In our worship
services this weekend, on this 17th national Children’s Sabbath,
we join some 10,000 United Methodist congregations across the nation
and a broad network of faith groups to lift up the needs of children
and our shared commitment to work with and for them. Christians and
Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Bahais—we unite based on our common scriptural
mandate to insure that the least among us, the most vulnerable, our
children—live lives free of want, free of fear, lives that are
rich and full and beautiful and full of promise.
To launch us into this
today, we lift up the sixth and final story in our Sermon Series on
“Six Bible Stories You Thought You Knew.” It has been
our goal to share in the foundations of our faith through these great
stories and to develop a greater familiarity with the Bible as God’s
living word of life for us. We have also seen how these ancient stories
inform how we approach a variety of current issues—creationism,
global warming, English Only, interfaith relations, peace-making,
and today, the welfare of our children. For indeed, everything that
we do here at First UMC in ministry and in mission is grounded in
these old, old, stories. Theses stories are our story—our story
of faithfulness, our story of purpose, our story of commitment, our
story of love.
Some of you may remember
that the first sermon in this series included a quiz about Bible literacy.
One of the questions was to name the first five books of the Hebrew
Bible or Old Testament. Well, we’ve helped you some on that
one. We spent five weeks in Genesis and today we venture into Exodus.
Genesis, Exodus. Maybe two out of five isn’t so bad!
And I did promise you that
this Sermon Series would you know who led the Israelites across the
Red Sea—and so you can get that one right when asked, the answer
is today’s hero: Moses!
Actually, I’m going
to maintain that the hero of today’s story is not really Moses
at all. He’s just a baby here. A newborn. Totally vulnerable.
We have enough beautiful newborns around our congregation these days
to remind us each week just how beautiful and how precious and how
special and how vulnerable they are. They are totally dependent on
the adults in their lives. And sometimes, in spite of all that their
loving parents might want for them, vulnerable to the conditions of
fear and violence into which they have been born, through no fault
of their own. And so they need other adults to step in and take a
part in their welfare and their well-being.
We have a story like that
right in the 2nd chapter of the 2nd book of the Bible, the Book of
Exodus. It’s a beautiful story about love, a mother’s
love and the love of strangers. It’s a story about violence
and about children at risk. It’s a story about how saving the
life of one child saves the life of a whole people. It’s a story
about the ways in which even the souls of “enemies” intertwine.
It’s a story about courage and about choosing life. It’s
the story I chose as our text on this Children’s Sabbath, the
story of Moses and the midwives.
Do you remember it? Let’s set the stage, starting with where
we left off last week. Joseph and his brothers and his father, Jacob,
once they have reconciled, live together in the land of Egypt and
they prosper there. The family grew and grew. As one translation puts
it: “the children of Israel…became many, they grew powerful—exceedingly,
yes, exceedingly; the land filled up with them.”
But, in time, a new king
comes to rule over Egypt, one “who had not known Joseph.”
That personal connection between Hebrews and Egyptians was lost. The
Hebrew people became vulnerable to the whims and aims of their Egyptian
hosts. The new pharaohs were seeking to regain lost Egyptian territories
and the presence of large numbers of Hebrews on their border came
to be seen as a security risk. Not so different from any number of
stories in today’s LA Times.
Pharaoh said: “Come,
let us deal shrewdly with them or they will increase and in the event
of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the
land.” He set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced
labor. But when even that was not enough, he ordered genocide and
told the Hebrew midwives to kill the baby boys at birth.
Here’s where the
hand of God starts to become apparent in this story, for those with
eyes to see. And let me tell you, the first hero is not Moses the
great Liberator, not yet, but those very midwives, Shifra and Pu’a.
And they are just the kind of heroes and role models that appeal to
me.
Shifra and Pu’a knew
who they were and who their God was. Whoever raised them, taught them
and grounded them so thoroughly in the love and the righteousness
of God that when Pharaoh himself commanded them to kill the Hebrew
baby boys, they let them live. Period.
Not only that, when Pharaoh
saw what was going on he hauled them in for questioning. They stood
right in front of his face and lied: “The Hebrew women are not
like the Egyptian women. They are vigorous and give birth before we
can get to them.” Can you imagine the guts that took?
The scripture doesn’t
say how Pharaoh reacted, but I guess he must have accepted their explanation.
Because it does say that God was well pleased and favored them—and
so the people multiplied and became strong. Pharaoh grows more concerned.
