Faces of our Faith: Shiphrah & Puah | Exodus 1:8-2:3 | 6.14.26

Grace and peace to you.

This is Pastor Chad here from Lake Forest.

We had a power outage yesterday at the church.

And so I am re-recording our sermon from yesterday.

I'm going to do my best to give you uh as close to the experience we had yesterday as I can.

We're in the second week of a series we're doing called Faces of Our Faith.

And uh to get in the zone this past week, I I told folks I've been listening to the Prince of Egypt soundtrack.

Um if you're around my age, I know you remember it.

It was so good.

Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Casey and Jojo.

Uh we're in the book of Exodus today.

But before we dig into our scripture, uh let's pray and ask God to bless our reading today.

God of all wisdom, there is so much noise in our world that it can be difficult to sift through the cacophony in order to hear your still small voice encouraging us to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly.

May your spirit open our hearts to the truth that we find in you, and may your living word inspire us to stand for the truth of your grace and mercy.

And may your presence today transform us into vessels courageously proclaim proclaiming that truth.

First, uh a quick refresher for us.

Uh Exodus is the second book in the Hebrew Bible, and our story uh comes just a few verses into that book, but there's a whole lot going on that leads us to this place.

Um, in Genesis, Joseph, uh you might remember him as being the one with the colorful coat.

Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and ended up in Egypt.

And when he was there, uh God gave him the ability to interpret dreams, and he used that gift to help this Pharaoh uh survive a famine.

And Joseph rose to a position of real power in Egypt, and eventually he reconciled with his family, with his brothers, and he brought the Hebrew people to Egypt during a time of famine, where they found a safety during that time.

But that safety didn't last.

Generations passed, and the pharaoh who knew Joseph, that pharaoh dies, and a new pharaoh rises to power, one who either doesn't know that history or at least intentionally ignores it.

This new pharaoh, rather than responding with gratitude and welcoming the Hebrew people and his empire, this pharaoh grows fearful of them.

And it's into that growing fear and nativism that our two brave characters show up today, and they change the course of their community's history.

Let's find out how, through the first chapter of the book of Exodus, verses eight through twenty-one, I'll be reading from the Common English Bible, and let's listen together for God's word to us today.

Now a new Pharaoh came to power in Egypt, who didn't know Joseph.

And he said to his people, The Israelite people are now larger in number and stronger than we are.

Come, let's be smart and deal with them.

Otherwise they will only grow in number.

And if war breaks out, they will join our enemies and fight against us, and then escape from the land.

As a result, the Egyptians put foremen of forced work gangs over the Israelites to harass them with hard work.

They had to build storage cities named Pithum and Ramses for Pharaoh.

But the more they were oppressed, the more they grew and spread so much so that the Egyptians started to look at the Israelites with disgust and dread.

So the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites.

They made their lives miserable with hard labor, making mortar and bricks, doing field work, and by forcing them to do all kinds of other cruel work.

Pharaoh then spoke to two Hebrew midwives named Shifra and Puah.

When you are helping the Hebrew women give birth, he said, and you see the baby being born, if it's a boy, kill him.

But if it's a girl, you can let her live.

Now the two midwives respected God.

So they didn't obey the Egyptian king's order.

Instead they let the baby boys live.

So Pharaoh, when he realized this, called the two midwives and said to them, Why are you doing this?

Why are you letting the baby boys live?

The two midwives said to Pharaoh, Because Hebrew women aren't like Egyptian women.

They're much stronger and give birth before any midwives can get to them.

So God treated the midwives well, and the people kept on multiplying and became very strong.

And because the midwives respected God, God gave them households of their own.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

So after seminary, when Lauren and I were living in Atlanta, I served as the director of a nonprofit called Door, which stood for Discovering Opportunities for Outreach and Reflection.

It was a really formative time in my ministry.

It was actually my first call after seminary.

I was ordained to that work.

We hosted year-long volunteer programs as well as weeklong service learning trips, youth groups, and alternative spring breaks from colleges.

We did all this in Atlanta for folks who wanted to spend a week there learning and serving and growing in their faith together, seeing the face of God and the people of that city.

At Dore, I learned one of the best ways for us to grow and learn as people of faith is to be active in service and then to reflect on those experiences.

Folks call it the action, reflection, action model for continuous experiential learning.

And I bet it sounds familiar to a lot of the teachers in our church.

You try something, you reflect on what worked and what didn't, and then you try again in a new way.

