Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "At What Price?"

Text: Exodus 1:8-2:10

This week, the lectionary takes us forward to a time when a new king has come to power in Egypt, to a time when the Hebrews in that land have become numerous, to a time when the Pharaoh and his government take measures to control, enslave, and even kill the Hebrews. In such difficult times, the baby Moses was born and then placed in the care of Pharaoh’s daughter.

But, wait a minute . . . . How did all of this come to pass? Let us take a moment to reflect on what transpired between Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers and the birth of Moses.

You will recall that, last week, in Genesis chapter 45, Joseph made himself known to his brothers. The story continued with Joseph’s brothers returning to Canaan, gathering up their father Jacob and all of the tribe, and coming down again to Egypt, where the Pharaoh provided them with "the best part of the land of Egypt" (Gen 45:18; Gen 47:6; Gen 47:11). According to the story, Jacob lived in Egypt for seventeen years, finally dying at the ripe old age of 147 (Gen 47:27). But, before he died, Jacob had one last moment in which he proved to be his mischievous old self.

In his final days, Jacob was presented with Joseph’s two sons -- Manasseh, the older, and Ephraim, the younger. After blessing Joseph (Gen 48:15ff.), Jacob reached out his hands to bless the two sons. He placed his right hand on the head of Ephraim, the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, the older. Joseph was displeased (Gen 48:17), and tried to switch his father’s hands – but Jacob refused, and "so he put Ephraim ahead of Manasseh" (Gen 48:20).

Then Jacob called together all his sons and blessed them. After Jacob had died, been embalmed, and mourned, his people took him back to the land of Canaan to be buried, accompanied by a full Egyptian military escort. And then they all returned to the land of Egypt.

Subsequently, Joseph and his brothers, and all of their families, remained in Egypt, where Joseph lived to the age of one hundred ten years (Gen 50:22) before he died and "was embalmed and placed in a coffin" (Gen 50:26). Thus ends the Book of Genesis.

So the stage is set for the Book of Exodus, which begins with a brief listing of the sons of Israel/Jacob (Exodus 1:1-7), before declaring "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph" (Exodus 1:8). This is the time and place for this morning’s lectionary passage.

Beginning with the recognition that "the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we," (Exodus 1:9) the Egyptian leader tried several plans to deal with the perceived threat of the Israelite people in his midst.

Plan A involved trying to "deal shrewdly with them" (Exodus 1:10). The king set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor (v. 11). But, "the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites" (Exodus 1:12).

Plan B took a different approach. The king of Egypt went to the Hebrew midwives, including two midwives named Shiprah and Puah, and ordered them to kill any boy babies, while letting girl babies live. But the midwives feared God more than they feared the king, so they let the boy babies live (Exodus 1:17). When the king challenged them, they made up a story about how strong are the Hebrew women.

This reminds me of Garrison Keillor’s description of Lake Wobegon as a place where "the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." Just as Lake Wobegon has taken on a special quality in our American psyche, so the story of these "strong" Hebrew women has assumed mythic proportions in the history of the Israelites.

The failure of Plan B brought about a more drastic Plan C. The 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" (Exodus 1:22).

The text here points in an ominous direction. The official oppression of the people of Israel, as a specific target of the king’s concern, becomes more generalized against the hapiru or "Hebrews," a term applied in those ancient days to any group of marginal people who had no social standing, owned no land, and who endlessly disrupted ordered society" (cf. Walter Brueggemann, "Exodus" in The New Interpreter’s Bible, 1994, p. 695).

At this point in the story, we should begin to appreciate that the forces of power and resistance are caught up in a great struggle. Do you notice that the king/pharaoh is not named, whereas the two Hebrew midwives – Shiprah and Puah – are mentioned by name. In their resistance, they bear witness to the power of God to sustain the Hebrews – that is, to sustain the oppressed and the marginal against the powerful leaders of state society. These two midwives put themselves at risk through their resistance, but their disobedience to the king’s order did not put an end to injustice.

During the time when Plan C was the law of the land, the birth of Moses takes place. Most of you know the story. A man from the house of Levi – the priestly tribe – married a Levite woman. She bore a son, and when she saw that he was a "fine" baby, she hid him for three months (Exodus 2:2). (It is worth mentioning here that the word meaning "fine" baby is the same as the word used in the first chapter of Genesis, when God declared his creation to be "good" [the Hebrew word is בט tob]).

