"Midwives of the Future" (sermon

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday November 26, 2023 (First Sunday of Advent)
Scripture Reading:  Exodus 1:8-22

(This year, our Advent theme is focused on midwifery and birth. Each week, we will hear the story from the bible of someone who was a midwife, or who encountered a midwife. The waiting, the longing, the pain of the “not yet” – all of our Advent themes – are captured in the metaphor of a midwife, in the metaphor of birth.)

 

 

My name is Shiphrah, daughter of Milcah, granddaughter of Hannah, of the tribe of Naphtali. Like my mother and my grandmother before me, I am a midwife. When the time comes for a mother to birth a child, I am sent for.  I accompany a woman through the hours or through the days of labour. I encourage her. I tell her when to push and when to refrain from pushing. I remind her to continue to draw fresh air into her body. If needed, I give her the herbs I have learned how to use to speed up her labour or to stop her bleeding.  When the baby comes, I catch the baby. I am the one to place the baby on the mother’s chest. I catch the afterbirth, I cut the cord, and I wash the baby. The day after the baby is born, I come to check on the baby and the mother to make sure that all is well.

 

Even though I live in the land of Egypt, I am an Israelite. I am a descendant of Jacob who was called Israel.  In a time of famine, Israel’s son Joseph was able to bring our people to Egypt under the protection of the Pharoah so that we would have food in a time of hunger. But now, many generations later, there is a new Pharoah in Egypt… one who is scared of us… and he has made all of our people to be slaves.

 

This new Pharoah, because he is afraid of us, he treats us poorly. Our men and our women have to spend their days working in the fields and building the city. If we ever do anything that displeases an Egyptian, we are punished for it. And sometimes the punishment is doled out for no reason. It is a scary existence for us.

 

I work with my sister Puah. I call her my sister, even though we have no blood relationship, and yet we have the kinship of the work that we share. The two of us are busy, as it seems as though every day there are many women delivering their babies. We have trained apprentices who work with us, but Puah and I are the lead midwives.

 

We are respected by the Egyptians more than the other Israelites. I think that they recognize the universality of birth – that they are only alive today because a midwife attended their birth. We are generally free to move around the community unmolested, attending to our business day and night.

 

Last year though… last year Puah and I were summoned to appear before Pharoah. Normally we are confident as we move about the world, but I have to confess that my knees were trembling that day.  We had no idea what he wanted from us.

 

I told you that he was afraid of us, and his fear usually came out as cruelty. That day, he told us that any time we, or any of the other midwives, delivered a boy child, we were to kill it at the moment of birth.  We knew in that moment that we wouldn’t be able to carry out these orders. As midwives, we are bringers of life, not bringers of death.

 

We had to wait until we were safely away from the palace to discuss what we would do next, but later that night, Puah and I were able to talk in private.  We knew that disobeying the Pharoah would likely bring us death, but we also knew that we couldn’t be the ones to bring death to an innocent baby.

 

The next night we called together all of our apprentice midwives.  We told them what Pharoah had ordered. And then we told them to disobey this order.  Any midwives who weren’t comfortable disobeying Pharoah were free to stop midwifing, but those of us who brought life were not permitted to bring death as well.

 

Our God is a god of life, and we serve our God by bringing life. And so we continued in our work.

 

Six months later, the Pharoah noticed that there continued to be baby boys around our community, and we were summoned to appear before him again.  Again, my knees trembled as we went – surely he was going to know that we disobeyed him, and I didn’t expect to be able to leave the palace alive.

 

This brought us to our next risk:  we lied to the Pharoah. We told a lie to the person who had the power to have us killed on the spot, and we told him that the Israelite women were stronger than the Egyptian women, and that they had stopped calling the midwife to attend their labour. We told Pharoah that we were willing to carry out his orders, but that we no longer had the opportunity to do so.

 

And he believed us. He must not have believed that our women were fully human; he must not have believed that our women felt pain and fear as they laboured and as they delivered; he must have thought that our women dropped their babies in the field, like a horse or a cow. He didn’t believe that our women needed the support of a midwife.

 

And so we were free to go, but instead, Pharoah ordered his soldiers to kill all of the male babies of our people. His reign of fear continues.

 

Three months ago though, I delivered a beautiful baby boy to Jochebed of the tribe of Levi. She already had two beautiful children – Miriam was 9 and Aaron was just 6. Now Jochebed is determined to keep her newest baby alive. She has hidden him away in her house, and she nurses him any time he threatens to make a fuss. He is growing well, but now it is getting harder for her to keep him hidden away.

 

She has made a basket for him, and has made it waterproof, and she tells me that she is going to float him in his basket down the river. He may be eaten by a crocodile, but the uncertainty of that end is better than the certain death her baby will face if he is discovered.

 

People say that I am courageous, to disobey Pharoah the way that I have; but me, I look to Jochebed when I need hope. She trusts that this baby of hers has a future, and because she trusts in his future, she is willing to take these risks. We may be slaves now, but Jochebed trusts that one day we won’t be; and she is going to do everything that she can to keep Miriam and Aaron, and now wee baby Moses alive so that they can witness the birth of this future; so that maybe they can be midwives of this future that will be theirs.

