Playing Our Parts

 

Photo by Michelle Garres on Unsplash

The First United Presbyterian Church 

“Playing Our Parts”

Rev. Amy Morgan

August 23, 2020

Exodus 1:8-2:10
8 Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.

9 He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more
powerful than we.

10 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."

11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They
built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh.

12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the
Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.

13 The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites,

14 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.

15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah
and the other Puah,

16 "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if
it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live."

17 But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded
them, but they let the boys live.

18 So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, "Why have you
done this, and allowed the boys to live?"

19 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." 

20 So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. 

21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. 

22 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."

2:1 Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. 

2 The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. 

3 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. 

4 His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him. 

5 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. 

6 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. 

7 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?" 

8 Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Yes." So the girl went and called the child's mother. 

9 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. 

10 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."





The other day, I informed my son, Dean, that among his peers in his generation, white people, as defined by the Census Bureau, are most likely no longer the majority. I had read this in a 2018 article from the Brookings Institute analyzing projections from the Census Bureau. On hearing this news, Dean’s eyebrows shot up. Then a smile broke across his face. “Cool!” he said.

Thanks to the diversity of where Dean grew up in Southeast Michigan and my immersion in interfaith relationships there, Dean is comfortable being in the minority. He was once the only Christian kid at a Muslim Montessori day camp. He thought it was totally normal.

But that’s not everyone’s response to the loss of majority position. As the state of Texas expects to see people of Hispanic ancestry become the majority within the next two years, reactions have been mixed. Some welcome the values, culture, and labor force Latinx-Americans contribute. Others call for immigration crackdowns, deportations, and employ racist stereotypes to justify discrimination and abuse of this growing population.

The rapid diversification of America has brought out the best and the worst in our society. In our better moments, we cooperate and align ourselves with the life-giving blessing of an increasingly diverse population, employing a variety of gifts, discovering common purpose, and working together for the common good. But when our uglier side surfaces, we turn the blessing of diversity into a curse, working against our own purposes and threatening destruction, oppressing others and engaging in death-dealing tactics.

My apologies if this all sounds too political. We don’t like politics from our pulpit, especially on the heels of one political convention and in the lead-up to another. We’ve heard enough politics, and we need a break from it at church. I get that.

But the text the lectionary has given us today is undeniably political. It involves a political power engaging in state-sponsored oppression and genocide. It depicts resistance to a brutal political regime. God is noticeably absent from the narrative, other than a mention that two of the characters were God-fearing women. This is a political text as much, if not more than, a theological text, and it will have political implications for us, like it or not.

You may be comforted to know that I don’t think this text sides with one political party, position, or person. It has implications for all of us, not matter our political affiliations. When the Bible gets political, and it often does, it is critical of all earthly powers and principalities, not just the ones we disagree with.


And that is because all human political structures fail to fully realize the reign of God on earth. How could they? Our political structures, like Pharaoh’s are designed to accumulate, sustain, and expand our security, strength, and power. It doesn’t matter what country or county we live in, what color our skin is or what language we speak, what god we worship or what sports team we cheer for. Our human nature drives us to dominate those who are different. And that is always easier to do when there are more of us than there are of them.

The new king of Egypt faces a crisis when the Hebrew people begin to threaten the Egyptians’ majority status. The word “Hebrew,” in this time period, is an ancient near- eastern term applied to anyone of non-status. After years of assimilation in Egypt, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the community of promise, the people of Israel, have lost that distinctive identity. They’ve been diluted to generalized nobodies.

And that is how the new king treats them – as less than human. The first tactic he employs in response to their fruitful multiplying is to subject them to hard labor. When this tactic fails, and the Hebrews are even more prolific, the king tries to hinder God’s life-giving bounty with lethal legislation. His edict to kill all male Hebrew infants is a self- defeating policy. In a few generations, he will have murdered his entire slave workforce. But his anxiety around losing majority status, is fear of the number of Hebrews, drives him to make this monstrous decree.

Walter Bruggeman writes in his book, Interrupting Silence, “the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places.” We can trace back through history and acknowledge numerous kings and dictators, regimes and rulers who shared pharaoh’s fear of a growing minority, a numerous underclass. I won’t dignify them with a list. And I’m certain we can all name leaders and governments around the world today who fit this profile, too.

But we resist casting ourselves in this role in the narrative. We would never enslave a whole people and force them into “bitter and hard service.” We would never condone, much less participate in, infanticide and genocide. We would never.

And yet, people have done this. People do this now. While the Egyptian citizens may not have had a say in the king’s policy decisions, many of them are complicit in those destructive policies. They “come to dread the Israelites,” and are employed as ruthless taskmasters. While we aren’t told if the Egyptians followed pharaoh’s order to cast male newborns into the Nile, a society already inclined to perceive a portion of the population as subhuman can often be enticed comply with such inhuman policies.


