“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 2: Shiphrah & Puah

July 2, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Exodus 1:8-22

Pastor Mike

Last week, I began a preaching series titled Short Stories: Lasting Calls which is going to set us inside the stories of some of the lesser-known characters of the Bible, so that we can appreciate the many different ways that God calls people into God’s work, and then turn to God ourselves and say, with renewed earnestness, “Here I am, Lord. Send me.” Every single one of us is called according to God’s purpose (Rom 8:28). When we put all our trust in Christ and walk in his Way, God gives us work to do. And God tailors this work to our uniqueness as individuals, which is thrilling – but also scary. We can’t deny that we stand personally responsible before our living God. Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit” (15:5).

The story of Shiphrah and Puah comes from the book of Exodus, the second book in the Old Testament. The Hebrews are living in Egypt because a prior generation sought refuge there during a famine in their own land of Canaan. They came to Egypt because they had an in with a man named Joseph, who was born an Israelite but came of age – and to power – in Egypt. At the beginning of Exodus, we learn that Joseph has died, and that a new Pharoah has come to power who did not know Joseph or respect Joseph’s people. This Pharoah sees that the Hebrew minority population is growing. He fears that if they get too numerous, they could turn against the Egyptians and instigate trouble inside the country. So he enslaves them, forces them into backbreaking labor, and then calls their midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, and gives the women an order: “When you are delivering Hebrew babies, kill the boys.”

Shiphrah and Puah’s story begins with the government telling maternity care providers how to do their job. I want to assure you that this is sermon about call, not a sermon about abortion rights. But the world of these midwives certainly resonates with our own world. They, and we, hear God’s call in the real world. Call is not just about understanding what God wants but feeling the urgency of what God wants, which means we have to hold call and context together. Pharoah has cast his shadow over the maternity care that Shiphrah and Puah offer.

They are midwives. They are women encountering other women in their most vulnerable moments, when bodily instinct has overridden everything else, and all has become a blur of pain and joy and, sometimes, panic. Shiphrah and Puah are women helping new life to enter the world – messy, screaming, glorious life. Loren, my oldest, was born at a midwife practice in North Carolina, and even though I was there for all of it, I’d have been lost without the midwives – their skill, their wisdom and experience, the way they could comfort and challenge in the same word. At the moment of birth, everything was surrendered into their hands. I trusted them to bring Loren and Sus across the finish line safely.

A midwife’s vocation is so close to her identity that the Hebrew language builds the word for the job out of a verb that means to “bear or bring forth.” The midwives, the m’yalledoth are, literally translated, “those who cause (or help) to bring forth.” Pharoah has commanded Shiphrah and Puah to distort the very essence of their work so that it harms rather than helps. Again, as midwives, they step with power and sacred trust into moments when others have completely surrendered. Pharoah has ordered them to misuse their unique role in “helping to bring forth,” to abuse their special access to the vulnerability of others.

If you’re a note taker, here’s the first element of Shiphrah and Puah’s call to put down. Their purpose emerges as Pharoah orders them to distort and corrupt their work so that it accomplishes his agenda. Sometimes God’s call hits us where we work.

Shiphrah and Puah stand among all of you who love your vocation, who have helping professions, and who, because of your job, get to be with people at vulnerable points in their growth and development, in their moments and seasons of bringing forth. Midwives, teachers, pastors, lawyers, counselors, nurses, doctors, and others – there’s you and the people who come to you because they desire or need what you have to offer, and then there’s Pharoah, calling you into his office, pulling you aside in the hall, passing a piece of legislation, whipping up antagonism in your community, so that he can press his will, his way, his fear, his anger into the spaces and lives that your vocation gives you access to. Pharoah is not going to dirty his own hands at the birthing stool – that’s too far beneath him – but he is going to try and pull the strings of your hands.

Shiphrah and Puah refuse to let him. And that’s the second element of their call: they disobey. Sometimes God calls us to disobey.

