Present at the Birth: Working with God to Transform the World

Exodus 1:8-2:10 (NRSV)
Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. 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."

Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birth stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live."

But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?"

The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them." So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.

Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him, "This must be one of the Hebrews' children," she said.

Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?"

Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Yes." So the girl went and called the child's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages." So the woman took the child and nursed it.

When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, "because," she said, "I drew him out of the water."

We have a new website for Franktown Church. Lois Fawcett and her team have been working hard to get it up and running. I hope you’ve had a chance to visit it. You’ll find it at www.franktownumc.org.

Besides the pictures and information on all of the exciting stuff going on here at Franktown that you will find there you will also see, at the top of the site, a moving logo of the cross and flame with the words of our slogan for the United Methodist Church: Open hearts, open minds, open doors. Those words have gotten out into the culture around us and the experts in our Communications Office in Nashville tell us that because of the ad campaign we have done as a national church over the past few years, a good chunk of the American population now associates those words with us.

Open hearts, open minds, open doors. It sounds pretty basic. Very welcoming. We like to think that we have open hearts that care, open minds to use our intellect to grow in our understanding of God, and open doors that welcome in every person in our community, no matter what they look like and no matter what sort of economic situation they are in and no matter what their life has been like. We are an open, welcoming, mission-minded, searching, loving church. That’s what I believe Franktown United Methodist Church is. But I’m not sure we realize what sort of attitude this gives us toward the world around us. What does it mean to have open doors to the community and world out there on Bayside Road and beyond? What might it require of us?

Well, I’m not going to answer those questions. At least not right now. Instead, I want to tell a story. No, what I really want is to have you help me tell a story about Egyptians and Hebrews.

Last week I talked about Joseph and his brothers and how their story brought God’s people into the land of Egypt. It looked like Genesis was going to leave us with a happy ending, but in the first chapter of Exodus things change. Joseph and his whole generation have died. Their descendents have become settled in the land and a new king has arisen in Egypt – a king who didn’t know Joseph. The stage is set for a new conflict.

What happened was that a huge rift grew between the Egyptians and the Hebrews, the descendents of Joseph—a rift we’re going to represent by the aisle down the center of the sanctuary. Today you get a role to play in this story. Those of you on the right side of the congregation are going to be Egyptians and when I point in your direction I want you to say, “There are just too many Hebrews!” You’re saying this because this is a very upsetting thing to you. These Hebrews are multiplying like rabbits. They’re everywhere. Egypt used to be a quiet, peaceful place. You didn’t have traffic jams in the summer time. You didn’t have carts with license plates from New Canaan or PennsaJerusalem clogging up the roadways. These come-heres are taking up the good land; they’re threatening to change our way of life. Why is this sounding so familiar? Anyway, you are Egyptians and your refrain is “There are just too many Hebrews!”

Those of you on the other side of the aisle are the Hebrews. You have only been doing what God has told you to do from the beginning of creation. You are being fruitful and multiplying, which is exactly what God told Adam and Eve to do in the garden. You are experiencing blessing in Egypt and, as God told Abraham and Sarah, you are being blessed to be a blessing for others. The Egyptians should recognize that God is with them because God is with you!

So you need a chant to recognize that. What I want you to say when I gesture toward you is “Multiply, multiply, multiply!” Are you ready for this story?

O.K., let’s start with you Egyptians. I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is: You are the strongest nation on earth. You are civilized and cultured. You have built pyramids and temples. Your king is probably Ramses the Great, though the Bible doesn’t give us his name. The kinds of building projects described here seem consistent with what Ramses did. The bad news is that Ramses the Pharaoh is a fool.

I mean, he can recognize some significant demographic trends. He can see that the Israelites are multiplying. [This would be a good time for your chant, Israelites - “Multiply, multiply, multiply!”] But he really doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s afraid of what might happen.

So the Pharaoh gathers together the Egyptian people and says to them, “Look, there are just too many Hebrews. We have got to be smart about this because if they keep multiplying like this they’re going to join our enemies and fight against us and they might escape.” It’s kind of a rambling argument. He doesn’t want so many Hebrews but he also doesn’t want them to escape. What he seems to be arguing for is that the Hebrews stay but just stop being so prolific.

