“Making a Difference without Making a Fuss” – sermon on August 24, 2014
Romans 12: 1-8 So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for her. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.
In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.
If you preach, just preach God’s Message, nothing else; if you help, just help, don’t take over; if you teach, stick to your teaching; if you give encouraging guidance, be careful that you don’t get bossy; if you’re put in charge, don’t manipulate; if you’re called to give aid to people in distress, keep your eyes open and be quick to respond; if you work with the disadvantaged, don’t let yourself get irritated with them or depressed by them. Keep a smile on your face.
Exodus 1:8-2:10 A new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built store cities for Pharaoh. But the more the Israelites were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread them, and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with harsh labor.
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”
The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.” So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, God gave them families of their own. Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: “Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.”
Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basketfor him and coated it with tar and pitch. She placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.
Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she said. Then the baby’s sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?”
“Yes, go,” she answered. So the girl went and got the baby’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.”
Sermon: Making a Difference without Making a Fuss by Rev. Doreen Oughton
Those of you who were here 2 weeks ago heard me talk about how remarkable it was to me that scripture is so full of flawed people doing God’s work. I talked about the Bad Boys who were the sons of Israel. And now we begin the story of Exodus, and we are hit right off with, not to put too fine a point on it, Good Girls. The latest King of Egypt has lost touch with the connection of the Israelites to the prosperity of the nation, and are anxious about them, anxious that they might rebel and either take over, or leave. Either would be bad for the Egyptians, especially the leaders. They want the Israelites to stay put, both in the country and in their role as less than and slave to Egyptians.
Too easy to digress… Back to the good girls. We have these midwives, who are named – Shiphrah and Puah. The text doesn’t say if they are Jewish themselves, and I would suspect not, but they could be. They are midwives to the Hebrews. So even if they are not Jewish, I’m sure they have come to know the people they serve – their beliefs and ways. Through them, Shiphrah and Puah come to know the God of Israel. Scripture says they fear that God, but we also might understand the word to mean “revere” or “stand in awe of.” They believe that the God of Israel is powerful, more powerful than their king. And so when the king commands them to murder the newborn sons of the Hebrews, they want no part of it. They did what they thought God would have them do. Now they weren’t martyrs about it. They didn’t stand up to Pharoah and say, this is evil and we won’t do it. They didn’t get arrested or killed or start a movement. They just resisted. They made excuses not to do what they could not bring themselves to do, maybe out of fear of God, but also maybe out of love for babies, or love for their Jewish brothers and sisters.
And then we have a girl you would expect would be bad, very bad – Pharoah’s own daughter. How much ranting and raving against the Israelites had she heard in the palace over the years? And yet somehow, these people did not become less than human to her. She recognized the situation when she came upon the baby in the basket on the river, and did not obey her father and king’s command to throw him out of the basket and into the river. Had she even spied the girl watching the baby? Was her compassion not only for this crying baby, but for a whole family who lived in bitterness and terror under her father’s rule; for a family that had to lose a son because of a reactionary response to the guilty conscience of a nation? So much harm can be done in an effort to keep that uncomfortable guilt away. So much on-going injustice to avoid facing the work of creating a just society.
But Pharoah’s daughter, un-named, also resisted. She took the baby from the basket and comforted him. Then she turned him over to his mother for nursing, under her protection. Did she know it was his mother? I believe she did. She let him know who his people were, she let his family love him and nurture him and teach him, while also ensuring his safety from her father. Did Pharoah know? How could he not suspect? And yet his daughter was before him, with a baby, insisting on bringing him into the family as her son. Maybe she’d been barren, maybe Moses was the answer to a prayer. Maybe Pharoah thought he would be able to help keep the Israelites in line, a plan B if the plan for eliminating all the males continued to fail.
And of course we have the baby’s resourceful sister, unnamed in this story, but we later learn she is Miriam. Miriam, keeping an eye on the baby, stepping out when she sees the compassion in the princess’s face, offering to bring a nurse for the baby. Again, no one is making a loud protest, shining a light on all the resistance to the evil, but finding a way to keep the resistance going, finding a way to bear light and life forward. And it is not just women who do this type of thing. I think of Oskar Schindler, whose actions were the basis of the movie Schindler’s list. He was a German businessman, and during WWII he saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. All of these people took risks to resist the evil, but they didn’t directly challenge it. I know there is a lesson in there for me in my bumbling ways of challenging injustice, some-times so in-your-face that it hardens attitudes rather than softening or opening them.
I also couldn’t help but make a connection between this story of the good girls (and boys) and Paul’s letter to the Romans, about making of one’s ordinary, everyday life, an offering to God. It doesn’t have to be on the scale of Schindler, just making a difference for one baby, for one family can have incredible ripple effects. By refusing to kill the baby on the birthing stool, Shiphrah and Puah changed everything for the Israelites and all their descendents. Just by opening her heart to one little baby, to one family, Pharoah’s daughter opened a path for God’s work to be done. Just by watching for the right opportunity, and stepping forward when it came, Miriam made sure that Moses knew who he really was. We never know how our small acts of resistance to evil, or our small acts that shine more light and love can change the world. Can you look back in your own life and recall someone who changed things in your world with some small gesture or way of being? I bet you can, and I bet that someone somewhere thinks of you when asked that question. You’ve heard of the butterfly effect? (explain if nec.)
It is true of individuals, and it is true of groups of people also. It was Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” We are a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens – citizens with a commitment to Christ and his ways of self-giving love. We may be few in number, but we are strong in love and faith and care. The ways we nurture each other – they matter. The ways we reach out to the community around us – they matter. Sure, maybe some would love to have lots of people here and start lots of important ministries. But that would not make us any more holy or worthy or loved by God. We go about being who we are – part of the body of Christ. We go on offering ourselves each day to God, inviting God to work in and through us. May it be so.
