Sermon August 24 2014
Exodus 1:8-2:10
Psalm 124
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20
“Take Action”
O God of liberation, you call us to take action, and to live in the world – a world of brokenness and pain. We thank you for all those who act on behalf of others; we thank you for those who use the gifts you have given to do your will. May they inspire us to live into your call to take action. May the words of my mouth, the meditation of our hearts, the work of our hands, feet, minds, and hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeember. Amen.
She shook with fear, wondering what terror the day would bring. Yesterday, she had heard the cries of the mother next door as she found out her son had been killed by those in power. Her own son was blessedly alive, but every day the fear was worse. Every day she wondered if this would be the day he was killed. Her people had come to this place of fear, this place and time when they wondered if they would survive—at all. They wondered if the people in power would kill all of their sons, letting them die out slowly, or even begin to kill all of them like they were killing their sons.
This mother was like other mothers, mothers who fear for the lives of their sons at the hands of power and violence. She was like mothers who wondered what his life would be like if he did survive. She wondered if he would grow up in anger or if her love would protect him. She wondered if there was anything she could do to make his life a good one, anything.
* * *
The story really began a generation or two earlier, when one young man was sold into slavery. A couple of weeks ago, we read the story of Joseph and his brothers who sold him because of their jealousy. And by doing so, they put him in exactly the right situation for them to be ruled by him because in slavery he was favored by the Pharaoh of his day and ruled for that king.
And as our text today says, that Pharaoh had died and at least one more had taken his place—this one had no connection to Joseph or at least had no concern for Israel’s descendants. He saw an opportunity for free labor. They had been rescued by Egypt, but now they would work. They had been guests; now they were slaves. Slaves, then and now, have no voice. Slaves, in all times and places, work for the sake of work receiving almost nothing for their effort. Slaves, especially those enslaved because of their ethnic background, are stripped of their dignity and kept enslaved because those in power teach them they have no value as human beings. But that never lasts, humanity rises above that falsehood—humanity and the image of God within produces people who will not bear that weight for long.
People who are taken advantage of will not stand forever under that kind of abuse—the kinds of systems that strip people of their humanity push people to the extreme. The kinds of systems that use wealth and poverty, race, gender and gender identity, and sexual orientation to categorize and value us according to those categories strip us all of our true selves. The energy we spend, alone, trying to make sure that justice never truly happens saps us of potential and always has.
But when we watch, when we listen, when we pay attention to the best of us, we know that there are those who will not stand for the terror and the violence of oppression. There are those who will risk the wrath of the powerful to take a stand. In our scripture today, two women named Shiphrah and Puah are those people, the people who stand against power—and they lie to the face of power, too.
I chose two pictures today for the front of the bulletin, one of two women, one is holding a baby, called Shiphrah and Puah defy Pharaoh. The other is an icon called Perpetual Felicity, which refers to two women martyred in Carthage in 202 A.D. because they identified themselves as Christians and refused to offer sacrifice to the Roman Emperor. They were two women who stood up to the power of Rome as Shiphrah and Puah stood up to the Pharaoh of Egypt. They did it because of Pharaoh’s fear of the men the boys would grow into. He was more afraid of them than he was greedy to use their labor to build his cities.
Certainly the story of the midwives and the mother who protected her son from the Egyptian murders was told to reveal who Moses was and where he came from, but in the telling we receive a teaching about what we can do in the face of injustice. Shiphrah and Puah were Hebrew women, Hebrews and Israelites seem to be equated here and into the next chapters of Israel’s history. When they were told to kill the male babies of the Hebrew women, they chose instead to lie to the king about the births they attended. And because they lied, the Pharaoh saw he’d have to be more direct. But they saved many boys, like it seems they saved the one born to the man and woman from the house of Levi. The Levite woman was the woman who shook with fear at what could happen to her boy.
The mother who feared for the life of her child could be many mothers—then and now. She could be the mother of a black or Hispanic male child in America today wondering, like my friend who lives just outside of Chicago, about her two young boys who are smart and beautiful and funny and African American. Statistically they are more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than white children.[1] The mother in Exodus could be the mother of a young person of color who is more likely than a white child to be shot before he or she turns 18.[2] The Children’s Defense Fund reports that in 2008 and 2009, Black children and teens accounted for 45 percent of all child and teen gun deaths, but were only 15 percent of the total child population. Her story was similar; she was a member of an oppressed population of Israelites or Hebrews in a land ruled by the Pharaoh, a man afraid of her infant son—and all of the other sons of her fellow Hebrew mothers.
This particular mother hit on a plan to trick the powerful people into saving her son’s life by appealing to their sense of decency, or at least the maternal instinct of the daughter of the Pharaoh. The midwives had shown bravery, she knew that. Her son had survived his birth. But soon he would be three months old, so she made a basket of papyrus reeds and waterproofed it with pitch. She floated it in the Nile as a last ditch effort to save her son—if he could live, she had hope. If he could live, if any of those boys could live, then her people had hope.
But you know and she knew that her son was never really out of danger—he was a Hebrew male child in the land of the Egyptians, the land of the Pharaoh who feared what he and his people could do with their rising numbers and growing strength.
In this particular scripture, the women in the story were the ones with the opportunity to subvert the power of the established governmental authority and save lives. Each one did her part, each one knew that God was behind their action, that their faith in the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah (the mothers of the twelve tribes) was meant to instruct and inform the decisions they made for the sake of their people and for the sake of humanity.
It is often difficult to imagine how we are to respond to the powers of destruction—we may even imagine that the power of the oppressed is the power that threatens us. We may, as white, relatively affluent people think with the mind of Pharaoh and fear people who threaten the lives we enjoy living. Many of us stand in positions of relative power and feel the need to control and direct the lives of others. On the other hand, by virtue of a broader vision, we may see the world differently and make choices on behalf of the oppressed or the less powerful. We may not think we have a choice, but to follow orders or expectations, but we do have choices, like Shiphrah and Puah choose to defy Pharaoh and instead of exercising power as control, they used power as compassion.
We aren't going to receive orders to kill Hebrew babies, but we are given choices to collaborate as we vote to cut funding to educate the youngest members of our society or when young people find it easier to sell drugs than to find jobs. We have choices about control and compassion when we respond to need in our town, county, state, nation, and in our world. We can ignore—which is a choice—we can choose to exert control and support those who do. We can choose to have compassion on others—even if and when others do not do the same. We can choose to speak up and act up in the face of controlling, abusive power.
Shiphrah and Puah acted, what will we do?
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