By Robert McAfee Brown The members of the church are emissaries of peace and seek the good of man in cooperation with powers and authorities in politics, culture and economics. But they have to fight against pretensions and injustices when these same powers endanger human welfare. Their strength is in their confidence that God's purpose rather than man's schemes will finally prevail ... (9.25)

-- The Confession of 1967

I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that most of us identify as servants in pharaoh's court, lower echelon folk who have advancement possibilities if we play our cards right. This is true whether our "pharaoh" is the current occupant of the White House, the CEO of the corporation that employs us, or the head of the real estate agency where we still work only on commission. How do we relate to the society around us, particularly if we wish to change it? The Exodus story provides a number of options.

Option One: The easiest thing is to accept the perks and the comforts with gratitude. Even though the job situation is tight, the hours are usually good, and the pension plan will be adequate. We have reasonable job security provided we get to work on time, exude efficiency, and carry out the boss's orders. If the pharaoh says "Jump!" we'll ask "How high?" and if he says "Crack down on the Jews," we'll ask, "How hard?"

The price we pay is selling our souls to the highest bidder. We let someone else manipulate the strings of our puppet-like existence.

Option Two: Some of us still want to help others a little bit so long as it doesn't get us in trouble. When we discover how many people fall below the poverty line, we make a gist to a charitable organization. When we discover how many people have no jobs, no homes and no food, we volunteer to help set up shelters and soup kitchens. Sometimes the pharaohs applaud our humane gestures, and at the annual banquet of the service associations we may be cited on the Honor Role of Responsible Citizens.

The price we pay is that we are kidding ourselves. We aren't really changing anything. We are tinkering around the edges of a fundamentally unjust situation, making no more than cosmetic adjustments. No matter how kind we are to people at the soup kitchen, they are soon going to be hungry again.

Option Three: Occasionally people become aware of the final ineffectiveness of such efforts, necessary as they may be in the short run. They decide that the social fabric must be ripped off, and the faulty structure under it displayed for what it really is, so that the construction can be discarded, and we can rebuild out of the debris. Let us be honest. We are talking about radical social change or revolution.

Radical social change is not likely to emanate from affluent suburbs, where the inhabitants benefit from the inequities.

Let us remember that we, who have little zeal for "starting a revolution," are usually content with a world in which the possibilities of genuine improvement are minimal. The conclusion we usually arrive at, as we face the poor, is that we don't want radical change, and so we'll see to it that the poor, who may want it, don't have a chance to practice it. Revolution looks attractive only when one is on the bottom.

The price we pay is our bypassing of one of the great insights of the twentieth century, that those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. What is called "the revolution of rising expectations" is the poor's greatest hope and the non-poor's greatest nightmare.

Option Four: Uneasy servants in pharaoh's court sometimes decide that their most creative option is to leave the court and start all over again. In Christian history this has been an important option, practiced with particular integrity by such groups as Quakers and Mennonites. Small groups withdraw as much as possible from the evil compromises of life in pharaoh's court, establishing communities where the power of government and big business and militarism can no longer brush aside the demands of individual conscience.

The witness is so clear-cut that it cannot simply be ignored, for those who adopt it have an impressive track record of enduring ridicule or attack, rather than yielding to the conventional standards of society.

The price we pay for this position is that disengagement from pharaoh's court removes us from the arena of immediate political effectiveness, and allows the power of conventional decision-making to avoid direct challenge. Those who adopt this position, however, believe that "the time is now" for creating a new society rather than waiting for a more "propitious" time.

Option Five: A final option is to stay within Pharaoh's court, conscious of all the compromises, but trying to be the loyal opposition. Such persons say, "In less than ideal situations, we will work for a society that tilts more toward justice rather than less. And when pharaoh makes decisions to which we cannot say "yes," we will try to speak a clear and collective "no," rather than a reluctant "yes."

Before the recent Gulf War, almost all the mainline Protestant and Catholic church leaders opposed the arms buildup and the consequent military action. From within pharaoh's court they tried "to speak truth to power," and power refused to listen. That was not a time to leave, however, but more than ever a time to remain and keep mounting a moral challenge, particularly when the human costs of the Gulf War were, by any standard of measurement, morally devastating in terms of the immensity of the consequent human suffering. Pharaoh's court will continue to need the massive work of critique from within as well as without.

The price we pay for being "the loyal opposition" is that we are never quite sure when we must leave, if we are to be faithful to the God at work within us. We run the risk of being accomplices in evil.

And if that's not clear, just ask Moses.