Fairhaven UMC

There’s a largely unspoken, common wisdom consensus among Christians in our world today that Christian morality is pretty simple, right? Follow the law, be nice to other people, accept Jesus as Lord over your personal life for whatever that means to you. And there’s this intensely private understanding of faith. Your relationship with God is primarily in your heart, something that nobody else really sees. And to the degree that anyone else in the world around you can perceive you as a Christian, it’s by your humble conformity. You keep your lawn nicely mowed, so to speak. You don’t cause any trouble. You’re just an overall pleasant sort of person. The image of Ned Flanders from The Simpsons comes to mind. And accordingly, you don’t have any enemies. because you mind your business and you basically do what the wider society thinks you’re supposed to do.

I wish this were the case. I’m pretty comfortable in that lane. And I think it’s fair to say that the expectation for the past 150 years or so is that pastors above all are supposed to be like that. But you’ve heard me say many times at this point that this is not how Methodism began. For the first few generations of the Methodist societies, they were an organization of troublemakers, of radicals, of a certain type of Bible thumpers who made slaveholders, nominal Christians, and businessmen who exploited the poor via gambling and liquor very angry. They refused to just tolerate to be agreeable to the state of society and of the church. If they saw something that was unjust, Wesley was preaching about it, the Methodists were organizing over it, angry mobs attempted to kill John Wesley more than once for his preaching, all five feet two and 120 pounds of him. And at its worst, particularly in the early days, Methodism was perceived as a real threat to the stability of the wider society.

And at best, when things got a little bit less controversial towards the end of Wesley’s life, It was still seen as a persistent annoyance. The Methodists were annoying to everybody else. And both our Romans and our Exodus readings this morning reveal a similar orientation. This tension between the body of Christ and the world around it that’s supposed to exist. It’s supposed to be kind of a tense relationship in some ways. And Wesley called this devoted sort of faith scriptural Christianity that had a bit of an edge to it. this faith that has an edge to it, scriptural Christianity. And he coined that term in a sermon that got him banned from preaching at St. Mary’s Church in Oxford 282 years ago tomorrow, as it happens. And Romans and Exodus, importantly, are addressed to the heart of the greatest empires in their respective times, the Roman Empire, obviously, and New Kingdom, Egypt. But the relationship between God’s faithful and their rulers in these settings is a lot different than the dynamic that we tend to live in in Europe and the United States today. Caesar and Pharaoh, they don’t have close Jewish or Christian advisors. In fact, Pharaoh not knowing Joseph is the catalyst of the conflict in Exodus. Pharaoh has no relationship with the Jewish people. They’re these outsiders in the midst of the Egyptians. If you were going to have, say, a national day of prayer, any kind of national faith in Exodus or Romans in Egypt or the Roman Empire, it was going to be to a very specific set of gods that does not include the God of Israel. This was a minority religion. They’re not going to have patriotic songs on the other end. In the Hebrews hymnals, they’re not going to sing, God bless Egypt, right? That relationship doesn’t exist. And God’s people in both of these societies are at the outskirts. In Egypt, they’re foreigners, and their existence is illegal, really. When we think about all these babies that weren’t supposed to be born, these people are not supposed to exist, let alone be in this country. And in Rome, they’re already persecuted outsiders, even 30 years after Jesus’ ascension.

So, that means that in Egypt, by necessity, following God cannot be embodied in a polite, law-abiding righteousness. It cannot be embodied in conformity to the society that they live in. Instead, what God is doing in these places, the kind of people that God is working in, is in wholly conniving, in scheming among God’s people. And I think that’s really the best way to describe what’s happening in the story of Exodus overall. So the background, if you missed the whole context in the reading, is Egypt is terrified. Egypt is terrified because the population of Hebrew foreigners has exploded. They imported them as laborers, and now their population’s growing. They’ve become a real threat. This is always the case in societies that have an underclass of slaves or something like that. You can read letters from South Carolina before the Civil War where they’re worried about the number of black people that are growing. And the Egyptians are in a demographic panic. They’re worried that control is going to slip from their grasp, that the slaves are going to get it. The Israelites are going to get control over their country. These people were supposed to keep their heads down. They’re supposed to be cooking and cleaning and doing construction work without complaining. And now Pharaoh has implemented a crackdown. The Hebrews are put into forced labor. They’re sent outside the major cities to keep them physically broken down, unable to threaten the centers of power. That’s this growing, boiling threat, and they’re trying to spread it out. And to prevent the threat from growing even bigger in the future, Pharaoh begins this program of population control.

