“Some unsung heroes”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Sunday, August 27, 2023
Exodus 1:8-2:10 (Forward p. 29) CEV p. 55
In many ways, I am rather surprised that the two Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah never made it into some ‘calendar of saints.’ After all, if hadn’t been for them, the entire plan of salvation as God had planned it might have come to a crashing and sudden end. There would have been no Moses to be raised up to later deliver his people from slavery. And in addition, a whole generation of future male leaders would have been wiped out. Sure, God could have—and would have—come up with an alternate plan, but history certainly would have been different.
We are told that these two women ‘feared God’, and so they were willing to disobey Pharaoh in order to preserve life, little knowing, of course, what significance one of these lives would turn out to have. They simply did their duty. Here I will let my political sympathies show, but I cannot but think of the countless men and women, doctors, nurses, care aids and others who did their duties during Covid, simply to preserve life, never knowing or caring just who they were doing it for. And the thousands of people who rolled up their sleeves for immunizations or who adopted other preventative measures: that, for the very same reason, to preserve lives. We may debate endlessly whether those things were necessary or appropriate, but their motive was dead-on. They wanted to preserve lives, and surely that is part of what it means to ‘fear God.’
And like all those Covid responders, those two women risked so much: their freedom, certainly, and possibly their lives, should Pharaoh have come down hard on them for disobeying his orders.
And then there are the other women who show up in today’s narrative, Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses’ mother and Moses’ sister, Miriam. They too risked their lives, not for a whole ‘mass’ of people, but for just one seemingly insignificant individual. Probably some of them never thought that by so doing they were ‘fearing God.’ Instead they just did their duty, did what had to be done. And here I think of the countless emergency workers who selflessly and courageously do the same, often at great risk to themselves, and sometimes losing so much in the process. (Here I think of the firefighter who came home to find that his own home had been engulfed
by the flames. He was fighting to save others but look what happened to himself!)
But, in a sense, this little story can highlight the incredible role that all sorts of ‘little people’, unnamed people, seemingly insignificant people, play within our society and world, and make it a so much better place. May we, you and I, even if seemingly uninfluential and unimportant, stand in line with all of them and do our parts. Amen.
Forward notes: “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (verse 8).
“My father always relied on people knowing him. He chose car repair shops and other service centres because they knew his father or he had a relationship with them. In the play Death of a Salesman, the protagonist Willy Loman begins to crumble when he realizes the store managers where he used to sell shoes don’t know him anymore.
“The Hebrews are in a terrifying but relatable situation when a new king arises who doesn’t know Joseph or the story of how he saved Egypt from famine. The new king enslaves the Hebrews and orders all Hebrew boys to be killed. But God is not mocked by the new king. God saves one small boy, Moses, setting him floating among the reeds, to be ‘found’ by his sister, nursed by his mother, placed in the house of the king to grow to manhood, and ultimately to lead his people to freedom. We know the fear of a new king. We know it in our politics, and we know it in the church. Trust God to provide, even when a new king arises who does not know us.”
Moving Forward: “Is there a situation in your life where you feel ‘unknown’? Can you trust that God knows you?”
Some concluding remarks: Nothing is said in the narrative about the new king not knowing what Joseph had done to save the nation. If the scholars are correct in surmising that this was a new dynasty, a purely Egyptian one as opposed to the previous Semitic Hyksos one, the king couldn’t have cared less. He would have wanted the power and influence, and even the legacy, of those past rulers to be wiped out. Other Pharaohs had done the same, so why not him?
As for ‘finding’ Moses in the reeds, his sister knew where he was the entire time and was standing watch over him. It was a foreigner, one of Pharaoh’s own household, his daughter in fact, who ‘found’ him. Interestingly, in this age when ‘foreigners’, immigrants and refugees, are sometimes treated with suspicion and disrespect, that here God uses one of those very people for His purposes.
And, as for the ‘fear of the new king’: was it his people’s fear of him, or was it his fear of this ragtag bunch of Hebrews and what they might do to his regime. Sadly, many of our leaders, civic and church alike, are motivated by fear of others, what they might think or say, or what they might do. This fear of the unknown motivates them to do many strange and nasty things.