Exodus 1:8-2:10 8 Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. 9 He said to his people, Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. 10 Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land. 11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. 13 The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, 14 and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them. 15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 16 When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live. 17 But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. 18 So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live? 19 The midwives said to Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. 20 So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. 21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. 22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live. 1
2 Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. 2 The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. 3 When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. 4 His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him. 5 The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. 6 When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. This must be one of the Hebrews children, she said. 7 Then his sister said to Pharaoh s daughter, Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you? 8 Pharaoh s daughter said to her, Yes. So the girl went and called the child s mother. 9 Pharaoh s daughter said to her, Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages. So the woman took the child and nursed it. 10 When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, because, she said, I drew him out of the water. 2
08.24.2014 In God We Trust But to Do What? I know that no one other than me is counting, but this is the fiftieth sermon that I have preached at this church. Since September 1 of last year I have preached a sermon almost every week, except for the two weeks that Chan, our children s pastor, preached. Fifty! That s a nice round number. That s also a lot of sermons a lot more than I ever expected to give when I planned on becoming a hospital chaplain. Anniversaries, even ones as short as one year, provide an opportunity to look back and reflect on the time that has passed. However, I want to look back a bit beyond the past year and not to a sermon that I preached but to one that I heard. The best sermon I ever heard was based on this passage from Exodus 1 and 2. It was during the daily chapel service of the first semester of my second year of seminary. The sermon was given by one of the professors who taught preaching, Professor Frymire. Hearing his sermon was one of the reasons I registered for his Intro to Preaching class the following semester. One of the best reasons to attend chapel, which was not mandatory, was that you never knew who would be preaching on a given day. Most days it was a student from the senior class, but some days it could be a professor from any of the departments, not just the preaching department. On this particular day, it was Professor Frymire. Professor Frymire, as I soon learned, was unafraid to take risks when preaching. The risk he took with this sermon was to preach it in the first person. Most sermons that we hear, including every sermon that I have preached here all fifty of them are preached in the third person. Like a third-person narrator in a novel, the preacher tells us what happened. He or she describes what took place in a given Bible passage and helps us interpret and make sense of the passage. This helps us make sense of a world that is in some ways very different from our own. 3
The preacher has many tools to help with this. Sometimes insight can be found by examining the original Greek or Hebrew. In particular I believe that having historical context is important, so that we know what was happening at the time of the events that are described in the passage. But regardless of the tools used by the preacher, preaching in the third person keeps a bit of distance between the Bible and the congregation. The preacher then serves as a bridge, helping the congregation access the Bible. But as I said, Professor Frymire did not preach his sermon in the third person. He dispensed with all the interpretive tools he had learned in seminary. All he was left with was the story that is told in Exodus 1 and 2. Yet it was how he chose to tell that story that left such an impression on me. He told the story in character, from the perspective of Moses mother. That is, he spoke in the first person, as if he really were Moses mother. Now, you may think this odd not only the first-person perspective, but that a man was playing the part of a woman. But wait, it gets better. Professor Frymire is not a small man. In fact, he is a very large man. You can see for yourself [SLIDE]. I found a photo of him online. He is a very large man with white facial hair. He has also been blessed with a resonant baritone voice that makes everything he says sound like it comes from the mouth of an Old Testament prophet. In appearance, bearing, and voice no one would ever mistake him for a woman, let alone the mother of Moses. And yet for the ten minutes of that sermon chapel sermons were always short for those ten minutes Professor Frymire became Moses mother. He wore a stole, much like the one I m wearing. He draped it over his arm and cradled it as if he were holding a small child. He cradled the child and, as Moses mother, looked up to heaven to ask why God was forcing her to give up her three-month-old son. Did God appreciate what God was demanding of her? Did God know how hard this was for her? 4
Still in character, Professor Frymire, as Moses mother, pledged her trust in God s goodness. Although in the raw emotion of the delivery, the pledge to God seemed more like a challenge, as in, I m trusting you to be the God you say you are. You had better hold up your end of the bargain! And then Professor Frymire extended his arm and released the child into the waters of the Nile River. I ll be honest from my seat in the back of the chapel I was holding back tears. Professor Frymire made the emotions of Moses mother real for all of us who heard that sermon. It ceased to be words on a page but became for us living, breathing flesh. That s amazing when you consider that the passage itself reveals very little about her emotional state. As is usually the case with the Bible, the story is told in a manner more factual than emotional. In fact, we are never even told the name of Moses mother. To try and understand what she must have been feeling, all we have to go on are a few clues, such as when we are told that after giving birth she hid the baby. Hiding implies fear. Yet Professor Frymire brought out something else in the passage, although it s never explicitly stated. He brought to life for us the trust that the mother of Moses showed in letting go of a mother s strongest, most basic instinct the care of her child. That s where I d like to focus today on trust. At its most basic level, when all the architecture that has been added on to the Christian foundation is stripped away, what we are left with is a relationship of trust. Christians have different theologies on so many topics, different means of structuring the church, different ideas on how the Bible should be interpreted, and so many, many more differences. But when all of those differences are stripped away when we get down to the core of what it means to call ourselves Christian it has to do with trust trust in God and God s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Do we trust in God s innate goodness? Do we trust God s love? Do we trust God s wisdom? 5
