A Proper 16 21
Ord BFC 2017
Exodus 1:8-2:10
August 30, 2017
Three years ago I began my ministry at Billings First
Congregational Church with a sermon about this Scripture passage. It begins one of the most important stories
in Jewish tradition. It is one of the
most important stories in our tradition, mythology, and
story.
The story is a departure from ancient religion. Most ancient religions stated that if we rule
over you and hold power over you, it is because our god is stronger than your
god and has granted us favor and wealth and power. The world is as it is because our god has
ordained it to be so.
This God
is different. This Lion of Judah nurtured and cared for the Children of Israel
by bringing them to a broad and spacious land in the land of Egypt. This God hears the cries of Hebrew slaves.
And liberates, rescues, saves. This God
delivers the slaves, the oppressed, the powerless.
I often hear Christians, from conservative to progressive, talk
about how they much prefer the loving, graceful God of the New Testament over
the judgmental, vindictive God of Hebrew Scripture or the Old Testament. But I just do not see it. Rather, sometimes I prefer the God of Hebrew
Scripture . . . who seems to have much more real-life love and grit. I want a God who does not back down from
despots and tyrants, who cannot stand the smell of sentimental prayers of the
oppressor and takes sides so that suffering, torture, and death might be no
more. I want a God who creates a healthy
fear in those despots and tyrants that if they don’t come correct, oppose
liberation and life, God’s judgment will come against them to deliver people
and peoples from their pain and suffering.
Retired seminary professor and UCC pastor, Mary Luti, tells
the truth as she relates the story. So
you know. She wrote this three years
ago, when another Pharaoh ruled.
Our story begins with a demographic problem
in Egypt. The minorities are having too many babies. Something has to be done
about them before they become a security problem. So the king gets Congress to
take away their driver’s licenses, deprive them of health care, and make them
clean office buildings for minimum wage with no benefits.
But you know how those people are. They’ll
work three jobs if they have to. The Hebrew people survive and keep on
breeding. So the king orders two of their midwives to smother male infants
right after they’re delivered. They say, “Yes, Sir!” (he was the king, after
all), but they know they’re not going to do it. And they don’t.
When Pharaoh finds out, he calls them on
the carpet. They wiggle out of it by telling him with straight faces that
Hebrew women are prodigious earth mothers who have fast deliveries, so the
midwives never get there in time.
When the king realizes that they’ve been
scamming him, he adopts a more straightforward strategy. He has his minions
throw the boys into the Nile. As it turns out, this is a badly flawed approach
to the problem. He makes two huge mistakes—he underestimates women, and he
messes with a river.
You don’t mess with water. You don’t foul
it with death. Water is life, it nourishes, cleanses and renews. It also kills,
of course; but unlike kings, it never kills for ambition, security, or sport.
If you defile a great body of water, it’s bound to come back to haunt you.
Somewhere, somehow, you’ll pay a price. And when water turns on you, it won’t
be impressed that you’re a king.
No, you don’t mess with water. And that’s
just Pharaoh’s first mistake. He also underestimates women.
It seemed so self –evident: get rid of the
males and there’ll be no one to father new baby Hebrews. No more babies, and
it’s the end of the line. And while you’re waiting for the genocide to run its
course, you’ll only have to deal with girls. And girls are not a threat. The
thought of girls won’t prevent you from sleeping soundly behind your walls.
See what I mean? Pharaoh fails to take into
account some important facts. Fact: girls grow up to be women. Fact: women tend
to outlast you. Fact: at some point women will put their foot down. They will
not join your procession to the grave.
Sick of being hemmed in and pushed around,
repulsed by casual violence in the name of order, power, principle and pride,
they will finally refuse to budge. “Not our
babies!” they’ll say. “Not our people! Not our future!” If Pharaoh had half a brain, he’d leave the boys alone and go
after the girls.
No, he doesn’t know much about women. Or
water, either. He doesn’t take into account that even clogged with blood,
rivers still hold things up, still carry things along, even fragile things like
a little ark, a bobbing basket with its tarred-over bottom and tucked-away
child.
If Pharaoh were a man of imagination, if he
were wiser about women and water, he might realize that, sooner or later, a
floating Hebrew baby boy, snatched by women from the water, will grow up to be
a Moses, and that such a Moses will make him let the people go.
He might see that one day this Moses will
extend an arm, and there will be a wall of water on the left, another on the
right, and a dry seabed in-between where an oppressed people will get to the
bottom of things and find their way to freedom. He might see that sooner or
later a terrible trap will spring, and that his mighty, mindless army will wash
up lifeless on the shore.
But pharaohs don’t usually have much
imagination. And so this king doesn’t know that women and water will have the
last laugh and the last word, and that while he presides over a drowned army,
that baby’s sister will improvise again, this time on her tambourine. Master
only of broken chariots, on the far shore he will watch Miriam do her dance and
sing her victory song: “Sing to God all the earth! Sing to God a fresh song.
God does marvels for us! Horse and rider God throws into the sea!”
Poor Pharaoh. He should never have messed
with the water and he should have got rid of the girls.
