“Midwives”
September 22, 2024
Rev. Daniel L. Migliore
My sermon this morning is about two Hebrew women. Their names are Shiphrah and Puah, and they were midwives. We heard their story in our Scripture reading this morning. The story of Shiphrah and Puah is one of my favorites in the Old Testament, for several reasons. First, it is the story of two women of faith who are mostly unknown to many church-folk today, even if they are Bible readers. Second, it is a story that speaks to us today, especially in times when we wonder if faith in God really makes a difference in our everyday lives. And my third reason for calling this story a favorite is that it was the text of my sermon when pastor Rebecca was being installed in the Patterson Presbyterian Church more than thirty years ago. Now I hasten to add, I am not going to repeat what I said on that occasion. Rather, I want to offer a fresh look at the story of these two women and its bearing on our life of faith today.
Let’s begin with a recap of the story. The Hebrew people had first come to Egypt as poor immigrants. For a time, the strangers were accepted by the Egyptians. But as the years passed their numbers grew, and Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, started to worry. He feared that this minority immigrant group might eventually become strong enough to disrupt or even overthrow his government. So, Pharaoh decided to change his immigration policy. He stripped the strangers of their freedom, and subjected them to brutally hard work under ruthless conditions. In effect, Pharaoh’s new policy made the Hebrew people, slaves.
Yet Pharaoh’s worries continued. When word came to him that his Hebrew slaves were having more children than the Egyptians, he foresaw big trouble ahead. And that was when he devised a new plan.
The plan was essentially a program of genocide. And adding to the horror of Pharaoh’ plan was that it would recruit a corps of Hebrew women to implement it. This is where Shiphrah and Puah enter the story. They were Hebrew midwives-- in other words, helpers to pregnant women whose time of labor had come.
Summoning the midwives, Pharaoh commanded them to kill all the Hebrew boys they helped to deliver. He believed he sweetened his order by saying they could allow the baby girls to live. But Pharaoh’s order met an unexpected obstacle. Shiphrah and Puah resolved to disobey Pharaoh because “they feared God.”
When Pharoah was told the midwives had disobeyed his orders, he ordered them back to his court to account for their disobedience. Shiphrah and Puah do not tell him the real reason. Instead, they respond with a clever evasion by saying, “O Mighty Pharaoh, the Hebrew women are so much stronger than Egyptian women that they manage to deliver their children by themselves before a midwife comes to assist them.” The story doesn’t tell us what happened to Shiphrah and Puah after that, but we may presume that Pharaoh--like tyrants of every age—was not pleased with slave women who disobey orders. Enraged, Pharaoh decreed that all Egyptians were to be enlisted in his genocidal project of kidnapping all newborn Hebrew boys and throwing them into the Nile river.
Now before saying more about the real reason Shiphrah and Pual chose to disobey Pharaoh, let’s pause to ask ourselves: Is there any possible connection between Shiphrah and Puah’s terrifying situation and our own? There are vast differences, of course. They lived in an autocracy; we live in a democracy. The gulf between their condition and ours seems gargantuan. With the exception of Black Americans, most of us lack a deep and haunting memory of ancestors who experienced the horrors of slavery in our own country.
Nevertheless, all of us can imagine something of the desperation and the temptations of Shiphrah and Puah as enslaved women ordered by Pharaoh to slaughter innocent newborn. Would they not have felt utterly helpless? Would they not have experienced an overwhelming sense of powerlessness? Would they not have been tempted to despair?
My friends, if we can imagine this undercurrent of fear, helplessness, and hopelessness in the situation of Shiphrah and Puah, do we not feel some measure of solidarity with them? Do we not recognize something vaguely familiar in their horrendous experience of living in a world that renders people helpless and pushes them to resignation?
Do we not live in a time of twenty-first century horrors, like repeated mass shootings of school-children, events that both shock and paralyze us, robbing us of a sense of agency, making us feel that we cannot do anything that makes a real difference? It’s just the way things are, we may say, as we slip into resignation.
We have recently lived through several withering seasons of a covid pandemic that brought misery and death to millions. We now find ourselves in a season of deep and frightening division in our country, and hear voices of anger and bitterness everywhere, even of calls for civil war. We are deeply disturbed by the deadly conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. And not least, we are up against a climate crisis whose ominous signals of future misery and suffering have already begun to be felt. Do we really need to be told that ours is not an age of optimism? As must have been the case for the midwives of our story, are we not sometimes tempted to give in to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness?
But, my friends, there is good news for us in the story of Shiphrah and Puah! They did not give in to the temptation of resignation. They did not comfort themselves by saying there is nothing we can do. They resolved to refuse to do what the king of Egypt ordered them to do. They resolved to let the boys live. Why? The text tells us it was because “they feared God.”
They said No!--because “they feared God.” Their sense of personal agency, of the power to act, was awakened-- because “they feared God.”
Now how are we to understand these words “they feared God,” which are the crux of our story? Do they mean, Shiphrah and Puah were more afraid of being punished eternally by an unseen, omnipotent, angry God than they feared what mighty Pharaoh would do to them if they disobeyed his command? Is this what their “fear of God” amounted to? I do not think so.
I think for these Hebrew women—who lived before the days of Moses, before the prophets, and certainly long before the days of Jesus—“fear of God” was a way of speaking of a sense of the holiness and goodness of God.
