Pietisten Annual Meeting Meditation: Exodus 1:15-2:10
This mediation was delivered at the annual meeting of Pietisten on October 15, 1993.
In light of articles and advertisements that have appeared in Pietisten lately, it seems appropriate to me to choose an aquatic text for our meditation this evening.
I am attracted to the beautiful irony in this story of Pharaoh’s attempt to keep his power by murdering boys — every newborn Hebrew boy. He is outfoxed and outmaneuvered by a conspiracy of women, by the power of wise women: old women, middle-aged women, young women, and little girls. The crowning peak of this irony — that Pharaoh does not perceive women as a wise and powerful threat — is that he is done in not only by this collection of Hebrew women, but also by his own daughter! By the princess herself, her ladies in waiting, and her own little slave girl. (I have a four-year-old princess at home, and I could have warned Pharaoh.)
How fantastically ironic it is that, in the context of scripture, the great prophet of Israel, the lawgiver Moses himself, is saved and sustained by a secret agreement between women of the faith of Sarah and women of the faith of Ra and Osiris. They were, all of them, women of faith, both Hebrew and pagan, who gathered by the banks of the Nile that morning.
Faith itself is an experience common to all people. It is part of what makes us human. Where faith distinguishes us depends on at least two things: (1) where we find our resources of faith and (2) where our resources of faith find us. The River Nile and its reed-laden banks became a resource of faith for two very different groups of people in this text.
What attracts me to this text tonight, for the sake of Pietisten and its readers, is that I find some common cause between those Egyptians who were trying to get away from things by going down to the river and the editorial staff at Pietisten: David Hawkinson to Lake Superior, Tommy Carlson to Spooner, Wisconsin, and Bruce Carlson to Bay Lake. (Phil Johnson and I are still looking for a lake shore that will have us.) We all want to get away to the water’s edge.
It is not only what we are getting away to, but also what we are getting away from. More often than not, we have been found fleeing from the institutions that have helped shape our lives, especially the church. Not only the editors but our readers as well often tend to confess a sense of disease with their institution or church and we all keep bumping into each other on our journey to the banks of the Nile.
The problem is that rivers are crazy things. They are alive, they have minds of their own, and they have no inherent interest in being sought or contained. Our summer-long encounter with the Mississippi floods confirms this. Mark Twain wrote of his experience and insight into this mad midwestern river in Life on the Mississippi:
The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way — its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cut-off has radically changed the position, and Delta is now two miles above Vicksburg.
Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut-off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi today, a cut-off occurs tonight, and tomorrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him. (2, 3)
It has been my experience of faith and life that, often, when I have fled an institution, a family, a relationship, a profession, I have come to a place, to a river bank, where I think I have finally encountered a boundary, where I can be still, where the riverbank — life itself — can be still, so still that even the reeds are not moving, for lack of any detectable wind of change. I go to sleep and wake up to find that the river has jumped — that the boundary of my faith and life has jumped over and past me again, cutting me off, placing me in a different country, causing me, who went to sleep being a slave, to wake up being a free man! And, a more faithful person! I think that this is how Pietisten began and, I hope, continues to be. It is an ongoing correspondence among those who have often fled to the edges of the water, to the banks of the river, and have been surprised by marvellous things — the gifts of faith and life that come floating along in the reeds. And sometimes we have been stunned by a river that had met us as a boundary, cutting us off, which has, during the night, leapt over us and around us to include us, to make us a free people of faith. May it continue. Amen.