Moses (Click on the sermon title for a .pdf copy)
Exodus 1:8 – 2:10
August 27, 2017
I pulled him out of the water, and so I name him Moses …
Moses. His name was Moses, which means “pulled out,” because he was pulled out of the water, pulled out of the place among the reeds at the edge of the river where his mother has hidden him, pulled out by the slave of an Egyptian princess.
Moses. Pulled out, pulled out of the water, pulled out from among his own people, pulled out to live as an Egyptian, the adopted son of an Egyptian princess, the adopted grandson of the Egyptian king, the grandson of the cruel oppressor of his own people.
Moses’ life was spared, he was saved, by being pulled out. Who pulled him out? A slave? A princess? God pulled him out! God saved him. But God didn’t merely pull him out of trouble. God thrust him into the midst of trouble, into the awful place where he had to watch firsthand the terrible treatment of his own people, watch them suffer and watch them die while he lived the life of a prince.
God pulled him out of hiding for that, just as God pulled him out again, out of the safety and obscurity of Midian to which Moses had fled, far, so far, from the terrors and torments of Egypt. God pulled Moses out of Midian and told him to go back, to go back down to Egypt and pull his people out!
Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land,
tell old pharaoh, let my people go.
Moses. Your name is Moses. God has pulled you out, pulled you out of the safety and obscurity of living an ordinary life, pulled you out of living a life just like everybody else. Do not conform! Do not conform yourselves to this world! Be transformed! Be pulled out!
God has pulled you out. Not pulled you out of the world, but pulled you out of the mindset of this world, pulled you out of the heart-set of this world, so you can go down, go down to where God’s people are suffering and pull them out! God isn’t just pulling you out of trouble. God is sending you in to where the trouble is.
Do you see where I am going with this?
Distrust and fear of foreigners. Suspicion and fear of people different from “us.” Fear that manifests itself in cruelty and hate and oppression and enslavement and government-sanctioned discrimination. Is that Egypt? Or is it us?
You are Moses! And like Moses, you are an Egyptian, but not an Egyptian. You belong to? You belong to God! You don’t belong to any race or to any nation. You belong to God.
Who else belongs to God? Who matters to God? The Hebrews did. God saw their suffering and pulled them out and made them his own. But when God did, God commanded them to never forget, never forget what it was like to be a stranger, a foreigner, an outcast, once they have strangers and foreigners and outcasts among them. Their lives are to governed by love, not fear.
Fear drives hate. Fear drives the hate that is bubbling up and boiling over all over this land. Hate has always been there, because fear has always been there, but now it seems to be gaining momentum and intensity and even legitimacy, and whether or not it is our current president’s intent, he has, by his own words and actions, lent support and approval and legitimacy to name-calling and race-baiting and discrimination against entire categories of human beings. But we are called to be pulled out, to not go along, to be ruled by love not by fear, to fight evil not with evil but with good, to speak never in hate but always in love.
I am not suggesting you choose political sides. I am suggesting you choose God’s side and the side of the people God chooses. I am suggesting you choose the side of truth.
But if there is anything new and particularly troublesome about the turmoil of our own day, it’s this: truth has become elusive, almost entirely subjective, almost entirely proprietary. Who speaks the truth and how can we know?
You can. You can know. You are never false, never wrong, when you speak or act in love, and you are never right, you never speak the truth, when you speak or act in hate. When in doubt, when the way is not clear, when you are not sure what to think or what to do, choose love and you will not be wrong. You will be on God’s side.
But what can you do to change the world? What difference can one person make?
Who brought the Hebrew people out of Egypt? God did. But how did God do it? God did it by sending Moses down to Egypt, to speak up for his people and to lead them out. But how did Moses get there? Moses got there because he chose to go, because he chose to say “yes” to God’s call however reluctantly. But even before that? How did Moses get there?
Moses was there because of Shiphrah and Puah, two women who served as midwives to the Hebrews. We don’t even know if they themselves were Hebrew or Egyptian, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because they feared God, because they loved God, because they chose to do what was right in God’s eyes regardless, regardless of what they were told, regardless of what all the other midwives were doing, regardless of the consequences.
Their story includes one tellingly poignant and uncomfortably funny moment. When the king asked them why they failed to do their job, why they let the male babies live, they told him: “The Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they give birth easily, and their babies are born before either of us gets there.” And the king believed them! “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women.” Of course he would believe that. They are foreigners. They are different. They are not like “us.”
Moses was there because of Shiphrah and Puah, and Moses was there because of his mother, because she hid him and protected him in defiance of the king’s order, and because she finally let him go, not giving him up, but giving him a chance, giving God a chance to save him.
Moses was there because of an Egyptian princess. She saw him and felt pity for him. She knew he was Hebrew, a three-month-old Hebrew baby boy, but she felt pity for him, she loved him, and she took him into her own home, choosing not to conform, not to abide by the law her own father had made.
Moses was there because of Miriam, his sister, his sister, Miriam, who later would sing a song of victory after she and her people has crossed the sea and escaped the army of the Egyptians: “Sing to the Lord, because he has won a glorious victory.” She got there, Moses got them there, because she risked standing near as he lay hidden in the reeds, because she, a lowly slave girl, dared speak up to a princess.
What can you do? What did they do, these five women, these five individual human beings? They chose not to conform, not to go along. They chose to speak up and stand up, in defiance of power, in defiance of empire, in defiance of the tide of human events, out of love, every one of them, out of love.
It was Moses, but not just Moses. It was all of them, each of them, making solitary decisions out of love, making a difference. God saved his people by them, through them. And your solitary choice, your solitary act, will make a difference. Because you are Moses. You are Miriam. You are Shiphrah. You are Puah. God has pulled you out so you can go now and help save his people.