“Fear of God” expressed the awe, reverence, and wonder evoked in Abraham and his descendants by the God who came to them graciously—the God who promised to be with them and to make them a blessing to all nations. Shiphrah and Puah would not have known what God said through the prophet Micah--“What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God,” or what Jesus taught his disciples in parables like the Good Samaritan that call us to act with kindness to those who are vulnerable—the wounded, the hungry, the sick, the stranger, the prisoner. No, for Shiphrah and Puah “fear of God,” would have been shorthand for reverence before the awesome holiness and goodness of God, the God of grace and promise and irrepressible hope. That heartfelt sense of gratitude and loyalty to a loving God would have been formed in them as young children by their mothers and fathers, as was the case with all Hebrew children since the days of Abraham.
But exactly when did Shiphrah and Puah show by their actions that they “feared God”? Was it when Pharaoh first issued his order to them? Did they at that moment say right off, “No Pharaoh, we will not do that?” Apparently not. According to the story, Pharaoh did not find out until later that many Hebrew boys continued to be born and that the midwives had disobeyed his order.
So let me suggest that it may not have been until Shiphrah and Pual returned to their midwife work in a house where an about-to-be mother was in labor, and when they saw the anxiety on her face mixed with joyful anticipation, and when they then held the totally vulnerable, totally helpless newborn child in their hands,--just at that moment, I suggest-- they had compassion, and they knew they had to disobey Pharaoh’s order.
Now, if someone says, well preacher, you’re confusing us. Which is it? Did that powerful moment of compassion for the vulnerable children well up in them as soon as they heard Pharaoh’ command because they “feared God”?—the God whose holiness and goodness includes compassion and who calls us to be compassionate? Or did that powerful moment of compassion well up in them from the depths of their own humanity at the moment when they were confronted with someone in desperate need of help?
Maybe the best response to this question is: Why do we have to choose? Maybe responding to the compassion God who calls us to be compassionate, and responding to the call to compassion for the helpless that arises from deep within our humanity created in the image of God--maybe they are simply two sides of the same reality.
However we answer that question, what is clear from the story is that authentic faith in and love of God—whether that of Shiphrah and Puah, or of Jeremiah and Micah, or of all those who follow Jesus as the decisive revelation of God—all such authentic faith in a passionate and compassionate God generates and builds up both the love of God and the spirit of compassion for the needy neighbor.
And, my friends, it is not only the call to compassion that speaks to us in the story of Shiphrah and Puah. It is also a story that declares that authentic, honest faith in God—whether that of Shiphrah and Puah, or of Jeremiah and Micah, or of all those who put their trust in the God revealed in Jesus Christ—all such faith, born of the Spirit of God, generates and builds up not only compassion for needly neighbors but also a stunning courage--the courage to say No to tyrants, No to injustice, No to cruelty, and the courage to say Yes to kindness and compassion for those in need.
And besides compassion and courage, the story of Shiphrah and Puah reminds us that authentic faith in God--the faith of Shiphrah and Puah, of the prophets and the Psalmist, and of Christians of every age who trust in the God revealed in Jesus Christ—such faith generates not only compassion and not only courage. It also awakens joy in living the life of faith. Really? So where do we find joy in this story? Well, remember the response of Shiphrah and Puah to Pharaoh’s question, Why have you disobeyed me and let the newborn Hebrew boys live? They said, “O Pharaoh, these Hebrew women are stronger than Egyptian women. They deliver their babies by themselves before we arrive to help them.” Their answer, I suggest, is not a lie. It is not an evil deception that, like all lies, does damage both to the hearer and the liar. I hear their words as faithful humor, as the gentile laughter of faith, of which the Pharaohs of this world do not have a clue.
It is the joyful laughter that often accompanies the life of faith in a compassionate God and that reverberates in compassion for others and the courage to say No to cruelty and Yes to kindness and mercy.
Compassion, courage, joy. They are all there in this wonderful story. And there’s one more gift the story gives us. It’s actually not in the story of Shiphrah and Puah but in the very next story--its sequel so to speak--that tells us of something totally unexpected---indeed something miraculous—the eruption of hope in a desperate situation. The very next story after that of Shiphrah and Puah tells of the rescue of a child from the evil genocidal policy of Pharaoh, and it goes like this.
A Hebrew mother hides her baby boy from the death squad of Pharaoh as long as she can until, in desperation, she decides to put the child in a water-proof basket and hides it among the reeds of the river. The sister of the child stands by at a distance to see what happens. Along comes Pharaoh’s daughter who, bathing in the river, finds the basket with the child in it and decides to keep the child. The sister of the child sees all this happen. She goes to Pharaoh’s daughter and asks, “Would you like to have a nurse to care for your child? I know a good one.” And she recommends none other than the mother of the child, who becomes nurse for him throughout his childhood. That child happens to be Moses who will one day lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt into freedom. Talk about the unpredictable emergence of hope from occasions of acts of refusal to be complicit in policies of injustice and cruelty! Talk about the miraculous emergence of new hope from simple deeds of kindness and compassion to those in need!
Now finally, a special word to this congregation. You have shown you are midwives in the tradition of Shiphrah and Puah. And when I say you, I include us men as well as you women. The word “midwives” is gender inclusive. It includes women and men. Just look it up in the dictionary. You all, women and men, have shown you are midwives in your long-standing food ministry to the needy in your area; you are midwives in your collection of funds to provide diapers and other necessary childcare equipment to parents in need of these items; you are midwives in collecting useful items for school children—backpacks, pencils, tablets, whatever—things some children might otherwise lack because their parents do not have the disposable income to provide them. In these and other ways, you are carrying on a ministry of midwifery. You are standing in the tradition of Shiphrah and Puah. You engage in this ministry because of your faith in, and gratitude to, the God of compassion, the God revealed in Jesus, who inspires our compassion, our courage, our joy, and gives us reason, in little and sometimes seemingly insignificant acts of mercy, to hope again. Thanks be to God.
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