Sermon delivered August 13, 2023 by Rev. Mark Seifried @ Haydenville Congregational Church, UCC.
Publication here is for devotional purposes and not for duplication.
Based upon Exodus 1:8-2:10,

Mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally renowned retreat leader Cynthia Bourgeault shares a great little tale in her book, The Wisdom Way of Knowing. Bourgeault spins her parable this way:

Once upon a time, in a not-so far away land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy; and since they were mid-life acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called “Getting All You Can Out of Your Shell.” There were recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being.

One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped “out of the blue” by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upwards at the tree, he said, “We – are – that!”
The other acorns concluded, “This is obviously delusional thinking.” Nevertheless, one of them further engaged him in conversation: “So tell us, how would we become that tree?” “Well,” said the dirty knotted capless acorn, pointing downward, “It has something to do with going into the ground – and cracking open the shell.” “Insane,” they responded. “Totally morbid! Why, then we wouldn’t be acorns anymore.”

We all want change, yet so few are willing to die to our old way of being. In some ways, life changes us without our consent. Accidents happen. Society changes. We become ill or less able. Technology forces us to learn new ways of being. People die. Leaders come and go and shake up the order of things. Franciscan author and teacher, Father Richard Rohr, has written extensively about spiritual journeys and teaches there is a cycle that keeps repeating itself in all of nature and in the human soul. We go from a life of order to a life of disorder and then, after a while, life is reordered. 

Rohr teaches that the order-disorder-reorder cycle is akin to many stories in the Bible and in social constructs. Our lesson for today is part of the order-disorder-reorder genre from the Hebrew Bible where the Israelites lived for many years as nomads. There was an order to their lives. And then there is the disordered period we heard about today where they were enslaved in Egypt and later when they spent 40 years in the wilderness. Finally, they arrive at the Promised Land and reorder their lives.

For many years, our society seemed to be well ordered. You can look back at television shows from the fifties and sixties to see social order epitomized in characters such as Donna Reed and June Cleaver. They created impeccable households for their hardworking husbands and children. These icons of virtue would awaken each morning and appear in their nicely appointed, spic and span clean kitchens with beautifully coiffed hair, makeup and a sharp little housedress. They cooked breakfast for their appreciative husbands while they read the morning newspaper. The children would join Mom and Dad for breakfast, and then Dad would go off to work while the kids went to school. While they were away, June and Donna worked their magic on the house, doing laundry and cleaning to their hearts’ content before they began dinner preparations. Magically, by the time their husbands arrived back home, they donned an evening dress and an elegant strand of pearls. Again they were meticulously coiffed and made up as the happy family ate dinner and spent their evenings together.

That model seemed to work well for many. Except it didn’t for many families who were not middle or upper class. And it didn’t work for many women. That model didn’t work for families of color or for LGBT people either because the system wasn’t created for them. The social order created a privileged class of people with white men as the overlords. And a lie was perpetuated by the privileged class, saying you were dealt a bad life because you either didn’t work hard enough or that had not received God’s favor. Throughout much of American history, there was push back against the white dominant system, albeit muted at times.

One example of a push back was on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 17, 1842, when James W.C. Pennington delivered a sermon in the Fifth Congregational Church of Hartford, CT. Pennington had escaped slavery in Maryland at the age of 19 and became the first African American allowed to attend classes at Yale University, although he was not allowed to formally enroll. He was eventually ordained as a minister in the Congregational Church of Newtown, CT. 

In his Thanksgiving sermon, Pennington said, “I am prepared to take the ground, and the show accordingly, that the Covenant [allowing slavery], involving a moral wrong, is not binding upon the aiding party. The difficulty presented is this, that the agreement is interwoven in the Constitution, and that it cannot be broken without breaking the Constitution, and this is treason. Now, we are Constitutionalists. We do not want to break the Constitution, but we want to mend it; for we contend that, just at this clause, there is no Constitution, as applied to slavery. There is a breach here, which is only filled with dead letters.

“Our [present social order] may be summed up in the following form: to deliver up a fugitive from bondage, is to commit a moral wrong, and taking away a man’s liberty, and reducing him to slavery. But, nothing is binding that is morally wrong. Therefore, to deliver a fugitive is not binding. To go out into the street and catch that man and bind him hand and foot, and send him into Maryland slavery, must be absolutely right or absolutely wrong. It cannot be right and wrong at the same time.

Pennington was right of course. The social order that sanctioned slavery was and is an absolute moral wrong. And yet that idea seems to be up for debate nearly 200 years after Rev. Pennington delivered that sermon. I’m sure you have heard the news recently where politicians in Southern states along with their minions who are assembling textbooks for school children state that slavery wasn’t all bad. They say slavery provided job training for those who were subjected to it. It seems that they want to teach children that there was some moral good is among the vilest corruption of morality experienced by humanity. Repeating the wisdom of Rev. Pennington, “It cannot be right and wrong at the same time.”

