Exodus 3:1–15
This passage, the great theophany to Moses, is probably my very favorite in the entire Bible. God appears to Moses in great glory and gives God’s very own name. It is profound and intimate.
It is also a response to injustice and oppression. It is the plight of the Israelites, migrants oppressed in the land they have moved to, that causes God to reveal God’s self and glory to Moses. It is in order to save them—to ensure their dignity, their freedom from slavery, their rights to their own liberty, safety, and cultural identity—that God calls Moses.
And God does not only call Moses to liberate the people of Israel, but to bring them on the move. The great story of the Exodus is a story of Exodus, of movement: a story of migration. The migrants who traveled to Egypt and found only oppression there will now travel again and find liberation in their movement. The freedom of movement, to stay or to go, underpins the entire narrative of divine liberation.
And let us not forget the role of Moses, who asks “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Moses is imperfect, himself on the run after killing an Egyptian. Moses is called because God will use him.
May we see ourselves, just a little, in Moses, as we look at the injustice faced by migrants today and ask: how is God acting to bring liberation and movement for the oppressed migrants among us today? How is God calling us, unprepared as we are like Moses was, to take our part in building the mighty acts that will bring about movement and liberation? What can we do, today, to help secure dignity for all who migrate?
God gives Moses God’s own name, and God gives us God’s name as well, to strengthen and prepare us for the work of making Migration With Dignity a reality.
Hannah Bowman is a member of the Episcopal Migration Caucus who lives in Los Angeles, the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, and the author of Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (forthcoming from Fortress Press in November 2026)