It’s not the last time a ruler will be afraid by signs of life among the people. It’s an old, old story and in Jesus’ time the king will be named Herod but the result will be the same. There’s some oppression coming.

So the Egyptians buy the argument and they start chanting, “There are just too many Hebrews!” They set up taskmasters to oppress the Hebrews. They force them into slavery. They have them go to work on the city-building projects that are making Egypt a great nation. But an interesting thing happens. The more the Hebrews are oppressed, the more they multiply and the more they spread. This passage doesn’t tell us what God is doing through this time, but we can suspect, because this is the kind of thing Israel’s God liked to do, that God is blessing the Hebrews. They are taking God’s command seriously. Their chant is, “Multiply! Multiply! Multiply!”

But the Egyptians still believe that “There are just too many Hebrews!” They have decided that the Hebrew baby boom is bad news for them and so they come to dread the Hebrews. And you know what happens when people in power become afraid…they do terrible, terrible things. That’s just what the Egyptians did.

The Bible says they became ruthless with the Hebrews. They made their life bitter. They put them on the worst work details making mortar and bricks and working in the hot fields. And just so we don’t miss what’s going on here, the Bible tells us a second time that the Egyptians were ruthless with the Hebrew slaves.

In the meantime, Pharaoh hatches another plan because he’s sitting up in the palace thinking to himself, “There are just too many Hebrews.” It’s like a plague, all these Hebrews multiplying all over the place, “Multiply, multiply, multiply.”

But being a not-very-bright man, Pharaoh thinks up a not-very-bright plan. You know and I know that when humans have babies it’s the females who give birth. In Jewish tradition this is such an important point that Jewish descent is traced through the mothers and not through the fathers. If Pharaoh were really going to do something about all the Hebrew births, it seems like he would try to impact the female population. But Pharaoh’s plan was to wipe out the male population.

Pharaoh must have been very proud of himself for thinking up this plan. He calls in the midwives who help deliver the babies for the Hebrews. We don’t know whether they were Egyptian or Hebrew. The Bible doesn’t say. It does tell us their names, which is interesting. Shiphrah and Puah. We know the names of these two midwives but we don’t have the name of the most powerful king of the age. Guess you know who’s more important in this story!

So Pharaoh says to Shiphrah and Puah, “When you deliver Hebrew babies, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him and if it is a girl, let her live.” We don’t know how the midwives reacted to this in front of Pharaoh. They may have been horrified. They may have sniggered at this ridiculous plan. We just don’t know.

What we do know is that Shiphrah and Puah decided to ignore Pharaoh’s command. The Bible says the midwives respected God and God’s command was to “Multiply, multiply, multiply.” Even Pharaoh couldn’t oppose that. So they let the boys live. (I think they also realized that if word got out they were killing the children they were supposed to be delivering they wouldn’t be asked to help at many births!)

So once again Pharaoh’s plans were thwarted. He’s still seeing little boy Hebrews running around in the streets. He’s still seeing the Hebrew population boom and grow. “Multiply, multiply, multiply!” And he’s still scared. All of Egypt is scared. And why are they scared? “There are just too many Hebrews!”

So Pharaoh calls in the midwives and says, “What is going on? Why am I still seeing little boy Hebrews?”

The midwives, who have figured out by now that Pharaoh’s elevator doesn’t run all the way to the top, tell him a white lie that they know he will believe. “Well Pharaoh, you know those Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. They’re...uh…strong and…uh…vigorous. They have the babies before we can get there. What are you going to do?”

Sure enough, Pharaoh buys this argument and the Bible says…and this is the only place in this passage where God is mentioned…the Bible says that God dealt well with the midwives and guess what happened to their families? “Multiply, multiply, multiply!” Their families multiplied. And so did the Hebrews. Pharaoh has now tried two different plans and the Hebrews are stronger than ever and the Egyptians are still saying, “There are just too many Hebrews!”

So now Pharaoh comes up with a third plan and it is more terrifying than any that has gone before, but just as misguided. He enlists the whole population in a purge and says, “Every Hebrew boy that you see must be thrown into the Nile River, but every girl…eh, she can live.”

Well, a pair of women foiled the last plot of Pharaoh and it’s a different pair that foils this one. There was this woman, a Hebrew woman, who had a child…a son. And like any mother she could not bear to see him harmed and so she hid him for three months. But when it became clear that she couldn’t hide him anymore, she decided she would follow Pharaoh’s order and throw him into the Nile. But she wasn’t going to let him drown.

