Proper 16, Year A: Exodus 1:8-2:10
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
August 23, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 23:00 in, in case the link doesn’t drop you at the right place).
“But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.” – Exodus 8:17
I went to college at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. To describe it as socially conservative would be a severe understatement, especially for those of us living on the West Coast. The administration trumpeted the school as “the West Point of Christian colleges.” Students carried the burden of a substantial number of restrictions and expectations, all, theoretically, based on the Bible. Having a “Biblical” (with a capital B) lifestyle and worldview were the focus and the mantra. So no one was allowed to go to movies or wear jeans. First-years weren’t able to leave campus without the company of a trusted older student of the same biological sex. Drinking, smoking, or gambling would get you kicked out immediately. Men and women couldn’t touch or even sit within six inches of one another. And yes, there were “chaperones” that enforced those rules anywhere we could possibly go.
My sister was a senior when I was a freshman. One night someone confronted her because I had walked her to her dormitory after dinner. When she pointed out that the school’s behavior handbook explicitly allowed brothers to walk their sisters to the women’s dorms, the response turned into the fact that she was engaged, and what would people think if they saw her talking to another man? She had been “a bad testimony” by failing to “avoid all appearance of evil,” like the Bible taught us. While neither of us received demerits for it—I didn’t even find out about it until she told me the next day—the incident still stands out in my memory more than twenty-five years later.
I didn’t often oppose the rules while I was an undergrad. Sure, you didn’t necessarily know all of them before you enrolled, but they were clearly written out, and honestly, they seemed a lot simpler to me than the ones in the small religious community I had come from. But every so often something would lead me to start questioning in the back of my mind.
All students attended mandatory chapel services Mondays through Thursdays at 11:00 in the morning. (Fridays were reserved for group prayer meetings instead.) One day I remember the speaker rebuking the entire student body for an incident that had occurred at a basketball game the previous night. Not having the remotest interest in sports, I wasn’t there, but apparently, a student had lost her balance on the bleachers and tumbled quite a way down the stands. (I never heard how badly she was injured.) The preacher was angry that none of the men had attempted to stop or even slow her fall. But his rant was confusing to many of us: it denied the reality of life on campus. Men weren’t allowed to touch women because the Bible, as the school taught and we understood it, told us not to. And we were expected to obey the Bible above all else. Add to that the constant external enforcement and repetitive internalization of the school “standards,” how could any of us have stopped her fall without breaking the rules, getting into trouble, and—worst of all—sinning against God? As the speaker continued to upbraid us, I began to wonder if maybe our adherence to the rules wasn’t quite as important as they had been telling us.
They also told us that anyone who was truly “saved” would know their Bible thoroughly so as to have the Biblical viewpoint on family, work, entertainment, and pretty much anything else you could think of. No matter what you faced in life, the Bible was the Answer. So I began to read it with more and more attention. That, however, brought additional confusion to my understanding of what we called Christian standards. Today’s Hebrew Bible passage was one that particularly troubled me.
It wasn’t the oppression and slavery or baby Moses’ mother abandoning him to the Nile—she was, after all, following the letter of Pharaoh’s mandate. It didn’t even bother me that Pharaoh’s daughter would be raising Moses within the pagan Egyptian culture instead of a “pure” Hebrew environment.
It was the midwives that gave me pause.
Here were two women, Puah and Shiphrah, who the Bible clearly recorded sinning, yet, according to the same text, God honored them. I could explain their disobedience to Pharaoh’s order to murder the Hebrew babies: the women were obeying God’s greater law, “Thou shalt not kill.” The problem was that in the process they had violated another of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not lie.”[1] Lying was one of the basic sins that affronted God. According to everything I had been taught, instead of lying, Puah and Shiphrah should have told the truth and borne the consequences of their action, likely as martyrs. That’s what I thought would have truly pleased God. But that’s not what happened. The midwives lied—they sinned. Yet God rewarded the two of them. It didn’t make any sense. The only way I could reconcile the conundrum was to note that since God wouldn’t be giving the Ten Commandments until several decades later, lying wasn’t yet a formal sin in their era.
But then I kept finding more and more problems like this. The way we read Jeremiah and Proverbs, alcohol was evil, yet portions of the Law commanded the Israelites to celebrate various religious festivals using “strong drink.” Worse than Puah and Shiphrah, Abraham and Jacob both lied constantly, but we held them up as Founders of the Faith. Ehud led an armed rebellion against a legitimate, God-given authority, flat out murdering the lawful king in the process, but the Bible celebrated him as a hero in the days of the Judges. David and his men ate the sanctified bread, reserved only for God and priests, from the tabernacle. Worst of all was that Jesus really did keep on breaking the rules God had clearly set down for Israel to follow.