 

May God give us all the hope of Jochebed. And may we be midwives too, bringing life to this future that is ours. Amen.

 

 

“Shiphrah, Puah, Jocheved, Miriam,

Pharoah’s Daughter, and the Infant Moses”

Mural from the Dura-Europos Synagogue, ca. 245

Used with Permission.

"Still, We Hope" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday November 19, 2023 (Reign of Christ)
Scripture:  Matthew 25:31-46

 

 

As I mentioned earlier, the Christmas letter is at the back of the church for you to pick up on your way out if you haven’t picked it up already. I wrote this letter back in October, because Elaine needed to print it for me to sign before I went on vacation. (I told this story to the Official Board on Wednesday night, so my apologies to you if you have heard it before.) So I wrote the letter and sent it off to Elaine, but then the next time we were both at the church at the same time, she summoned me into her office. She sat me down and gave me my letter to read. A couple of minutes later she asked if I was done yet, and I said “almost.” She asked how I was feeling.  “Fine…” Apparently I wasn’t fine, and that first letter I had written was far too gloomy to be sent out as a Christmas letter.

 

Because I trust Elaine’s judgement, I re-wrote the Christmas letter the next day; with thanks to the Summerville quilters who offered to be my test audience – they approved version 2, which I was then able to send to Elaine who also approved version 2 and printed it so that I could sign 300 copies of it before going on vacation.

 

The challenge with writing the Christmas letter this year is that the world feels so full of doom and gloom at the moment.  As I was writing that first version of the letter, the fighting in Gaza was intense… well, I guess it’s still pretty intense… it was the day that the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine had happened; Covid infection rates were surging; and my list could go on and on and on. Poverty is increasing as inflation increases. This time of year brings longer nights and shorter days.

 

With all of this going on, it was really hard to write a cheerful Christmas letter this year!

 

Don’t get me wrong – the underlying message of that first letter was exactly the same as the message of the one that was printed, but apparently I spent too long in the first draft expanding on the woes of the world.

 

The message of both drafts of this year’s letter is that we, as the church, are in the “Business of Hope.”  We, as the church, trust that the grief and the pain and the fear of the right now isn’t the end of the story.  We trust that God dreams of a world that is radically transformed, so that all of the grief has become love, so that all of the pain has become joy, so that all of the fear has become peace.

 

And we trust that this dream, that this vision of God will one day be the only reality.

 

Which brings us to today.  Today is the day when we celebrate the Reign of Christ, or Christ the King Sunday. It is the last Sunday of the church year – next week when we enter the season of Advent, we will begin a new year. As we move through the church year, we travel through Jesus’s life story – from the anticipation of his birth, to the birth itself, stories of his teachings and his actions, the story of the last week of his life, his crucifixion and death, and his resurrection. We read stories about the very early church, from its origins at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came to the disciples in force.  And today – this last Sunday of the church year – this is a day dedicated to looking forward in time.  Today we look forward to that time that will come when God’s dream for the world will be complete, will be fulfilled, will be perfected.  And we trust that this transformed world is going to come some day.

 

As we said in our Prayer of Awareness today, we tend to want the “not yet” to be the “right now.” We want all wars to end right now. We want all poverty to end right now. We want all grief and suffering to end right now. We want the transformation of the world that began with the birth of Jesus to reach completion right now. It’s hard to be patient.

 

But because we trust that this transformation has begun, that the transformation began when God took on flesh and blood in the person of Jesus; and because we trust that the transformation of the world will some day reach completion, we can keep going, one step at a time.

 

I heard an interview earlier this week on CBC radio with two women, one Palestinian and one Israeli, both actively working towards peace by building relationships, one person at a time. When the interviewer asked how they avoided becoming despondent, one of them replied, “we have to hope.”

 

We have to cling to hope.  Without hope, we would be paralyzed by despair. But because we have hope, we keep on going, one step at a time, one loving act at a time.

 

In today’s bible reading, we heard Jesus’s very last public teaching before his crucifixion. He has some private teaching time with his disciples after this, but this is his last public teaching. And in this teaching, what does he say?  He says, in a fairly direct way (and we all know how Jesus can sometimes talk in circles, but this time his instructions are pretty concrete):  feed anyone who is hungry; give water to anyone who is thirsty; welcome strangers; give clothing to anyone who needs it; care for anyone who is sick; and visit people in prison.  And why should we do all of this? Because whenever we do this to another person, we are doing it to Jesus himself.

 

If Jesus were giving us concrete instructions in 2023, what might he say to us?  “For I was being bombed, and you cried out for peace. For I was a transgender student and you advocated for my rights and gave me a safe space. For I was a child in a refugee camp, and you supported my schooling by donating to Mission & Service. Truly I tell you, just as you have done it for one of the least of these siblings of mine, you have done it for me.”

