You can make a difference

Pentecost 11a

August 24, 2014

Exodus 1:8-2:10

We’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well.  In 1830, the congress of the United States of America passed the Indian Removal Act, which decreed that members of the five Native American tribes which did not wish to assimilate into current culture, would be removed from their homeland and relocated to land west of the Mississippi.  The act was passed under pressure from those who wished to settle the lands held by those tribes.  Thousands of Native Americans died on what is now known as the Trail of Tears.   In 1930’s Adolf Hitler rose to power on a platform which would come to include a systematic genocide of the Jewish people.  The Jews, Hitler argued, were the reason that Germany had been unsuccessful in WWI and they were also to blame for the economic collapse of Germany that followed.  It only makes sense to rid the Reich of that enemy. 

If we can only get rid of this group or that group, we can get what we want. If you blame them for long enough, others will think there is something wrong with them and then they will rally with us against them.  They’re lazy, they carry diseases, they are driving the value of homes in our community down, they want to take our jobs, they are ruining this country, if we don’t get rid of them, they will ruin our economy again and we won’t ever get it fixed. 

The movie I am referring to is called Scapegoat…so named for the ancient practice of symbolically placing the sins of a community onto a sheep, but usually a goat, and then sacrificing that goat in order to satisfy the anger of the gods.  We can usually tell scapegoating is going to occur when the us vs. them language occurs…and experience tells us that it usually doesn’t end well.

Those Hebrews are getting too many in number, worried a paranoid Pharaoh in today’s version of the movie.  Forgetting their shared history with Joseph having saved the Egyptians from the famine and the then Pharaoh welcoming Joseph’s family as honored guests in their land about 400 years earlier, this Pharaoh now saw the ancient Israelites as possible terrorists.  If one person caused an uprising, he worried, those Hebrews would outnumber us Egyptians and certainly overtake us. So persecute them…enslave them, he said, but the Hebrews just kept increasing in number.  The more they were persecuted, the more babies they seemed to have. 

Under further stress of a growing Hebrew population, his new solution was simple, kill the male newborns.  A generation without members of the male gender would render this Hebrew threat powerless quickly. 

Little did he know that one act of civil disobedience performed by four women would have the power to change history. 

The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah ignored Pharaoh’s order to kill the male babies, playing off of Pharaoh’s own paranoia and prejudices about those Hebrew women, informing Pharaoh that these women were much different in childbirth than the delicate Egyptian women.  For the Hebrew women were forceful in childbirth and delivered their babies before the midwives even had a chance to arrive.  They just got their too late to carry out Pharaoh’s orders, Shiphrah and Puah said.  And though Pharaoh doesn’t realize it, we know they are lying.

Then we have a young mother, who, upon seeing the beautiful and healthy nature of her son, hides him in her home as long as she can and, when she can no longer hide him, she places him in a basket in the Nile.  Technically she did follow the orders of the Pharaoh to toss the male babies in the river Nile, but her baby had some protection from the pith and bitumen covering the basket.  Finally, we have Pharaoh’s own daughter, who finds this baby in the basket floating among the reeds.  Even though she knows that this little boy is the son of a Hebrew woman, she is moved by pity hearing him cry and spares his life, even taking him into her house…Pharaoh’s house and adopting him as her son after he is weaned by his own mother. 

Little did they know it at the time, but in these seemingly insignificant acts, four women would wind up changing history.

In those acts of civil disobedience, a young man was raised up in the house of Pharaoh who would be called by God to rescue the Hebrews from the hands of the Egyptians and return them to the land that God had promised to Abraham.

We don’t talk about this story much, we prefer the flashier stories in Exodus about the acts of God in bushes on fire but not consumed by fire, in rivers turned to blood, and staffs turned into snakes, in plagues…and we sometimes forget that the beginning of this story had a humbler origin.  It was this beginning, though, that would lead to an ending that turned out differently than what we would expect from the opening credits of the Exodus version of the scapegoat movie.

How are you going to change the world this week?  In what way will your actions change the course of history for the better?  Did you know that you have the power to change the world?

In 2012 when the National Youth Gathering met in New Orleans, each day we heard the theme song for the gathering…the chorus goes like this.

I want my life to make a difference

I want my life to make a change

I want my life to do some good here

I want my life to make a change

You have that power, children of God, to make a difference…to make an impact that could change the course of history.  For with God, nothing is too small or insignificant to have the power to do amazing things. 

Seek out the lost, feed the hungry, heck – smile at the stranger walking down the street.  When school starts, sit next to the kid who is at a table all by themselves.

It took just one person, we really don’t know exactly who, to start the ice bucket challenge that would come to focus on Lou Gehrig’s disease and has so far raised over $40 million dollars for ALS research. 

Your impact may not be as big in the eyes of the world, but it is just as important in the eyes of God. 

So get out there.  Make a change.