When she no longer could hide the baby, the unnamed Levite mother got a papyrus basket, plastered it with bitumen and pitch, put the child into the basket, and placed it among the reeds on the riverbank (Exodus 2:3). To emphasize the special qualities of this baby boy, the text uses the Hebrew term [הבת teba] for basket, a term often translated as "ark" in the flood narrative. This basket-ark is placed in the reeds [ףס sup], the term later used in the exodus narrative to name the body of water through which the people of Israel would pass on the way to freedom from the Pharaoh.

Thus, from the beginning, this baby boy is in line to become a child of destiny. By being placed into the basket-ark among the reeds, he was not being abandoned by his mother or by God. Far from it! His unnamed sister stood at a distance and kept watch to see what would happen (Exodus 2:4). And what happened was a miracle in its own right.

The daughter of Pharaoh, accompanied by her attendants, came down to bathe in the river. She spotted the basket and sent her maid to bring it. When they opened the basket, they found a crying baby boy. Immediately, Pharaoh’s daughter took pity on him and said, "This must be one of the Hebrews’ children" (Exodus 2:6).

Just then, the older sister of the baby boy in the basket-ark strolled over and inquired "Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?" (Exodus 2:7). Without any suspicion about how this girl just happened to be on the spot at that moment, Pharaoh’s daughter agreed. The sister went away and brought back the boy’s unnamed mother. And, without revealing any concern over her own father’s edict to kill all Hebrew baby boys, Pharaoh’s daughter told her to "take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages" (Exodus 2:9). The mother of the baby boy must have been overjoyed at her successful ruse to keep her child alive. Not only was the baby boy spared, the initial cost of raising the child was to be covered by the "wages" paid to her by Pharaoh’s own daughter!

So the unnamed woman took the baby away and nursed him. Presumably, some years passed, for the next part of the story states that, "when the child grew up," the unnamed woman "brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and Pharaoh’s daughter took him as her son, and named him Moses, because "I drew him out of the water" (Exodus 2:10). Just so!

The ending of this story strikes me as quite remarkable. First, I want to know what would have possessed the mother of the grown-up child to take him back to Pharaoh’s daughter? The text is completely silent as to her reasons for taking the grown up child to the princess, who immediately "took him as her son" and gave him the name Moses.

Second, a remarkable feature of the story is that the narrative is sustained by the unnamed three women:

Pharaoh’s daughter, who has pity on the Hebrew baby boy in the basket-ark;

the woman who is the mother of the baby boy; and

the older sister of the baby boy.

Taken together, these three women contrived – one is tempted to say, conspired -- to get around Pharaoh’s commandment that all Hebrew baby boys should be put to death in the Nile.

His mother could not have known what this baby boy’s future would hold. But she did know about the risks of the present, and she acted in response to those risks. Pharaoh’s daughter could not have known that her "pity" would bring forth a man who would stand up to her own royal family, and would dismantle the structure of oppression by which her father made the Hebrews to suffer.

Finally, perhaps you too have been struck by the parallel between this story of Moses and the earlier story of Joseph, which we heard last week. By the end of his long life, most of it spent in Egypt, Joseph came to understand his role as God’s instrument in saving Israel from destruction. He came to recognize that the evil that his brothers had committed against him was intended by God for "good," in order that God might "preserve a numerous people" (Gen 50:20).

In the end, the journey of the Israelites from the days of Joseph to the rescue of the baby Moses shows us that God could make use of dysfunctional families, could find good in the evil that we create, and even could use the children of society’s power-holders to subvert the dominant paradigm.

In our own day, God still is concerned about the fate of the many people in our society treated as hapiru – marginal, powerless, and disruptive outcastes. What progressive Latin American theologians have called God’s "preferential option for the poor" is more important than ever in our modern world, not just in distant nations but right here, in our own city and even in our own neighborhood.

Daily, we are confronted by modern-day outcastes. Emerging from under the bridges, sleeping on downtown sidewalks, and panhandling on street corners, homeless persons make us uncomfortable. Without a doubt, they are the poster children for modern-day outcastes here in Dallas. The folks at Hillcrest House (where we will be serving the dinner meal this evening), who are dealing with HIV/AIDS and its consequences, know all too well what it is like being treated as outcastes. The Spanish-speaking adults who participate in the DISD programs in our building also understand about being treated as outcastes. And when residents of Grace Presbyterian Village look beyond its walls, many see a society more interested in youth-oriented materialism and consumerism than in honoring our growing population of elders.

Contemplate the breadth and depth of these examples – those who are homeless, those with HIV/AIDS, those who lack English and citizenship, and even those who only feel safe by living in age-segregated villages. Consider that, in our city and throughout our society, we fail to sustain a social justice contract that overcomes differences in power, class, ethnicity, and age. Before it is too late, we should ask ourselves a simple question: At what price?

Amen.