The Neighborhood Podcast
This is a podcast of Guilford Park Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina featuring guests from both inside the church and the surrounding community. Hosted by Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing, Head of Staff.
The Neighborhood Podcast
"The Women Who Kept Moses Alive" (June 29, 2025 Sermon)
Who really saved the day in the Exodus story? Behind Moses stands an extraordinary lineup of women whose courage, wit, and quick thinking repeatedly preserved his life—from infancy through adulthood. This exploration of biblical heroines challenges our conventional understanding of what makes a spiritual leader.
The Hebrew midwives Shiprah and Puah kicked off this chain of resistance with their breathtaking act of civil disobedience, refusing Pharaoh's command to murder Hebrew babies. Their defiance created the possibility for Moses to be born at all. Then his mother Jochebed, facing impossible choices, crafted a waterproof vessel and set her son afloat on the Nile—not in desperation, but with a strategic plan. Standing guard was Moses' sister Miriam, perfectly positioned to suggest that Pharaoh's own daughter hire the baby's birth mother as his wet nurse! This delicious irony—Pharaoh unknowingly paying a Hebrew woman to raise her own child—demonstrates the power of subversive humor against authoritarianism.
Perhaps most surprising is Zipporah, Moses' Midianite wife. When God mysteriously attempts to kill Moses during their journey to Egypt, Zipporah performs an emergency circumcision that saves his life. With nerves of steel, she serves as mediator between God and Moses, foreshadowing Moses' later role as mediator between God and Israel.
These stories remind us that liberation never happens through a solo hero. Instead, it requires a community of brave individuals, often women, taking risks in moments both dramatic and ordinary. Their legacy offers a profound blueprint for courage in today's world, where small acts of resistance and moments of intervention can still change everything.
What might happen if we recognized that we're surrounded by such potential heroines and heroes today? How might our faith communities transform if we honored not just the charismatic leaders but also those whose behind-the-scenes bravery makes everything else possible? Listen in and discover your own calling to practice courage, compassion, and holy resistance.
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Today's reading comes from the book of Exodus. We have two separate readings. We will start with the second chapter, verses 1 through 10. 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.
Speaker 1: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. 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 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 he became her son. She brought him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses because she said, I drew him out of the water.
Speaker 1:Moving to Exodus, chapter 15, verses 19 through 21. When the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his chariot drivers went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them, but the Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground. Then the prophet, miriam, aaron's sister, took a tambourine in her hand and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing, and Miriam sang to them. Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously. Horse and rider, he has thrown into the sea Holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God.
Speaker 2:All right, friends, let's hear again what God is saying to God's church as we turn our focus to the women who saved Moses. Time and time again, we're hopping around a little bit in the book of Exodus. Our first reading will be Exodus 2, 15 through 22,. And then we'll hop over to Exodus 4, 21 through 26. So Moses oh, I got the wrong one up there, Sorry.
Speaker 2:So Moses fled from Pharaoh. He settled in the land of Miriam and sat down by a well. The priests of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water and fill the troughs of water fill the troughs to water their father's flock. But some shepherds came and drove them away. Moses got up and came to their defense and watered their flock.
Speaker 2:When they returned to their father, Ruel or Jethro, he said how is it that you have come back so soon today? And they said an Egyptian helped us against the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock. He said to his daughters where is he? Why did you leave the man? Invite him to share a meal? Moses agreed to stay with the man and he gave Moses his daughter, Zipporah, in marriage. She bore him a son and he named him Gershom, for he said, I have been an alien residing in a foreign land All right. Now we're going to skip over a few chapters, a couple years, to a story that my guess you did not encounter in vacation Bible school growing up. This is a story about an emergency circumcision to assuage the anger of God. Did you learn about that at BBS?
Speaker 2:No, so this is a story of how Zipporah saved the day in what is really one of the most bizarre stories in the book of Exodus. So this is after, just to give you a little bit of context. This is after God went through all that trouble to convince Moses to go back to Egypt. And Moses comes up with all those different excuses and then, for some reason that commentators never quite understood, god decides to kill Moses, or try to kill Moses, but his wife, zipporah, saves the day. And this is that story Exodus 4, 21 through 26.
Speaker 2:And the Lord said to Moses when you go back to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders that I have put in your power, but I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go. Then you shall say to Pharaoh Thus says the Lord Israel is my firstborn son. I said to you, let my son go that he may serve me, but you refused to let him go, and now I will kill your firstborn son. Now, on the way back to Egypt, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met Moses and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, touched Moses' feet with it and said Truly, you are a bridegroom of blood to me. So he let him alone. And it was then that she said A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.
Speaker 2:Holy wisdom, holy word, thanks be to God. Where is your pastor going to go with this? Aren't we all curious? Let us pray, o Lord. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight, o Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Pleasing in your sight, o Lord, our rock and our redeemer, amen. So, friends, last week, as we explored the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, chapters 2 and 3, I was reminded that you could make a light-hearted case that the only time in all of scripture that God says oops is after creating man. God made Adam and said it is not good. In other words, oops. But it is important to finish that thought. God said it is not good for the man to be alone. So this reveals an essential truth about how God made us, you and me, from the very beginning, and that was we were created to be together.
