All summer we’ve been following the story of God’s promise and the people God worked with to make those promises real.  There was Noah and the Ark; and Abraham; and Sarah and Hager, and Ishmael and Isaac; Esau and Jacob, and Joseph and his brothers; In every generation, relationships that reveal God’s work and purpose.

When the sons of Jacob were brought to Egypt by Joseph to escape famine, Egypt became their home for generations.  And that’s where we pick up the story today.  The many descendants promised to Abraham are beginning to emerge, but not in the land that was promised by God to Abraham.  In Egypt, where the Pharoah begins to fear their numbers and uses the time honored governing strategy of tyranny to protect his country and his power. 

Pharoah begins to abuse the Israelites, and his abuse becomes more and more cruel, until he places the lives of the children in jeopardy by executive order.  Readers familiar with the stories of the Hebrew Bible will recognize the tension in the plot, and know that just as the threat to God’s covenant becomes the greatest, God will act to provide some way forward.  And the threat is great.  The people are not in the promised land; and the promise of many descendants is under attack by the tyrannical Egyptian ruler. 

And it is just at this time, as Pharoah orders that the children be drowned, that the liberator is born!  But today’s story is the amazing story of how the child who would grow up to liberate his people from slavery in Egypt was himself delivered from danger. 

Delivered by a crew of women, none of whom obeyed the legitimate governing authority under which they lived.  Shiprah and Puah, themselves members of the enslaved tribe of Israel, are particularly disingenuous.  They no doubt play on the Pharoah’s racist assumptions about these inferior slaves when they tell him that essentially, the Hebrew women give birth like animals, and the midewives just can’t get there in time to assist in the birth and carry out the cruel orders. 

God bless Shiprah and Puah, who use the freedom they have to resist abusive power, and choose life over death. 

And then there are the mother and the sister of Moses – women not named in this story – but whose names we later learn are Jochebed and Miriam, who conspire together to save the male child of their family. 

The role of water in the story of the Hebrew people will become central.  And here it takes its central place, as drowning is ordered, and a baby is saved from the waters.  Moses’ mother takes care to put him in a basket that will be water proof, in which he will float and be discovered alive.  He is placed where the daughter of the Pharoah will surely find him when she comes to the river to bathe.  And his sister is stationed nearby, in order to be conveniently helpful when the baby is discovered and there will be need of a nurse to care for him.

With the cooperation of the daughter of the Pharoah, the Hebrew women manage to get the child who will grow up to be their deliverer safely into the very household of the tyrant who is threatening them, and keep him under the care of his own biological mother.  The irony is rich and inescapable.

And a good deal of the plot turns on the daughter of Pharoah.  The text says that she took pity on the child, and knowing that it was a Hebrew child, and undoubtedly knowing of her father’s edict, she took the child as her own.  And took it right into her tyrannical father’s house.  She chose compassion over obedience to the law. 

As we move through these early biblical stories, we are not only learning the story of the people God is working with, we are learning to know God as God is revealed in the text.  And we are learning how God works.  Here is an example of how God’s power is claimed and used by people who have little power in their human community. 

This story begins to teach us that when there is a relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, God is on the side of the oppressed.  But the story is also continuing to teach us that God works primarily through relationship with God’s people.  God doesn’t act unilaterally to overthrow the Pharoah.  God will later act through the leadership of Moses.  But here, now, when the future is unclear – God is acting through people who choose God’s way over other available choices. 

Here we see the true nature of power; and God’s preference for the power that saves over the power that oppresses.  We begin to see the power that saves as God’s power – and the power of tyrants as the enemy of God’s way.

And we see how choosing compassion over unjust law can ultimately transform the injustice. 

Shiprah and Puah and Moses’ mother have power that Pharoah can’t begin to understand.  They have the power to give birth to life.  To quote Butterfly McQueen, in that memorable scene from the movie Gone with the Wind¸ this pharaoh don’t know nothing bout birthin babies. 

There is a power that chooses life and freedom that no tyrant knows anything about.  And, given enough time, every tyrant will fall to that greater power. 

One of the things this story has the potential to reveal is this truth: for every tyrant there is in the world today, there is very likely already a force at work that will bring that tyrant down.  For every tyrant there is in the world today, there may very well be a Mahatma Gandhi, a Nelson Mandela, a Martin Luther King, Jr., being born and nurtured and destined to be shaped by the power of persuasive love to emerge as a liberator. 

But I don’t for a moment assume that this is a story only about liberators of nations and peoples.  I find in this story a call to each of us to follow the example of these courageous and disobedient women. 

There are forces at work in the world today that threaten our children.  Some would say that the greatest threat is to unborn babies; but I would say that there are also plenty of dangers to the already born.  And many of those dangers are institutionalized in policies and legal systems so that they have the authority of rules, regulations and even law behind them.

Our children’s very lives may depend on the presence of disobedient persons in their lives; persons who will choose God’s way of compassion over other available choices.  Those who have the most opportunity to act compassionately toward children are teachers.  Teachers see children more hours per day than parents do, in many cases. 

Teachers see when a child is hungry.
Teachers see when a child is not well rested.
Teachers see when a child is physically or emotionally traumatized.
Teachers see when a child needs a warm coat, or new shoes.
Teachers see when a child has material needs, but little spark for learning.
Teachers see all the ways that every single child is especially gifted and unique.

And they teach in a system that normalizes average and operates with ever diminishing material resources. 

But so many of them are like Shiprah and Puah – finding a way to choose compassionate action, God’s way, over other available choices. 

Today, we celebrate the beginning of the school year – and I especially want us to appreciate those who choose to teach our children.  In difficult circumstances, often with too few resources and too many obstacles, men and women relate compassionately to children, and inspire them to learn and live and become themselves capable and compassionate people. 

Systems that no longer work for their intended purpose will not fix themselves.  People have to work together to fix systems.  And God has a vision for justice, shalom, well being, that should guide that work.  And more often than not, some disobedience will be required of those who desire to work on God’s side. 

This is the story of how Shiprah, and Puah and a Mother and a sister and a daughter brought down a mighty tyrant by choosing compassion over law; this is a story about courageous women who undermined the laws of power and death by choosing freedom and life.  There is a higher wisdom than the orders that come from the palace.  And it is available to us. 

Shiprah and Puah and Jochebed and Miriam are already free of the tyranny.  The tyrant may live in the palace, but his policies do not control their lives or their choices. 

We do not have to live under the power of the forces of evil in this world.  We are free to act independently of those forces.  Is there risk?  Of course there is. 

Think of the risk Pharoah’s daughter took when she took pity on the crying child!  Think of the risk Jesus took when he took pity on the hungry, the outcast, the lepers, the prostitutes, the blind and the lame.  He broke all the Sabbath laws for the sake of compassion. 

And paid the price with his life.  But the cross doesn’t end his life.  It reveals God’s deliverance into life of those who take the risk. 

We can risk the will of God – that which is good and acceptable and perfect without fear – because though the risk is great and real, it ends always – and sometimes after much suffering – in life. 

The apostle Paul suggests that it is through renewal of our minds – learning – that we are transformed into disciples. 

As the academic year begins, let us all be students and teachers of God’s way, resolved to be transformed by the renewal of our minds, lest we become conformed to Pharoah’s world. 

May it be so.