Pentecost + 12A

^{27.8.17 — Ex 1.8—2.10 Bridgewater}

Bad girls for God

A few weeks ago we began the Joseph story – we saw him sold off by his brothers to become a slave in Egypt. Later he’d call those brothers and his parents to come to Egypt as he saved them and his adopted country from a catastrophic famine. Today we’ve moved on about 400 years in the story. Joseph’s family still lives in Egypt; but now it’s grown from a clan of twelve households to a numerous people. There’s a new Pharaoh, and he sees these outsiders in such numbers as a security threat. He calls them Israelites children of Israel/Jacob the refugee. He forgets or doesn’t care that they’re the people of Joseph, the one who saved his country from ruin. He calls them by a derogatory name too; Habiru-Hebrews. This isn’t just another name for Israelites. Habiru then meant refugee, fugitive, non-citizen, fringe dweller; but mostly Habiru just meant ‘slave’.

Today’s story is part of a grand historical sweep. But unlike other historical narratives, it doesn’t spend much time on the comings and goings at the palace. Nor does it tell of desperate men running an underground resistance movement. Instead, we zoom in on five women; women who conspire to preserve life rather than obey an order to kill children. They conspire to pervert the course of injustice. We’re told the names of two of the women; Shiphrah and Puah (Fair and Splendid); they’re midwives. That they’re named makes me notice that the Pharaoh hasn’t been named.

Shiphrah and Puah expose the Pharaoh’s fearful bigotry; how he dehumanizes vulnerable people. These two women expose him brilliantly. When the Pharaoh confronts them with their failure to obey his order and kill the Hebrew baby boys, their reply plays on his all-too-familiar racism.

He asks, ‘Why have you allowed them to live?’, and they reply,

Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. (v.19)

The first of his prejudices they play on is that foreigners – Habiru – are different from ‘humans’, and that this difference will obviously show in the way Habiru women bear children. Pharaoh won’t even question a statement that implies Habiru are more like breeding animals than human beings.

And of course his other prejudices are that these Habiru midwives wouldn’t possibly be smart enough to try to trick the Pharaoh with a lie, and they certainly wouldn’t be brave enough to engage in real civil disobedience!

Pharaoh digs himself in, deeper and deeper, and in the process, exposes his own heart as the real place of inhumanity. If these Habiru boys must be spawned, then let’s throw them in the river; drown them like the rats they are. Who’s the real inhuman one? The story tells it all.

And so we read on to the point we all know so well, where Moses is born again – drawn from the Nile – the river sometimes called the Mother of Egypt. A child ‘abandoned’ in the river according to the letter of the law, and drawn from it by an enemy – death turned to life by commitment and compassion; it’s a parable of salvation history written from the perspective of freed slaves.

Do you need to be a slave to enter this story? Do you get your name in the story like Shiphrah and Puah did by joining in the story – by being a midwife to new and risky rebirth? These women got under the guard of their slavers and worked with God whose purpose was ultimately to set a whole people free. Do we face anything like they did? Are there stories like this where we can to join in with these women?

We Australians also have stories of asylum seekers and dangerous waters and vulnerable children, and East Africa has catastrophic famine again. These stories are still with us; and they won’t be going away. I remember reading in the 1990’s about 25m displaced people in the world. Now there are more than 65 million – each with a real life story to tell.

The women of today’s Bible story show us that God’s little people are called to resist power that dehumanises; called to act in a way that helps vulnerable people needing safety and dignity to find it. Today’s story challenges our Pharaohs when they turn bigoted stereotypes into ‘truth’ and try to hide the victims of their stereotypes somewhere where people can’t learn their names or hear their stories. But today we learn that God knows their stories, and that we are to work in a way to make all such stories heard.

If we accept without question that people and their stories get automatically locked away, this has spiritual consequences.

We must hear the hope in the women’s defiance and be encouraged by their wit and their bravery. A three-month-old baby was hopefully entrusted to the river by his mother and sister, launched to a new future in a tiny ark tevah תֵּבָה and watched and prayed for. This, and the story of Noah’s ark are the only places in the Bible where this word occurs. An ark is God’s way of preserving the future against calamity. What is our role in this sort of rescue mission today – refugees, Aboriginal people, unemployed, endangered species, endangered ecosystems, etc.?

Like the midwives, we should preserve life and defy fearful bigotry. Amen