Sabbath Day Thoughts — “Resist!” Exodus 1:8-2:10

The world needs advocates, people who will dare to resist the powers and work for change.

In 1978, Lois Gibbs was a Niagara Falls housewife. She had two young children with unusual health problems. As Lois talked to neighbors, she learned that many of them were similarly plagued with chronic health issues, including reproductive problems, birth defects, chromosome abnormalities, and leukemia. The land on which their community had been built was the site of an old canal, Love Canal, which the Hooker Chemical Company had used as a dumping ground for chemicals. After the site was filled in, Hooker Chemical gave it to the growing city of Niagara Falls, which allowed housing to be built there. When state officials detected the leakage of toxic underground chemicals into the basements of local homes, Lois Gibbs wondered, Could the illness plaguing her daughters be linked to the leaking chemicals? In need of answers, Lois soon found that no one wanted to admit the truth and there were no watchdog agencies or consumer resources that she could turn to for help.

On May 3, 1980, 13-year-old Cari Lightner was walking to church along a quiet road. She was meeting friends for a carnival but never made it. A car swerved out of control and struck and killed the girl. Police later arrested Clarence Busch in connection with the death. Busch had a long record of arrests for intoxication. In fact, he had been arrested on another hit-and-run drunk-driving charge less than a week earlier. Cari’s grieving mother, Candy Lightner, learned from police that drunk driving was rarely prosecuted harshly, and that the man who killed her daughter was unlikely to spend significant time behind bars. The infuriated Mom decided to take action against what she later called “the only socially accepted form of homicide.”

In 2008, when Malala Yousufzai was eleven years old, the Taliban took control of her town in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. The Islamic extremists banned many things: television, music, and education for girls. Malala kept a diary which recorded the events and spoke out against the terrorist regime. When her diary was published by the BBC, the Taliban soon responded with death threats. In 2009, a Taliban gunman boarded the bus that Malala was riding and shot her in the head. She survived and was evacuated to Birmingham England for months of surgeries and rehabilitation. Malala and her family had a new home and a new life in the UK with unlimited educational opportunity. But Malala kept thinking about those other girls, her friends back in the Swat Valley—and in countless places around the world—where education for girls and women was outlawed.

The world needs advocates who will resist the powers and work for change.

Our reading from Exodus grants us a glimpse of two humble women who would outsmart their king and head off genocide. They faced a formidable opponent: Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the Ancient Near East. He ruled over a Mediterranean empire that stretched from Libya to Sudan to Syria at a time when Egypt was at the pinnacle of its economic, military, and cultural power. Pharoah made laws, waged wars, collected taxes, oversaw the land, and dispensed justice. As the Empire’s religious leader, Pharaoh was the divine intermediary between the pantheon of Egyptian gods and the people, a living god on earth who, upon his death, would become fully divine.

When Shiphrah and Puah were summoned to an audience with Pharoah, they knelt before a man who never heard “no.” Even though their calling as midwives made them guardians of life, Pharaoh demanded that they become agents of death. When attending the birth of Hebrew women, the midwives were ordered to murder every boy baby.

Can we imagine the fear, powerlessness, and terror that the midwives must have felt? They had no Midwives’ Union, no ACLU, no powerful political allies who could help them speak back to power. If change was going to happen, they would have to do it themselves.

Shiphrah and Puah were afraid of Pharaoh, but they feared God. Their reverence and devotion to Yahweh gave them the courage to resist.  The two midwives engaged in what Dennis Olson of Princeton Seminary has called “the Bible’s first act of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance.” They went about their work. They coached those laboring mothers through painful contractions, tiresome transitions, and big pushes. They caught those newborn infants, cleared their airways, wiped them clean, and pressed them into their mother’s arms. They welcomed life. And when Pharaoh called them out on the ongoing baby boom among the Hebrew slaves, Shiphrah and Puah covered their tracks by appealing to Pharaoh’s prejudice. “Those Hebrew women aren’t like you refined Egyptians. They’re like animals. They push out their babies long before we arrive to do your bidding.” Those midwives resisted, creating the space for Moses to be born, Moses, who would one day oppose Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of Egypt to freedom.