There’s a way that Shiphrah and Puah could’ve refused which would have been less risky than what they did. They could’ve just ended their midwife practice, quit their jobs: “Well, Pharoah, if that’s how it’s going to be, here are our credentials.” But they did not do that. If they had, they would have surrendered their mediating place between the wiles of Pharoah and the vulnerability of the women and children. It’s one thing to leave so that you don’t do harm. It’s another thing to stay so that you can continue to help. Rather than leave, and rather than blatantly disobey, they take another tack. They put their heads down and continue to do their job with integrity. When Pharoah brings them before him a second and asks why they aren’t killing the boys, Shiphrah and Puah lie.

Yes, they lie. They deceive him. They tell Pharoah that Israelite women are more vigorous than Egyptian women; by the time they get to the birth stool to assist, those babies are already born and safely nestled in their mothers’ arms. It’s an absurd lie, of course, but Pharoah goes for it. It hinges on Pharoah’s unfamiliarity with birthing. Their deception works. As one modern Jewish commentator, Nahum Sarna, has written, “Here we have history’s first recorded case of civil disobedience in defense of a moral cause.”[1]

Shiphrah and Puah discern that God has call them to stay in the middle, between those in power and those in need. They continue to occupy that middle space. They stand in the gap. They block for their birthing mothers and newborn boys, just as you, perhaps, have blocked for your patients, clients, students. Just as you have continued your work in creative defiance of the systems or policies that loom over you. To do this, Shiphrah and Puah can’t be showy or public in their disobedience, their refusal. They must be sly, deceptive, strategic, under the radar. The important thing for them is to keep their access to the birthstool, so that the boys can live.

How did they know to do this? How did Shiphrah and Puah know that this was their God-given work to do? At this point, their story is very different than Ananias’s story from last week. Ananias saw a vision; Ananias heard the voice of God’; Ananias was given specific instructions. Shiphrah and Puah get none of that. They do not experience an explicit call. They do not receive visions or hear God’s voice. As far as we can tell, there is no conversation between them and God. That same commentator, Nahum Sarna, sums it up: In the opening chapter of Exodus, “God is not said to have intervened.”[2]

Shiphrah and Puah just knew that what Pharoah was ordering was wrong. They had an innate moral objection to the command to kill instead of bring forth. It was incompatible with the God of life, love, hope, and joy.

Sometimes we wait around to hear God’s voice, to get clear and explicit instructions for moving forward, when deep down at the level of feeling we know the right path to take. Not everyone sees visions; not everyone hears voices; not everyone receives a blueprint. For some of us, the work of living for God is in learning to trust our gut, our instinct. That’s the third element of this call story. The call comes to midwives from within, not from beyond.

In the original Hebrew language, it is unclear if Shiphrah and Puah are ethnically Egyptian or Hebrew. The grammar construction can be read both ways: “Hebrew midwives” and “midwives of the Hebrew women.”[3] Isn’t that curious? It’s entirely possible that these women creatively disobeying and deceiving Pharoah were Pharoah’s people, Egyptians who knew that it was wrong to abuse their power and harm anyone in this way. What if God’s call is not exclusive to God’s people? What if God’s call, especially the call to “help to bring forth,”  transcends God’s people – it’s something we share with others. No one needs to be told that it is wrong to tear down in spaces and moments of helping to bring forth.

In our hyper-politicized culture, we can be deceived into believing that it is our immediate neighbors who are our enemies, and we are conditioned to treat one another with suspicion, fear, and anger. But it is the powers and principalities who are pulling strings that aren’t theirs to pull. The systems and the Pharaohs find it advantageous to their purposes to set neighbor against neighbor because it obscures the origins of the fear.

I thank God for those of you who, in our troubled times, have felt the call to remain in the middle between the powers and the people, so that life can be brought forth in those who are vulnerable. The God of Shiphrah and Puah is on your side.

 And let us affirm and encourage those outside the Church who are responding faithfully to the same moral call. Let us acknowledge and bless God’s hand working in all who labor with some creative disobedience simply because it is the right thing to do.

After all, it’s Shiphrah and Puah; it’s the midwives, always in the plural.

Amen.

[1] Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 25.

[2] Sarna, Exploring Exodus, 27.

[3] Sarna, Exploring Exodus, 25.