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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Today, we start the exodus, so let's pray.
Speaker 1:God of grace, who welcomes and invites and opens doors and prepares tables, thank you for all the ways that you have guided and inspired and laid down the path of peace before us. As we read and we wrestle and we work out our faith in real time together, we pray that your spirit would always remain near, speaking profound love to us, reminding us of the wisdom available to us, convicting us of where we need to make adjustments or changes in order to love more fully like you. May the voice of spirit be the one that we learn to listen for and then slowly come to trust with our steps. As we turn now to the exodus today, May you begin to inspire a redemptive imagination in each of us. One that looks for the voices that have been ignored, one that searches for the path of justice before us, one that moves ahead of history, preparing the way for your kingdom that liberates and restores and makes all things new.
Speaker 1:In this, might we work alongside you in the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Alright. Today, it's forgetting your past, abhorring your neighbor, following orders, and hiding your kids. And there's a lot to get through in this one week, so we are gonna pack it in and jump right in.
Speaker 1:And we're gonna start at the start. So this is Exodus chapter one starting in verse six. Now Joseph and all of his brothers and all of that generation died. So this is our link to the patriarchs of Genesis. Over the past almost decade now here at Commons, we have done this kind of a longer series on Abraham and then Jacob and Joseph, and you can find all of those in the archives.
Speaker 1:But this opening here in Exodus is making the connection for us back to Genesis. And if you can remember, at the end of Genesis, Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt but ends up becoming a ruler in his own right. And at the end of Genesis, he welcomes his family back into his life by welcoming them into Egypt in his care during a famine that threatened to wipe everyone out in the land. So Genesis ends with Abraham's lineage living in Egypt. Exodus picks up some time down the road.
Speaker 1:Because in verse two, we read that the Israelites were exceedingly fruitful and multiplied greatly. They increased in numbers and became so numerous that the land was filled with them. Then a new king to whom Joseph meant nothing came to power in Egypt. Look, he said to his people, the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous.
Speaker 1:And if war breaks out, we'll join our enemies and fight against us and leave the country. So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Patum and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, So the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives a bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields. In all their harsh labor, the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.
Speaker 1:So that's Exodus one verses six to 14, and it sets up our story for today. It sets up the whole story of the Exodus. And today, we are just going to get to the edge of baby moment Moses. We will get there, I promise. But there is some really important stuff here already in the setup that we need to take our time with.
Speaker 1:And I already talked about why Exodus starts with Joseph. Let's go back to that for a second, though. Because, really, one of the very important verses in the entire Exodus narrative is right here, right at the start in verse eight. It says this, then a new king to whom Joseph meant nothing came to power in Egypt. And it's really easy to kinda blow past this and get to the good stuff.
Speaker 1:I mean, we get it. Time has passed. A generation has died. The new king doesn't remember Joseph. Except there's a lot more than that.
Speaker 1:Case in point, the ESV translates this verse as now arose a new king in Egypt who did not know Joseph. That's fine, technically. The word here is yada, and that means to know. Except that verb yada is incredibly broad in the Hebrew language. It encompasses everything from having intellectual knowledge about someone.
Speaker 1:I've heard of Joseph, therefore, know him. All the way down to sexual relationships. Adam lay with his wife Eve, and he knew her. And I mean, I think we all understand that those are two very different ways of knowing someone. And to be fair, delineating the measure of our relationships is always being kind of hard.
Speaker 1:Are you a friend or a best friend or a best friend forever or just someone I have a strange parasocial with relationship with online? Sometimes those lines get crossed. Right? But in this case, I think the ESV has gone too literal, and in that, they've missed the point. The NIV is much closer to the intent here.
Speaker 1:It's not that the king doesn't know about Joseph, as if the court historians have somehow forgotten about this seven year famine that Joseph led the kingdom of Egypt through, is that the king doesn't care about that. And that is a really important idea in Hebrew literature. All through the Old Testament, you will see writers linking stories together. That's why Exodus starts with Joseph in the first place. The writers want to show continuity, how one story leads into another.
Speaker 1:And in this way, they demonstrated that their present was linked to their past and that their future was somehow part of a larger unfolding story that was impacted by the choices they made today. The historian, Thomas Cahill, speaking about the Abraham story in particular says this, that the Jewish identity was a complete departure from everything that had gone before it into long evolution of culture and sensibility. Out of the Sumerian dynasty, a civilized repository of the predictable, out of a human race which knew in its bones that all striving must end in death, came a story with impossible promise. Out of a mortal imagination comes a dream of something new. Something better.
