The Good Book- P is for Puah- Rev. Wendy McCormick- June 30, 2024
“P is for Puah” Rev Wendy McCormick
June 30, 2024
I was late to discover and become a huge fan of the British television series, Call the Midwife. It’s been around since 2012, is now on Netflix, and is currently in its 13th season. The series was originally based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth who worked as a nurse midwife with the nuns of an Anglican religious order, delivering babies, in the impoverished working-class neighborhood of Poplar in the east end of London in the 1950s.
Through the show’s wonderful characters and stories, we learn a lot about social conditions among the poor, including the immigrants from all corners of the world, we learn about rapid change coming to society during those years, and we see all manner of issues and experiences in women’s reproductive health in that era.
I think part of the appeal of this show is that for us midwifery is largely an historical curiosity. We live in an era in which births attended by midwives are the exception. But of course, for millennia before us in nearly every society and culture, the exceptional or rare birth would have been the one without a midwife. In this country, they were disproportionately Indigenous women and women of color.
Today’s Bible story tells of two midwives who changed the course of faith and history. Most female characters in our Bible do not have names; they are at best identified as someone’s wife or daughter . . . or concubine. So we learn to pay extra attention when a female character has a name. Shiphrah and Puah, midwives to the Hebrew women in Egypt. I don’t know about you, but my Sunday School lessons about the Hebrews in slavery in Egypt started with the baby Moses in the basket in the bullrushes, not here with Shiphrah and Puah. But what a story!
The beginning of Exodus tells about the thriving and multiplication of God’s people in Egypt. Fear that the “natives” will be outnumbered by those of a different ethnicity is familiar in our time. And that’s what motivates Pharoah to enslave God’s people.
Look,” Pharoah said, a few verses before today’s reading, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” But, the Bible tells us, even in bondage, the Hebrew population continued to grow and multiply.
Slavery was not enough, so Pharoah turned to genocide, instructing the midwives to kill the male babies of the Hebrew women just as they are delivered.
According to Anna Carter Florence: “Puah and Shiphrah knew how blood-and-guts hard it was to bring new life into this world. . . . And women who do this kind of work, day in and day out, don’t scare easily. Pharoah hadn’t foreseen that. He assumed anyone to whom he gave a direct order would be so terrified of him that they’d snap to immediately, no matter what the order was – but he underestimated the midwives. . . . When Pharoah told them to kill any Hebrew boy they delivered, they went right out and didn’t do it. When he asked them why, they lied to his face. It’s the Bible’s first recorded instance of civil disobedience.”
The midwives did not do what the king of Egypt commanded. Why? The text is clear: it’s because they feared God.
It’s all there in one verb. They feared God and not Pharoah. After all, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as it says in Proverbs.
Fear of the Lord saved all those babies. Fear of the Lord preserved God’s people. Fear of the Lord set in motion the part of the story we know so well about Moses. Fear of the Lord memorialized two working women who would otherwise be long lost to history. Fear of the Lord caused two apparently powerless people to defy and lie to the most powerful person around without “fear” of the consequences.
Fear of the Lord. It’s not fear in the sense of being scared of the dark or afraid of heights or fearful of monsters. It’s more like awe and respect and ultimate loyalty. Fear of losing our integrity or of misaligning our priorities. Fear of standing with the temporal, self-serving values of hatred and death that are all around us instead of with the eternal and divine values and priorities of our God.
We don’t have Pharoah to fear, but Pharoah represents so many worldly powers that enjoy our allegiance and our fear – our fear of rocking the boat, our fear of speaking out, our fear of saying or doing something controversial or unpopular. To say nothing of our fear of losing what we have – our privilege, our comfort, our position. Nobody is asking us to our faces to commit murder like Shiphrah and Puah. But when our fear of the Lord – or our loyalty to God’s way -- is subordinate to other fears and loyalties, we give our silent consent to all sorts of death-dealing realities that go on right under our noses --- whether it’s women not getting the health care they need or infant mortality rates that should shock us; whether it’s the death of 10’s of thousands of innocent people in a conflict we tell ourselves we can’t understand and shouldn’t take sides in; whether it’s the appalling experiences of asylum seekers or the even more appalling reasons they flee.
Perhaps it’s because Puah and Shiphrah had little to lose. They did not have rank or status or privilege. Some say it’s easier for those who have less to resist evil, to stand up for justice, because they have less to lose, that it’s harder for us. The more we have, the more fearful we are of those with the power to take it away. Perhaps.
