"Disobedient Obedience"
August 21, 2011

Exodus 1:8 - 2:10

Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.”

Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him, “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”

Romans 12:1-8

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

Matthew 16:13-20

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

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The other day, I was reading something a man had written, complaining about the state of things in our country. He complained about the terrible loss of lives and the disruption to families that the war was causing, that it was forcing otherwise good and decent people to do very indecent and immoral things in the name of the higher cause. That the decision to go to war had really been pushed through by a relatively small number of elites who were getting the common people to do their dirty work, and to die, in order to protect their wealth, or power, or both; and that the regular people, if they had their say, wouldn’t ever support this war. He wrote about how shameless it was for the civil government to support policies that hurt so many of the nation’s residents. And the man went on to say that in such cases, it was not just acceptable, but it was, in fact, the morally right thing to do to not support the civil government when it did these kinds of things, to oppose and to disobey these kinds of immoral actions on the part of the government.

The interesting thing about what I’d read was that it wasn’t on a blog or in an op-ed piece on the internet. And the war he was talking about wasn’t Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even Vietnam. The words I was reading were written by Henry David Thoreau in the year 1849, in his book Civil Disobedience, which he wrote about the moral correctness of disobeying the laws of the country that supported slavery and which had just ended the Mexican-American War. Thoreau’s classic book has become required reading for anyone who disagrees with what our government is doing, from abolitionists to women’s suffragists to prohibitionists to civil rights marchers to pro-life demonstrators. From Democrats who don’t like what the Republicans are doing, and Republicans who don’t like what the Democrats are doing. Other than probably Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau probably made the most reasoned and eloquent argument of anyone in the history of our country that there are times when the most moral and correct thing a person can do is to disobey an immoral or unjust law, even if that law was established in a perfectly legal manner.

But before Dr. King or Thoreau, there were Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives living in the days when the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt. We heard their story in our reading from Exodus today. After years of the Hebrews being welcome and valued in the land of Egypt, with Joseph being the highly valued lieutenant of the Pharoah, this passage says that time wore on, and Joseph was long in the grave, and his service to the king was hardly more than a distant memory. A new Pharoah came to power who didn’t have any real connection to, or care about, the Hebrew people living as aliens among his own countrymen. He came to believe that these foreigners, with their increasing numbers and their foreign ways and their foreign religion, would eventually change their own culture – and that their loyalty to the country was questionable; they might even side with the country’s enemies when the chips were really down. For these Hebrews, their morals, their culture, their religion, it was a complete system that wasn’t very compatible with the ways of the Egyptian government or its people. They were considered a national security risk by the Pharoah’s Department of Homeland Security. So Pharoah issued a terrible command, a horrible command that ended up foretelling a future calamity that befell his own people later on in the Exodus story. He instructed the Hebrew midwives to kill all the newborn male Hebrew children, to make sure their population didn’t increase to the point where they’d be a threat to the Egyptian government and culture.

But Shiphrah and Puah couldn’t bring themselves to carry out Pharoah’s orders. They didn’t do what he’d ordered, and when called to account for their disobedience, they offered up a phoney, made-up excuse. They had decided to take a stand, to live out their morals, even if it meant disobeying the law and the direct command of the king.

Their actions weren’t large, bold actions. They didn’t organize protests or marches, they didn’t work up a bunch of media coverage to increase public awareness about the Pharaoh’s unjust law or to ask people to write to the Pharaoh asking him to change his command. They just did what they could do – they decided to refuse to obey it. And because of their very simple, very small acts, they saved large numbers of Hebrew children – and the story is somewhat unclear, but they may have even saved the life of baby Moses himself, who grew up to be a great prophet of God and the great liberator and deliverer of the Hebrew people out of bondage and into freedom.

And we can do the same thing. In our Adult Ed class, we heard the Archbishop Desmond Tutu a while back, saying that none of us is the whole ocean, but each of us is just one drop – and if each of us did just what we were able to do, then there would be an ocean’s worth of good and righteous acts carried out in the name of God and God’s kingdom. God has given each and every one of us particular gifts, as Paul pointed out in the passage from Romans that we read today, and God expects us to have the strength and backbone to use those gifts in the ways we’re supposed to, even if it doesn’t square with current laws. God wants us to be like Shiphrah and Puah, living out our faith – in our case, living our lives and living in relation to others in a way consistent with Jesus’ teachings - even when it goes against the law, or conventional wisdom, or any human institution. To do the right thing, even if it seems like a little thing. Because we never know what the ripple effect of our actions are going to be. One way or another, whatever we choose to do today is going to change the future, for better or worse, and often in ways we’ll never know. We have no way of knowing that when we volunteer to read to, or teach, a child for a few hours a month, we might be lighting a spark for lifelong learning in that child, who grows up to find a cure for cancer, or AIDS. We might be teaching a child who isn’t loved in his own home that there are people who love him, and that he is a special, loved child of God, who will grow up to become a mission worker bringing food and shelter to thousands of people suffering in the next generation’s Somali drought. When we offer help to some scruffy, rough looking woman who’s down on her luck by giving her a sincere smile, a warm meal, and some second-hand clothing, we might be the light of the world to her that finally makes her decide to turn her life around, and she gets clean, and gets married, and her son grows up to be the paramedic that pulls your teenaged granddaughter out of the car wreck and who administers life-saving CPR to her, or the firefighter who breaks through the flames and pulls you out of your burning house to safety. You just never know what kind of ripple effect our choices and decisions will have. But whatever we choose to do – whether we choose to be strong in our convictions and to do the right thing regardless of what the law or conventional wisdom would tell us to do, or whether we don’t – our actions, every day, will shape the world we live in tomorrow, a year from now, a century from now.

So if we’re serious about our faith – if we’ve made the same confession Peter made in our gospel reading today, that Jesus is our Messiah, our Lord – then we’ve got to take very seriously his call to us to be whatever he’s called us to be, and to do whatever he’s called us to do. In ways big and small. In ways legal, and sometimes, I’ve got to say, even illegal.

In the Exodus story, we heard that God richly blessed Shiphrah and Puah for standing up to Pharaoh and doing the right thing, even in what seemed like a small thing in the whole scope of world history. God blessed them and their families. In our case, doing the right thing, being faithful even in what seems like little things, might seem hard, or sometimes even dangerous or risky for us, too. But that’s the cross that Jesus has called us all to take up and to carry. And we can do it. We can all do it, because just as God blessed Shiphrah and Puah, we know the blessings that Christ has prepared for all of us, too. We’re all Shiphrah. We’re all Puah. And in each of our lives, there’s someone whom we won’t know until later on, when we’re in the presence of God, who was our Moses – the one we were supposed to protect. To help. To save.

Thanks be to God.