Denman Island United Church

Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost – Elaine Julian, August 30, 2020

DENMAN ISLAND UNITED CHURCH OUTDOOR WORSHIP August 30, 2020 Rev. Elaine Julian

THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

 

Acknowledgement of Traditional Territory and Ancestors

As we gather for worship, we acknowledge with respect the history, spirituality, and culture of the K’omoks First Nation and the Coast Salish Peoples on whose traditional and unceded territory we meet. We also honour the heritage of all indigenous peoples, as we recognize the need to seek healing and reconciliation between the descendants of the settlers and those who were here before colonization.

Welcome Everyone

Please take note of the special COVID-19 protocols as we help each other stay safe and healthy.

Please follow along in this outline, noting that Bold Print is an invitation to participate

GATHERING AND CENTERING

When they were few in number, of little account, and strangers in it, wandering from nation to nation, from one kingdom to another people, he allowed no one to oppress them…” (Psalms 105:12-14)

Silence: As we light the lantern, be still and aware of God’s presence within and all around.

Candle is lit.  Bell is rung.

 

Call to Worship(By Gord Dunbar, used with permission from Gathering Pentecost 1 2020)

In this space of nature, come honour the Creator who invites us.

We come embraced by God’s good creation as we worship.

Into this space at the centre of our community, come breathe deeply of the Spirit.

We come inspired by our interweaving with all that is.

On this pilgrim pathway, come to wonder and to act.

We come to follow in Jesus’ footsteps for justice and healing.

Into this space, we come in prayer.

Show us, O God, your many faces in the people we meet.

Name us, O Christ, as those you send into the world to transform.

Open us, O Spirit, to love in the midst of unloveliness.  Amen.

Music: “Hymn for Pincher Creek”, Connie Kaldor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnLVepwOu90

Copywright Connie Kaldor, socan  CoyoteEntertainement Quebec Canada
Hymn for Pincher Creek

I look to the hills from whence cometh salvation

I find strength in their quiet roll

When I feel myself troubled I look to those hills

And the quiet green quiets my soul

Oh I never will leave my hills of salvation

No you never will get me to roam

For all the silver and gold that this world can hold

Is nothing compared to a home

Oh there’s some that say take all you can from this world

It’s dog eat dog from the start

But what good is your finery if in your last days

You cannot find peace in your heart
Chorus

There’s power that comes from money and fear

Oh what man can do

But the power that rests in those God given hills

Is the power I know to be true

 

READING AND REFLECTING

Exodus 1:8 – 2:10(Hebrew Scripture lectionary reading for Aug. 23, Common English Bible))

8 Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. 9 “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. 10 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.”

11 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites 13 and worked them ruthlessly. 14 They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.

15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16 “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” 17 The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. 18 Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”

19 The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”

20 So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. 21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.

22 Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: “Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.”

Now a man from Levi’s household married a Levite woman. The woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She saw that the baby was healthy and beautiful, so she hid him for three months. When she couldn’t hide him any longer, she took a reed basket and sealed it up with black tar. She put the child in the basket and set the basket among the reeds at the riverbank. The baby’s older sister stood watch nearby to see what would happen to him.

Pharaoh’s daughter came down to bathe in the river, while her women servants walked along beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds, and she sent one of her servants to bring it to her. When she opened it, she saw the child. The boy was crying, and she felt sorry for him. She said, “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children.”

Then the baby’s sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Would you like me to go and find one of the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?”

Pharaoh’s daughter agreed, “Yes, do that.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I’ll pay you for your work.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. 10 After the child had grown up, she brought him back to Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopted him as her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I pulled him out[a] of the water.”

Holy Wisdom, Holy Word.  Thanks be to God.

 

Poem: The Songs of Miriam (excerpt)

By Alicia Ostriker

“And Miriam the prophetess took a timbrel in her hand and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.”

I’m a young girl
My periods not started yet
Up to my waist in Nile water, I push
The baby basket through the bulrushes
Onto the beach
Come on, I say to myself, let’s go
And they see it
And come running
My brother cries like a kitten
In the arms of that princess
Her painted face fills with the joy
Of disobedience, which is the life of joy
When she is hooked I walk
Out of the river
Bowing and bowing
I am Miriam, daughter
Of Israel

We gather the limbs, we gather the limbs
We gather the limbs of the child
We sing to the river, we bathe in the river
We save the life of the child.