In my work with DOR, one of my favorite places to take our groups when they had the time and resources was to take them to the Center for Civil and Human Rights.

It was right downtown near Central, near near Centennial Olympic Park and the Coca-Cola Museum and all that.

The Center for Civil and Human Rights, if you've never been, it's an incredible museum, interactive, informative, and deeply moving.

And it brings to life the world of segregation, the uh the pre-1960s world to life, and invites us to reflect on and engage with the activism of the civil rights movement, its philosophy, its organization, its leadership, and its spirituality.

One of the exhibits I'll never forget is the lunch counter sit-in simulation.

You walk up to a mocked-up lunch counter, like a diner, and you sit down and you put on your pair of headphones, and you're invited to close your eyes.

And then for about 90 seconds, you get just a shadow of what it might have felt like to sit at a counter like that decades ago.

Maybe in Greensboro, North Carolina, or in Nashville or in Atlanta, or even here in Knoxville, where there were regular sit-ins for a couple of months between May and July of 1960.

With your eyes closed, you hear the clink of plates and forks, the ordinary din of a diner at midday.

And then underneath it, menacing whispers start behind you.

Someone shouts from across the room, get out of here! And the voices get closer, and then you feel your stool shake as someone kicks it from behind, and the noise builds and builds right up to the moment when you would have been dragged from your seat.

And then you take off the headphones and walk through to the next room, and the exhibit grounds you back in the history of the freedom rides, the other nonviolent protests of that era, and you learn just how much preparation and organization went in to groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

You learn that these events, like the sit-ins and the freedom rides, these were not spur-of-the-moment agitations by fed up individuals or small groups.

These were carefully planned and executed actions by people who were committed to the freedom of others and to the life-affirming, world-changing ethos of nonviolence.

The freedom riders and activists would actually practice having their blood pressure raised.

They would practice receiving verbal and physical harassment and not responding.

They would practice meditation and breath work to help them keep their heart rates down as their nervous systems responded to the threats around them.

As I had the opportunity to reflect with these door groups on that experience, I learned that the world is not changed by spur-of-the-moment outbursts of angry and fed up folks.

But it was changed by the reasoned, committed, practiced, and intentional implementation of creative nonviolence by folks who knew the world could not stay the same as it was.

Rosa Parks, for example.

She did not just decide to stay seated one day.

That's a myth I was taught at a younger age.

I was taught that she just didn't want to get up on that day and she didn't believe that she ought to, and she was just tired.

And then the boycotts just sort of flowed naturally from that spontaneous event.

But that's not true.

It's just not true.

Rosa Parks had been an activist and a member of civil rights groups in her area for over a decade at that point.

And before her participation in civil disobedience, she had traveled the Highlander Folk School here in Tennessee to train with other activists on peace movements so that she could continue to advocate for workers' rights and racial equality.

You see, her seat was kept not on a whim, not out of reactivity, but with intention, careful planning, deep ethical commitment to something bigger than herself, spiritual practices, and the support of organizations ready to amplify that moment and use its momentum to push our country toward justice.

Perhaps one of her inspirations was the creative, nonviolent civil disobedience of two Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Puah.

Their names are recorded for us as faithful women in one of the earliest moments in the biblical narrative, and they too could not abide the call from the civil authorities to participate in something evil.

So they creatively resisted calls to violent conduct.

No powerful human, not even the most powerful human in their world, calling for them to do harm to others, was powerful enough to supplant their commitment to the God of their lives.

This is a deep commitment that many people of faith have made throughout history, even when it was personally harmful.

To commit to rejecting violence no matter who demands it of us.

Whether they're the richest person in the world or even just a guy who cuts us off in traffic, we seek to reject invitations to violence, and we respond to violence by creatively and disruptively working for peace and justice for everybody, and especially for people who are vulnerable, the ones who are being taken advantage of, those who are feared and scapegoated by the powerful.

The text gives us their names, and that in and of itself is remarkable.

Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the known world, a god among his people, is known only by his title in the story, but these two women, these midwives, Shifra and Pua, their names are written down, remembered.

The biblical authors believed it was important that we know who they were.

Imagine what it felt like to receive that summons.

You do not refuse the Pharaoh.

You don't even let that thought finish forming in your mind before you push it back down.

He is the sun and the Nile and the harvest, he is the law.

And so Shifra and Pua made the walk to the palace.