In a multitude of ways, the legacy of slavery continues in our contemporary culture. And yet white domination is seen as normal to the point that, when I told a former high school classmate at our last class reunion I could not live in the racist city of St. Louis where I was raised, she told me: “There is nothing we can do to change it. Besides, we are not a racist society.” This former classmate of mine has advanced degrees and has traveled the world. She knows, just like we do, that health outcomes and mortality rates are vastly different between Caucasians and people of color and yet she and many others think that we can do nothing about the disparities – to which I say, “You are wrong. This is willful and it’s part of the white dominant order of society.” She knows, just like we do, that overall children who go to school in black majority schools fare worse than their white counterparts and that black children are more likely to face detention than their white peers in multiracial schools. She knows, just like we do, that black men are more likely than white men to be arrested and incarcerated for the same infractions. She knows, just like we do, that garbage dumps and industrial waste disposal sights are more likely to be located near majority black communities than their white counterparts. She knows, just like we do that people of color are paid only a percentage of what white folks are. She knows, just like we do, that all these injustices are the way our culture is intentionally ordered and she shrugs her shoulders and says, “There is nothing we can do about it.”  – to which I say, “You are wrong. This is willful and it’s part of the white dominant order of society.” Amen, church?

It was that way in ancient Egypt as we heard in our Bible lesson for today. The order of the day was oppression and forced hard labor for the Israelites who were enslaved in Egypt. The order of the day was to kill the newborn male babies of the Israelite parents. Thanks be to God for people like the midwives Shiphrah and Puah who defy the social order of oppression for the sake of liberty.

Echoing the words of Rev. James W.C. Pennington, “Nothing is binding that is morally wrong.” We cannot tolerate the systems of oppression that deem some members of the human race as lesser and even disposable. We cannot blindly turn an eye to the moral wrong and claim that our nation deserves our patriotism. No nation deserves blind patriotism and as those who follow the way of Jesus, our nation cannot receive our cooperation in maintaining the present order. 

It feels to me as if we are in some ways being called to manifest the work of two midwives in our Bible story for today. In this lesson, we discover that, regardless of their nationality, Shiphrah, which means “beautiful,” and Puah, which means “splendid,” show that they serve the transcendent God, not Pharaoh. They do not carry out the king’s orders, and to save the Hebrew boys, they appeal to what appears to be Pharaoh’s own prejudicial sense of the relationship between physical difference and ethnicity. They insist that “the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” The Hebrew word here for “vigorous” shares the root of the word “life.” While deceiving Pharaoh, that phrase indicates to the reader that Hebrew women are full of life. Their identity as children of the transcendent God resists death. And so it is and has been for people of faith – because we worship the God of love, we revere the sacred nature of every life, even to the point of defying social order. 

Beloved, I sense that the Spirit has called us all to be midwives for God and defy the Pharaohs of our day by helping to birth a new social order. The Spirit calls us to speak again about what we see, what we know and what we believe. The church is called to demonstrate to our community, in our own neighborhood, that what we have to say is important for the common good.

However, in order for the church to faithfully speak, we will need to stop identifying and standing against groups and ideas at what we think others have gotten wrong and begin to get clear on what we stand for and what we hold that is good, beautiful and true. As Madeline L’Engle wisely wrote: “We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” 

Now is the time for the church to order itself by loving God and serving our neighbors with urgent conviction so that we can more effectively disrupt the status quo of social order. Our call is to model an identity that matches our aspirations where we have deep and fulfilling relationships that help us unlearn the internal and external expressions of oppression, violence, supremacy and inferiority. Our call is to both show and tell the transcendent nature of the kin-dom of God. This social order imagined by Jesus, Shiphrah and Puah would bring a sea change to a community that is divided and oppositional, even and especially in this charming little hamlet of Haydenville in Williamsburg, MA.

Let us pray …O God, you call us into relationship with one another. You urge us to end the divisions among us. And yet we wonder, “How is this even possible?” With fists clenched and jaws set, we grip tightly our perspectives and opinions, ready for battle with any who would challenge us. We worship the god of Being Right. Desperate to belong somewhere, we claim allegiance to tribes of our own making — tribes of doctrine, of politics, of social location. Our quarrels reach your ears, and even as we stammer out our excuses, we know it is not your way.

Your way is excellent. Your way is relational, humble and dedicated to serving others who may live outside our bubbles. Your way transcends the dim truths we might fashion from earthly resources. And your way seems impossible for us to imagine. And so we pray that you would help us to imagine it, O God. Imagine it for us. Imagine it within us. Show us how to break the bonds of oppression. Help us to sacrifice our paltry security, our self-made identity. Teach us to share your abundance. You have a better identity in mind for us. Transform us into Shiphrah and Puah, midwives of justice and liberation. Let us be one community. This is your way. We long for it, too.