She made a basket for him. I say a basket, but it was more like a little boat. I say a boat, but it was more like a little ark. That’s the word that’s used here. It’s a word that is only used one other time in the scriptures, when describing Noah’s ark that opened a new chapter in God’s saving work. That’s what’s happening here, too.

The mother puts her baby in the ark and floats him down the river. She sends her daughter, Miriam, to watch over the baby. It floats down to a place near the king’s palace where Pharaoh’s daughter was coming down to bathe. Do you see how great this ending is going to be?

Pharaoh’s daughter saw the baby crying in the ark and has him brought to her. She realizes it is one of the Hebrew children, but she’s not about to follow her father’s ridiculous command. She’s going to keep the child. And Miriam happens upon them at just that moment to say, “I know a Hebrew woman who can be the child’s wet-nurse.” And that’s how the child’s mother ended up as a nurse to her own boy in Pharaoh’s house.

Pharaoh’s daughter named the child Moses, which is really only half a name. It means the son of. But whose son is he? Is he a son of the Hebrews or of the Egyptians? That, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story.

For now what we know is that despite this third plan, the Hebrews will continue to “Multiply, multiply, multiply!” And the fearful Egyptians with their bumbling king will continue to say, “There are just too many Hebrews!”

So the plans of Pharaoh, the most powerful ruler of his age, were thwarted by two midwives, a Hebrew mother, and his own daughter. In the end he looks pretty foolish for being fearful. What Pharaoh didn’t realize that the Hebrew people were not a threat to him and the Egyptians…God was a threat to him and his pretensions of power. If Pharaoh could not be the lord of life and death then he would have to acknowledge that someone else was…that the God of the Hebrews was.

Pharaoh ran up against a truth that gets illustrated time and again through the Bible—God’s purposes will be fulfilled. God is transforming the world. God is taking slaves and making them free. God is lifting up the poor and frustrating the plans of the powerful. God is saying ‘no’ to evil and ‘yes’ to good. God is doing all these things and we can either cooperate with God’s coming victory or look like fools as we operate out of fear and try to block God’s reconciling work.

Which brings us back to our United Methodist slogan. To have open hearts, open minds and open doors is not just a saying; it’s a statement. It’s a statement that we are not afraid of what God is doing in the world. We are not afraid of the people we may be in ministry with. We are not afraid of who might walk through those open doors or whom we might meet when we walk out through those open doors. We are not afraid to love this world with open hearts though every message we have tells us not to trust and to love what we do not know. We are not afraid to approach the world with open minds that recognize that God is at work in universities and schools and culture and even in government.

It is a radical thing to have open hearts, open minds and open doors. It puts the Pharaohs of this world in their place. It tells them that they do not deserve the respect and attention we have given to them. A media culture that celebrates the degradation of people, particularly women, is a Pharaoh that doesn’t deserve our respect and attention. Drug and alcohol addictions that dull our senses and ruin our relationships are Pharaohs we cannot respect. The glorification of violence is a Pharaoh we cannot respect. In the end these evils, which seem so insurmountable, are fearful and foolish responses to what God is doing to liberate the world.

Karl Barth, one of the great theologians of the last century, was asked once why he wrote so much about angels and so little about demons. He said, “I have no taste for demons, not because I think they are a creature of myth, but because they aren’t worth it. The very thing which the demons are waiting for, especially in theology, is that we should find them dreadfully interesting and give them our serious attention.” [Church Dogmatics III.3, pp. xii. & 519].

So then what should be our response to the demons and Pharaohs of our day? We should laugh at them, like the midwives chuckling over Pharaoh’s gullibility at their white lies, like Moses’ mother smiling as she was paid to breastfeed her own baby by the man who ordered the child’s death. The world doesn’t know it yet, but evil has had its day. God’s new day is coming. We know because, through the scriptures, we were present at the birth – the birth of this child Moses and more so in the birth of the child Jesus of whom it is said, “in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” [John 1:4-5. NRSV].

And the Egyptians join the Hebrews to say, “God is light and life. Multiply, multiply, multiply!” Thanks be to God.