Defiant No’s

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 124
Exodus 1:8—2:10

When fear drives our narrative and becomes the steam-engine of all our reactions and decision-making, it stops being healthy. It becomes consuming. It consumes us. And, often, it consumes others. . . . But the daughter of Pharaoh chose compassion. She cast off fear. Likewise, may we draw compassion out of the waters, that all God’s children may live.

Rick Morley
www.rickmorley.com

“Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” If scripture came with a soundtrack, this is a moment when we would hear an ominous musical score, for, indeed, this opening line signals a highly dramatic and ominous moment in the story of our spiritual ancestors. It was very bad news for the Israelites that a new king was coming into power—a new king, a new pharaoh, who did not know of Joseph or his legacy.

According to Genesis 41, the Egyptian people had come to know Joseph as one who was wise, discerning, and filled with the Spirit of God. Joseph spent years cultivating the pharaoh’s trust, and his work had paid off. Although he was not an Egyptian, Joseph had ended up just one step below the pharaoh in terms of influence and power. That influence and power are why Joseph was allowed to bring his father, brothers, and their families to settle in Egypt when a famine broke out in their homeland. That influence and power are also why the Israelite immigrants in Egypt had a certain status and a certain favor. And that status and favor led to the Israelite immigrants flourishing throughout the land of Egypt.

But then Joseph died. Apparently enough time and enough generations had passed between Joseph’s death and today’s story that Joseph’s legacy no longer held any influence on those in power. His legacy, never forgotten by the Israelites, had been completely forgotten by the new Egyptians who lived in the palace, and a new king, a new pharaoh, had come into power: A new king who had no idea who Joseph had been for his Egyptian ancestors. A new king who only saw that these Israelite immigrants seemed to be taking over his land, and he was determined to take his land back for his people. A new king who felt just one thing about those Israelite immigrants: they were a threat to the Egyptian way of life and to the Egyptian culture.

So Pharaoh’s first plan to deal with them was to break the Israelites’ spirits and their bodies by forcing them into slavery. He decided to make the newly enslaved people build monuments to his power—things like flagship cities full of statues and storehouses. That way, for generations afterwards, every time one of those Israelites had to walk by one of Pharaoh’s monuments, they’d be forced to remember their painful history and who was still really in charge of the institutions of their world. That would show them, Pharaoh concluded. Yet even in the middle of oppression and exploitation, according to Exodus, the Israelites continued to flourish. So Pharaoh made their work harder.

Are they getting faster at making bricks? Make them gather their own straw for the brickmaking. Do they seem to have the stamina to last long hours out in the fields? Ring that bell and wake them up before dawn. Then keep them out until long after the sun has set. Do they still have a gleam of freedom shining in their eyes? Command them to build even more storehouses for Pharaoh so they will be forced to see the way he keeps all of the food of their labor. Do they still pray out loud to their God of the covenant and dare to sing the songs of their faith? Make them go in through the back doors and sit in the balconies of the churches while the preacher preaches submission to the master as God’s will for their lives. Whatever it took, no matter how long or how inhumane, Pharaoh was determined to crush the Israelites’ bodies and spirits.

But those Israelite immigrants were a lot more resilient than he expected. No matter how hard the pharaoh tried to crush their bodies with backbreaking work, no matter how hard the Pharaoh tried to crush their spirits with humiliation and degradation, no matter how hard the Pharaoh tried to keep the Israelites down, they kept on rising. They kept on flourishing. They kept on having babies and having hope that a change was gonna come.

So Pharaoh got angrier, and Pharaoh got personal with plan number 2. This pharaoh, for whom we have no name, summoned two Israelite midwives, for whom we do have names amazingly enough. Shiphrah and Puah were called into this pharaoh’s presence and given the royal order to kill each Israelite baby boy as he was born. They did not need to worry about the girls, though, because Pharaoh decided a girl’s life wasn’t of much use anyway. Especially an enslaved girl.

Now, I am not sure what kind of musical score we would hear during that dreadful scene when Shiphrah and Puah were given their marching orders, but I can almost guarantee that as Pharaoh spoke those words, all the blood drained from the midwives’ faces. There was no way that they as midwives—those who helped to bring new life into the world—could ever contemplate snuffing out that life just because a no-named pharaoh said so. They could not do it. They would not do it.

Undoubtedly Shiphrah and Puah knew their refusal would be risky, life-and-death risky. They were fully aware of the pharaoh’s power over them. They were reminded of Pharaoh’s power every time an Israelite child was ripped out of his mother’s arms and put up on the auction block. They were reminded of the pharaoh’s power every time they were told not to look their taskmaster in the eyes. They were reminded of the Pharaoh’s power every time the bank said it would not lend them money to buy a house in that neighborhood because of the “community demographics” (to learn more, explore the history of redlining in Chicago), so they’d just have to keep paying higher rents and hope they never came home to their furniture sitting out on the lawn. They knew the pharaoh had power over them and that to defy him might be to sign their own death certificates.

They also knew, though, that regardless of what he thought, the no-named, easily-threatened, Joseph-forgetting pharaoh did not own them. They belonged, body and soul, only to God—to the God who had created them, who had called them to follow, who had made a covenant with them and promised continual divine presence. Their Creator God was the only power to whom they belonged. And no pharaoh could ever take that identity from them. It would always rise.

So these two enslaved Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, made a decision that would echo down from generation to generation. They made a decision to act with creative disobedience, with nonviolent resistance. With their actions, they said a quiet but defiant no to the death-dealing powers of the no-name pharaoh. Grounded in their trust in the Creator God, the God of life, the two midwives made a subversive, faithful decision to defy the powers-that-be, no matter what happened to them as a result. The babies kept being born, and with every single birth, the hope of the Israelite people kept being born. And with that hope, the Israelites’ determination to survive and thrive, even in the face of the pharaoh, kept being born and renewed each day. And Pharaoh noticed.

