Thirteenth Sunday after the Epiphany August 23, 2026, The Rev. Angela Compton-Nelson

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp16_RCL.html

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Take this child and nurse it for me. 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. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The book of Exodus opens up with the people of God living in Egypt following the famine that Joseph brought the people through with great skill. For a time, the people of God in Egypt appear to have a pretty good arrangement. They are fruitful and multiply, a sign of God's blessing, the people's alignment with God's work, and a continuation of the covenant promised to Abraham. For the generations of people settled in Egypt, time marches on. And as they move further in, years from the memory of Joseph and the Pharaoh he served, a new Pharaoh rises over Egypt. He does not know the stories of Joseph and of the great famine. This pharaoh looks around and starts to worry because an immigrant people are thriving in his land, and he wonders about what could happen if the people of Israel were to enter into conflict with the people of Egypt. Look, the sons of Israel are more numerous and stronger than we are. So while the people of God are living in response to God's blessing and gift and multiplying, Pharaoh decides to put a stop to their flourishing and commits to dealing craftily with them. If you're already starting to hear echoes from Genesis, you're right to do so. The people of God are told to be fruitful and multiply, and then the crafty serpent makes its way onto the scene. And even though we've left the book of Genesis, we've not left the structure of the story. Exodus continues to echo earlier stories with subtle and some not so subtle callbacks. Pharaoh begins his campaign against the people of Israel through a series of strategies. First, the population is enslaved, forced into hard labor on behalf of a society in which it is clear that they are now outsiders. Nevertheless, the people continue to multiply. Pharaoh moves on to strategy number two. He calls two midwives who, unlike Pharaoh, are named Shifra, meaning beautiful, and Pua, meaning something like sparkle. He commands them to kill all baby boys as they are born, but the girls he is to let live. This strategy betrays much about Pharaoh's fears. While he calls two women to execute his orders, he lets infant girls live because he doesn't think women are a threat to his power. He fears what the boys will do, how they'll become powerful, how they have the potential to build a military force to be reckoned with. But women don't inspire the same fear. This is, of course, a major misstep, because the rest of the chapter in Genesis will tell us how it is through the wise work of women that the seeds for Israel's liberation are planted. Make no mistake, Puah and Shifra are in real danger. They've been summoned by a despotic ruler who is afraid. Surely a ruler willing to oppress an entire group of people and kill a large number of infants is willing to kill two midwives. But the midwives fear God more than they fear Pharaoh. More than Pharaoh fears the multiplication of the people of God, and they defy his orders. When they are summoned to give an account of the continued growth of the people, they play into the stereotype that Pharaoh has of the Hebrew people. The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women. They're vigorous and they give birth before we arrive. Remember how often God's people are tricksters? Here are two women named just like Israel's ancestors and descendants who fear God and subvert the power of Pharaoh. Pharaoh, the one with the say over life and death, the very say he purports to give to them. For his part, Pharaoh wanders around thinking about what he can do to take down the men, but he isn't paying attention to the real power and cunning that's right before him. The Hebrew women continue to give birth. And now even the midwives, Pua and Shifra, are both blessed by God with families. Pharaoh is not satisfied in the least with his original depopulation strategy, so he makes a third move, extending his edict beyond the two midwives to all people. Every son who is born you shall throw into the Nile, but every daughter you will let live. If Shifra and Puah don't follow the commands of Pharaoh, surely he can rely on the whole of his people. And as the edict gets extended to all the people of Egypt, the story, which has become bigger, narrows in to one particular story. A Hebrew woman gives birth to a beautiful son in a phrase that calls to mind the goodness of God's creation of the world. And as the chaotic outcome of Pharaoh's policies swirl around her, she looks at her son and sees that he is good. She hides him for as long as she can, but eventually the game is up. Any hope she has in the child's first three months diminishes entirely as reality sets in. He grows from newborn infant to bright-eyed baby. The child who once slept for most of the day is awake more often than asleep. Periodic low cries are replaced with squalls, louder and more frequent. And as he begins to practice in preparation for using language, he coos and shrieks and squeals. And it's only a matter of time before he'll roll over, crawl, and wander out of the house. His mother cannot hide him anymore. So she carefully fashions a basket. No, an ark and seals it. As Noah sealed his own ark with bitumen and pitch to make it watertight. This callback is intentional. The word for ark, it's only used twice in the whole Bible, in the story of Noah, and right here. She places the child in the ark and then into the Nile River. The Nile River with its rushing water and hippos and crocs, no place for a baby. The Nile River, just as Pharaoh had commanded in his edict, all baby boys are to be put into the Nile. Why does she do this? Surely she has no idea that someone might pick this child. And if they do, he's unlikely to live in their hands. A last-ditch effort to appeal to someone's empathetic side, maybe? An elaborate funeral ritual, a way of taking control of the situation, as though she's saying, if my child must die, it will be on my terms. She brings forth her son from the waters of her womb, and when she runs out of time, she places him back into the chaos of the waters in a small arc, waterproofed with bitumen and pitch. She's followed the order, but only barely. Like Hagar, who places her son under a bush and walks a bowshot away so as not to look at her child. Moses' mother is off the page, but his sister waits at the water's edge, observing her baby brother floating amongst the reeds. She's rightly positioned to notice Pharaoh's daughter when she comes. The baby's sister is also unnamed in this story, though we know from later in Exodus that Moses has a sister named Miriam who will play a significant role in leading the people's walk to freedom from slavery in Egypt. The girl stands at a distance, watching and waiting to see what will happen. She must be young to wonder about something like this, because it just can't end well. When the basket with her baby brother is picked up by the daughter of Pharaoh and her maids, the girl approaches and asks a woman who could surely kill her and toss her baby brother back into the Nile. The daughter of Pharaoh is also unnamed in this story, but she is different from the four others we have heard about so far. To begin with, she is Egyptian, a member of Pharaoh's household. It is her father who issued the order to throw baby boys into the Nile. As an Egyptian and the daughter of Pharaoh, she's certainly privileged, but as a woman and one who is about to defy his orders, she isn't powerful. But she leaves us with no doubt that she knows what she's doing. This must be one of the Hebrew children, she says. And still, she looks at him with compassion. And when approached by the baby's sister, Pharaoh's daughter calls the child's mother and gives her wages in exchange for nursing her own child. The unpaid labor of a mother becomes the paid nursing of the revolutionary with the purse of Pharaoh's own household. When the child, who for all intents and purposes, should have drowned as an infant, is weaned, he is adopted into the household of Pharaoh. And Pharaoh's daughter gives him a name that anticipates the people's exodus from Egypt, Moses, because I drew him out of the water. Each of these women, everyone from the midwives to mother and sister to adopted mother, become incubators to the liberation that God is going to offer to God's people. And for his part, Pharaoh brings about the very thing that he fears. His own policies lead to the adoption into his own household of the one who will become a liberator. In the face of his policy of destruction and decreation, we receive this story of a people created by God, working with God. And this is a move that the Bible seems quite interested in from start to finish. The defeat of Pharaoh, like the defeat of many of the Bible's powers, emerges from the moment when his own violence seems most absolute. At the moment he is creating a system from which people will come to desire liberation and freedom. He is also creating the conditions for his own undoing, the resilience of the people, the birth of hope, their dependence on God, the last ditch bids for life that give rise to the one who works with God for the people's liberation. Thanks be to God. Amen.