He orders the Hebrew midwives that they need to kill any baby boy who’s born at birth. We don’t want more of them. But because they respect God, that’s the phrasing that Exodus uses, these midwives, Shifra and Pua, refuse to go along with that plan. And it’s ironic and sort of funny the excuse the midwives give to the Egyptians. It becomes pretty obvious fairly quickly that baby boys are still being born. And Pharaoh calls the midwives into his office and asks what’s going on here. And the way they choose to respond is playing into Pharaoh’s pre-existing prejudices, this racism against the Israelites. And the midwives tell Pharaoh, well, these Hebrew women, they keep popping out babies because they’re just too robust. They give birth before the midwives can even show up because they’re so strong. They’re not like these delicate Egyptian women. And so the babies keep escaping before they can be killed. Shifra and Pualai, they’re scheming. They break the law. They become threats to national security. And yet, in response to their faithfulness, God calls that faithfulness, God blesses them. And their people continue to multiply, continue to strengthen.

And that’s a little bit different, I think, than the way we understand ourselves in the relationship to the society we live in. It’s clear that in this circumstance, here in Exodus, God approves of and upholds what from the outside looks like extremely bad behavior. But I think this isn’t a moral relativism thing. This isn’t an ends outweigh the means thing. The story that’s being told here is that Shiphrah and Puah and us, we can’t just do whatever we feel like we need to do for the greater good. That’s not what’s happening here. What God requires of his people in the living of our lives is this careful weighing of what allegiance to God means. And this can never be light. It can never be careless. This is some real deep, hard work. And we’ve got to be clear here that what we’re reading about in Exodus, what we’re being called to as Christians, is not a looser moral standard for living. But this higher standard that’s much more complex, that’s difficult, harder than the one people outside the church exist under. Chiphrah and Pua here, they know the consequences if they get caught. They know what’s going to happen.

And the Apostle Paul insists to the Christians of Rome, who are similarly under pressure, do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And he is describing exactly the process that’s going on in the heart of the Hebrew midwives. Note here, and this is hard, that God doesn’t tell Shiphrah and Puah what to do. He doesn’t say, oh, whenever these Hebrew babies come, you need to lie, you need to do this and make sure they’re still born. No, they respect God. They know God, and accordingly, their hearts are already shaped in such a way that whenever the time comes for them to serve, they know what to do. Their defiance, this kind of resistance that’s in them, comes from hearts who are already transformed, not from some personal sense of heroism. It’s God’s already been working. And it would be a lot easier if Christian life had just easy black and white choices, where we keep the peace, we don’t rock the boat, this is what you do in this situation, this is what you do in this situation, and then we just worship God in private. That’s not what we see in Scripture. The reality is that to truly be God’s people is to be transformed in our minds and then from our minds in our living. And it’s refusing to go with the flow, that conformity that Paul talks about. It’s refusing conformity. I love the full verse here, Romans 12, 2. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is, what is good and pleasing and mature.

And this is really important, especially coming from Paul. We often imagine, this is another one of those kind of stereotypes of Paul caricatures. We imagine that Paul leans on the side of conformity, of Christians going along to get along in a hostile environment. That’s not really the case. Paul’s position is very nuanced. He is for staying under the radar, not causing trouble whenever it advantages the church. Because whenever you think about it, right, you can’t go around making enemies of everybody on purpose if you want to survive. Paul knows that he’s trying to build something up that needs to survive. But he is fiercely against conformity when it undercuts the work of the body and the gospel of Jesus. There are places to blend in and there are places to stick out. and unfortunately that means that we have work. We are required in Paul’s words to figure out what God’s will is. It means things are maybe not simple. Answers might not be clear in whatever situations we face in our lives, but the Spirit’s leading is there if we look for it. A transformed heart, a transformed mind, has to discern what’s good.

We see this in Exodus all over the place in this chapter. There’s a pervenient grace working even in Pharaoh’s daughter who doesn’t follow the God of Israel. She feels this tug of defiance on her heart, and when she pulls baby Moses from the Nile, she refuses to be complicit with the sin, the death that’s happening all around her. and she uses what we might call her privilege in the service of someone she knows is an enemy of the state. She flat out says when she pulls this baby out of the water, he must be a Hebrew baby. It’s not like she thinks that he might be an Egyptian baby who just happened to be floating away. She knows who he is. She knows what she’s doing. She knows she’s breaking the law. She knows she’s defying her own father, that she’s putting her people at risk. But the water, so to speak, of the Nile of baptism is thicker than blood, and God has no interest in ethnic loyalties or national loyalties. And by the grace of God, Pharaoh’s daughter gets caught up in what is right.