If you listen to me once
You will have to go on listening to me
I am Miriam the prophetess
Miriam who makes the songs
I lead the women in a sacred circle
Shaking our breasts and hips
With timbrels and with dances
Singing how we got over
O God of hosts
The horse and his rider
Have you thrown into the sea–
That is my song, my music, my
Unended and unfinished prophecy–
The horse was captivity–
And its rider fear–

O God of hosts
Never again bondage
Never again terror
O God of hosts

Reflection: “Women and Numbers and Names”

Let’s talk about numbers and names and why they matter.  In 2014, the Rev. Lindsay Hardin Freeman published her frequently-quoted book, “Bible Women: all their words and why they matter”.  Here are the numbers that she and her team of three other women discovered as they counted all the words spoken by women in the New Revised Standard Version: 93 women speak in the Bible, and 49 of these women are named.  By contrast, there are 1770 men named in the Bible. Women speak just over 14,000 words, 1.1% of the total words of scripture.

So I think it’s really important to pay attention to the stories where women are named, where women are crucial to the action.  Stories that foreground the unique power and role of women like this morning’s story from the beginning of the book of Exodus that features three of the 49 named women in Scripture: the midwives Shiphrah and Puah, and the future prophet Miriam as well as two unnamed women, identified only by their relationships to men: Pharoah’s daughter and the mother of Moses.

If this story were a movie, there would be an ominous soundtrack accompanying that first sentence, “Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt.”  Change is coming and it’s not going to be good.  The new king has forgotten the lessons of history, forgotten that Joseph once saved the Egyptians from starvation.  He has forgotten everything that they are still contributing to their economy, and can only see the potential threat in their growing numbers and prosperity.  And so begins a systematic program of forced labour, becoming more and more harsh as the Israelites continue to multiply.

When enslavement doesn’t work, the king turns to genocide, ordering his midwives to kill all the male babies.  It’s significant that here the writer turns from referring to the oppressed people as Israelites to using the term Hebrews.  Throughout the near East at the time, the term “Hebrews” meant any group of marginalized people with no social standing and no land, the low-class outsiders who disrupt society.  The Israelites in this passage lose their national identity based on their origins and become “the other”, a people feared and hated for their differences, the immigrants and migrant workers of that time and place.

But the midwives who assist the Hebrew women with their births do not fall in with the king’s program of infanticide.  Their work is to bring life into the world, not to end it.  Inevitably, the king can see that they are not following orders and calls them to account and they blame it on the hardiness of the Hebrew women, who are giving birth before the midwives arrive.  So Pharaoh extends the command to all his people to throw the Hebrew baby boys into the river.

Now the story switches to the origins of Moses, born into a priestly family and hidden by his mother for three months.  When he is old and strong enough, she puts him in a little waterproof basket in the river with his big sister watching over him.  When the Pharaoh’s daughter finds him, he is crying, as 3 month old babies do, and even though she knows he is a Hebrew baby her compassion leads her to save him. Miriam, Moses’ quick-witted sister, offers to find a woman to nurse the baby, and so Moses’ mother is paid to feed him and raise him.  When he is old enough, she takes him to Pharaoh’s daughter.

So many popular treatments of this story focus on Moses, on his transformation from a slave baby who should have been killed into a prince of Egypt.  Too often the crucial role of the women is ignored, but without them Moses would not have survived and the people of Israel would not have escaped their oppression.  The courageous midwives ignore their king’s commands and lie to him when they are caught breaking them. Moses’ mother and sister do everything they can to help him survive: first hiding him, then tricking Pharaoh’s daughter into saving his life and giving him back to them to raise, then letting him go so that he eventually has the power to save his people.  Letting him go, over and over again, as families do, so that their children can reach their full potential. And finally, the daughter of Pharaoh lets compassion for a helpless infant overrule everything that she has been raised to believe.  Without being fully aware of it, they are all working together to undermine the power of the oppressor, to further God’s plan for God’s people.

 

This is a story of defiance and resistance, the kind of defiance that happens relatively quietly, almost in the background, resistance that lays the foundation for the more dramatic liberation that follows.  Before the plagues, before Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, through the Red Sea and across the wilderness, a few women worked together to save his life.

Let’s look a bit more closely at the Biblical story of these women, to see if there are some lessons to help us today as resistance to oppression becomes more and more urgent.  Here are a few things I’d like to highlight.

