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August 24, 2008 sermon

Midwifing the More that Awaits Us
(Exodus 1:8-2:10; Romans 12: 1-6a; Matthew 16: 13-15)

Reverend Minister Sally Harris

Giver of Life and love this I pray:
for stillness to hear the song of Your Spirit.
For vision to see the shape of Your dreaming.
For wisdom to touch the depths of Your creating.
For courage to take the paths our souls have always known. Amen !

A Zen master was invited to a great Catholic monastery to instruct the monks who resided there in the practice of Zen. The holy man exhorted the monks to meditate constantly and to try to solve their koan or Zen mystery with great energy and zeal. He told them that if they practiced with full-hearted effort, true understanding would come to them. "But, you really must put your hearts into it," he stressed. All of the monks listened attentively and smiled politely. Finally, one old monk raised his hand and said, "Master, our way of prayer is a little different than yours. We have been meditating and praying in the simplest fashion without effort; for we believe that a person must wait, instead, to be illumined by the grace of God. Isn't there anything in Zen about this illumination that comes from doing nothing, that comes to a person uninvited?" The Zen master, when he heard this, laughed out loud and said, "My dear fellow, the reason we Buddhists put so much effort into prayer is because we believe God has already done enough!" Christians, it seems, have a fondness for stories in which God does things. You know. Stories where God gets into the act, makes himself known, or gives people clear and precise directions about the kind of thing she wants done. Like next week’s story when God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush, "Go tell Pharaoh to let my people go!' Parts like that. A hands-on kind of God. We like stories like that. We like it when God makes things clear. Which means - that it is easy for us to miss stories like this week's text from Exodus, the part before Moses even shows up.

It has been about 400 years since the story left Joseph inviting his brothers and their families to come and live with him down in Egypt where the Hebrew tribes enjoyed all the privileged benefits of honoured guests. A lot has happened during that time and the original family of "seventy" born to old Jacob had grown by leaps and bounds so that Egypt “was filled with them." In today’s story we read that the old Pharaoh died and a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. The people who have been experiencing safety and security, sanctuary and success, now find that their prosperity is a threat. The new king sets out to subdue them and remove them. What the people do not know or have forgotten until this new king arises is that they are in bondage and have unwittingly become comfortable and complacent far from their true home they have settled down and forgotten, no longer sure from whence they had come or who they are.

Wendell Berry writes in his novel, Jayber Crow, that there comes a moment of truth; a turning in life when you suddenly see things where your vision has until then failed you. He writes: “It is as though I had been covered all over for a moment by a beautiful shawl and a cat had caught a raveling, and in a moment pulled it all the way”. The unraveling happens in moments like September 11 or when the doctor says it's cancer or when disillusionment blindsides you or sudden death overtakes you... It is as if the world suddenly, quietly, falls away, leaving one standing in the air alone with one’s heart hollowed out with longing in need of what one does not have.

A new king arises and everything that is firm becomes uncertain, what is taken for granted isn't anymore. The ground melts, the world tilts, and nothing is ever the same again. When the unraveling happens, we may not immediately know who we are, but suddenly we discover in a new, dramatic, and sometimes frightening way, who we are not. When the foundations shake in our world, church, career, family, marriage, soul, there is the awful, even awesome, need to redefine ourselves, an opportunity to realize that we are more rather than less.

The new Pharaoh fears the power of the Israelites. And so the new king rules to control and controls by wielding death. When death is the bottom line, then causing to live must be the response. If death is meaningless, then life in its fullest is the surest act of revolution. The refusal of the midwives to allow death to proceed made them the vehicle of social change AND makes this the first story of civil disobedience! The response of the midwives was to make live, to make the giving of life, rather than the taking of life, the key towards liberation. Faced with this, Pharaoh turned his entire nation into murderers. In this devastating moment of Israel's history, when the Hebrew people could easily be wiped out, God seems not to be directly involved. What happens depends not on a declared act of God but on what ordinary folks do because they ‘know God’. The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah defied Pharaoh because they respected God. That is how a nation got saved. Here, in this ironic little masterpiece from Exodus, we are reminded that before what needed to happen did, it was two gutsy women working behind the scenes who made things possible. They didn't wait for God to give them specific instruction. Maybe, the way they figured things, God had already done enough. That is how there ever came to be anything left of the Hebrews down in Egypt. And out of the fearful violence of this new king ordinary folks braved a new vision that defied the odds and midwifed the future Moses from the waters of the Nile to the royal palace.

Reynolds Price, a famous writer, was diagnosed with spinal chord cancer in 1984. His treatment ended in paralysis from the waist down. It also became the occasion to write a book entitled “A Whole New Life”. Price describes it this way: "I needed to read some story that paralleled at whatever distance my unfolding bafflement, some honest report from a similar war with a final list of hard facts learned and offered unvarnished. Offering useful instruction in how to absorb the staggering but not quite lethal blow of a fist that ends your former life and offers you nothing by way of a new life that you can begin to think of wanting." He writes that there will come a crucial juncture when you need to turn toward the future, defying the definitions and commands of the past and midwife who you need to be now and how to be, the more that awaits. "The kindest thing anyone could have done for me once I finished five weeks of radiation," he writes, "would have been to look me square in the eye and say clearly, 'Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now? Who can you be?'" What he needed most to hear were the words "Come back to life whoever you'll be."

It is only after the new king arises in Egypt that the Israelites begin to find out where they are and later who they are and where they are meant to be. The new king is the occasion for the heartache and misery, destruction and death that also gives birth to brave midwives and baby Moses – those ordinary folk who carry on the struggle of liberation and who takes the people of God through the water where they will meet themselves.

A midrash about Moses at the Red Sea describes Moses leading the people homeward only to be confronted ahead by the deep sea waters and behind by the fierce armies of Pharaoh. Moses is poised between the devil and the deep blue sea. It was when Moses' big toe touches the water that the sea parts and slavery is left behind. The moral or teaching of the tale was:

Do not stand on the river bank praying for miracles.

Like the midwives, intent upon bringing forth life, the call is to step over old boundaries, risk the unknown, and brave the darkness for the sake of new life.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes in her diary, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: "What I am saying is not simply the old Puritan truism that suffering teaches. I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise. To suffering," she writes, "must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable."

New kings are forever arising and bringing carnage to our world between us and within us. The challenge remains the same as it was for the midwives and for Moses: Will we step into deep water and midwife the person, the church, the world – the more that awaits us? May it be so!

[resources: Rev. William Dols and Barry Robinson]

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