He noticed that his covert death plan was not working. So the Pharaoh called Shiphrah and Puah back into his presence and asked them point-blank what was going on, and with as much creativity as they could muster, those two midwives told him it was not their fault. The Israelite women were so strong and so vigorous that they would just pop those babies out before the midwives even had a chance to get there, and well, once the babies were in their mothers’ arms, they could not very well carry out Pharaoh’s plan without blowing his cover.

The pharaoh did not realize he had just been defeated by a subversive use of a stereotype offered by two enslaved women. He went back to his drawing board. When he came back with plan number 3, he threw all caution to the wind and decided not to simply control the Israelite immigrant population but, rather, to eliminate it altogether in his attempt to create a pure Egyptian ethno-state. The pharaoh commanded all his people to go and take every baby Hebrew boy and throw him in the Nile, and from that moment in Egypt, murder became national public policy and the death-dealing powers of the pharaoh took center stage.

Yet even though he continued to exercise power over their bodies, Pharaoh still could not capture the Israelites’ spirits. No matter how many babies were taken away, no matter how many mothers cried buckets of tears at the discovery they were pregnant, no matter how many fathers had to sit and watch as their families were turned upside down, the Israelite people, with their firm trust in the God who would deliver them, were not destroyed. They were not vanquished.

As Maya Angelou writes in her poem “Still I Rise,” “Do you want to see me broken? / Bowed head and lowered eyes? / Shoulders falling down like teardrops / weakened by my soulful cries? . . . You may shoot me with your words, / you may cut me with your eyes, / you may kill me with your hatefulness, / but still, like air, I’ll rise.” Even when their eyes were emptied of tears from too many hours of crying, their hearts were still not emptied of hope from so many years of God’s covenant promise-keeping. With their acts of creative disobedience and nonviolent resistance, they kept on rising.

Meanwhile, in the middle of Pharaoh’s death-dealing power, some other no’s were being quietly uttered and acted. A quiet no came from a newly married couple as they gave birth to a fine son and hid him away for as long as they could. A quiet no came from the mother as she created a little ark for him, a basket, to try and keep him safe on those chaotic waters of the Nile. A quiet no came from the sister as she sat, hidden, watching her baby brother, the future deliverer of Israel, as he waited for his own deliverance.

And a not-so-quiet no came from Pharaoh’s own house as his daughter found that baby, had compassion on him, and decided to draw him out of the waters that had become the grave of far too many others due to her father. When she took that child into his house, into the literal center of Pharaoh’s death-dealing power, she said no again to her daddy and made the child family, naming him Moses. Even though she might not have known it, her no, like the no of Shiphrah and Puah, would also echo down the generations, eventually leading to liberation, to freedom, for all of that child’s people.

All of this unfolded because the enslaved people had more trust in the God of the covenant than they had fear of the power of the Pharaoh, and they said no. All of it unfolded because every single day the people of the covenant made small, faithful decisions to defy the powers of Pharaoh, decisions to defy the powers that dealt only in death, in division, in anxiety, or in fear.

For even though the enslaved Israelite immigrants lived at the bottom of society’s power structure, they were not powerless. Every time they said no to the powers of fear, no to the powers of anxiety, no to the powers of division and hate, no to the powers of the death-dealing Pharaoh; every time they said no to those powers, they said yes to God. Every time they acted in a way that said no to the ownership of the no-name Pharaoh, they said yes to the One to whom they truly belonged.

For it was the power of the midwives’ yes to God that gave those two women the strength to keep dealing in life. It was the power of the Pharaoh’s daughter’s yes to Moses that led to his calling and to our liberation. It was the power of Israel’s yes to freedom that led to their wilderness survival.

It was the power of Mary and Joseph’s yes to the angel that opened the door for God’s surprising plan of incarnation. It was the power of Jesus’ yes in the baptismal waters of the Jordan that led to his full embrace of who he was and what he was called to do. It was the power of Peter, Andrew, James, and John’s yes to Jesus’ call to “follow me” that led to the formation of that first group of disciples. And it was the power of the yes of a crucified Messiah who was willing to first say no to retribution and violence that led to the death of Death at the cross and in the empty tomb.

Do you know what all of this means? This means, siblings in Christ, that it matters a great deal where and when we say no to the death-dealing power of the no-name pharaohs in our lives and yes to the life-giving power of our covenant-making God. In these days, just as it did in their days, our no’s and our yes’s have tremendous effects, not just in our lives but also in the lives of so many others whose names we do not even know.

Furthermore our no’s and our yes’s have tremendous effects in our national life, in our city’s life, and in our church’s life. It matters where and when and how often we follow in the footsteps of the midwives. Perhaps in these days we should all commit their names, Shiphrah and Puah, to memory so we might never forget the power contained in a quiet, faithful, defiant, creatively resistant no.

Make no mistake about it: the way we live out our faith, the myriad of ways we say yes and no with our own lives, with the life of this church, those decisions we are making here and now, will also echo down from generation to generation. With God’s help, and with your courage, perhaps that echo might be one that always rises, for the sake of all God’s children and not just our own, for the sake of God’s beloved community. So when and where and how will you say no this week? And when and where and how will you say yes this week? It matters.

Amen.

Notes
1. I was heavily influenced by some of my reading into the lives of slaves in this country. You will see and hear that influence running throughout the sermon.

2. The language of “rise” is directly influenced by a poem of Maya Angelou’s entitled “Still I Rise,” from which I also quote directly in the sermon.