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Scripture: Exodus 1:15-2:10

Prayer of Preparation: We give thanks O God, of sacred stories, for the witness of the holy scriptures. Through it, you nurture our imaginations, touch our feelings, increase our awareness, and challenge our assumptions. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Moses is a central figure of the Jewish religion. Moses is to the Jews what Jesus is for us Christians. Moses is important to us, also, very important. The Gospel of Matthew describes Jesus as a new Moses. Jesus did not render Moses obsolete. Jesus fulfills all of what Moses was about. We need to remember Moses. Besides the story of Moses is another one of those great stories of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Moses had a miraculous birth. The details are recorded carefully, emphasizing that God had plans for Moses from the very beginning of his life. Moses was born in a time when it took a miracle for him to live. His miracle was orchestrated by some very bold and creative women.

At the end of Genesis, all was well, all was reconciled for the Israelites who had moved to Egypt because of the famine in the Promised Land. Joseph had rose to power, made the Pharaoh look really good, everyone prospered, and they lived happily and peacefully ever after….until a new Pharaoh came to power. This one did not have a clue about Joseph. This one was paranoid. The Israelites had grown strong and numerous and looked very threatening. So this new Pharaoh made them into slaves and worked them hard. The problem for the Pharaoh was what didn’t kill them, made them stronger. The Egyptians became ruthless, made the Israelite’s lives bitter with hard service. When this didn’t work, the Pharaoh took even more drastic measures and ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill all the male children they brought into the world. Many children were saved because the Hebrew midwives refused to follow orders. Many were lost because the Pharaoh also ordered his people to throw every baby boy born to the Hebrew slaves into the Nile River. This was the time when Moses was born and he was saved because of the bold risk his mother took. She set him afloat in a basket in the Nile River, hoping that he would float into the life and heart of the Pharaoh’s daughter. The plan worked and Moses was saved from the Pharaoh’s edict—saved by his own daughter.

Miriam, Moses’ sister stepped forward and offered to find the baby in the basket a nanny. Miriam went to her mother, brought her to the Pharaoh’s daughter, who accepted the offer. It was the Pharaoh’s daughter who named Moses or in Hebrew, Mosheh, because he was drawn out of the water.

The women worked God’s miracle. The midwives, Moses’ mother and sister, and the Pharaoh’s daughter are the reason Moses lived through a time when death was more certain than life.

Moses grew up in the Pharaoh’s house and was treated like a prince. He had it all and he didn’t even lose his mother or sister in the process. But as Moses grew into a young man, his privileged position became more complicated. He knew he was Hebrew and he saw how brutally his people were being treated.

One day Moses went for a walk out where his people were slaving away. He saw an Egyptian beating his slave. Moses became enraged, he looked around and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian, hid his body in the sand and went back to his royal home.

The next day Moses went out again and saw a couple of slaves struggling with each other. Moses stepped in and broke up the fight, asking, “Why are you struggling with each other?” Moses was taken by surprise when one of them said, “Who are you? Who made you our prince and judge? Are you going to kill me just like you killed that Egyptian?”

Moses was shocked. He was shocked because even though he had saved one of his own people from the cruel hand of an Egyptian, he was feared by his own people. He was shocked because it was common knowledge that he had killed a man. He was shocked because he realized he had no place to call home—he wasn’t an Egyptian or a slave. He was feared by his own people and sentenced to die by the Pharaoh. So he ran. He became a fugitive from justice. He fled to Midian, some 200 miles across the Sinai Peninsula, where he married a Midianite woman and planned, presumable, to hide himself for the rest of his life, in comfortable exile, away from the question of who is was.

One would think that a person who was brought up in a life of privilege and protection would not have acted the way Moses did. Moses had it made in Egypt. He was an adopted member of the ruling family. How did it happen that he felt such passion for the oppressed? Why didn’t he just shrug his shoulders and say to himself, “It’s not my problem.” Where did his anger come from—such righteous, murderous anger?

We have to read between the lines because as usual, the answers to our questions are not written in the Bible. However, we are good at reading between the lines. Hollywood has Charleton Heston, I mean Moses, growing up under the daily influence of his mother, teaching him and giving him a sacred Hebrew garment to remind him that he was one of God’s chosen.

The Prince of Egypt, wonderful animated movie about Moses throws in an Egyptian brother and makes Moses’ life even more complicated and divided as he grows up.

Whatever we read between the lines, notice this: Moses’ preservation is credited to his mother in the Bible. It reads: She saw he was a fine baby, so she hid him; and when she could not hide him any longer, she prepared a basket for him, and she placed him in the reeds of the Nile. We don’t know anything about his father. He was either out working as a slave or no longer alive. We only read about Moses’ mother, the midwives, the sister, women who acted on the behalf of the child every step of his life until he was a young man.