Speaker 2:Human life was never meant to be a solo act. Despite the common myth in our country that elevates individual self-sufficiency as the ultimate goal or measure of success. You and I know better we were made for each other. Success, you and I know better we were made for each other. The heartbeat of faith is that God calls us to love, to support and to encourage one another. Paul's letter to the Galatians counters this myth that we must pick ourselves up by our bootstraps when Paul tells the church in Galatia to bear one another's burdens and in so doing, fulfill the law of Christ. I mention this because Moses receives a lot of credit in the book of Exodus for being the hero, and much of this is certainly well deserved. However, we must never let our celebration of his heroism overshadow the fact of the heroism of the group of women who saved his hide on multiple occasions throughout the book of Exodus. Lynn Japinga, in her book From Widows to Warriors that is kind of the source of this sermon series, reminds us that if it weren't for this group of women who protected and saved Moses through multiple life-threatening situations, the book of Exodus may have had a very different ending. Today we honor those women by exploring their stories, because without their courage and cleverness, their bravery, boldness and determination, Moses never would have had the chance to say yes to God's invitation to be God's vehicle for the Israelites' liberation.
Speaker 2:Now we won't spend much time today on the first two women in this list of Moses' saviors, because I preached a sermon on them just last year. They are, of course, Shipprah and Puah, the two Hebrew midwives who provide the first biblical example of nonviolent protest. You may remember that they defied Pharaoh's explicit commands to murder the Hebrew baby boys by refusing to cooperate. They chose not to obey in advance and instead organized all of the Hebrew midwives to subvert Pharaoh's murderous edict. Shipra and Pua provide you and me with a blueprint for responding to violence through peaceful protest and for taking calculated risks to undermine systems of oppression. So, as we read today, with Ms Kim and the children, thanks to Shipra and Pua's civil disobedience, a young boy named Moses was born, and he was raised with love and care by two women his mother Jochebed, and his sister Miriam Jochebed had observed the growing oppression of her people.
Speaker 2:Wilda Gaffney, whose scholarship on women in the Old Testament I lean upon heavily, compares Moses' mother, jochebed, to Jewish mothers in the 1930s Germany who watched in horror as their families were torn apart and their neighbors saw increasing marginalization, oppression and disappearance by the state. Gaffney notes that Jochebed became an agent of resistance because the very decision to give birth was an act of defiance. Jochebed gives birth to a fine baby, as the text tells us, and successfully hides him for three months. However, since babies usually start to roll over and crawl around that age, she must have known that her window of opportunity to keep him safe was closing and that desperate measures were called for. You all know the story well. She crafts a papyrus basket and sets him afloat on the Nile, but she doesn't leave her son's life entirely to chance. She works with Moses's older sister, miriam, to keep a close eye on the vessel's journey. And here is where the story takes a delightfully ironic turn. Who finds the boy, but Pharaoh's own daughter? And instead of dutifully handing the boy, whom she instantly recognizes as a Hebrew, over to her father's Gestapo, she takes pity on him. And at that very moment, who hops out of the bushes. But Miriam, pharaoh's daughter, needs someone to take care of the Hebrew boy, and Miriam has just the woman for the job, jochebed, the boy's mother. So, during the early years of Moses's life, not only has Pharaoh's murderous plan been thwarted, but this is hilarious. Now Pharaoh is literally paying a Hebrew woman to care for her own Hebrew son. Things are not going the way he had planned. Friends, this is subversive humor at its best. Friends, this is subversive humor at its best, using irony and absurdity to portray an authoritarian ruler as hilariously inept and foolish. Shipra and Pua, pharaoh's daughter, miriam Jochebed all of them together undermine a leader who believes that he alone can solve Egypt's problems, by blaming everyone and everything else. Now I believe that these stories that we've shared so far are pretty familiar to most of us. So, as I said, I want to shift our attention to that really bizarre story and see what God is possibly saying to God's church with that one. This character is Zipporah. Everybody say that with me.
Speaker 2:Zipporah, that was Moses' wife. She's not named earlier in the text, but named a little bit later, after Moses fled Egypt. After murdering the slaver who was beating his fellow Israelite, he settled down in the land of Midian, which is about to the east and to the south of the Jordan River. As fate would have it, one day he came across a well and defended several women who, a group of shepherds, were accosting. This impressed the father of these women, and the text tells us that he gave one of them, zipporah, to Moses in marriage, and she bore him a son named Gershom, and then, later on in the text, another son named Eliezer. It's important to know, as is often the case, that the text makes no mention of dating or courtship between Moses and Zipporah. These marital arrangements were more often than not economically motivated than by romance. The text suggests that Zipporah had little, if any, agency in the transaction.
