Baby Moses

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

August 24, 2008

Text: Exodus 1:8-2:10

How soon they forget!

It was Karl Barth and the Niebuhr brothers who saved me from despairing of Christianity. But when I ask current seminary graduates which theologians have most inspired them, 8 times out of 10 they will name a photogenic happy-talk preacher, or a writer of devotional literature! Many do not even name a living theologian, much less ones who died in the 1960s. (It would be like a young counselor telling a psychologist that they have learned about the psyche from Psychology Today or Mother Earth News.)

A Church in which the giants of 20th century theology are not remembered? How can it be?

Tempus fugit were the words on the grandfather clock in the old barbershop. “Time flies.” And memory of those on whose shoulders we stand often flies away with time.

The man had built the bank up from obscurity. A faithful Methodist, he now had a little office on the third floor in the old left-over bank building. He was once widely respected in banking circles, a mover and shaker in the region. He was now retired going on 10 years.  I went to have lunch with him. As we were leaving, he stopped by the teller’s window to cash a check. The teller asked him, “And do you have some form of ID?” Thank goodness he had a sense of humor.

In a world always straining forward, we forget those who built that which we stand on.

Life in 2000 BC was much slower. Even so, we are told, when Joseph and his whole generation died, the new Pharoah (king) “did not know who Joseph was.”

Who was Joseph?  (Read Genesis, chapters 37-50.)

Joseph was one of the twelve sons of Jacob by Leah, Rachel and Zilpah.   Joseph was the son of his father’s old age, the apple of his father’s eye. And he had greatness in him. And he did not mind telling his brothers about how they would one day look up to him. In his dreams, he was magnificent. 10 of the 12 brothers hated him.

They caught him away from home, took off his Technicolor dream coat, pitched him down in a deep, dry well. They took the fancy coat and dipped it in goat’s blood, took it home and told dad that a wild animal had attacked and killed Joseph. They sold him to slave traders who were in a caravan going into Egypt.

Long story short: He was a bright and clever young man, adept at interpreting dreams and guiding matters of state. In time, the king of Egypt (Pharaoh) brought him into his royal cabinet as second in command, a kind of prime minister. He saved the Egyptian people during a terrible drought by convincing them to store up resources. “All the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain….” (41.57)

Later, when times get hard for Jacob-Israel, he and his eleven sons and their families go into Egypt themselves. After a heart-rending reunion between Joseph and his father and his brothers,  the tribes of Israel settle in Egypt, with the promise of someday being led by God to their own land.

In time, they “grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.” But they were treated well by the Egyptian leaders----until Joseph and his generation died, and a new king came into power.

“Who is this man Joseph? What have his people done for me lately?”  Instead of seeing them as a gifted people, he sees them as a threat.

So he enslaves them and works them worse than cattle: “bitter, hard service.”

Promises, promises? Abraham and Sarah’s descendents (Jacob and his family) were to become a great nation, blessed to be a blessing? Here their great-grandchildren are in slavery. Has God forgotten them?

In spite of Pharaoh’s treatment of them, they flourished, became stronger. What to do?

Pharaoh was not a politician. You don’t have to be when you have absolute power. Or so it seemed to him.

He tells two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah to kill all the male babies upon delivery. But they feared God more than they feared Pharoah. Life is sacred. They did not do as the king commanded. When confronted by the king, they lie, saying:

“The Hebrew women are so strong, the babies are born before we can get there.”

Two powerless women refuse to be powerless. They use the power of disobedience, deception and dishonesty in order to preserve the lives of innocent and helpless children.

It has been so and will be so: people of faith answer to a higher authority, when push comes to shove.

 Following orders is not the same as being right in God’s eyes. In the bloodiest century (the 20th) in recorded history, it was often the dishonesty and disobedience of the faithful that has saved lives. Remember Schlinder’s List?

Anytime some human beings treat other human beings as cattle, as less than human, through torture or ethnic cleansing, or simply through ignoring their legitimate needs, evil is out of control----no matter the reasons given. These midwives are responsible to God for their decisions; they will not cooperate with the King’s evil decisions. God will not be mocked.

