Return to Recent Sermons or St. Andrews Home page
The River Flowed
Exodus 1:8-2:10 (JPS)
August 24, 2008
I’d like to try a different kind of sermon today. So though you’ll be hearing today’s scripture from Exodus 1:8-2:10 in its modern Jewish translation, we’re going to hear the text within a story. In the Midrash tradition of our ancestors I stand here not as a preacher but as a storyteller.
As I said today’s text comes from the first two chapters of Exodus, but then again the story goes back further than that. Perhaps we should start at the beginning, in Genesis, with a young boy named Joseph who was the apple of his father eye, and the source of bitter jealousy for his older brothers.
Joseph was given a special present by his father and sent out into the fields where he was kidnapped, thrown into a pit, and sold into slavery by his furious brothers. He was taken as a slave to Egypt—the land of slavery—where he was imprisoned yet somehow ended up working for the servants of Pharaoh. And then Joseph worked for Pharaoh himself! Everything Joseph did seemed to work out. He was the golden boy, God’s golden boy, and Pharaoh’s too. Pharaoh realized there was something special about the boy, and eventually he made him second in command of all Egypt.
Joseph was the hero of the day when a long deadly drought came, and he alone was prepared, with food enough for all. Joseph saved Pharaoh’s life, not to mention his political career. With Pharaoh’s blessing, Joseph invited his own family to come from Israel and settle in Egypt, so that his father Jacob and his brothers and his entire extended clan might survive. And not just survive, but flourish!
There they were told they could live as faithful Jews: marry and have food and drink and multiply
and have lives of dignity living in Egypt, but never as Egyptians. So Joseph invited them, and God led them there. All the way to Egypt they came, hesitantly at first but then with great hope. And Pharaoh, out of his great respect for Joseph and the God Joseph called Yahweh, let Joseph’s family settle in one of the best regions of Egypt: the Nile delta, known as the land of Goshen.
And the River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
In fact living around the Nile was perfect for raising sheep and cattle, and children obviously. Because Joseph’s family began small and tired from travel, but quickly they began to grow, to multiply over generations. From child to grandchild to great-grandchild up the family tree, Joseph’s family became a village, became a town, became a people, became a powerful presence in Egypt. No longer a band of refugees.
For the River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
Over the years many things changed. Children were born and grew. Pharaohs came to power and eventually died. But as the Israelites grew, with time so did the Pharaohs’ fear. Sometime between 1290-1224 BC, “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” Rameses II was his name and he knew not the old stories. He knew not the legends of the wise and gracious Hebrew man who had saved countless lives in Egypt. This Pharaoh came to power who knew nothing of the God of Joseph or his ancestors: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Pharaoh “said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase. Otherwise in the event of war, they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground!’”
The threat they posed was too real now, now that Egypt saw enemies to the left and right, saw how impossible it would be to fully defend their borders. So Pharaoh looked instead to something he could control: the enemy within.
Suddenly the sight of Israelite children playing in the streets of Goshen struck fear in Pharaoh’s heart.
For those would grow up and have more children and their children would have children….and none of those people, Pharaoh knew, would ever be loyal to him. That was the infuriating thing about Yahweh’s people. The only one to whom they were loyal was God.
For the River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
“So [the Egyptians] set taskmasters over [the Israelites] to oppress them with forced labor,
and they built garrison cities for Pharaoh; Pithom and Raamses. But the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out, so that the Egyptians came to dread them.
They ruthlessly imposed upon them various labors. Ruthlessly they made life bitter with harsh labor at bricks and mortar and with all sorts of tasks in the field.” From daybreak to sunset the people worked, dying of thirst under a scorching desert sun. Not allowed to use even the technology available back then, they made mortar and bricks and built, brick by blood-stained brick, whole cities for Pharaoh.
Ruthlessly those taskmasters oppressed them. Ruthlessly Pharaoh despised them. Quietly he sought to bring their future to an end. But in the town of Goshen…
The River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
“The King of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiprah and the other Puah, saying, ‘When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birth stool. If it is a boy, kill him. If it is a girl, let her live.” For take away the little Israelite boys and you take away their Israelite traditions, you take away their families, and with their children you take away their future.
With a laugh, Pharaoh realized that with the Israelites’ mighty warriors exhausting themselves making bricks in the fields, who could ever be strong enough to fight back? With only the women and their silly God left, Pharaoh knew he held their future tight in his grasp.
But the River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
Because, you see, those women, “the midwives, fearing God, did not do as the King of Egypt had told them.” Risking their own lives, the mid-wives kissed those bouncing baby boys and let them live.
“So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this thing, letting the boys live?’ The midwives spoke to the Pharaoh, ‘Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; they are vigorous. Before the midwife can even come to them, they have given birth.”