Or perhaps it’s because they were so literally and fundamentally in the life business. The business of preserving life, saving life, and bringing forth new life. And because the focus of their work was not on themselves. in the very first episodes of Call the Midwife, the main character, a young Jenny Lee, feels justifiably proud of herself after a terrifying and harrowing first day in which she is tested and proves herself up to this difficult job. An older nurse midwife reminds her that there are no medals for midwives, that this is the sort of triumph she will need to perform on the daily. Never forget, she tells her, that we are not the heroines, the mothers are. The story is never about us; it’s about them.
Maybe it’s because Shiphrah and Puah were so thoroughly focused on helping bring new life into the world that they had no time or energy for anything else. Maybe that’s why they defied the Pharoah’s order and then lied about it, apparently without thinking twice.
Anna Carter Florence asks what it might be mean for “midwives who fear the Lord” to be a metaphor for our faith. What if faithfulness is to put loyalty to God and God’s ways above all else --- fear of the Lord --- and to make our life’s work bringing new life into the world.
What if that’s the calling for the church in our time --- to be a community believers who fear the Lord and are single-mindedly in the business of ushering in new life.
What if we feared the Lord more than we fear what the future of our church might be? What if we feared the Lord more than we fear what might happen to us?
And what if we were all about new life? What if our focus was on helping God bring about something new for younger generations and those to come after them?
Midwives have no time for nostalgia. They have to deal with what is right in front of them with an unwavering commitment to the new life that is fighting to appear.
If we consider “midwives who fear the Lord” as a metaphor for being the church, our focus is not on ourselves or on how hard it is to be the church right now – and it is hard – our focus is on watching and waiting with those who seek to bring about something new – encouraging them, helping them in every way we can imagine, getting as creative as we have to to remove their obstacles so that new life can emerge.
This metaphor reminded me of an experience I had a few years ago with a grant-making organization in Indiana. We invited Indiana congregations to apply to be part of a learning cohort for young adult ministry and then to receive grant funds for new ministries. One small congregation wrote a good proposal, but we hesitated to admit them to the cohort. The church had just 60 members – and they had no young adults. Zero. Literally no members under retirement age. They were located in a small town without a college or even a large employer. They had a building in good condition, and they had financial resources. They could match the grant monies and then some. But the chances of them doing young adult ministry seemed somewhere between slim and none.
But they were earnest. They really wanted to try. We decided to take a risk and include them in the cohort.
They did not have an easy time of it. The first assignment was to talk with young adults in their 20s and 30s, to get to know them, what their lives are like, what keeps them up at night, how they make meaning. Notice in this model you most certainly don’t ask why they don’t go to church and what it would take to get them to your church. It took them a while to realize that they all knew people in that demographic, just not in church. And so they started. One conversation at a time.
Eventually, they learned that the young adults in their town were longing for a place for community but there wasn’t really a place. And there were a hundred reasons why the church building, nice as it is, was never going to be the place. Instead, the leaders who emerged among the church’s new young friends, identified an empty building downtown on Main Street, a place that could be fixed up to host community meals and Bible studies and issues conversations and game nights in a central and neutral location.
The church could help. With money. Their own money and the grant. And with expertise on starting a nonprofit and organizing the kinds of things churches are good at organizing – like Bible studies and community meals. Perhaps even encouragement to leaders who run into all sorts of roadblocks like people who flake out and things that you try that don’t work out.
Did those young adults join the church and return it to what it remembers from 40 years ago? No. Will that community center be “the” new church in that community. I doubt it. But the model of an aging church playing the role of midwife is one I’ll never forget.
The last part of our Bible story is that those faithful midwives, Puah and Shiphrah, were blessed, blessed with families. Blessed with people to love them and care for them and see that they got what they needed. Blessed with a legacy of people to come after them. And isn’t legacy one of the ways we measure whether our time on this earth has been worthwhile?
Because they were single-minded in their fear of the Lord and their commitment to bringing new life into the world. Because like those 1950s London midwives they realized that the story is not about them. Because with those priorities they were clear about doing what they had to do, day in and day out, they were blessed. Blessed with people to care for them and with people to come after them.
Perhaps if our work as Christians in this time and place is to be like those midwives who fear the Lord, it is little beyond our imagining what new possibilities we might help to bring about.
May it be so.
Chapters in “A is for Alabaster," by Anna Carter Florence, published in 2023 by Westminster John Knox, provide the source and inspiration for this sermon series.