Speaker 2:At any rate, as time passes, moses is busy shepherding the flock of Zipporah's father, or Jethro, depending on the text. When he has that famous encounter with the burning bush, moses comes up with every possible excuse to avoid answering God's call to return to Egypt and free the Israelites. Why would Pharaoh listen to me, moses asks. I'm a terrible public speaker. He insists Please, please, anybody, anybody but me. He begs.
Speaker 2:But Moses' stubbornness is no match for God's stubbornness. God finally offers Moses's brother, aaron, to be his spokesperson and companion along the way. So Moses agrees, but, as Linjapinga states, his heart really wasn't in it. Can we really blame him? And so, at this point, moses gathers Zipporah and their sons, gershom and Eleazar, and they head back to the last place in the world that he wants to revisit. And on the way back to Egypt, one of the most bizarre divine encounters in the Old Testament takes place. The three of them, or the four of them rather, set up a tent in the night and at some point in the evening God tries to kill Moses. The text is frustratingly sparse on details.
Speaker 1:It doesn't explain why.
Speaker 2:God, after going through all of that trouble to convince Moses to return to Egypt, would then turn around and try to kill him. But the text is clear on one thing it is Zipporah who comes to the rescue to save Moses' life, albeit in a very, very bizarre way. Zipporah's intuition kicks in and she suspects that God's divine anger is because at least one of their sons is not circumcised. Now, this makes sense, because neither of them were likely raised as Israelites, as Moses had spent by this time so long away from Egypt that he probably identified more as a Midianite, and the Midianites did not practice circumcision. At any rate, Zipporah discerns that God's anger could be soothed by fixing the situation. So she grabs a flint knife, circumcises one of her sons and touches the severed foreskin to Moses's feet. It should be noted that the term feet is commonly used as a euphemism for genitalia in Hebrew. Yes, the story gets weirder. So the text is a bit ambiguous as to what part of Moses' body was touched by their son's foreskin to save their skin, so to speak. At any rate, it was a close shave, but Zipporah saved the day. Any rate, it was a close shave, but Zipporah saved the day. Did y'all really think I would be able to make through this without at least one circumcision pun. So Zipporah saves the day. Her quick action resolves the situation Of Zipporah, Linjapinga says.
Speaker 2:Whatever the reason for her action, Zipporah was a gutsy woman with nerves of steel who could perform emergency surgery on her son without losing her lunch. Zipporah served as a mediator. On a more serious note, Zipporah served as a mediator between God and Moses, just as Moses would serve as the mediator later on between God and the Israelites. And so, through this really bizarre story and the other stories that Rita read for us today, we give thanks for the women who, in many different ways, saved Moses's you know what time and time again.
Speaker 2:I just hope that today we may remember that if it weren't for Shipra and Pua's act of civil disobedience, Moses would never have been born. If it weren't for Moses' mother Jochebed and for his sister Miriam's ingenuity and courage, Moses wouldn't have survived long down that journey of the Nile to Pharaoh's daughter's arms. And then, without Pharaoh's daughter's willingness to use her privilege to resist a violent political movement, Moses never would have reached adulthood. And without Zipporah's intuition and assertiveness, and without Zipporah's intuition and assertiveness, Moses would have died in that tent that night, before ever having the chance to enter Pharaoh's court and demand that he let God's people go. Shipra Pua, Pharaoh's daughter Jochebed, Miriam Zipporah, each share stories of perseverance and bravery in the face of violence and oppression.
Speaker 2:Today's world that you and I live in, right now demands such perseverance and bravery of all of us. I think these women provide us with a blueprint for how to live in these times when our individual actions may seem small amidst the world's suffering and uncertainty, but in each of their stories I am reminded that small acts of courage really do make a difference. You may one day, like Shiprah and Puah, find yourself in a position where you can choose between life and death. You may one day, like Pharaoh's daughter, stumble upon a situation where you can use your privilege to protect someone else who is in danger. You may one day, like Jochebed, be in a position to give someone else a fighting chance in a culture hostile to their very existence. You may one day, like Miriam, find yourself in a position to maneuver and manipulate a system to help the vulnerable at the expense of the violent. And you may one day, like Zipporah, have the chance to perform an emergency circumcision to save someone's life. I hope you're never in that position, but in all seriousness, like Zipporah, you may find yourself in a place where you can be a mediator or an advocate for someone who needs help.
Speaker 2:And after all of these stories, after Shipra and Pua's defiance, pharaoh's daughter's bravery, jochebed and Miriam's ingenuity and Zipporah's assertiveness, moses did in fact make it to Pharaoh's court. We all know how that part of the story goes, but I hope we never forget the women who got him there. And I hope that we never forget those who have brought us here to where we are today. And may we never forget that the time may come when we too will be called upon to practice their bravery, their courage and their tenacity. In the name of God, the creator, redeemer and sustainer, may all of us, god's beloved children, say amen.