They did not just hate evil; they loved the good. As someone Once said, “If you just hate evil without loving the good, all you end up being is just a really good hater.” God’s people have a future because ordinary people refuse to buy into the plans for their extermination.

 Pharaoh’s “Plan B” is this: He told all the people: throw all of the male children into the Nile.

What will happen? Will people obey? Where is God in all of this? Is God at work in history? Is God just observing?

The story takes a detour. From the house of Levi (one of the 12 sons) a young couple marry and have a son. Will they follow orders and through him in the Nile?

No, the mother of this son, Joch-ebed, hides him for three months, and then comes up with a plan.

She makes a little boat-cradle of rushes and bitumen and pitch---a sticky, impervious substance---and then places the baby in the basket and places it among the reeds at the river’s edge. The little baby’s sister is strategically placed so she could fulfill the plan.

Pharaoh’s daughter came to the Nile to bathe; she sees the basket; her heart goes out to the baby, who was crying. She picks him up out of the water, recognizing him as a Hebrew child. She knows the edict of her father: this little baby is not supposed to be allowed to live. Perhaps she sees beyond his ethnicity, his skin shade, his religion. Perhaps she sees that this baby, like all babies deserve to live.

She disobeys her father! She saves the baby from certain death.

And the sister of the baby? The baby’s sister sees her opportunity. She goes to Pharaoh’s daughter and asks her, “Would you like for me to find a Hebrew woman who is able to nurse this child for you?”  “Yes,” she says. So the baby’s sister goes and gets the baby’s mother (and her mother) and she is hired to be the baby’s nursing mother and nanny. “So the woman took the child and nursed him.”

Pharoah’s daughter names him Moses (an Egyptian name); and she adopted him; and he was raised in the Pharaoh’s house.

Pharoah’s plan is subverted in ways that no one expected! The baby in the basket is Moses, now being raised in the Pharaoh’s house, is the very one who shall deliver God’s people from slavery in Egypt.

Again, Moses’ mother, her daughter, Pharaoh’s daughter: they make decisions which keep this child alive.

God is hardly mentioned in the story. And yet the purposes of God to liberate the people of Israel from are being worked out----through the decisions of these women.

So often we look for God’s hand only in the unusual or the extraordinary.

And yet here, God’s hand is evident in ordinary events of humble people. It is shown in the “flowing rhythms, the non-dramatic, behind the scenes activity….” (Terence Fretheim, Exodus)  God works through human freedom to accomplish God’s will for the world, and for God’s people in the world----and to oppose evil in all of its disguises.

God will get the work done. But in these events, it could have been otherwise.

Whatever became of Pharoah? Well, the story picks up later. He brings great grief on himself and on his people when he will not let the Hebrew people go.

“As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized…. Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior for those caught up in it, oppressors and oppressed alike. Both are submerged in the situation, and both bear the marks of oppression.” (PauloFriere,Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 43-44, quoted in Fretheim)

God will free God’s people from slavery and bring them into their land. More importantly, God will shape their life indelibly with the divine presence and the ways of justice and peace.

For you and for me: Insofar as we have, in Paul’s words, been grafted onto the vine of Israel and share in the title “God’s chosen people,” we also are not alone. And “God can use the lowly and the high born to forward God’s purposes for the world, and we all need to be reminded of this at times.” (Source uinknown)

The Pharaohs of the world are strong. Great suffering can be and is still being done to the innocent. And God needs leaders like Moses to bring us through our wildernesses. Jesus, especially as Matthew pictured him, is the fulfillment of the work of Moses, the ultimate deliverer. God is stronger than the Pharaohs,  and we trust that God’s will  will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Celebrate the women whose names are not household words:

Shifrah and Puah, Hebrew midwives.
Moses’s mother, Joch-ebed, who hid him for three months and devised a plan to keep her baby alive, even if she was regarded only as his nanny.

Moses’s sister, just a girl, who tricked the Pharoah’s daughter into adopting Moses, and recruited Moses mother to nurse the baby.

Pharoah’s daughter, unnamed, who disobeyed her father.

God works under the radar, to preserve his people, to free them from slavery.

Perhaps God still does!  Who knows? Maybe the decisions that we make in our ordinary lives are paving the way for a new Moses for our time.