Bruggeman asserts that “‘Pharaoh’” reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production.” To some degree, every human political enterprise results in coercive economic production of one kind or another. It may be easy to point to labor camps in China or sweatshops in Bangladesh. But we cannot forget that much of our country’s foundation, including our national capital and early economic infrastructure, was built with slave labor. And while that may be more than a century and a half behind us, today we are confronted with different forms of “coercive economic production” that are shuttering small farms and small business that can’t “get big or get out” fast enough. We are confronted with “coercive economic production” that has enslaved many of us to consumer debt, which averages over $100,000 per household in this country. The national debt is over 26 trillion dollars. And some of that individual and national debt is the result of purchasing products of coercive economic production in other countries.

This text calls us to recognize our role in pharaoh’s system right here and right now.

But the good news is, this is not Pharaoh’s story. It’s interesting to note that “the new king” of Egypt is never named. He is a nameless, faceless, generalized authoritarian power that, try as he might to erase the names and eliminate the faces and marginalize the people of God – he is the one who is erased from memory.

The ones who get named, who get remembered, are the ones who resist. Hebrew midwives - Shiphrah and Puah – resist the murderous edict of the most powerful force on earth. They are clever and quick-thinking. They are God-fearing and compassionate. They risk their lives to defy a direct order from an oppressive, genocidal ruler.

Just as our review of history revealed numerous leaders who took up the mantle of pharaoh, history provides us with plentiful examples of those who resisted such powers. Esther, Deborah, and Jael. Elijah, Amos, and Micah. Jesus, of course, and some of his followers – Peter and Stephen, Perpetua and Hildegard of Bingen. More contemporary resisters include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. Sojourner Truth, Malala, Austin Channing Brown.


And as much as we hesitate to cast ourselves in pharaoh’s role, we also struggle to see how we can live into the roles of those legendary resisters. We grapple with our place in the narrative because we don’t sense exactly what it is God wants us to do, or we don’t think we have the courage or gifts to do it. We disappear into the crowd of faceless, ordinary, everyday Egyptians or Hebrews, sometimes feeling like the privileged class and sometimes seeing ourselves as the underdogs, but rarely, if ever, casting ourselves in any leading role.

But we are all the lead player in our own stories. They may not play out on a global scale or be remembered in the annals of history. But we all have our part to play.

Shiphrah and Puah are not the only women who thwart pharaoh’s demonic plan to subdue and exterminate the Hebrew people. There are three other women in this story, whose names are not remembered but whose actions set in motion the demise of pharaoh’s schemes. A Levite woman with the unimaginable courage to resist pharaoh’s edict by hiding her child and then entrusting his life to the very river in which he was condemned to die. The child’s sister, who kept a close watch on him and craftily intervened to reconnect mother and child in safety and security. And Pharaoh’s own daughter, his flesh-and-blood, who knowingly defied her father’s murderous edict to rescue one child who would, in turn, liberate a whole people.

These are not women who set out to redeem Israel from slavery. They aren’t remembered in the recitation of patriarchs and matriarchs of the faith. Their resistance wasn’t overt. Their actions were small, private, and personally motivated. A mother’s desperate attempt to save her son’s life. A sister’s concern for her brother’s safety. A privileged woman’s compassion for a vulnerable child.

We take these kinds of actions every day. We do everything we can for our children’s safety and well-being. We look out for our friends and family members. We live out compassion for vulnerable people in our society.

And we may feel like we aren’t doing anything as grand as changing the world, transforming societies, or living into the reign of God on earth. But we might be wrong about that. Mother Theresa is often quoted as saying, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” And our scripture today affirms that those small things can change the world, transform society, and help us live into the reign of God on earth.

In the end, we must recognize that none of us plays just one of the roles in this story. While at times we work to actively resist oppressive systems, we are often, sometimes unwittingly, participating in other forms of oppression. While we may perform small acts of love, self-sacrifice, and compassion, we may also, again sometimes unwittingly, reinforce stereotypes and perpetuate prejudice. We are all oppressive pharaohs and courageous midwives, loving parents and protective siblings, vulnerable children and compassionate elite. Our role shifts from day-to-day, and sometimes we’re playing several parts at once.

As confusing as this might sound, our awareness of our roles matters greatly. We’ll likely never be entirely free from our relationship to pharaoh, but we can be aware of it, and counteract those death-dealing policies with our role as resisters. We’ll likely never perfectly inhabit our role as courageous resisters, but we can lean in to our roles as those who do small things with great love. And, over time, God-willing, our stories with end with liberation, with life, with joy.

We all have roles to play, but God is in the script, even when God has nothing to say. If we play our parts faithfully, we will see where God’s action appears in italics, between the lines. And we will see that God is always working for life, even when the powers of the world are working for death and destruction and oppression. Life will win out because the power of God is always greater than the gods of power. Pharaoh loses in this story. He loses again and again. And so we trust that the pharaohs of our own day and in our own souls will be defeated, too. Not by muscle and military might. But with cleverness and courage and compassion.

Let’s play our parts, glorifying the God who is always on stage with us, guiding our story toward love and liberation. To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.