 

Sometimes when we read stories from the bible, a good question to ask ourselves is “where to I see myself in this story?” but with this story, an even better question might be to ask, “where do I see Jesus in this story?”

 

Jesus is the one sitting on the seat of judgement, separating the sheep from the lambs.  Jesus is also present in anyone who is hungry, in anyone who is thirsty, in anyone without clothing, in anyone who is sick, in anyone who is in prison. In other words, Jesus is present in anyone who is vulnerable or marginalized.

 

But I also think that Jesus is present in the helpers in the story as well – Jesus is present in the ones giving food and water and clothing, Jesus is present in people who care for the sick and visit the incarcerated. Because when we, as the church, do these things, we are able to do them because we are the Body of Christ, carrying out God’s mission in the world.

 

Which brings us back to where we started.  We serve the vulnerable people in the world because the Holy Spirit is transforming us into the Body of Christ. And we keep on serving, even in the pain of this world, because we know that the world as it is right now isn’t the world that God dreams of. And we keep on serving, without falling into despair and despondency, because we have hope, because we trust, because we are confident that the world will eventually change.

 

We as the church – we are in the business of hope.  Everything that we do as the church should proclaim this hope to the world, especially in times like right now.

 

And when my hope falters, I know that your hope will carry me through. And if your hope falters, I pray that my hope might carry you through.  And together we hope.  Still, we hope.

 

Amen.

 

 

 

Signing Those (Revised) Christmas Letters

(With Help from my Favourite Christmas Movie)

"Outer Practices for Inner Chage" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday November 5, 2023
Scripture:  Matthew 23:1-12


Reading this part of Jesus’s story, it’s tempting to paint it as a battle between good and evil.  We’re in the last week of Jesus’s life, and Jesus is in the temple debating with the Pharisees. Tensions are running high as they engage in this battle of the wits.  Jesus has been telling pointed parables trying to reform the religious systems of his time and place, and then the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians ask Jesus a series of trick questions trying to trap him with heresy but Jesus manages to answer back to all of them.  And then we come to what we heard today – Jesus calling out the Pharisees for hypocrisy – for not practicing what they preach, for accepting the honour that their position brings them, for making showy displays of faith without any substance or actions to back it up.  It is very tempting to paint Jesus as the triumphant hero over the evil Pharisees.

 

And yet instead of a battle between opposing forces, this story might be better understood as an inter-religious dialogue.  Jesus and the Pharisees have a different way of living out their faith, but they hold that faith in common.  An analogy might be to gather a Roman Catholic with a rosary, a United Church person with a cross pendant, an Anglican with a communion chalice, and an Evangelical with a bible – all of them sharing why these symbols help them to live out their faith.  We all have different practices, even as we share our faith.

 

Jesus isn’t calling out the Pharisees for their practices.  There is nothing wrong with their practices.  The phylacteries are a little box containing a tiny scroll of scripture that is bound to their forehead, reminding them that God is always present.  The fringes on their shawls remind them to pray.  These are both good things.

 

What Jesus is calling them out for is when the symbols or the actions are empty – that they aren’t backed up by inner change.  Jesus wants our whole hearts to be transformed for God… the practices that we use to get there are less important.

 

And there are lots of different practices that we can use to get there. For some people, it is prayer. For other people, it is studying the bible. For some people, it is quiet meditation or contemplation. For some people it is through music. There are probably as many different paths to be in relationship with God as there are people seeking that relationship!

 

I do think that we need both practices to work on our relationship with God as well as an inner re-orientation of our hearts.  External practices without that changed heart… well, that’s what Jesus is calling out in today’s reading, with the group of religious leaders who seem pious on the outside but who lack a heart for God and for their neighbours.  And yet expecting a changed heart to happen out of the blue without seeking it… that may not happen.

 

We need to seek for a balance – seeking an internal transformation through our external practices.

 

I’m reminded here of one of my favourite bits from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians when he writes:  “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”  It may seem like a contradiction – are we the ones working on our transformation, or is it God?  But I see it as a both/and situation. We seek relationship with God, and it is God, by the Holy Spirit, working in us. And then as we are transformed, we long more deeply for God, and God deepens our transformation. And so it goes on and on.

 

So is Jesus telling the Pharisees to ditch their phylacteries and prayer shawls? No! We need practices to help us connect with God, and sometimes those practices involve physical objects. But I think that Jesus is telling them that they need to open themselves up to God’s transforming power, rather than using these objects to appear more holy than their neighbour. That’s the hypocrisy that he's calling out.

 

And so I invite you to ponder… what practices do you have in your life that help bring you closer to God? What practices do you have in your life that empower you to love your neighbours more deeply? And do you have practices in your life that are “empty” practices – things that don’t nurture your spiritual life at this time that you can prune from your life?

 

And may the Holy Spirit be at work in all of us, every day, empowering us to love God with all our being, and to love our neighbours as ourselves. Amen!

What practices nurture your relationship with God?
Image Credit:  bartb_pt on Flickr
Used with Permission.