The God Who Makes a Way (9.29.19)
The God Who Makes a Way
Exodus 1:9-22; Exodus 2:1-10; 3:1-14
Septemer 29, 2019
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
We’re ignoring mandates from kings today, crossing borders as asylum seekers, listening for the holy word to release those who are enslaved. It’s decidedly and overtly political again, isn’t it, this sacred text of ours? I really do wish sometimes that it wasn’t that way. There are times I want to drop the requirements to DO SOMETHING with this faith and just let it make me feel better about my life. I crave the texts about rest and beauty and mindfully noticing signs of God in the created world. I understand the desire for spirituality to start and end right there: noticing, rest, beauty. But BEING and DOING are intimately linked in sacred story. Even if we’re practicing these things and only these things, it doesn’t take long before noticing signs of God in the created world causes us to feel something for the created world—something warm in our hearts that causes us to smile or sigh or say “wow” when we see that pink and orange sunset over the lake or a years-old-firecracker-plant hanging over a fence. This particular way of BEING makes a way in us and through us that necessarily and actively makes a way in and through the world.
Observing true Sabbath rest, fully and rightly, will absolutely and necessarily cause us to reexamine the other six days of the week and how they are ordered. If there is tremendous chaos in the other days, we will feel that imbalance. If our neighbor isn’t holding space for holy rest (or can’t hold that space because it means lost wages because the wages are so low to begin with), then we might start to at least question why rest isn’t available to all. If sabbath doesn’t set the pace for the other days of the week and other ways of being in the world, then we’ll feel that need to DO SOMETHING in order to get the balance and order right.
See, God is making a people. My life is connected to yours, and yours to mine. And ours to the world stepping into Spring on the other side of the planet. That’s the thing that keeps happening in scripture again and again—God makes a way for connection. God makes animals, separates water and sky, gives them to a human dirt creature as companions, and then realizes something is still missing—the dirt creature needs a partner, a friend, a teammate. From the very beginning of the whole collection of stories, “alone” is not how we are to experience the world God has created and the life God has given us.
By the time we get to Shiphrah and Puah in Exodus 1, we see consequences of what all of that diligent practice means. They live in a nation, in an empire, in a land with a ruler who does not value and honor their tradition. More than just their tradition, he does not value and honor their people. He does not value and honor what they believe to be true about God. He does not view them as equally valid and equally human to the Egyptians.
Generations have passed. There is a new king who does not remember Joseph. And babies are being born to the Israelites; lots of them. If a king does not remember Joseph, and babies are being born, that is the storyteller’s way of telling us that quite a lot of time has passed. The first wave of forced migration due to famine has now led to generations of Israelites who have only known Egypt as home and have settled in that land. And the king wants them gone, so he enslaves them and gives an executive order to midwives to kill the baby boys.
But Shiphrah and Puah are women who practice all that stuff about holy rest and co-creating beauty and mindfully noticing signs of God in the created world. They are trained and tasked with standing at the threshold between life and death and coaxing life into the world. They don’t hesitate and ask, “Are we being political in this moment? Is it wrong to disobey the king and challenge this order?” They are shaped by what they believe to be truer than the king, truer than the nation in which they live, truer than an executive order based in fear and hate of people who look and sound different than the king. And so they bring those babies into the world and then lie about it. Period. It is deliberate, intentional, and direct defiant of a head of state.
“Why are the baby boys being born,” the king wants to know. And Shiphrah and Puah lie, without hesitation, to the king’s face saying, “Israelite women just give birth SO FAST that we can’t get there in time.” Because the king truly does believe there is a human difference between Egyptians and Israelites, he buys it. He believes it is possible for the labor and delivery of an entire ethnicity to be radically different from his own people because somehow these “less than” people keep wildly reproducing and erupting babies into the world.
So the king solves the problem with a new executive order: throw the boy babies in the river. Let nature do what the midwives can’t. And we get to a family who has a boy baby, and they don’t do what the Pharaoh says to do. Instead, they hide the baby for three whole months. And then they sort of, technically, kind of honor the order to throw the baby in the river. But first they make a waterproof basket boat. And they gently place him in the river. And they do so in a spot with lots of reeds, so he won’t drift away. And the sister hides close enough to where he is floating so she can keep an eye on him. Oh, and it’s also the place where the Pharaoh’s daughter and attendants happen to visit. They have no intention of giving this baby up. They are only working around the Pharaoh’s order.
They hatch a plan for survival that not only defies the king but takes this illegal, hidden baby straight into the king’s home and makes him Egyptian in all kinds of privileged ways. But Moses’ life is shaped from the very beginning by these other folks who have a certain way of being in and seeing the world, and he values them. So much so that he flies into a fit of rage when he sees an Egyptian beating one of his own people, and he kills the Egyptian, hides the body, and then flees Egypt because Pharaoh finds out.
That’s how we end up in Midian for this third story; Moses as a shepherd to his father-in-law’s flock. He didn’t just run away for a minute. He ran away two countries over, got married, settled down, took on a new trade, and had every intention of staying far, far away from Egypt. And there in the ordinary, there in the midst of minding his own business, there in the place of wanting to just rest, and create some beauty, and notice God’s creation, he encounters the holy. He cannot escape this way that God is making.
“Take off your shoes,” God says from the fire. And Moses takes off his shoes to stand on holy ground before the one who is seeking him out. Moses can’t escape with his own life and not remember the lives of the brothers and sisters who are left behind. Moses can’t move on with a new family in a new home and not remember the ones still in Egypt. This Way that God is making requires a love and care of neighbor that is persistent, and God chases after Moses, the one drawn out of the water, to draw him back to Egypt to challenge the king, to free his people, and to guide them to a better land. “I will be with you,” God says. “And what shall I say to my people and to Pharaoh,” Moses asks. “I AM has sent me to you,” God answers.
This is not a mind your own business and keep your head down faith. This Way God is creating connects people—really flawed, prone to anger, given to running away kind of people—and requires them to show love by advocating, freeing, showing up, challenging, even in practicing total and absolute civil disobedience. This faith does something in us and through us and requires us to embody the very way God is making. The Love of God is active and moving, not limited to borders of any empire, and more powerful than the orders of any king.
Do you know that point in “Blessed Assurance” where voices start to choke up because something old and beautiful has filled the room? We sing those words, “This is my story, this is my song,” and we freeze. Because try as we might to be rational people who have an academic approach to talking about mystery and myth and metaphor, we are singing about how these sacred stories that have shaped us. We’re singing about these ancient tales of what love looks like. We’re singing about the texts of beauty and rest and noticing God in the created world AND about the prophetic, radical, chase down the king, free the enslaved people, challenge the accepted order of things kind of texts, too.
You can’t walk this winding, emerging path and not be changed by it. And try as we might to walk it alone, that doesn’t work out, either. The God Who Makes a Way is also the God who makes a people. The Way and the People can’t be separated, in fact. Even when we’re tending our sheep and raising a family and minding our own business, thank you very much, the holy voice of God shows up in the middle of our ordinary and whispers to us: Take your shoes off. I’m with you. Go face this absolutely, ridiculously, impossible situation with me. I will make a way for all of you to get there, a way for all of you to speak to this power, a way for all of you to radically live into this story together.
Amen.