Pentecost 13 - Year A

Our Hebrew Bible reading is one that many of us have known from childhood. Moses in the bulrushes is one of those stories that has been adapted for young children as an introduction to the Bible. It’s depicted as a story about kindness and good deeds and, of course, tells of the saving of the life of Moses.

We encounter a new king who was afraid; the more the people of Israel were oppressed, the stronger they appeared to become. His solution was to end their population explosion by killing the male children. History may tell us that kind of social engineering rarely ends well, but the cruelty at the heart of the story means that it’s not easily forgotten.

This morning, I want to look at this story through a different lens – to look at the impact of acts of defiance. The impact of disobeying abhorrent orders.

The very first act of defiance in this narrative is often overlooked or forgotten. The midwives were the people who were tasked with carrying out the genocide. They were given a clear instruction. Kill any boy babies that you deliver for Hebrew women. In fact, it’s a very precise instruction.
When the Hebrew women are on the birth stool, kill their boy babies. Were they perhaps expected to tell those mothers that their babies had died during the process of delivery? And what an ask for women who were involved in a profession that was about saving and valuing lives, not ending them.

But the midwives were made of stronger stuff than the king imagined – we’re told that they feared God more than they feared him, they knew he was asking them to do something that was wrong – and they found a way to subvert his instruction without outright refusing. They reported back that they were in a tricky position – the Hebrew women delivered their babies so quickly that they were unable to get to them in time, and so they weren’t in a position to carry out the orders however hard they tried. What a smart way to manage the situation they found themselves in. They weren’t braver than other people, but their fear of God, their desire to do what was right, enabled them to find a solution they could live with.

They model what it might mean to do what we know to be right, rather than what we have been told we ought to do. Those women, let’s give them their names, Shiphrah and Puah, were courageous. It’s not clear whether they were Egyptians or Hebrews – scholars differ in their opinions, but it seems clear that they were women of faith. God was in their lives.

And then we come to the part of the story we know well. Moses was born and his mother hid him for a few months. Presumably she wasn’t alone in taking that course of action, there must have been other boy babies born who were hidden away, perhaps passed off as girls, in order to save them.

But a new commandment came – baby boys were to be thrown into the Nile to drown. They were to be treated like unwanted kittens, discarded. What was a mother to do? If she disobeyed, both she and her baby would have been at risk. What mother could bring herself to carry out that appalling act of genocide? And so we come to Moses’ mother who has her own cunning plan. She will obey orders and put her baby into the Nile. But she will do it in such a way that she maximises his chances of life. She doesn’t disobey the commandment, but she finds a way to subvert it. She shows us what defiance might look like when it emerges from a fear of God rather than a fear of power.

So now we have three smart and enterprising women. Shiphrah and Puah and Moses’ mother, Jochebed. And in this particular bit of Scripture, they are the people who do God’s will; they are the people who lay the foundations for Moses to become the man who eventually stood up to the Pharoah and demanded: Let my people go.

The women are central to the working out of this story. And I’ve been wondering why they got away with so much. It would be foolish to suggest it was because they were smarter or more wily than the men – that path would take us into very unhelpful territory I think – but I wonder whether it’s because they were women and therefore underestimated.

The people who have been given power and authority in this story, in common with the people who hold much of the power and authority in our contemporary world, are often men. The balance may have shifted a bit over the centuries, but fundamentally that is still true. The most powerful countries in the world haven’t elected women as their leaders. And the powerful men in our 21st century world don’t appear to be very different from the powerful men who ruled Egypt more than 3000 years ago. They are also driven by a need to hold onto their power. They appear to often be fearful of those who they perceive may be a threat, to value their own position above all else. And by virtue of the fact that they are not in the spotlight, some women have been able to behave in ways that are truly radical.

Just one example would be women in Afghanistan. Despite the increasing oppression of them by the Taliban, and the fear that generates, we can find stories about the ways that women and girls are forging paths for themselves.

Whether it’s the use of social media to make sure that the outside world knows how life is, or deliberately failing exams in order to stay in education for longer, they are finding ways to work around the outrageous situation they find themselves in. I’m not underestimating the challenges they face or their daily pain, but I am applauding their ingenuity, their ability to find something that is, at least, worth trying. And that is what Shiphrah and Puah did; that’s what Jochebed did; that’s what Miriam did when she thought quickly enough to offer his own mother to be a wet nurse for Moses; and that’s what the Pharoah’s daughter did when she chose not to look away but to respond to the plight of the baby in front of her.

Each one taking a risk; each one finding a way to do what they knew to be right; each one living out their commitment to God’s commandments. Each one, many, many years before Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, witnessing to his instructions: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Most of us are not engaged in life-saving defiance, but we can choose to follow the example of the five women we have encountered this morning. In all sorts of ways, we have opportunities to evidence our own fear of God, our own discernment of the will of God. Can we be inspired by the example of the women who are the heroes of this story, who collectively subverted the power of the Pharoah? Like those women, we have agency, perhaps more than we imagine. We choose how and whether to use it.