The world needs advocates who will dare to resist the powers and work for change.

Back in 1978, Lois Gibbs organized her neighbors to form the Love Canal Homeowners Association. She led her community in a lengthy battle against the local, state, and federal governments. After years of struggle, more than 800 families were eventually evacuated, and cleanup of Love Canal began. Her efforts led to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “Superfund,” used to locate and clean up toxic sites throughout the US. In response to her success at Love Canal, Gibbs received over 3,000 letters from Americans everywhere, requesting information on how they could solve toxic waste problems in their area. Lois founded the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, a grassroots environmental crisis center that has trained thousands of community groups around the nation to protect neighborhoods from exposure to hazardous wastes. Lois Gibbs was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1990 which honors grassroots environmental heroes who take significant action for our planet. 45 years after Love Canal, Lois is still resisting.

Candy Lightner, the bereaved mother of that 13-year-old child killed by a drunk driver, stood up to the injustice of a world that turned a blind eye to drunk driving. She founded MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She began lobbying California’s governor, Jerry Brown, to set up a state investigative task force. In 1981, California passed a law imposing minimum fines of $375 for drunk drivers and mandatory imprisonment of up to four years for repeat offenders. President Ronald Reagan later asked Candy to serve on the National Commission on Drunk Driving. In July 1984, she stood next to Reagan as he signed a law reducing federal highway grants to any state that failed to raise its drinking age to 21. By the following year, all 50 states had tightened their drunk-driving laws. By 2000, the 20th anniversary of MADD’s founding, alcohol-related fatalities had dropped nationally by some 40 percent, and states with the toughest drunk-driving laws were beginning to treat alcohol-related fatalities as murder.

On Malala Yousufzai’s 16^th birthday in 2013, she spoke in support of education for girls at the United Nations. Later that year, she published her first book, an autobiography entitled I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. In 2014, through her non-profit Malala Fund, she began traveling the world and advocating for girls in Jordan, Syria, Kenya, Nigeria and beyond. At age 17, she became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance speech, Malala said, “This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those voiceless children who want change.” Time Magazine has named her one of the 100 most influential voices in the world. She remains a staunch advocate for the power of education and for girls to become agents of change in their communities.

The world needs advocates who will resist the powers, get into good trouble, and work for change, holy change, change that will nudge this hurting world a little closer to God’s Kingdom. Could it be you?

Resources:

Kimberly D. Russaw. “Commentary on Exodus 1:8-2:10” in Preaching This Week, August 27, 2023. Accessed online at workingpreacher.org.

Karla Suomala. “Commentary on Exodus 1:8-2:10” in Preaching This Week, August 27, 2017. Accessed online at workingpreacher.org.

Dennis Olson. “Commentary on Exodus 1:8-2:10” in Preaching This Week, August 24, 2008. Accessed online at workingpreacher.org.

Christopher Eames. “Who Was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?” in Let the Stones Speak, March-April 2023. Accessed online at https://armstronginstitute.org/882-who-was-the-pharaoh-of-the-exodus

History editors. “MADD founder’s daughter killed by drunk driver,” in History, April 30, 2021. Accessed online at https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/madd-founders-daughter-killed-by-drunk-driver

The Goldman Environmental Prize. “Lois Gibbs, 1990.” Accessed online at  https://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/lois-gibbs/#recipient-bio

–. Malala Yousafzai – Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Sat. 26 Aug 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2014/yousafzai/biographical/&gt;

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Exodus 1:8-2:10

⁸Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. ⁹He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. ¹⁰Come, 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.” ¹¹Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. ¹²But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. ¹³The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, ¹⁴and 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.

¹⁵The 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.” ¹⁷But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. ¹⁸So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?” ¹⁹The 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.” ²⁰So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. ²¹And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. ²²Then 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.”

2Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. ²The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. ³When 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. ⁴His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

⁵The 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. ⁶When 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. ⁷Then 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?” ⁸Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. ⁹Pharaoh’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. ¹⁰When 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.”

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