He commands his troops to throw the Hebrew baby boys into the Nile
and kill them all.
Now we come to the part
of the story we heard this morning. In the midst of all that violence,
a baby born is born to a Hebrew mother and father. A fine boy, strong
and beautiful. The midwives let him live. His mother manages to hide
him for three months until the situation becomes untenable. She builds
an ark, (remember the Noah’s ark and the ark in which we worship
each week?), she builds a little ark, a sea-worthy basket of pitch
and loam, and sending his sister to the riverbank to watch, places
the boy in the basket and sets it on the gently rocking Nile. What
an amazing example of the theme of Children’s Sabbath that you
see on the cover of our Order of Worship this morning, the child’s
prayer: “Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide and my
boat is so small”…
Now God acts through another
woman, the most unlikely one of all. Pharaoh’s very daughter
is down at the river’s edge, bathing, surrounded by her attendants
and entourage. She sees the basket among the reeds. She looks inside,
hears a baby crying and takes pity on him. With a heart full of compassion,
in full knowledge of what she is doing--for she says: “this
must be one of the Hebrew’s children”—she acts in
defiance of her own father’s death-dealing policies and saves
the baby boy.
Then Moses’ sister
does her part, too. She sees what is happening and rushes over to
ask: “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the
child for you?” And she runs and gets her own mother to nurse
the baby. Thus, Pharaoh’s daughter raises him as her own, naming
him Moses: “the one drawn out of the water.” And, as they
say, “the rest is history.”
But how different this
story might have been, indeed the whole story of God’s people
might have been, had the women turned away and that child had perished.
Friends, we live in a world,
in a community, where far too many children are perishing and it need
not be so. This past week I attended a meeting of the Everychild Foundation
of which I am an Advisory Board member, a non-profit women's charity
dedicated toward alleviating suffering of local children, due to disease,
disability, abuse, neglect, poverty or disability. I heard a presentation
by the Boys and Girls Club of the Los Angeles Harbor on their College
Bound program. They described the area where they serve—San
Pedro and the Harbor City area, where 1/3 of the youth live in poverty,
where homicides have increased 100% in the past year, where gang violence
is increasing. They told us that 50% of the high school and middle
school students drop out before graduating high school. And how so
many of the high school counselors are themselves so burned out that
they barely expect the kids to graduate let alone attend and graduate
college. One teen described how people look at you and say: “you
don’t have much of a future.”
The College Bound program
of the Boys and Girls Club starts working one-on-one with these at-risk
kids in the 8th grade and walks them every step of the way into a
successful college experience. Each of us read one kid’s file,
just as an example of what’s possible when given support and
coaching. I read about one kid growing up there, a Hispanic student
at San Pedro High, raised by a single mom. Overcoming all odds, he
is currently taking two honors classes and playing in the Advanced
Concert Band. His goal is to attend USC and major in Business or Law.
And I bet he’ll be one of the 90% of the kids in the College
Bound program who succeed.
This is just one dedicated
program and there are many throughout our area. Saving kids one at
a time. Think what would have happened if Moses’ mother had
looked at her baby and said: “you don’t have much of a
future.” Think what would have happened if Shifra and Pu’a
had bought into the violence Pharaoh had unleashed. Think what would
have happened if Pharaoh’s daughter and turned away and taken
the easy way out.
Moses wouldn’t have
made it into his little ark. He would never have floated safely down
the Nile. He would not have lived to become a great leader of his
people.
There are all kinds of
Moses’ out there even this day, boys and girls who need us to
pay attention to their cries. They need us to believe that they have
a future. They need us to step up—and there are many ways to
do that through the ministries and mission of our congregation. Together,
we can defy the odds. Together we can end the violence. Together we
can raise up the children into the fullness of life God intends for
them and for us all.
As we conclude our sermon
series on these great foundational Bible stories and look forward
to Laity and Missions Sunday next week, I close this morning with
the Franciscan blessing I used some months ago that touched many of
you:
”May God bless you
with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths and superficial
relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within
your hearts.
May God bless you with
holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so
that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom and peace among
all people.
May God bless you with
the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection,
starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may
reach out your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into
joy.
And may God bless you with
enough foolishness to believe that you really CAN make a difference
in this world, so that you are able, with God’s grace, to do
what others claim cannot be done.”
Amen.
©Patricia
Farris, 2007. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved.
"Moses
and the Midwives"