Exodus 1:8-21
Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians subjected the Israelites to hard servitude and made their lives bitter with hard servitude in mortar and bricks and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this and allowed the boys to live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.
The story starts: there arose a new king who did not know Joseph.
That’s a key line. Because this new king did not know the technicolor history or smuggled faith or liberating dreams of a towering figure like Joseph, it meant something. Not just that the new guy didn’t read the employee files. It meant the new king could only see the Israelite people in terms of their numbers. In terms of their power. Without knowing their story, he saw them as “they.”
They are different.
They are not us.
They are a threat.
And midway through this paragraph, the king stops even calling them Israelites. He starts calling them Hebrews. The word “Hebrew” was not the name they used for themselves. It was a word that, up until this point in Scripture, was only used about them by others, like the Egyptians and Philistines. It comes from Ha’ivri, meaning the ones who crossed the river. The people from over there. Those foreigners. Those outsiders. Those laborers whose growing numbers made Egypt nervous.
“Hebrews” was a label. They became “those people.” And Pharaoh, like so many rulers before and after him, was afraid of those people. He said, “They are too many and too strong. We must deal shrewdly with them.” So he built a policy of fear. And fear became cruelty. And cruelty became law.
That’s the story of empire in every age: fear that someone else’s life might diminish yours. But this story is also about another kind of fear. Pharaoh feared people. The midwives feared God. And that makes all the difference.
The king called in two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah. Their names sound like Lamaze breaths. They come, with the fresh smell of newborn life still clinging to their clothes. 1 The Bible makes sure we know the names of these hidden figures who stand, probably trembling, before the Pharoah. “When you deliver the Hebrew women,” Pharaoh said, “if it is a son, kill him; if it is a daughter, let her live.”
And right there, we get this remarkable story. Before Moses ever draws his first breath, before the Red Sea ever parts, the movement of courage and liberation has already begun.
Right here. “The midwives feared God and did not do as the king commanded them.” Shiphrah and Puah, whose history no one knows, defied Pharaoh. They risked everything. They protected life when power demanded death. Without these two saints in the shadows, there might not have been a Moses.
And it’s almost comical how they pulled it off. “Oh, you know how they are,” they tell Pharaoh, “they’re not like Egyptian women, who need us to dab their foreheads with a washcloth. They’re so fast. The word here, hayot, is translated vigorous but scholars say is better translated ‘animals.’ 2 They’re so tough, like field animals! They hardly need us!”
Notice how they used the stereotypes of empire against the empire. They turned Pharaoh’s blindness into their cover. They worked their holy mischief in the shadows.
If justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, this story may be the headwaters. Shiphrah and Puah were the midwives of the Israelite freedom movement that we call Exodus. And the Bible makes sure we say their names.
In October, our series is In Good Company, and we are learning how faith shows up in the lives of ordinary people. Sometimes those people become famous, like Mother Teresa, whose story we told last week. But more often, faith is the work of people who never see the limelight.
Ella Baker was one such saint in the shadows. Part of the technicolor history and faith of the Civil Rights Movement that many of us don’t know. We see the heroes, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, but before they stepped onto large platforms, people like Ella Baker
were midwifing the movement.
Ella was raised in the Black church. She sang the hymns and anthems of the prophets. She was nourished on the stories of Jesus. Her soul sang freedom songs before she saw them come true. Her grandmother told stories of escaping the horrors of slavery. Like Shiphrah and Puah, Ella saw how policies born of fear turned into cruelty turned into law. Then came the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, and something in her must have said, Not one more baby. Not on my watch.
Ella began organizing. Like Shiphrah and Puah, she knew the shadows could be holy ground, hidden places where ordinary people discovered their power while the empire wasn’t paying attention. It started in church basements before moving to the lunch counters. She helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside Martin Luther King Jr., but when she worried the movement was centering too much on one voice, she quietly planted another seed, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That was the group that led the sit-ins and freedom rides.
In 1960, she wrote: “These sit-ins are about something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke. The students, North and South, are seeking to rid America of the
scourge of segregation and discrimination, not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life.”
Our Kibwezi team will appreciate this: Her nickname was Fundi, a Swahili word meaning one who teaches a craft to the next generation. And she was known for saying, “Give light, and people will find the way.” In Spanish, to give birth is dar a luz, to give light.
Maybe the reason Scripture makes sure we know the names Shiphrah and Puah is because God wants us to remember that liberation never begins with kings or armies or famous leaders. It begins with the quiet courage of people who refuse to cooperate with fear. It begins with people who say no to cruelty, and yes to life, right where they are.
And that’s where faith still begins. In the quiet places where no one is filming. In the office where you refuse to gossip about the one everyone else is tearing down. In the classroom where you notice the kid who sits alone. In the family where you decide not to pass down bitterness to the next generation. In the late-night decision to tell the truth, or forgive, or try again.
You might not face Pharaoh, but you do face fear: fear of failure, fear of change, fear of losing control. And faith still looks like saying no to fear and yes to life.
Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is refuse to let fear set the policy in your heart. Because fear still builds systems. Fear still writes laws. Fear still tells us who counts and who doesn’t. But the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, is that God is still doing what God has always done: bringing life into a world obsessed with death.
And then, centuries after those midwives, that same God took on flesh and was born in the shadows too… no palace, no platform, no power. Jesus came as the midwife of a new creation, defying death itself, bringing light into the deepest darkness.
And here is the good news: the power that took hold of those midwives, that courage that pulsed through Ella Baker, that same Spirit is still at work in you. You may not have a platform or a movement, but maybe God has placed you in a delivery room of sorts, a friendship, a workplace, a community, where something new is trying to be born, and you are the one God has trusted to help it into the world.
So take heart, dear church! You are in good company. When you fear God more than Pharaoh, when you choose courage over comfort, you stand beside Shiphrah and Puah. You stand beside Ella Baker. You stand beside Christ himself, born in the shadows, still midwifing new life in a fearful world.
Da la luz. Give light. And people will find the way. Amen.
1 With thanks to Rev. Meg Peery McLaughlin for this line.
2 https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/how-midwives-shiphrah-and-
puah-mock-violence-empire Scholars argue that the word hayot in this verse is softened too much when it’s
translated as “vigorous,” “strong,” or “lively,” as it usually is. The literal translation is closer to “brutish, animalistic, unrefined.”]