Well, that’s it—the story of a king
disposed to violence to solve a dilemma. It’s what happened to him for ignoring
the rules of water and for taking women for granted, not factoring them into
his plan. It’s a story about Moses, too, of course, and about God who directed
the whole drama from backstage.
But mostly it’s about what happened when an
impromptu conspiracy of women decided that enough was enough. It’s about what
happened when they decided that there’s never anything to be gained by standing
around wringing your hands and cursing fate. It’s about the risks they took to
assure a future, not just for a boy named Moses, but for a whole people; and,
you could say, also for us. And
it’s a good story for celebrating the gifts and courage of the Bible’s women,
and of all women everywhere.
But you don’t have to be a woman to have
this story be about you. This
could be anybody’s story. It might be yours if you understand that Egypt is not
some strange land far away, and that what goes on there has something to do
with you. It’s yours if you know that Egypt is every place where tyrants large
and small oppress human bodies and human spirits so that the powerful can hold
onto what they’ve got, acquire even more, and sleep peacefully at night.
It’s your story if you decide that enough
is enough and put your foot down, if you resolve to try something, anything, to save a life, and not
just your own.
It’s your story if you’re clever enough,
determined enough, cheeky enough, angry enough to devise delaying tactics
against injustice; if you decide to join the small persistent band of God’s beloved
who lie awake at night, thinking up ways to bamboozle the king.
No, you don’t have to be a woman to sing
that song. You only have to believe that it’s wrong to foul life’s currents
with death for the sake of something as insubstantial as undisturbed sleep
behind a guarded wall.
You only have to believe that it’s
unspeakably wasteful to stand by wringing your hands while a procession to the
grave goes by, day after hopeless day.
Someone who once launched us like a faint
dream on a great river is keeping track of us, the same Someone who will, like
a woman, know how to seize just the right moment to reach for us, and save.[1]
It’s your story. It’s our story. It is a profoundly political story that calls
us to walk into the public square and speak and act our faith. Jewish scholar and mystic, Abraham Joshua
Heschel, speaks of Judaism as the theology of the common deed and the every
day. He shared that the Jewish
truth-teller’s concerns are not the mysteries of heavens but “the blights of
society, the affairs of the marketplace.”[2] Rabbi Sharon Brous recently preached a sermon
in which spoke these truths.
Tell me
this: can one really claim that Torah is not an inherently political document?
This sacred scroll recounts the story of a band of slaves rising up before the
most powerful and iconic ruler of the ancient world and demanding freedom and
dignity. Is that not a political message? Four of the five books of Torah tell
the story of the journey our people took from slavery to freedom, from degradation
to dignity. And lest we think that is an abstract, theoretical or one-time
journey, along the way, they are commanded to establish a society that would be
the antithesis in social policy and political reality of Egypt[3]
This is the birth story of
Judaism. In a sermon earlier this year,
Rabbi Brous spoke out of that birth story to talk about what is the central
tenet or value of the Jewish faith and role of the Jew. She spoke of Jews rising up, who refuse to be
silent, refuse to be safe, refuse to cede Judaism to those who have a limited
and limiting expression of God’s love. At
this moment of greatest danger since the 1930s for the Jewish people, she went
on to say that the water in which the Jewish people swim and the air in which
they breathe, their greatest value, is justice, speaking up and acting up in
the public square and the marketplace for the most vulnerable, the
marginalized, the poor, the oppressed.[4]
Though there are Christians who have a limited and limiting
expressions of God’s love, I see other Christians, like people in this
congregation, refusing to cede to them. . . refusing to be silent and refusing
to be safe. For it was Jesus of
Nazareth, as a Jew who knew his faith’s deepest values, who swam in the water and
breathed in the air of unarmed truth and unconditional love. Jesus was rooted in justice.
Water is life. Mni
Wiconi. Learn the ways of women in the
world. Willing to sing new songs. For God is tracking us. And that God, that God, is an everflowing
stream, exhales into our communities of courage, prophetic words and actions of
justice. From her den, the lioness of
Judah wakes, emerges, and roars to rescue, liberate, and save her
children. May we have the courage to continue
walking the path with her. For, it’s our
story. Praise God. Amen.
[1] J. Mary Luti, “You don’t
have to be a woman,” Sicut Locus Est,
August 22, 2014, https://sicutlocutusest.com/2014/08/22/you-dont-have-to-be-a-woman/.
[2] Abraham Joshua Heschel, from the White Man on Trial, February
1964 quoted in Rabbi Sharon Brous, “What you call politics, we call Torah,” IKAR Community, June 18, 2017. http://ikar-la.org/wp-content/uploads/What-You-Call-Politics-We-Call-Torah.pdf.
[3] Rabbi Sharon Brous, “What
you call politics, we call Torah,” IKAR
Community, June 18, 2017. http://ikar-la.org/wp-content/uploads/What-You-Call-Politics-We-Call-Torah.pdf.
[4] Rabbi Sharon Brous,
“Justice is the air we breathe,” IKAR
community, March 4, 2017. http://ikar-la.org/sermons/justice-is-the-air-we-breathe/.
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