We Are the Story

We Are the Story
Proper 21A
Exodus 1:8-2:10
Rev. Karla Miller Eliot Church of Newton August 20, 2011


We are this story, sisters and brothers.
We are the enslaved,
We are the oppressor,
We are the mother,
We are the midwives who choose life and fear God,
We are the daughter of the oppressor, filled with compassion,
We are the river, source of salvation
We are the big sister, entrusted with the most vulnerable...
We are this story.

Pharaoah.
I will let you think, on your own, how you participate in oppressing others. It’s not an easy thought. It requires deep down scouring contemplation and meditation, and this is not part of who Pharoah was.
Pharoah was scared.
Pharoah was threatened.
Pharoah didn’t know Joseph, and his family, didn’t bother to learn who they were,
And in spite of of the fact that it appears that the Israelites were anything but good and faithful citizens of the empire, Pharoah imagines that the growing Israelite minority is becoming an terrorist threat. An enemy.
I wonder, who or what threatens you?
Is that, or are they really a threat?

Enslaved.
Who are our pharoahs?
There are many powerful forces that shape our lives, telling us how to live, and what we need.
We live in a time when those in political power, or those desiring political power, are working to undermine our unity. Our human connection to life. They generate an US vs. THEM mentality. Need I say more?
It used to be that our institutions existed for the life and health of the people in them.
Now, they exist, sadly, for the life and health of the institution.1
This is not just true in secular life.
It’s true in the Church.
Do we exist, only for the institution? Really, as the church, how do we exist for the the least of these? The prisoner, the hungry, the sick, the elderly? The spiritually starved?
Or do we exist, so that we can say what a wonderful lovely community we are, and wonder, “what do people do without a church?”
The church needs to find those who don’t have a church family. Bottom line.

Midwives.
My great, great grandmother was a midwife in the late 19th century on the rugged plains of North Dakota. Her name was Gina. Often in the middle of the night, she would be called to assist in a difficult birth. Whether it was summer, or the middle of a blizzard, she would go, if at all possible. Because that is what midwives do--they embrace and enable birth, and life.

The Egyptian kind commands Shiprah and Puah, Hebrew midwives, to kill all Hebrew male babies at birth.
It’s ironic that Pharoah isn’t threatened by Hebrew women, because it is Hebrew women that begin the unraveling of Pharoah.
Shiprah and Puah’s vocation from God is to preserve life.
The Pharoah insists they deny their vocation from God, and kill.
However,
“ In the Bible's first act of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance for the sake of justice, the midwives refuse to obey Pharaoh's deathly command. They lie to the authorities, breaking the law for the sake of justice and life. They explain to Pharaoh with their fingers crossed and a wink in their eye, the Hebrew women just give birth too quickly before we can get there!”2

In fact, they cleverly appeal to Pharoah’s prejudices by referring to the Hebrew women to be like “animals” (khayot). “ Indeed, Pharaoh's genocidal plan indicates that he has ceased to regard the Hebrews as fully human, and the midwives use this to satisfy Pharaoh's inquiries. They intend for him to hear such a statement as echoing his own loathing of the Hebrews.” 3

Amazing. And, as it happens often in the Bible, God uses what the power hungry consider as low and despised and worthless as instruments to shame and overthrow the arrogant and strong.4 (1 Samuel 2:1-10; Jeremiah 9:23; Luke 1:46-55; 1 Corinthians 1:26-29).

So here is a question--
Who has been a midwife to you?
Helped you give birth to something new, to life? A mentor, a teacher, a friend?
If you can, write a note to that beloved midwife in your life. Your life is LIVELIER because of that person.

Here is another question:
Is there something subversive you can do, to defy oppressive power that you are witness to?
Maybe you can’t build affordable housing, like Josephine does,
but you can shop for a cause! (that’s blatant, I know)
Maybe in the all of the horrible rhetoric you hear, you might write a letter to the editor, claiming the Christian faith you know rather than the voice of Christianity that is perceived what the media and others promote?
Maybe it’s simply being kind to someone that is perceived as different...
that is a victim of xenophobia.
What can you do?

Intergenerational, Multicultural Trinity

Irony abounds in this story.
Have you noticed that Pharoah is only threatened by Hebrew males, and yet the real threat are the women? Pharoah has ordered all Hebrew boy babies to be drowned in the Nile River, attempting to make the river, a source of life and abundance in ancient mesopotamia, a place of death and destruction.

An unlikely alliance of three women--
Jochebed, Moses’ mother,
Miriam, Moses’ big sister,
and an Egyptian princess, Pharoah’s daughter,
commit the second act of civil disobedience in the Bible.
They defy death
by working together to save the baby in the basket.

These three women--Hebrew mother, young sister, and powerful Egyptian princess by embracing life, blur “Pharaoh's attempts to draw lines of distinction between "us" and "them," between Egyptian and Hebrew, between dominating and dominated.”5 (Amy Miller)
This is powerful, friends.
This isn’t a little Sunday School story, is it?

So, again, I wonder,
How can you blur the lines between the perceived “Us vs. Them” that the pharoahs of our world attempt to paint?
Who can you protect, like an ancient hebrew mother?

What is something or someone vulnerable that needs your watching over, like Miriam in the bulrushes?

What unlikely alliances can you make, can we make,
to protect life and love,
and defy death?


Sisters and brothers.
We are the story.
We are this story, sisters and brothers.
We are the enslaved,
We are the oppressor,
We are the mother,
We are the midwives who choose life and fear God,
We are the daughter of the oppressor, filled with compassion,
We are the river, source of salvation
We are the big sister, entrusted with the most vulnerable...
We are this story.

1 Dennis Olson Exodus 1:8 – 2:10: From Welcomed Guests to Suspected Terrorists
http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=8/24/2008&tab=2
2 ibid
3 Amy Merril Lewis, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=8/21/2011&tab=2
4 ibid
5 ibid