Exodus 1:22; 2:1-10
The story of baby Moses, placed in a basket on the river Nile, is a story that many of us learned as children through plays, storybooks, and songs like “Let My People Go” and “Where is Baby Moses?” As we learned it in Sunday School, the story appeals to children for the overarching message – trust God. Do what is right. Be courageous and faithful. When the parents of Moses decide that it is far too dangerous to keep their son, his mom trusts him to God, and devises this plan to send him down river where he may have a chance for life.
His sister, Miriam, participates in the story by suggesting to the Egyptian princess who finds him, that she knows the perfect person for the princess to hire to feed and tend to the baby whom the princess has decided to adopt – an Israelite woman who, unbeknownst to the princess, is the child’s own mother.
Told this way, it is a good story and a simple way to introduce the whole Moses story arc to the story of our faith to both small children and adults alike. The thing is though, that the story glosses over elements that we should confront in order to fully appreciate the import of the story.
When my husband, Jim, and I began our family, we had wonderful dreams for our children. Who doesn’t? We dreamed different but similar dreams for each of them. They would each grow to know they are loved and cherished. They would grow to have lots of good, abiding friendships with loyal people who would help them learn to navigate relationships in all their rich complexity. They would go to school and, because they are our children, they would do brilliantly. Of course.
They would be active in sports, where they would excel. They would be extraordinarily gifted in music and the arts. They would grow to be fine, upstanding citizens, ready at the end of their college years to fulfill their destiny to change the world for the good. Along the way they would meet and marry their soulmates and give us drop-dead gorgeous grandchildren, because, again, they would be our grandchildren.
We didn’t have every detail worked out, but we certainly had dreams.
Isn’t that true of most, if not all parents? Don’t we all have hopes and dreams and even plans for our children? What happens when those dreams become unraveled?
I doubt that any of our hopes and dreams included bombs falling from the sky, replacing our sweet lullabies with screams and cries of terror, destroyed homes and cities, and daily sounds of gunfire, suicide bombs in the marketplace, or air-raid sirens at school.
None of us would ever have thought that in the place of a good education, music lessons and sports competitions, our children would confront drug cartels and gangs terrorizing our towns and threatening their lives in gruesome acts of heinous violence.
Today, when children are sent undocumented across borders, unaccompanied by adults, we judge the parents. “How could parents simply send their children on such a dangerous mission, alone? I hesitate to even send mine alone, on foot, to the grocery store.”
Or when we hear of families and individuals seeking asylum and detained at the border, or entering our country illegally, perhaps we think, “why don’t they do things the right way or follow the legal path designated by the destination countries – never imagining what it is like to fall victim to despots and gangs, soldiers and rebels, who cause you to flee in the middle of the night, hoping upon hope to save your life or your child’s in a hostile and terrifying situation.
What would you do to keep your child safe? How far would you go? What would you risk? What chances would you take to save their life or to shield them from monsters?
Those are the kinds of questions that must have confronted Moses’ parents, driving his mother to the ultimate act of sacrifice and desperation.
For Moses’s mother, what she would do to keep her beloved baby safe and give him a chance a life away from the murderous barbarian Pharaoh and his forces, was to weave a basket of papyrus leaves moistened by her tears and held together with bitumen and pitch, and to sorrowfully place her son in the basket and set him adrift on the river Nile. This was a river full of dangerous animals and perilous currents; it was a river that contained both shallow rushes and deep, dark, swirling waters. To what end?
While God once promised faithfulness by providing many descendants for Abraham, Pharaoh now sees the burgeoning population of Israelites enslaved in Egypt for over 370 years by the time Moses is born as dangerous. Forced to harsh, physical labor, day in and day out, these Israelites grew strong and mighty, the author of Exodus tells us.
Bad rulers make bad things happen to people. Inspired by his fear of rebellion growing in the Israelite camp, Pharaoh seeks to accomplish two things through his edict which would send Moses along with every other Israelite baby boy into the Nile to drown.
First, when you wish to subjugate people or break them, you take away their hopes and dreams and strike at their soul. Nothing serves to do that as well or as quickly as threatening or depriving them of their children or taking from them their women. Taking the hope of the people – their offspring would certainly accomplish this. Secondly, keeping the Israelites from birthing and raising a new generation of strong young men would squelch their ability to formulate a rebellion.
But through the courage and cunning of five women, God provided safety for the child, Moses, who would ultimately grow to free the people of Israel and lead them through the wilderness to the Promised Land.
Then, there is Miriam, his sister, who maintains vigilance to see what happens to him and to shape his future.
The Egyptian princess is not named here, but in Jewish tradition is called Bityiah. Bityiah rescues the baby from the river. Where does she think he came from? Does she suspect he is one of those unfortunate Hebrew children? Does she suspect Miriam knows him and is somehow orchestrating a dangerous liaison?
The servant girls must also keep safe the truth about this child, regardless or what they know or suspect about his origins.
God uses these people to save not only one small child, but an entire people.
God uses good to overcome evil.
God uses the powerless – a baby, women and a girl – to overcome the powerful Pharaoh.
God uses the compassion and caring of Bityiah to overcome the fear and hatred illustrated by her father toward the Hebrew people.
Each of these women, involved in the story of saving the wee baby Moses, are involved in our salvation story, too. In the same way, they serve as examples to us of how God uses the most unlikely people to do the most amazing things, and to overcome evil in the world.
When we look at the overarching narrative of God’s relationship with God’s people, and of the way that God works in the world, what we repeatedly see, is that God is never satisfied with wrongs going unanswered, evil going unchallenged, or fear and hatred exerting their influence over right, good, and mercy.
In Egypt, God used Moses’ mother, Miriam, Bityiah, and the slave girls to save the babe. Then, God used Moses to save the God’s People. In Bethlehem, God used shepherds and magi to save another baby destined to serve humankind by fulfilling God’s plan for salvation history. In Jerusalem, God used his Son, who was at once fully human and fully divine, to save the world. On the cross, God overcame evil with good, and in the resurrection, God overcame death with eternal life.
This ancient text from Exodus echoes powerfully for the church, our nation, and the world. Issues of religion and politics, gender and power, terror and faith come together to illustrate how God is at work bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly.
From them, we learn how God calls us to work for justice and mercy, and is always faithful to these. When we see wrongs, God calls us to work for the right, and empowers us to do so. When we trust in God, we are strengthened to resist evil, overcome cruelty, and show love in humble service to the poor, the downtrodden, the lonely, the hungry, the homeless and so many other vulnerable people.
On a day we celebrate God’s work being done by our hands, we pray that God will continue to lead us to follow his will. We pray that God will use us to illustrate for the world and the community we serve God’s mercy and compassion. We pray for the strength to always strive to unravel evil with good.
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