Exodus 14:19-31
Back when they still taught things like history and literature in public schools, before “no child left behind” left most children behind and white supremacists gutted public education, preferring indoctrination, I learned a little bit about English history, the Magna Carta, the War of the Roses, and their Civil War in high school World History class, though world history really only meant white history back then.
But most of what I learned about English history I learned from Shakespeare, whoever that might have been, for I am among the many who believe the guy from Stratford-upon-Avon probably didn’t write the plays.
The history plays feature memorable figures, like the evil hunchback Richard the Third and the party-boy Prince Hal who becomes the courageous Henry the Fifth over the course of three plays. The former, Richard, has been portrayed on screen by Ian McKellen and Benedict Cumberbatch, while the latter, Henry, by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, three British knights of a different kind, and one in the making.
It turns out, while Shakespeare’s history plays are great theatre, they are less than great as history. In fact, they are thinly-veiled Tudor propaganda, for the playwright’s career started during the reign of the final Tudor monarch, Elizabeth the First. Richard was not as grotesque as portrayed, the Tudor kings not nearly as righteous and wise.
But remarkably, Shakespeare’s “Henry the Fifth” gets it right about the Battle of Agincourt.
Most of us only know of the battle, if we know of it at all, from the Shakespeare play. Americans don’t spend a lot of time on the Hundred Years War, though this particular battle is well known to military historians.
The English had invaded France to press Henry’s claim to territory and titles in places like Brittany, Normandy, and Flanders. This was the age of chivalry, which is to say an age when a powerful few exploited the poor many, and threw lives into the buzzsaw of war for profit and for vanity. Not that that ever happens anymore…
Henry’s troops arrived in France in mid-August, already late in the season, and immediately besieged a town called Harfleur. The siege took longer than expected, and diseases like dysentery were running rampant among the English troops.
Henry had hoped to provoke the French crown prince, the Dauphin Louis, into a decisive battle. When that didn’t happen, the English moved back toward the coast, fearing the onset of winter and the sizable French mobilization. The two armies finally clashed at Agincourt.
The English had around 8500 fighting men, the French three times as many. It should have been a slaughter, in which case we would not know Henry’s speech on the eve of battle, rallying his “band of brothers” as imagined by Shakespeare.
When the battle had ended, around 6000 French soldiers were dead, including three dukes, nine counts, and even an archbishop. The French had attacked the English baggage train, generally understood as bad form, and the English had executed French prisoners, also considered bad form, and possibly caused because the English had captured more prisoners than they could control.
Quite apart from the fact that the English were superior humans, and Henry the finest of them all, at least according to the propaganda, how did the English win?
Mud.
The battle took place on a recently plowed field with thick woods on each side. The French knights were in heavier armor. They got stuck, sank, trampled one another, and even drowned in their helmets.
Kind of what happens at the Red Sea, if you are willing to park Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston for a few moments.
You will not be surprised to hear me say that the Exodus did not happen exactly as reported in scripture, and not just because the talking bush and plagues are a bit over the top. A couple of million escaped slaves did not wander around the Sinai Peninsula for 40 years.
Some historians go so far as to claim that the Exodus narrative is complete fiction, but I’m not there. I tend to agree with scholars like Richard Friedman, who argues for a smaller escape to Canaan, possibly only the group that would come to be known as the Levites.
As we read a couple of weeks ago, the myth has infant Moses rescued from genocide and named by the Pharaoh’s daughter. It is interesting that the late Israelite authors imagine a Hebrew meaning to the name, when the name is authentically Egyptian, the sort of mistake that argues for historicity.
There does appear to have been a significant slave escape from Egypt in the 12th or 13th century before the Common Era. And there are some interesting theories that tie the development of monotheism in Canaan to the collapse of monotheism in Egypt. The reforming PharaohAkhenaten had introduced worship of one god, but the old polytheism we now know as Egyptian mythology re-established itself when his young son succeeded him, a boy known to us as King Tut.
But let’s park debates about historicity over there with Hollywood spectacle, and just focus narrowly on what probably happened in today’s reading, for the escaping slaves should have been no match for the Pharaoh’s advancing army. And I think what happens is an Agincourt moment.
The crossing probably takes place in the Nile river delta region, possibly at Lake Timsah, and in a bizarre twist, probably at a reed sea rather than the Red Sea, for the two words are similar in ancient languages as well.
A reed sea. We know about reed seas. They are where we lose our sneakers in the mud when we are picking cattails. Fleeing slaves on foot might be able to pass through a marshy region, especially if fortunate winds create dry flats, but horses and chariots won’t. As the text tells us, the wheels become clogged. And as the weather changes and the water returns, there would be certain disaster for the army stuck in the mud.
Now, we could wrestle with the notion of whether might makes right, wrestle with God’s work of liberation, but we have no reason to believe God favored the invading English troops over the French at Agincourt. Both of those monarchies were pretty terrible for most people, including the residents of Harfleur and the boys in the English baggage train. So we’re just going to place both events, the Medieval battle and the Biblical escape, in the category of human phenomena, and focus instead on this: in both instances, what was meant to protect, instead weighed them down, and led to defeat.
And it honestly doesn’t need to get much more complicated than that. Sometimes we end up, face down in the mud, drowning as others walk across our backs. At least the Egyptians could have seen the returning water, abandoned the chariots and horses, and gotten to safety. Those French knights at Agincourt could not, for they needed the help of others to cover themselves in armor.
There are things in our lives, possessions, behaviors, beliefs, that don’t end up serving us as well as we had thought. Sometimes, others have helped us build those defenses, helped us strap on the armor. We can’t even escape on our own.
And here we are, a community for liberation, liberation from our sins and our guilt, liberation from the homophobia, misogyny, and racism of our age, liberation, when we are at our best, from economic systems that mostly benefit us, and mostly brutalize most.
And I have this crazy idea that if something that was meant to protect you is killing you, it has to go.
We are not there, but some churches have had to let go of buildings.
In most cases, we’d be better off dropping Robert’s Rules of Order, for we are not meant to divide our community into winners and losers like some factionalized parliament.
Many of us have had to drop theologies that were killing us, killing our joy and our hope by depicting God as the worst kind of human.
We may even have to drop the idea that being polite is the most important thing we can do, for given the circumstances, we may be forced to choose rude victory over polite victimization, the low-born English archers over the French nobility drowning in the mud.
What is weighing you down? What is weighing us down? How might we best be a community of liberation, for ourselves and for others?
Amen.