Over a long period of time I began to realize that much of what I had deemed to be Biblical was actually theological. The Bible makes statements and tells stories—those things are biblical. In addition, faithful, well-meaning people have used logic, experience, and philosophy to draw additional conclusions from what the Bible says—that’s theology. Those ideas, suggestions, and rules may be based on things found in the Bible (or extrapolations from what someone else says the Bible tells us), but they themselves are not the Word of God.
I had grown up thinking that what our theological tradition said was the same as what the Bible said. And the Bible does say some things related to much of what I had learned. But seeing the world only through that particular tradition’s interpretation, its form of theology, had warped my view of the Bible itself. I was seeing the words but missing the point. I was looking at the Bible as rules for life while the Bible is, more accurately, a rule of life.
Some of you may remember that before COVID-19 hit, I was offering a monthly series on Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s “Way of Love.” The first session of those classes begins by explaining the concept of a rule of life. A rule of life can sound a lot like—and can easily devolved into—a list of rules, but that’s not the point or even the right way to look at it. A rule of life is simply a set of standards one adopts and chooses to adhere to in order to develop a long-term practice in a particular area. It’s a “rule” in the sense of a ruler—something you can use to measure your own progress. The military establishes a code of conduct, but soldiers must develop a rule of life to effectively attain the ideals settled within those rules. Athletes create rules of life regarding nutrition and fitness. And pretty much every religious tradition is, at its core, a rule of life. But a rule of life is not meant to be static. In fact, to be effective, it can’t be invariable. It needs to flex in the face of reality. If, in the course of following your rule, you realize that some of your practices are holding your back or even leading you away from where you want to go or who you want to be, that’s your opportunity and responsibility to become creative—to change and react in ways that redirect you back toward your goal.
As Christians, we do try to follow what the Bible says—especially Jesus’ life and teachings—as a means of correcting our direction, of cooperating with God. This alignment, the way of straightening oneself out and getting back in adjustment toward our ultimate goal of living as children of God, is what the Bible is talking about when it uses the word “justification” or “righteousness.” A “just” person isn’t one who always thinks the right thoughts or is able to follow each and every rule at all times. A just person is one who consistently realigns themself with God. Righteousness isn’t about perfection. It’s about realizing you’ve left your rule, then adapting and doing your best to return. God doesn’t judge anyone for how precisely they’ve adhered to a set of commands. Through Christ, God has made us one family and, like a loving parent, is happy to see us give our best try, to get up again and keep moving when we fall and to lift up our friends and siblings who may have fallen around us.
That’s why I try to emphasize fidelity and faithfulness over the more common understanding of “faith” and “belief.” Faith and belief tend to be individual and internal. They’re often thought constructs rather than means of living. But assenting to or adopting the idea of a thing isn’t the same as it becoming a reality. An idea unattached to some sort action is really more like a daydream or simple imagination. What we call “faith” and “belief” can easily become ways of avoiding responsibility. They turn into a means of pretending to ourselves—deluding ourselves—that God is content with our inaction as the world devolves into chaos around our feet.
Without action—without faithfulness—it is impossible to follow God—the word “follow” inherently is action. Life as a Christian is not based on some decision that stays locked inside your head or a set of words and songs that come out of your mouth a few times a day. It isn’t supposed to be a way of purifying your own personal being, of finding a way to become “right with God” as an individual. It certainly isn’t about obeying a list of rules telling you what you must or must not do or think.
The Christian life is about living. It’s about paying attention, about moving and making decisions. It’s about seeing where God is at work in the world, not just the Church, and joining in. It’s about making mistakes. It’s about falling down. It’s about getting up again, about realigning ourselves with the Reign of the Heavens Jesus has already brought so near. It’s doing the hard work, not of somehow escaping to heaven, but of bringing heaven with us wherever we go. It isn’t about trying to recapture some sort of glory or status buried in the past but rather finding a way forward, of moving toward a better future for all of God’s children. It’s about seeing others’ personhood, about breaking the rules in order to save someone falling down the bleachers. It’s about lifting up others who have fallen and sharing from our own scant supplies as we continue along the path Christ laid out for us, a path that, one way or another, will lead through suffering and death as much for us as it did for him. But most of all, the Christian life is about resurrection—of being the diligent, incarnate hands of God in the renewal of Creation. Even if—even as—the powers of the world force you into bondage beside the rest of your family, it’s about finding creative ways to rescue and restore humanity—both others’ and your own—just like Puah and Shiphrah.
“But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.”
[1] More completely, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”