And to have faith in Moses’ God and in Paul’s God, the one who became flesh in Jesus, demands that we give up a simple, easy, lazy moralism in favor of figuring out what is actually good and pleasing and mature. I love that. Those three words there, what is good and pleasing and mature. Paul hits us with some tough love here, which is his style, obviously. And he’s saying to the Romans, he’s saying to us, you’ve got to grow up. Whenever you see injustice in the world, when you see abuse or exploitation in the workplace, in the family, in the church, when you see a situation where something is inescapably wrong in the eyes of God, a confrontation emerges between you as a child of God and the patterns of this world. You must not be conformed. If you’ve been transformed, you cannot be conformed. Those are opposites. If you’ve been transformed and you see something that God stands against, that there is something that needs to happen, that there is something that has to be addressed, leaving it alone is not an option. That’s what Pharaoh’s daughter, that’s what is being shown to us here. We can’t leave it alone because we’re supposed to chafe at the container of conformity. Your spirit, if it’s transformed by the Holy Spirit, can’t just live with it anymore.

And this is hard because then it requires you to do something. You’ve got to refuse to kill the children that Pharaoh demands. You’ve got to pluck the babies from the river. And the good news is that God comes alongside us when we do this, that we don’t have a lone ranger approach to things. You’ll notice that that’s what he does with the midwives. He doesn’t just leave us out on the edge whenever we’re trying to discern and do what is good and right and pleasing. And neither are we alone, not just with God, but with the body of Christ. Notice how communal all of this is that’s happening in Exodus. Shiphrah and Puah are heroes. You know, we have these named two great heroes in Exodus 1. But notice that they’re also part of like this underground resistance. Moses’ sister is part of it, Miriam. His mother, Jochebed. They together, they hatched this plan to float him down the river in the basket for someone to find. And Pharaoh’s daughter is part of it too. All of these unrelated people who don’t know each other, some of them, find themselves working together without having meant to for the good of God’s people. And imagine how shocking it is to be Jochebed and Miriam, Moses’ sister and mother, when Miriam’s watching to see where Moses goes in the river, and he gets pulled out pretty quickly from the reeds by an Egyptian. And not just any Egyptian, but this Egyptian, the princess, Pharaoh’s daughter, she rescues Moses. She rescues the one who will soon lead his people into freedom. The Spirit is working here among people who don’t even know each other, let alone have a shared plan, to ensure that God’s saving work is done. The Spirit is at work all over the place among all of these people.

And there’s this inherently subversive dimension of being God’s people. Maybe not all the time, and maybe it’s not going to be as dramatic for you as it is with Shiphrah and Puah and Pharaoh’s daughter, but there are moments, there are places in our lives where, like our Methodist ancestors, we have to become a threat or at least be really annoying. And Romans 12 gives us a vision of this too, as the Apostle Paul discusses the many different gifts of Christ’s body. He says, you know, some are prophets, some are servants, some are teachers, some are encouragers, some are givers, some lead, some show mercy. Everyone has a specific roll. The princess in this story with her institutional safety and sway, she can get away with what she’s doing in a way that lots of people can’t, and so she does. You know, the Miriam, this little girl, is able to stand back and watch what’s happening because who cares what a little girl’s doing? She can get away with spying here. And these midwives with their defiant mercy. And so the question emerges for each of us from time to time, given where you are, given the gifts that you have and who you are, what particular point of leverage do you have in service to God and to other people where you can transform the situation rather than conform to it?

And the point here is not to go looking for trouble or something. The point is that Christians, like the Hebrews before us, lose the ability to go with the flow if we’re allowing the Holy Spirit to work within us. That can be tough. That can be painful. And again, Paul uses that word mature. It requires us in some ways to grow up, to recognize that things can be hard, can be gray, can be difficult sometimes. But remember that a couple lying midwives, a mother with a basket, and a single compassionate Egyptian set into motion the fall of an empire, the liberation of God’s people. And who knows what God might transform by transforming you. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.