It was a joke, a brave subversive joke. And because Pharaoh, who knew nothing about labor and childbirth, bought the joke…the laugh was on him! “And God dealt well with the midwives; and gave them families. And the people multiplied and increase greatly.
And the River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
And then one day “a certain man of the house of Levi” one of those Israelites baby boys who was delivered and spared by the midwives, one of those tiny survivors, now a man, “married a Levite woman.
The woman conceived and bore a son. When she saw how beautiful he was; she hid him for three months.”
For three months this brave unnamed mother kept her baby behind closed doors; this child who would one day hear the voice of God, Let my People Go. Who would part the waters and lead the slaves toward the Promised Land.
But then he was only an infant, and when his mother heard Pharaoh’s men coming she would run and hide
and pray to God to spare her child. But day after exhausting day Pharaoh’s men searched for evidence of birth, of new life. And when they found it, they crushed it.
“When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him, and caulked it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and place it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile River. And his sister,” whom we will know later as Miriam, “stationed herself at a distance, to learn what would befall him.” And carrying the baby in his basket, over waves and through the reeds…
The River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
“The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the Nile, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant girl to fetch it. When she opened it, she it was a child, a boy crying.” As she pulled the basket from the water, she held in her royal arms he most feared thing in her father’s hardened heart, the future of his slave people, and a foreign threat to national security. By what can only be God’s amazing grace that royal girl “took pity on him and said, ‘This must be a Hebrew child.’”
Then out of the watery reeds sprang a little girl who seemed most interested in the baby. She ran to Pharaoh’s daughter, and said boldly “Shall I go and get you a Hebrew woman to nurse the child for you?’ And Pharaoh’s daughter answered, ‘Yes.’ So the girl went and called the child’s mother.”
Now this daughter of the king must have been really rather dumb, or really very wise. For the nursemaid came—with no baby in her arms—and somehow able to nurse the boy, who reached out to her when he heard her voice and smelled her smell. Even so, Pharaoh’s daughter doesn’t ask any questions.
In my mind’s eye I see Pharaoh’s daughter giving this mother a small sly smile, two unnamed women of the Bible changing the history of the world. And all she says is this, “Take this child...” This baby, whose eyes are your eyes and whose hands are your hands, and you nurse him. And you clean him, and sing him to sleep And watch with pride as he takes his first steps and speaks his first Hebrew words. You teach him the ways of his people. You teach him the ways of his God. And I will pay your wages-I’ll sustain you.. And I, the daughter of Pharaoh, will protect you!
“So the woman took the child and nursed it,” and as the years passed…
The River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
Until the sweet times turned bittersweet. “When the child grew up, [his mother] brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter who made him her son.” That means that sometime in his preschool years this unnamed mother took her beloved son to the palace and gave him away to the Princess. She hugged his small chest, kissed his tan cheek, let go of his little hand, already grieving and thanking God she had been able to hold him for so long. Her son would be the son of Egypt now. He would be educated and given privilege beyond her wildest dreams. He would be a man of power.
But she trusted, and she had prayed by the River that within him that seed would grow. That he would remember—remember one day- his People. That he would have a heart to feel their pain, and ears to hear the call of Yahweh his God. So his mother and the Israelites waited, and waited, and all the while…
The River flowed, deep and strong, and nothing could stop it.
“[Pharaoh’s daughter] named him Moses, explaining, ‘I drew him out of the water.’”
Can’t you feel the water, like the ripples on Platte Lake, the ripples of the Nile? Can’t you just hear the water? Rushing, rippling, current churning deep beneath the surface?
Maybe the River Nile sounds a bit like
… the waters of creation.
... the flood for 40 days and 40 nights.
…the Rock of Horeb that burst with water in the desert.
…the sound of Jesus stilling the Storm,
…his miracle of water into holy wine,
…his own baptism beneath the waves of the Jordan.
The River flowed, deep and strong, and I imagine it sounds a great deal like baptism: Jesus’ baptism, and mine and yours.
The River flowed and flows still, deep and strong. And just as it flowed then and there, so it flows here and now. By God’s grace in Christ we too are a people of that River. And every time we gather here we gather beside the baptismal font, it is as if we gather at the riverside. Beside an unstoppable river, deep and strong, into which we wade, week after week together.
Listen to the water [water poured into the baptismal font].
It sounds like Hope, like Life flowing deep and strong, that nothing can stop. Neither fear nor Pharaoh, neither violence nor despair. Neither death nor life, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else… could quench the rippling roaring waves of God.
Thanks be to the Creator of Hope and Life. Thanks be to the Source of the River. Thanks be to God.
And all the river people of God say together—Amen!
Copyright 2008 Rev. Shelaine R. Bird
Return to Recent Sermons or St. Andrews Home page