I’m going to sneak in a tiny sermon here, before we continue with more holy stories. In the story we just heard, Moses is an adult, and a leader of his people. But let’s remember how the story began. God’s people, the Hebrews, were enslaved in Egypt. They were forced to make bricks for the Egyptians’ many building projects. But God helped them thrive anyway. And Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, got nervous. He was afraid the Hebrews might become so numerous that they would rise up against the Egyptians. So he told the midwives who helped the Hebrew women give birth that they should kill all the baby boys. But the midwives were not on board with that plan; they made excuses to Pharaoh: “Oh, the Hebrew women are so hearty and rough, they just drop their babies before we can even get there.”
One woman, Jochebed, gives birth to a son – and decides to hide him. She’s able to keep the baby hidden for a few months, but when he starts to get too big and too loud, she and her daughter Miriam take a basket, use tar to make it waterproof, put the baby in it, and put it in the reeds at the riverbank of the Great River, the Nile. Miriam stands by to keep an eye on the situation, and pretty soon Pharaoh’s own daughter, a princess of Egypt, comes down to the river to bathe. She finds the baby and decides to adopt him. Miriam immediately pops up and asks if the princess would like her go to find a woman who’d be willing to nurse the baby for her… then fetches her mother. You have to think this was all planned!…
So, Moses grows up a man of two worlds, Egyptian and Hebrew, which is hard and complicated and also perhaps exactly what God needed in a leader to confront Pharaoh and lead the people to freedom.
A few weeks ago I saw a video of the Reverend Sheleta Fomby preaching about Moses at a church in Maryland. She points out Pharaoh’s error in thinking the males were the greatest threat, by saying, “Kill the boys.”
He thought those baby boys would grow up to become warriors and take up weapons and fight back against their oppressors.
“In his misogynistic short-sightedness,” she says, “he messed around and he let the girls live.” He never saw women as the true threat, or as worthy opponents. But the courageous, subversive women and girls of this story “used their God-given intuition and strategic innovation to set the stage for the deliverance of a people.” The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who “quietly but defiantly disrupted Pharaoh’s plan;”Jochebed and Miriam; and Pharaoh’s own daughter! (The Vivian Wilson of her time?)
Reverend Fomby says, “When we read Exodus, we go straight to Moses, but the only reason Moses could be a deliverer was because Moses had been delivered.” She concludes, “They never saw the women coming!”
The Bible is complicated and conflicted and argues with itself. But there are overarching themes – or maybe deep, underlying themes – and those are what I try to seek out, the things I think God is really trying to get through to us across the millennia.
And one of those deep themes is the significance of the insignificant. The power of the powerless.
Not just women and girls, but also folks like the three young men in the story we’ll hear soon: immigrants targeted because they were seen as outsiders, strange, dangerous, vulnerable.
Folks like God’s people at the time of Ezekiel’s vision – burdened, burned out, fearful, crushed to the point where it felt like there was no more life in them.
Can these bones live? Oh God, you know!
People like Jesus, disruptive teacher and enemy of the state, crushed under Empire’s heel. Made an example of, to show others that they should keep their heads down and cooperate.
But it didn’t work.
It didn’t work.
The marginal, the insignificant, the powerless, survive. Revive.
Persist. Adapt. Endure.
Fight and evade and feed each other and raise children and weep and sing and shout and tell stories and laugh and make art and love and live.
That’s the story of tonight.
That’s the story of Easter.
That’s the story of now.
Let me name one more thing – a resistance, a friction with this story: the joy of the Biblical text at the drowning of the Egyptian army. Yes, those soldiers were following cruel orders. But does that mean we dance and sing in response to their deaths? And what about the poor horses?
Triumph at the destruction of one’s enemies is certainly a familiar human emotion. But it’s not one we may choose to endorse, or to hallow, to treat as holy and good.
Aurora Levins Morales is a poet and scholar of Puerto Rican and Ukrainian Jewish background. Here’s part of her poem called “Red Sea.” She envisions us standing once more on the shore of the Red Sea, yearning to cross over to something better, and she insists that for the waters to open this time, the path to freedom has to be for everyone, friend, stranger, enemy, together.