August 21, 2005
Pentecost 14: Year A
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Thirty years ago, some teenagers found a quotation from William James in a magazine and painted it on the side of Pete Seeger's barn in the Hudson River Valley. The four-foot high letters, now weather beaten, say, “I am done with big things and great things, great institutions and big success; and I am for those tiny, invisible, molecular forces that creep from individual to individual like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monument of (human) pride.”
The central characters from our reading from the book of Exodus are not movers and shakers; they are not momentous leaders or high profile Biblical characters. They are a group of women—midwives, wives, sisters and daughters—who, as the words on that barn say, together are a part of “tiny, invisible, molecular forces” that have a potent, history-altering power in that they make possible the call of Moses, the fall of Pharaoh and the liberation of the Jewish people.
Tiny, invisible molecular forces. Who are the specific people we are talking about?
First, two Hebrew midwives whose names are actually given in our text: Shiphrah and Puah. Ordered by Pharaoh to kill all Hebrew baby boys, they remember to whom they owe their loyalty, who they are in awe of, who they trust in. So they engage in civil disobedience and cloak their actions in a lie that probably saves their lives.
Second, we have Moses’ mother and his sister Miriam. The one gives birth to Moses, hides him away for three months and then preserves his life by setting him adrift in a fragile, little ark. The other watches over Moses until he is discovered and then assists in finding him care.
Finally, we have Pharaoh’s own daughter who, as the story goes, just so happens to come along while bathing and spot the infant Moses among the reeds. We are told that she feels compassion for him immediately, and even after realizing that he’s a Hebrew baby, decides to care for him and to raise him as her own.
And so what we have here as the preface to one of the mightiest and most powerful acts of God—the call of Moses and the liberation of the Hebrew people from their bondage in Egypt—is a cast of female characters and a series of interconnected female actions that operate under the radar and by a slender thread, by a rootlet, by the capillary oozing of water serve to secure the life of the one who will be God’s agent in rending apart a people’s oppression.
Biblical scholar Brevard Childs puts it this way:
In Exodus 1-2, we see the Biblical writer depicting that “God’s plan for (God’s) people has a fragile beginning…the thread on which everything hangs is exceedingly thin…God seems to be taking…an enormous risk to let everything ride on two helpless midwives and a frail ark as a protection from the sea.
Yes, God seems to be taking an enormous risk to let so much hang on such seemingly frail creatures, to enclose their future in such a seemingly frail container.
And this, I think, is what many of us feel each day—that in places of darkness, confusion, and danger, whether these are in our own lives or how we feel as we look out into our world today, that God is taking such an enormous risk to entrust so much to us frail creatures; God is taking such an enormous risk to enclose so much of the future into so frail a container.
We do not feel adequate to the task and can feel overwhelmed by the task of playing our part in bringing light into the places of darkness, confusion and danger. For how good are we really? How skilled are we? How much energy do we have, and how much can we really accomplish?
“I am done with big things and great things, great institutions and big success; and I am for those tiny, invisible, molecular forces that creep from individual to individual like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monument of (human) pride."
It seems to me that while we would certainly feel better about ourselves if we were bigger, better, more powerful or more energetic than we are, what our preface to the call of Moses suggests to us is that we don’t have to be bigger in order to play a critical part in the rending apart of darkness and confusion in our world. What have to do is to be faithful to the source of our being and all beings as we take the next step that is right in front of us, the one that we can take, the way the two midwives did, the way the mother and sister of Moses did, the way the generous daughter of pharaoh did. And what we will find is that our actions are a part of “invisible, molecular forces” that together over time with the actions of others have great power.
I’ve been a bit of whirling dervish this last week since I came back from Maine. So much to do to prepare for September and so little time to do it in. Somehow our new signage on the corner makes me feel that we are, well, bigger and more visible than we were only a month or so ago. With all this in mind and much to do, I walked our labyrinth late in the afternoon on Friday. The really great thing about labyrinths is that to walk them in earnest you have pay a lot of attention to your feet: where you place one after another as you wind your way in and as you wind your way back out. As I did this, I was aware of being surrounded by the garden itself, the work of many different people who as they worked were simply trying to get one thing done in a faithful way. As I walked and thought about all these things, one idea, one mantra, kept coming back to me: “take it step by step, one foot at a time, just follow the path, follow the thread.”
To draw on our story from Exodus, what you and I are being asked to do in much of our lives is to renounce the illusion that we will bring light into the darkness through a dose of what you might call “pharaoh power.” Instead, God invites us to be the faithful midwife who knows whom to put her trust in and to listen to; to be the loving mother who nurtures her baby (whatever that baby may be) and then has the courage to entrust that baby to an ark floating on the deep; to be an attentive and watchful sister; and to be a daughter of swift compassion, one who adopts those who are not her own.
These are the kinds of humble actions in the moment that together over time will bring light and life into the world.
Peter Gomes, the chaplain at Harvard says it this way: “The gospel of Jesus Christ comes down to a rather simple proposition for ordinary people like you and like me: If God is to be known, that knowledge will be in the lives of the ordinary people who are redeemed by his extraordinary message of love. What the world knows of God it will know through us; for better or for worse we are the good news, the gospel; we are the light of the world… . We do not have to postpone the blessedness of Christ into some ever- retreating future, and we dare not wait for more qualified Christians, better prayers, or better rules to come along and do our shining for us. No, the work of God awaits our hands, the love of God awaits our hearts, and the people of God await our fellowship here and now, ordinary and imperfect though we may be.”
Sources cited:
William James quote cited in article by Rebecca A. Clay in Monitor on Psychology, Volume 31, number 6, June 2000. On the web at http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun00/seeger.html
Brevard Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary, page 24.
Peter Gomes, Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living, page 119.