  1. “The midwives were God-fearing women”.  Their defiance of Pharoah’s orders was rooted in their understanding of God’s plan, and they know that Pharoah’s order to kill the Hebrew babies is not part of that plan. There are people of faith behind so many historic and contemporary justice movements.  Christian clergy and lay people crossed the line and were arrested at the Burnaby demonstrations against the Transmountain pipeline.  Movement chaplains are on the ground today at Black Lives Matter demonstrations, supporting and counselling the activists.
  2. The women in this story did not hesitate to break unjust rules. In John Irving’s great novel “The Cider House Rules”, the migrant workers feel free to ignore the owners’ posted rules.  They weren’t involved in making the rules, many of them couldn’t even read them, and the rules were more concerned with the owner’s liability than with the safety of the workers.  And so they gather on the cider house roof every night to smoke and drink and talk and build community.
  3. The women know they can’t fight violence with violence. Instead, they use their imaginations and their quick wits to subvert the king’s orders and save Moses’ life.  Some of the most effective protests today use humour and street theatre to make their points.  Clown troupes are a familiar sight at demonstrations. Christian activist Shane Claiborne recently toured the United States and literally transformed swords into ploughshares by melting guns down and making them into gardening tools.
  4. In a time and place where they have almost no power, these women use their traditional skills and the small amount of power they do have. Because the midwives assist with the births of both Hebrew and Egyptian children, they seem to have a bit of influence with Pharoah, who doesn’t call them on their lies when they claim that the Hebrew women are giving birth before they arrive.

Indigenous women today are relearning traditional birthing skills to help their people.  In Manitoba, my friend Susie from the Sandy Saulteaux Centre that trains indigenous ministers recently participated in an indigenous doula training program, working to reintegrate the experiences of new mothers and their children back into their traditional communities and cultures.

  1. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the women in this story work together across major divisions: the racial and cultural boundary between Egyptian and Israelite, the economic boundary between princess and slave. They even take advantage of the gender boundary that makes the king blind to the subtle power of the women of his kingdom.  Maybe it’s not even too much of a stretch to think of Shiphrah and Puah and Pharoah’s unnamed daughter as among the first allies, the first members of an oppressor class to cross all those invisible lines and accompany the oppressed in their fight for justice.

 

So yes, women’s names and voices and stories do matter.  Referring to her team’s encounter with the words of the women in the Bible, Lindsay Freeman  said that they started to see them as “neighbors” with important wisdom to offer.

“I think they have a lot to share with us about what it means to believe, what it means to have faith,” Freeman reflected in an interview. ”We have been transformed, our little group of four people. We have cried over these stories, we have laughed over these stories. Our faith has been increased.”

Let us give thanks for the defiant and compassionate women of history and of today, for their cleverness and their persistence, their commitment to their principles, their ability to work below the radar and across boundaries, and most of all, for their grounding in God’s love and their trust in God’s plan for a world of justice and peace.  With them, let us do what God requires: to do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with our Creator.

Let us pray:

Holy One, source of living water, you are the God of bitumen-soaked baskets and babies and bulrushes. We ask that you give us ears to hear your prophets wherever they cry out and courage to faithfully and joyfully disobey unjust rules, that we may join you in the dance of life and love and freedom. In the name of the Lord of the Dance, Jesus our Christ. Amen.

Silence as we reflect on the Word: Which of the people in the birth story of Moses do you identify with most strongly? Why? How do you use your own particular gifts and strengths to build justice and peace? Is it ok to break unjust laws and rules?

Bell is rung.

RESPONDING

Offering: We are creatively combining work and play in the Spirit, talking, dreaming, and planning for a new way of being the church and connecting with the Denman Island community.  We continue to need your support through your sharing of time, talent and treasure.  If you are worshipping from home and you are able to support us financially, your donations can be mailed to: Denman Island United Church, 4575 Denman Road, Denman Island BC V0R 1T0

Music: “Come Healing”, Leonard Cohen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA9VExCEV_k

O gather up the brokenness
And bring it to me now
The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow

The splinters that you carry
The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

And let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb

Behold the gates of mercy
In arbitrary space
And none of us deserving
The cruelty or the grace

O solitude of longing
Where love has been confined
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

O see the darkness yielding
That tore the light apart
Come healing of the reason
Come healing of the heart

O troubled dust concealing
An undivided love
The heart beneath is teaching
To the broken heart above

Let the heavens falter
Let the earth proclaim
Come healing…

 

Prayers of the People: (From “Celtic Prayers from Iona” by J. Philip Newell)

O Christ of the poor and the yearning,

Kindle in our hearts within a flame of love for our neighbours,

For our foes, for our friends, for our kindred all,

From the humblest thing that lives to the Name that is highest of all,

Kindle in our hearts within

A flame of love.

Aloud or in silence, share your prayers of thanksgiving and concern. You are invited to place a shell or stone on the labyrinth as you pray.

And so, as children turn to a mother who watches over them, let us turn to God praying in the words Jesus taught us:

The Prayer of Jesus

Closing Prayer:(From “Celtic Prayers from Iona” by J. Philip Newell)

This day and this night, may we know O God

The deep peace of the running wave

The deep peace of the flowing air

The deep peace of the shining stars

The deep peace of the Child of Peace.

 

Go in peace and go in love to be God’s face and hands in the world.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

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