Maybe they were together whispering to each other along the way.

Maybe they didn't have to say anything at all.

And so the Pharaoh told them what he wanted, he wanted them to kill.

He wanted them to use their familiarity with the sacred in service of the Empire.

He wanted them to twist what was meant for life, for death instead.

And he promised them proximity to himself and his power if they would only turn against their neighbors.

Imagine sitting with that on the way home, the weight of it, not just the horror of what was being asked, but the particular horror of being asked to use their hands.

The hands that wiped sweaty faces, that held mothers, that caught babies, tied cords and swaddled, to use those hands as instruments of the Empire's cruelty.

The Empire had found a way to implicate them in its violence, to make them complicit, to make their vocation itself into a weapon.

This is what empires do, by the way.

They don't just oppress you from the outside, they convince people among you, your leaders, your community activists, your teachers, your pastors, they convince them to use their position for the empire.

They try to get inside your head and your calling.

They try to turn your hands against your neighbors, turning communities against themselves.

But somewhere in between the palace and the next birth they attended, Shifra and Pua made a decision.

The text says in a lot of translations that they feared God.

And that phrase in Hebrew, uh Elohim, carries with it more than the English suggests.

It isn't cowering, it's not terror, it's more like a reverence that is so deep it reorganizes your loyalties.

They had a prior commitment, a more fundamental allegiance.

And when the commands of the nation collided with the commands of the God who makes life and calls it good, there was in the end no real contest.

They were not going to participate in that, and so they let them live.

And when Pharaoh called them back, furious, suspicious, they didn't fall apart.

They got creative.

Well, Hebrew women are different from Egyptian women, they said.

They're stronger.

The babies come before we can even arrive.

It was a brilliant story, and it was necessary.

I think it was possibly a stereotype that the Egyptians already had held about the Hebrews anyway.

And they took that stereotype and repurposed it as a shield, a lie that protected the innocent.

They refused to give the Pharaoh what he wanted, and they also refused to pay for it with their own lives if they could avoid it.

Not recklessness, right, but wisdom.

Resistance that had counted the cost and planned several moves ahead.

This was intentional.

It was thoughtful.

The Empire wanted their hands, but they kept them.

And God, the text tells us, not the God of Egypt that threatened them, but the God of love that they served, that God did not leave them without a home.

So here is the challenge that these faces of our faith, these ancestors of ours, leave us with.

Most of us will not be summoned to a palace.

Pharaoh isn't going to call us in by name and hand us an order this stark, this monstrous, this direct, but you and I will be handed subtler versions of it.

And they tend to come dressed in much friendlier clothes.

It's the comment at the ballgame or the neighborhood Facebook group or around the family dinner table about those people and about what's happening to our schools and our neighborhoods and our way of life.

They'll say it reasonably.

It won't sound like a summons to violence.

It sounds like concern, like common sense, like protecting something good.

I'm sure that was how it was pitched to Shifra and Puah as well.

Surely they could see that the Pharaoh was simply asking them to protect Egypt.

Same shape.

Smaller stakes, maybe, but it's the same fork in the road.

Will we allow our hands and our voices or our silence to be used in ways that participate in harm or resist it?

And here's the thing, for us specifically as Tennesseans, this isn't someone else's history happening somewhere else a long time ago.

It happened and is happening right here, about an hour from where we sit, is the Highlander Folk School.

The place where Rosa Parks trained, where countless organizers of the civil rights movement learned the practiced, disciplined, non-anxious courage we talked about earlier.

That training ground for some of the most consequential nonviolent resistance in this country's history is practically in our backyard.

After they were kicked off of their property in Middle Tennessee in 1959, their offices were actually here in Knoxville for a decade.

Which means that the question of which side of that history we're on has never been abstract for us.

It's been answered before on this soil by people who had to decide.

In the long, unremarkable middle of ordinary days as ordinary people, where their deepest loyalty lived.

Shifra and Pua feared and served the true God, the God who stands with the vulnerable, the weak, the foreigner, the scapegoated.

And that reorganized everything for Shifra and Pua, and I pray that it reorganizes us as well.

Into people whose hands remain instruments of life, whose creativity and work serves liberation, and whose courage is quiet, practiced, and stubborn enough to outlast every empire that has ever tried to claim it.

May God continue to grant us, by the Spirit, the courage, wisdom, and love we need to live with God's Christ like love as our ultimate foundation.

May it be so.

Amen.