His mother must have told him stories of the Lord God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, and Sarah and Rebecca, Rachael and Leah. She must have told him that they were not always slaves and that God didn’t’ mean for them to remain slaves. She must have sung songs of faith to her child and, in doing so, planted in his soul, with words and rhythm, the pride of a people and the glory of their God.

So how did Moses’ even though he was dressed and educated like an Egyptian remember that he was Hebrew? Because his mother told him. Not that there’s something automatic and magical about the word mother. Before Moses’ mother was another mother, the mother of Jacob, Rebecca, who told Jacob to lie and cheat to get what they wanted. It’s a title full of influence, but there’s no guarantee that a mother or father’s influence will be used for good. The sons of Noah had the opportunity to learn great faith from their father; they also saw their father in a drunken state.

All these stories of the Old Testament remind us that there is untold power of influence in family. The people closest to us when we are young are the ones from whom we learn about relationships with others. Sometimes they are the ones who teach us the difference between right and wrong, between good and best. Sometimes they are those who help us want to be good, who give us a passion for what is best. And I’m not just talking about the traditional family with a father, mother, and siblings. A traditional family is rare these days. I’m talking about all kinds of families—single parent families, grandparents parenting their children’s children, what ever the configuration. Look at Moses’ family—talk about non-traditional. An adopted mother with his real mother and sister was his family.

Many of our convictions, passions, beliefs about life are established early in our lives. Sometimes we cannot fully explain why we believe so strongly. This is because our believing has been caught more than it has been taught. Moses may have been taught by his mother; but he caught her sense of justice starting from the day she risk giving him to an Egyptian princess. It is our peculiar human ability to perceive with our inner being, with a logic beyond logic, with thinking that includes blood and sinew as well as our mind. It is not infallible, of course. But in its own way it is more powerful than the mind because it involves our whole person, deep down into our bones. It is our intuition and it is important to pay attention to. Not everything that matters can be fed into a computer or measured in a test tube. I would even dare to say that the most important things in life can’t be measured. They are matters of the heart and soul.

When Moses responded to injustice with violence, he fled, running from all he knew, because suddenly all he knew didn’t make sense. He fled to the wilderness, not only to save his life but to save his soul. And when he saved his soul, then and only then was he able to save his people.

So I want to give you with a couple of things to think about. First, be very thankful for the good you have caught from people close to you—your family, your mentors, your teachers, whoever it was, be thankful. God speaks to us often, through the simple goodness we encounter in a variety of people; and that goodness, and that relationship causes us to hear and learn in a fashion that is much deeper than logic and words.

Second, be conscious of what others may be catching from you. You and I really have no idea who may be paying attention to us. Not that others are finding gems of wisdom in our every passing greeting. But some people, especially young children, more than we think, are catching something from us. Be sure that what they catch is good.

Today Scripture lesson is about the mother of Moses, and those bold midwives. These are the ones who influenced Moses in his early years, who gave him a foundation upon which to find his soul. And all of us know what happened to Moses after that. He saw a burning bush that called him by name and told him what to do and he led his people to freedom, out of Egypt, brought them the ten commandments, and he died knowing that his people had made it to the Promised Land.

Wouldn’t that be incredible, to have at least one clear direction from God? Just one burning bush. At least I think that is what I want. But do I really? Sometimes I am so busy I wonder if I would see it. Sometimes I am so focused on the task at hand and my list of things to do that I wonder if I would notice a burning bush until I was scorched by it. Or, like Moses, I am really quite terrified of what a bush might know about me, or what it might ask me to do. So, if I stay busy with the little things, maybe, God will not notice me or see that I already have plenty to do and call someone else to do the BIG stuff. So, I hunch my shoulders, keep my head down, and mind my own business. What burning bush? I must have missed it. Did someone call 911? A burning bush? Grab the fire extinguisher, for goodness sake, and put it out.

We live in a marvelous, stunning world. And complicated. It’s a world that takes our whole selves to live in fully alive and present. “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” wrote Elizabeth Barret Browning, “Each common bush aflame with God. Yet only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” Or mind our own business, run errands, pay the bills-- slaving away just to make ends meet.

Maybe it was because Moses was set adrift among the bulrushes of the Nile, maybe it’s because he had the most unlikely trio of heroes in his life, the midwives, his family, and an Egyptian princess, that he stopped in the wilderness that day and tended to the bush rather than the sheep. He risked getting burned, looking foolish, and being wrong. And because he did, maybe we can drop what we are doing and turn aside to look into every bush, every face, every event of life—the big and the small, the hoped for and the feared, the bad and the good. Maybe we can look into every one of them for God’s presence and God’s call. Because whatever it is that is going on in our lives, God is with, God is present, always has been and always will be. Earth is crammed with heaven and each common bush is aflame with God! Thanks be to God.