Speaker 1:Something yet to happen. Something in the future. And Cahill's thesis here is that the very notion of human progress, the idea that history is going somewhere, that comes from the Jewish imagination and their desire to link different stories together into a larger thread. Humans didn't really do that before them. We told stories, but we didn't put them together this way.
Speaker 1:And here, not only is the writer linking the next story, Exodus, to the previous story, Joseph, he's saying that to forget that connection, or maybe even worse, to ignore that connection, is in itself the source of great suffering in the world. Think of that line. There arose in Egypt a king to whom Joseph meant nothing and the pain that results for the Hebrew people. But then think about all the sayings of the Hebrew God post Exodus. So there's Deuteronomy five.
Speaker 1:The seventh day is a Sabbath day. You shall do no work, neither you nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor any foreigner residing in your town. No one should work that they all may rest as you do. Remember, you were slaves in Egypt once, and the Lord your God brought you out of there. Or maybe Deuteronomy 15, if you or any of your people sell themselves to you and serve you for six years in the seventh year, you must let them go free.
Speaker 1:And when you let them go, do not send them away empty handed. Supply them liberally from your flock and from your threshing floor and from your winepress. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt once, and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. Or then there's Deuteronomy 24. Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice.
Speaker 1:Do not take the cloak of a widow. Remember, you were slaves in Egypt once, and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. All of the post exodus ethics in Israel, resting and allowing others to rest, forgiving debts and blessing others generously, ensuring justice for the marginalized, all of that depends on remembering where the story comes from and how we ended up here. And that framework of learning from our history post Exodus, that is being set up here at the start with the contracts to the pharaoh who does not learn from his history pre Exodus. In fact, you could probably suggest that what the writer wants to say is that forgetting leads to slavery, and remembering leads to liberation.
Speaker 1:And there are so many ways that we have translated this into colloquial wisdom today. Right? Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Insanity is trying the same thing and expecting a different result.
Speaker 1:We know all of this, and yet still somehow we regularly ignore it. Do you remember what it was like to be the junior employee who was mistreated by their careless boss? Are you the boss now? Do you remember what it was like when your parents mis directed their frustrations at you as a child? Are you a parent now?
Speaker 1:Do you remember what it felt like to have arbitrary and unreasonable expectations placed on you by someone who didn't take the time to understand your story or what you were going through, because I know we all still do that one from time to time. Far too often, we are the king who arose and cared nothing for Joseph instead of the ones who remembered the way that God lifted and healed us and then carried that forward for someone else. And all of that is being set up here in this opening line because that's what the Hebrew people did. They understood their history as story. Now, you want an interesting exercise?
Speaker 1:Sit down sometime, take out a blank page, and just write out your personal history. Like, all the major twists and turns and things that have brought you here to that moment as you sit there, no motive, no blame, just the contours of your journey, And then think about the story you tell yourself about what's on that page. Do you carry shame for things that happened to you? Do you blame yourself for things that you didn't control? Do you have pride about the way that you've grown and changed when you made mistakes?
Speaker 1:Do you celebrate unexpected moments that pointed you in new and surprising directions? It's not just knowing about our past. It's how we care for our past, how we understand our past. And the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the way we metabolize and learn from our past is far more important than just the facts you put on the page. That's what the writer wants us to tap into here.
Speaker 1:It's not that the king doesn't know the facts about Joseph. It's that the king isn't wise enough to know what to do with them. And sometimes we don't spend enough time learning what to do with our past. And so we read that the king said to his people, the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them.
Speaker 1:So they put slave masters over them to oppress them. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ever more ruthlessly. Some interesting stuff here. First of all, the NIV says that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. That's the word kutz or yakutzu specifically here in this passage.
Speaker 1:But the reason translators have gone with dread is to tie the people's feelings back to the pharaoh's concerns about a revolt. They feared the Israelites might rise up, and that's fair. Except the root of that word is actually more along the lines of loathing. So the intent here has more to do with animosity than it does with fear. The sentiment here is sort of, this is our country, and these immigrants are here breeding like rabbits.
Speaker 1:We don't like them. And before we get too far down on the Egyptians in this story here, let's remember sort of, like, everything happening in our world today. Now friends to the South have a certain politician that has made their entire career off this kind of sentiment, so this is a very human instinct. It starts with loathing. We don't like them.
Speaker 1:And it slowly gets weaponized into fear. They are a threat to our way of life. And that is a story that is very easy to fall prey to, especially if we don't remember our past. And here's the truth. Most of us here in this room, we are settlers on native land who somehow instinctively feel the right to control who gets to come here next.
