Year A, Pentecost 13 Exodus 1:8-2:10
“Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know
Joseph.” Some of you will remember that
Joseph was young boy who was sold by his cruel brothers into slavery. He ended
up in Egypt and interpreted the Pharoh’s dreams so accurately and
advantageously, the Pharoh ended up giving him a great deal of power and
authority. Joseph later forgave his
brothers, and his whole family settled in Egypt. Joseph’s father was named Israel and the
descendants of his family were who this new king was referring to as the
Israelite people. It’s the first time
this group of people is recognized as Israelites.
Notice, the new king is not named. Apparently the author of Exodus didn’t think
his name was important. Many have
hypothesized on who this king was, but the author of Exodus didn’t name him. What we know is that not only did he not know
Joseph, he didn’t care about the story of Joseph, which is part of the reason that
instead of working with the people known as Israelites, he decided to oppress them.
He was threatened by a community he didn’t understand. We see that far too often.
As a result he decided that instead of working with
them, he would simply oppress them more and more until they lost their will to
live. However, that didn’t work. The more they were oppressed, the more they
multiplied and spread. Since oppressing
the people he feared was not effective, this nameless Pharaoh came up with an
even more evil plan. He asked the
midwives of the Hebrew women to kill all the male babies. The men were more of a threat because they
could join Egypt’s enemies and fight.
It
would seem that the Pharaoh should have feared the women more as they were the
ones who thwarted his plan. It was the midwives who saved the day--two women
named Shiphrah and Puah. Those might not
be names most of you recognize but their names are obviously important. They
are named, even when the most powerful man isn’t.
They defied the Pharaoh. Why? Because they feared
God. We don’t talk a lot about fear of
God. It meant something different in this context then how we perceive it now. It wasn’t necessarily about being afraid of
what God might do. It was about awe,
reverence and respect. We all connect
with God in different ways. When I pray,
I think of Jesus, the more human and vulnerable aspect of God. But God is more
than that. The God of the Old Testament had some vulnerable moments, but was
mostly associated with awe, majesty and power.
The midwives had a deep reverence for the God who
created the heavens and the earth, the creator God. Because they respected this
God of creation, they refused to help a corrupt king destroy God’s greatest act
of creation—humans. So when Pharoh
called them before him, they simply explained that the Hebrew women just gave
birth too quickly. By the time the midwife was called, it was too late. The baby was already born and whisked away.
The hilarious part of this explanation is the Pharoh obviously felt like he
couldn’t argue with these women. I
mean…what did he know about childbirth?
Later, church fathers like Augustine and Gregory the
Great debated whether these women were lying.
If they were lying, then they were sinning and they were wrong to do so.
These church fathers went as far as to
say that while these women were rewarded by God in this life, they would not be
rewarded in the next life. About 1000 years later, Martin Luther (the man who
had the courage to take on church corruption) wrote that these midwives were
the model for living under the pressure of persecution because they disobeyed
unjust orders. Their lies were justified
because they were meant to aid rather than injure. Martin Luther (the great church reformer) understood
more than most the courage it took to defy unjust rulers and why sometimes, it
was necessary.
It wasn’t just the midwives that defied the unjust
ruler’s orders. There was also Moses’s
mother. She was rather crafty in how she
defied the orders. After the Pharoh was thwarted
by the midwives, he told everyone to throw every Hebrew boy into the river.
Moses’ mother carefully placed him in the river in a waterproof basket…in a
place where he would likely be found.
Another woman, the Pharaoh’s own daughter, chose
compassion over cruelty when she found the baby boy in the basket. She knew this was one of the babies who her
father demanded be killed. She defied
him and drew him out of the river and raised him as her own. At some point the Pharoh must have realized
that this baby was one that he commanded be killed, but it would appear that
even he could not tell his own daughter to kill a baby. It’s so much harder to
oppress and kill when we don’t know the people who we are oppressing.
What is interesting is that we hear no more of the
Pharoh’s plan to kill the Hebrew boys.
For all we know, he gave up the plan because of the courage of the
midwives, the sacrifice of a mother and the compassion of a daughter. They all defied power in a different way and
it changed history. This is not to say
that the Pharaoh was defeated in that moment.
He wasn’t. He continued to enslave the Hebrew people. But he didn’t’ succeed in killing a whole
generation of Hebrew boys. Moses lived
and went on to defy Pharaoh in a public and dramatic way. He freed the Hebrew people. That would only
be decades later. As we know, change
takes time. Civil disobedience can be a
very effective tool, but it’s not always the most efficient tool.
What we see from this reading is that practice of civil
disobedience has Biblical precedence that goes back thousands of years, long
before Jesus was killed by the Roman government, long before the Civil Rights
movement. There are political leaders
today who eagerly quote Romans 13 which says, “Let
every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority
except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.
Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed...” Current political leaders like to use this
line to show that loyalty to the government is our Christian duty.
The thing we have to remember is that Paul was writing
to a community in Rome…people living in one of the most powerful empires of all
time. He was mindful of what could
happen when a faith community appeared to oppose the government itself and he discouraged
that kind of wholesale opposition. Yet
we can see from our reading in Romans today, which is the chapter right before
Paul encourages people to be subject to the governing authorities, he tells
people, “not to be conformed to this world.”
That is the tricky position we are in as Christians. We have to exist in this world and be
responsible citizens, but we also can’t be conformed to the world. That means
that like the midwives and the Pharaoh’s daughter we must try to discern not
just what we think is best, but discern the will of a loving and compassionate
God.
You might note that in this entire reading from
Exodus, the only time that God directly intervenes is to reward the midwives
who refused to follow Pharaoh’s orders.
That would appear to be very limited involvement. Sometimes we are tempted to look around and
observe whatever injustice might be currently plaguing our nation or world and
wonder, where is God in this? When is God going to step in and fix this mess?
In those moments, we would be wise to remember, that God works through us, the
people of God. God will inspire us,
support us, maybe even reward us, but it’s up to us to do the work that
requires compassion, love and sometimes a degree of disobedience.