Do we trust God s timing, which may be different than our own? Do we trust that God has the power to save, to redeem, and to resurrect? In America all of our currency both coins and paper is printed with the words In God we trust on it. In God we trust. What is it that we trust God to do [SLIDE]? If we trust God, will God make us wealthy? Will we live lives of happiness and good health? Will we get into the school of our choice? Will we land the job or the promotion we want? Will we not lack for material blessing? That gospel is preached in some churches, although I wouldn t really call it good news. Quite the opposite, in fact. What about when life seems to turn against us? Is that a sign that we lack trust? Do those who suffer do so only because they lack sufficient trust in God? If only they had more trust, would God then bless them, cure them, or comfort them? Christians who say such things and they are many would be better off saying nothing at all. Not only is such thinking not in line with what Christ teaches, it causes added pain to those who already suffer. In the short time I spent as a hospital chaplain I served in the trauma/intensive care unit. That part of the hospital was filled with victims of car accidents, shootings, and stabbings. There was so much suffering, and much of it was self-inflicted through poor decision making, like driving drunk and getting involved in gangs. But in that sense, I had it easy. Most of the patients I talked with were well aware of their own responsibility for how they ended up in the hospital. But one of my colleagues covered the pediatric intensive care unit. The patients there were all children. Many of them were just days old and bore no such responsibility, but their suffering, and that of their parents, was no less real. Trusting God doesn t mean that we trust that God will ensure our own happiness or that everything will work out as we would like if we just trust God enough. God makes no such promise to us. In fact, often times our trust is met with suffering. 6
Look at the disciples, most of whom lost their lives in service to the gospel! For its first two centuries of existence, when Christianity was a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, the Church produced generations of martyrs. The Book of Acts even tells of the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. One of the early Church s theologians was a man named Tertullian. He famously wrote that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church, meaning that those who sacrifice their lives because of the gospel make converts of nonbelievers through their bold witness. His words themselves witness to the profound trust that Christians place in a God who can redeem even the worst situation. Now my point is not to praise martyrdom. That is a tough road that I hope none of us have to travel. But the original disciples, as well as Stephen and the countless martyrs of the early church, all teach us the true nature of what it means to trust God that it is not about what happens to us, but it is all about who God is. It s about trusting in God s goodness despite our circumstances or what may happen to us. It s about trusting God s power to work through all circumstances God s power to rescue, yes, but also God s power to redeem and God s power to resurrect. That is the kind of trust that the mother of Moses displays when she lays her infant son in a basket made of papyrus, plasters it with bitumen so that water cannot seep in, and places the basket with the boy into the waters of the Nile. She is trusting in God to redeem this horrible choice that she has been forced to make. We mustn t picture her as happy in doing this. She is not thinking, All things work out for the best. I m sure the boy will be fine. Let s recognize the agony of what she is being forced to do. To give up the care of a child goes against a woman s maternal instinct. She is living a mother s worst nightmare. But such is the evil of the power that governs Egypt that it compels Hebrew mothers to give up their baby boys or have them face certain death. 7
As Moses mother shows, trusting God involves letting go sometimes even literally. The moment that she lets go of that papyrus basket, she immediately clings to God. She knows that she can no longer protect the boy. The boy is in God s hands. Trust is where our self-reliance ends and our dependence on God begins. Whether through choice or because of desperation, we cede control. We say, God, you take the wheel. We let go. We are all holding on to papyrus baskets of one form or another. We re clinging to something that we don t want to let go of because to do so would be to give up control. We are trusting in something God has given us rather than in God himself. But the greatest gift that God has given us is himself Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ God shows us that he is trustworthy [SLIDE]. God shows his trustworthiness in two ways. First, the life of Jesus is one of absolute fidelity to the mission that God gave him. Throughout his life through all the parables, all the healings, all the feeding miracles, all the public preaching to crowds, and all the quiet conversations with the disciples, Jesus demonstrated and embodied the love of the Father. That was his mission. And Jesus remained faithful to that mission all the way to the cross. Second, God was faithful to Jesus by not letting death have the last word. Death would have robbed the life of Christ of meaning, but by raising him God redeemed both Christ s life and his death. In doing so, God too shows us that he is trustworthy. We can trust in God s power to redeem even the worst situation and to resurrect hope and life [SLIDE]. What this means for us is that ultimately our trust lies not with anything that God has given us or can do for us, but with God himself. Through Jesus Christ, God calls us into a relationship of trust with the one who is fully trustworthy. 8