Speaker 1:Right? And I understand immigration is a complex issue, but if we forget how we got here and the suffering that we caused, how on earth do we ever expect to navigate the future honorably? To quote from the end of Exodus, do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner. Why? Because you were foreigners once.
Speaker 1:That's Exodus 22. And look how easily things escalate once the dominant group gives itself permission to even just slightly diminish the humanity of those they see as a threat to them. This is picking up where we left off in verse 14. They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields. In all their harsh labor, the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.
Speaker 1:We read that part already, but that word ruthlessly here, it's the word parak in Hebrew. It means to crush or grind, to crumble and crunch, and it actually comes from a neo Assyrian root that meant simply violence. So violent laws lead to verse 15. The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives whose names were Shipprah and Puah, when you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him. But if it is a girl, let her live.
Speaker 1:So think about this. In eight verses now, we have gone from a new king who does not learn from the past, from animosity that turns into dehumanizing fear of the other, from oppression that becomes very quickly outright murder. Things can escalate quickly, and the writer wants you to see that here. If we let these ideas take hold in our heart, they will take us to places we never thought we would go. But let's talk about Shipwrought and Puah here for a moment.
Speaker 1:Is there some debate about these identities? These names are not straightforwardly Hebrew, but they are Semitic. And so because of that, the question has become, well, are they really Israelite midwives, or are they midwives assigned to the Israelites? After all, if they are Hebrew, why would Pharaoh ever think they would even go along with this request? And that's a fair question.
Speaker 1:I don't think, though, that the author is casting identities. I think the writer is trying to demonstrate something about the corruption of power here. Remember, this king is so deeply entrenched in his own imagination of himself, completely unconcerned with the past. He's so full of his own present. He can't even fathom the idea of a future where someone would refuse his orders no matter how antihuman they might be.
Speaker 1:And that's the problem. But Shipprah and Puah, if the Israelites are really any kind of a numerical threat to Egypt at this point, clearly, they are gonna need more than two midwives. So likely, what we're seeing here are the women who were the heads of a Hebrew birthing guild. These are essentially the union leaders. And they are called in and given orders by the king to disseminate to the other women who did this work.
Speaker 1:So what happens? Well, the text is pretty silent here, which leaves us to fill in the gaps imaginatively. And to do that, I wanna read you a longer section from Will Gaffney, who is one of my favorite black women scholars reading the Hebrew Bible right now. This is from her book, Womanist Midrash. But this is how she imagines these two Shipprah and Puah leaving Pharaoh's court.
Speaker 1:Shipprah and Puah call all the birthing women to assemble, telling their overseers that they are passing on Pharaoh's instructions. And perhaps one Egyptian longers lingers longer than the others, but Pua shoos him out with the ancient womanist refrain. This is women's business, and he leaves. Hundreds of women come to the place of Shipra's tent. Many bring their daughters, their granddaughters, nieces that they are apprenticing in the practice.
Speaker 1:Some are pregnant. Others are nursing. It takes more than a day for everyone to gather, to eat, and to rest from their journeys. And there is talk, shop talk, women's wisdom shared, experiences, and new techniques, herbs to stop bleeding, and herbs to begin labor, and teas to increase milk production, ways to limit pregnancies. Finally, Shipra speaks.
Speaker 1:She tells them Pharaoh's words, and the women gasp. Some mutter, others shout, some of the children are frightened, but Shipra and Pua shush them and call for calm. Shipra begins to prophesy. God has brought our people a mighty long way. I do not believe that God has brought us this far to leave us.
Speaker 1:Do not fear this pharaoh or his warriors nor his war horses or chariots. God will blow them away like smoke in the wind. In our days, before our eyes, God will break the back of empire and wash away its might. God will rise up one of our sons to lead us out of this house of slavery, and our hands and our wounds will do God's work. We will deliver the deliverer, and we will keep him safe until the day God calls.
Speaker 1:Shipprah takes her seat, and Puah now speaks. This is what we'll do. Deliver the babies. Hide as many of the boys as you can. Raise others as girls.
Speaker 1:Do not worry about the Egyptians. They will not come to the house of a woman to check. They cannot even imagine that we would defy the pharaoh whom they revere as a living god. The woman leave the convocation of midwives, days, weeks, then months go by, and babies are born, but Pharaoh is too busy to think about the Hebrew birthing women. Finally, someone mentions that the Hebrew people are still growing in spite of Pharaoh's command, so he summons them back to explain themselves.
Speaker 1:And here, back to Exodus verse 19, the midwives answered Pharaoh, look, Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. They are vigorous and give birth before the midwives can even get there. Now here, they're using Pharaoh's prejudice against him. The word that's translated vigorous here is actually something more like brutish or animalistic. They're not refined like Egyptian women.
