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Refection on Genesis 41:19

by Aaron Scott

Following the January 2009 Immersion Course in New York City and State, participants shared their experiences with the Union Community through a service in James Chapel. The sermon drew on bible studies used during the course.

Genesis 41:19 is the first use of the word “poor” in the bible and I think it’s no coincidence that it’s a word first used to describe bodies. In this instance, in Pharaoh’s dream, “fat and sleek” or “poor and thin” reference the bodies of animals but in this era of antiquity similar language can also be applied to the standards of beauty or ugliness ascribed to human bodies. Especially the bodies of women. At any rate, this passage is Pharaoh’s nightmare. It becomes a nightmare the moment the poor, thin cows enter his dream. It is poor bodies that terrorize Pharaoh in his sleep. He calls them, literally, “evil.”

Have we finished yet the project of fearing and degrading the bodies of the poor? The standards for discerning and measuring embodied poverty may have changed since Pharaoh’s day. But aren’t we still so often desperate to prove the “otherness” of poverty to our own lives and bodies? Not in Egypt, he said. Nothing so ugly should ever have the audacity to show its face in Pharaoh’s back yard. And what about our own back yards, front steps and fire escapes? What images do we keep out of our own family photo albums? God help us if the world knew the shame so many of us carry in our own hearts and minds about the poor bodies we know, the poor bodies we have been, or perhaps about the poor bodies we continue to be. God help us, because Pharaoh certainly will not.

“Lean of flesh” in our own place and time has a nicer ring to it. We’re all into this, we’re into fitness today. If we can pay for it, make time for it. We’re into eating healthy, too, if we can pay for that. Those of us who can’t pay, though? Well, we’re still a neo-liberal Pharaoh’s nightmare. Still showing up in his dreams at night, starving for justice and ready to take it. And our bodies? In the 2009 U.S. version of that dream? Asthmatic, diabetic, homeless, incarcerated, undocumented, unemployed, underpaid, uninsured, exhausted, maltreated and overworked, malnourished and of every size. Pharaohs don’t like to remember bodies like ours. They don’t like to take our picture, unless it’s to scare somebody else. Or mock us as subjects. Just the sight of us sends that American dream spinning into a nightmare.

But was it really a nightmare, or did Pharaoh just happen to finally wake up one day? And maybe that was the scary part for him? To see how close to home those ugly, skinny, poor cows actually were? It is indeed terrifying when poverty comes home. When it does show up in Pharaoh’s Egypt, in my back yard, your own home, my own family. It’s terrifying and it’s also profoundly common. And that’s what we want to start talking about.

Those of us who participated in the Poverty Initiative’s immersion course in New York City and upstate New York would like to start that conversation with you all right now, sharing some personal testimonies from the trip in the small groups you’re sitting in. And please, keep the conversation alive once you leave here today.