I Will Be An Observer for Pharoah at COP27
Climate Bible Study: November 2022
My friend Julianna Morilla and I were walking to a church service in Madrid, Spain on one of the days of the COP25 climate summit in 2019. We had just passed an ornate train station and I made a remark about the beauty of the architecture in Madrid. “Yes, but,” Julianna commented, “I can’t help but think that it was built with the gold stolen from my people.” Julianna is from Colombia and is the facilitator of the Lausanne WEA Creation Care Network for Latin America. “The empire of the conquistadors,” I thought to myself with a sudden jolt of sobriety. Two friends on the way to a church service during a climate summit. As a Colombian, Julianna couldn’t seem to forget empire; as an American immigrant to Canada, I couldn’t seem to remember it.
What does it mean to show up at COP27 next week as a citizen of a historically colonizing nation?
What does it mean to re-read the old Bible stories from a similar perspective?
As a reminder, the bible studies in these newsletters are an attempt to imaginatively—but still faithfully—re-engage the Bible in an age of climate crisis. I know that CO2 is an invisible gas, but I like to imagine that the 415 ppm of it in the atmosphere between my eyes and the written page of Scripture creates a filter that encourages me to read the text in new ways. COP27--located where it is in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt—certainly stirs up much in a re-reading of books like Exodus or Deuteronomy. After all, COP27 will be conducted on what may have been the shores of the original Red Sea, in the shadow of what may have been the biblical Mount Sinai.
What should I write about in 2022 from stories that took place circa 1446 BCE? I am going to write about two sets of “drowned Egyptians,” one set from ancient Egypt that we read about in Exodus 14; the other from modern Egypt who drowned in the same year the Paris Agreement was adopted. Both sets of drowned Egyptians confront people like me as effectively as how Julianna’s statement about the empire of the conquistadors brought me up short in Madrid.
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea so that the waters may flow back over the Egyptians and their chariots and horsemen.” Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at daybreak the sea went back to its place. The Egyptians were fleeing toward it, and the Lord swept them into the sea. The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen—the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them survived (Exodus 14:26-28).
It is natural to read any story in terms of “who are the heroes?” and “who are the villains?” Moses and the Israelites are the hero of this story and Pharoah and his charioteers are the enemy. Then, as a next step, it is natural for any reader to identify with the hero, particularly if those heroes are the Israelites, and if you are like me, someone who grew up with these stories in Sunday School. Esau McCaulley is the author of Reading While Black: African American Bible Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope and even though he doesn’t know me, he accurately surmises that when I read Exodus, as a reader I have been habituated to identify myself with the Israelites and to thrill at God’s love for us, “his people,” and the way God redeems us and puts us on a dramatically-triumphant path of nation-building. When I read the laws listed in Exodus, I think of obedience, order, and personal righteousness. I never—repeat, never—stop and ask, “What would this text say to me if I identified as a reader with the imperial army instead, with the enslavers instead?” I never make that hermeneutical shift. I never identify with the Romans, nor the Babylonians. When I read the Book of Revelation, I read it like Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins so tragically did in the Left Behind Series: that in the End Times, I would surely be part of some mythic Tribulation Force made up of American evangelicals and Messianic Jews. McCaulley explains that historically when African Americans read the Exodus story, they see a God who loves slaves, condemns slavery by divine intent, and topples empire. McCaulley sees the long arc of the universe bending toward justice. I too-often see it bending (after some squiggly but short-lived detours in the wilderness) toward Solomon’s palace and temple.
I might have tripped mindlessly through Exodus 14 once again on my way to COP27, except for the second set of drowned Egyptians, the ones from 2015. At five million, the city of Alexandria is Egypt’s second largest. It is surrounded on three sides by the Mediterranean and backed by a lake, and thus, as one University of Cairo professor points out, “uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise caused by global warming and melting polar ice caps.” In 2015, a severe storm flooded large parts of the city. Six people were killed.
My birth country of the United States is responsible for 25 percent of the total cumulative emissions of C02, in the years between 1751 and 2017. My new home of Canada is responsible for two percent; the EU for 22%; China for 12.5%; and Australia for 1.1%. By contrast, Egypt is responsible for only 0.35% of all accumulated CO2 emissions. Where these discussions get more problematic is when we might say, “Well yes, BUT modern Egypt is 100% responsible for their governance or their construction or whatever else failed to prevent the deaths of those drowned Egyptians in 2017.” Egypt was a British colony from 1882 to 1956. Does that mean anything? Or more importantly, does colonialism mean anything to us as readers of the Bible preparing for COP27?
COP27 is designated as an “African COP;” we are encouraged to be attentive to the African story of climate change, both sub-Saharan and North African. For the sake of solidarity with Africans at COP27, I think we need to, in our re-reading of Exodus, identify with the Egyptian empire in the Bible for a change.
If we re-read the story from the standpoint of Pharoah’s court magicians, we can examine our hearts and ask: What gods have I harbored in my life—both privately and publicly and systemically—that might actually be at war with YHWH? How may I have “christianized” aspects of capitalism, extractivism, consumerism, and geo-politics because that is what religious systems naturally do?
If we re-read the story from the standpoint of Pharoah himself, we can ask: Whom alive today am I effectively ‘enslaving’ so as to maintain my current lifestyle?
If we re-read the story from the standpoint of Pharoah army, we can ask: What I am afraid of losing if the developing nations at COP27 have their say?
Such a re-reading may not be easy, but I'm excited about what it can me for our own growth and for the success of COP27 as it gathers under the theme "Together for Implementation."
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
on behalf of the Climate Intercessors Leadership Team