Speaker 1:So they're playing him here. And it seems like it works because the next verse all we read is God was kind to the midwives, and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, God gave them families of their own. Now families here might mean families. More likely, what it means is lineages, dynasties, long stories of their own, descendants from today.
Speaker 1:But I like what Gaffney says here. She says, the liberation of the Israelite people begins with Shipprah and Puah. They are the mothers of a revolution waged first by women. Here's what's important about that. We get no indication in the text that Shipprah or Puah were ever involved with, that they ever delivered Moses?
Speaker 1:Because that's not the point of the story. In fact, it's precisely the opposite. See, the point here is that when we know where we come from and we live out of that grounding narrative, even at great risk to ourselves, we can inspire great things in other people around us, and that is how revolution starts. Shipprah and Puah aren't named in the text of Exodus because they saved Moses. Shipprah and Puah are named in the text of Exodus because they preserved the hope that would be needed when God finally called on Moses.
Speaker 1:And sometimes that is the much harder work. Here we go. One last vignette. Baby Moses to close us out today. When Pharaoh finds out that his plan has not worked, he escalates the violence even farther because that's what happens.
Speaker 1:This time, he orders all Hebrew boy children thrown into the Nile River to drown. But one mother who has been hiding her son for three months now, as Shipra and Pua have advised, she decides she needs to do something drastic. So she prepares a basket, and she makes it waterproof, and then she floats her son out into the river trusting God to look after him. Now lo and behold, the pharaoh's daughter just happens to be there that day. And she sees the basket, and she realizes that this is one of the Hebrew children, and she has compassion on him and decides to take him home, but she knows she's going to need help to do that.
Speaker 1:And so she hires the mother who's hiding in the reeds nearby to raise the child for her, and that feels a little convenient. In fact, Jewish commentators often play up the divine irony here. Nahum Sarnah points out that when Pharaoh's daughter says to Moses' mother, here, take him and nurse him for me. That's chapter two verse eight. The text uses a somewhat obscure form of the verb in what we call the Hiphel stem that implies something like ownership.
Speaker 1:And he suggests maybe we could translate this something more like, here, he's your responsibility now. He belongs to you. Take him and nurse him for me. Sort of this unconscious acknowledgment of her motherhood embedded in the narrative and the language of the text. Text.
Speaker 1:The point being, again, that the story that leads to the rise of the single most important figure in Hebrew history is Moses who will lead his people out of bondage. It all begins with a king who ignores the past, with midwives who know their place in a larger tale, with an Egyptian woman who has compassion on a stranger, with a mother who is returned to his rightful place, and none of that is by accident. Because Exodus doesn't want you only to celebrate Moses when his part comes along. It wants you to understand before that that liberation begins in the faithful choices of regular people who become aware of the injustice around them and then work to subvert it wherever they can. It wants you to understand your place in all kinds of different stories that ebb and flow, some of which you get to be the star in, some of which you will play a small but vital role in from the sidelines.
Speaker 1:Because you see when we get to the end of chapter two and the story really kicks off and gets going and we read that the Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried for help and God heard their groaning and was concerned, Exodus wants us to remember that this isn't the start of the story. It's a response to the faithfulness of countless Hebrews, particularly women who kept the story moving forward through some of its darkest moments. And because they knew where they came from, they kept things moving forward, and often, really, that's all faith is. So might we honor those in our lives who've kept us moving forward when we didn't think we could. And might we uncover strength in ourselves we thought that we had lost?
Speaker 1:Might we ground ourselves in a story, in a past that is large enough to weather whatever may come in front of us. And through it all, might we find each of us some small way to contribute to the liberation that Jesus welcomes all people to encounter. That's the Exodus story. Let's pray. God, who comes to find us, who hears us, who listens to us, God, welcomes us to uncover and discover your grace all around us all the time.
Speaker 1:Might we, even in our frailty, in these moments when we struggle to see what's ahead, might we even in those moments hear your voice calling us, strengthening us, pushing us forward into what comes next. And in that, might we look around ourselves to those near us, to those who still suffering, to those who are still pushed down by structures that oppress, and might we put our back and our hands and our hope and our strength into small moments of liberation that compounded together can change the world. And we believe that we play a role in your story of redemption, And that it added up and together, we can contribute to a world that looks more like your kingdom. Heaven here on earth through the small steps that we take today. God, might your spirit enliven us to injustice around us.
Speaker 1:May it give us courage to act. If we find ourself as the one who is pushed down and bogged down, might we believe that you are near and that there are people on our side today. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen.