Israel. It seems that their fortunes turn on a dime, most certainly for Israel.
[00:13:43] The Levy breaks in this moment, in this transition from the book of Genesis to the book of Exodus.
[00:13:56] And yet, and yet a new thread appears.
[00:14:07] We get this curious story about a new baby who comes on the scene.
[00:14:15] Joseph is forgotten, but there's a Hebrew baby who's been hidden by his mother who for three months.
[00:14:25] And when this baby becomes too squeaky, too noisy to hide anymore, his mother hatches another horrific plan, right?
[00:14:40] We don't hear it that way. We hear it through the tradition of this story being told over and over again of a birth mother laying a baby in a basket and floating that baby down the stream. But maybe we should hear it in the way that it's intended to be heard.
[00:15:02] Here is a mother, a mother who is so desperate, so desperate to keep her baby alive that she goes in search of a basket and she engages in a process to waterproof that basket.
[00:15:21] And she places her three month old son into this basket and floats that basket atop water in a river that is filled with the corpses of the babies of her people.
[00:15:46] That is both an act of desperation and an act of courage.
[00:15:52] God.
[00:15:54] Because only God, right?
[00:15:58] God seems to follow that baby, maybe somewhere from the Snake river ranch down to the Wilson boat ramp, where that baby is discovered crying.
[00:16:16] And that baby is then welcomed, with enormous narrative irony, into the household, into the palace of Pharaoh, where he is raised by Pharaoh's daughter and nursed by the mother who bore him and placed him in that basket.
[00:16:52] This is a watershed moment for the people of Israel in light of horror, of upon horror, suffering upon suffering, oppression upon oppression, a new thread emerges.
[00:17:20] Church.
[00:17:22] This story doesn't exist for our own entertainment.
[00:17:30] The spirit of God influencing this story is seeking to pull us along through our own lives.
[00:17:41] God knows the story knows.
[00:17:46] And you and I, if we are honest, we know that the levy breaks for all of us at one time or another, in one form or another, for us individually or for us corporately.
[00:18:13] The levee breaks and we find ourselves drowning in a reality of suffering and despair.
[00:18:26] None of us misses that reality.
[00:18:35] Maybe it's visited upon some of us more than others of us.
[00:18:42] But I have been known to say pain is not a contest.
[00:18:49] It's just pain.
[00:18:54] And even still, even still, while the levy breaks for Israel, this new thread emerges.
[00:19:06] A mother births and hides a baby.
[00:19:11] Somebody, somebody whose name we don't know and we never will, weaves a basket.
[00:19:23] A mother places a baby in a basket in a moment of both courage and desperation. And that baby is discovered through the generosity of the heart of Pharaoh's daughter.
[00:19:38] A mother nurses that child. Somebody changes that child's diapers. Somebody raises that boy and maybe teaches them hieroglyphics in Egyptian elementary school, right?
[00:19:55] As that boy grows, someone begins to teach him the culture of the Hebrews alongside the culture of the Egyptians.
[00:20:05] Somebody, at some point in that kid's young life tells him, hey, when you are out there, when you are way out there beyond the wilderness, keep your eyes open because there are burning bushes everywhere.
[00:20:29] Somebody encourages this stuttering young man to grow into a leader who would speak up for a whole culture of people.
[00:20:46] Church.
[00:20:49] We can live in a reality where the levy breaks and we can drown in our despair, or we can take that dark, hard, sorrowful experience and we can follow a thread in our lives.
[00:21:15] I am not saying that there is either a Joseph or a Moses sitting in this church this morning, but I am absolutely certain that in this church this morning, there is a basket weaver and there is a teacher of hieroglyphics and there is a diaper changer and there is an old and graying guru who is encouraging young people to. To keep their eyes open for God at work in the wilderness around them.
[00:22:02] Somebody, somebody in the Mississippi Delta picked up a guitar and carried it to Chicago.
[00:22:14] And that person who picked up the guitar and carried it to Chicago taught a young boy or a young girl the old songs from the South.
[00:22:28] And when that young boy and young girl learned the old songs in the south, some community planted a church where that kid could play.
[00:22:42] And then eventually that kid grew to be such a good player that he or she began to play in the speakeasies and the dive bars of the industrial midwestern north, eventually influencing supergroup rockers across the Atlantic.
[00:23:11] I am not saying that there is a Joseph in these pews.
[00:23:18] I am not saying that there is a Moses in these pews.
[00:23:23] I'm not saying that there's not.
[00:23:29] But I am saying that there are basket weavers, that you little old, you might be a basket weaver without even knowing it. And I'm saying that there are hieroglyphic teachers and it might be you without you even knowing it.
[00:23:50] And I'm saying that there's a silver haired guru who encourages a grandchild or a great grandchild to have eyes that are so wide open and a heart that is so wide open that you might find God somewhere out there in the wilderness. Church There are guitar toters sitting in these pews right now. Church, There are children learning the old songs from the South.
[00:24:31] There are people like you, like all of us, coming together to grow into a line, a thin line of God's love that stretches through the sorrow and the despair and the tragedy of our very real existence. I am not denying the hardship. I am standing up in the face of it and saying that it does not get the last word.
[00:25:11] Church, we are basket weavers.
[00:25:16] We are guitar toters and we are thread followers of the love of God that has existed since the very beginning of the story and will continue into the very last day of which none of us is aware.
[00:25:42] What grows here is an ever growing consciousness of the idea that we have the ability to be co creators in this beautiful story, this beautiful plan that God has launched from the very first line of Genesis to the very last verse of the Book of Revelations to this very day of the Episcopal Church in Jackson, Wyoming.
[00:26:18] What grows here is love and nurture and care and faith and courage to follow that thread forward.
[00:26:39] Amen.
