Exodus 1:8-2:10
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. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”
Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.
The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” 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 will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
It is a rare pastor who can make a basket. We can usually weave together some words for a prayer at a lunch meeting. We can invite you to bring your fish-box offering and place it up front in the basket. But actually make a basket? At my former church, a woman named Kathy ran the silent auction. Her crew produced a book basket festooned with ribbon-bookmarks, a movie- night basket wrapped in cellophane like a giant pastry. Then they looked at me. “We need a pastor’s basket!” “Kathy, it would be half-read theology books and random conference mugs, sliding around in a Trader Joe’s bag.” She looked concerned. “How about a prayer?”
I cannot make a basket. I am almost allergic to Michaels. And yet the invitation I hear in today’s story is: make a basket. I’ll share why.
This is one of the best-known stories in Scripture … baby Moses among the bulrushes. Our sermon roundtable gave it a nine out of ten on the familiarity scale. But the more we waded into it, the more courageous, subversive currents we found running underneath.
The story begins with a new king who does not know Joseph. He does not know, or does not care to know, the history his nation shares with the Hebrew people. It is always dangerous when leaders refuse to remember history. Not knowing flows into fearing. Fearing flows into oppression. And oppression always seems to delegate its dirty work to ordinary people.
Pharaoh summons two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, and orders them to kill every Hebrew boy at birth. Midwives are trained to rush toward the cries of a woman in labor and usher life into the world. Pharaoh tells them to turn their calling inside out, to make the hands trained to welcome life into instruments of death. But Shiphrah and Puah refuse the assignment evil gives them. They can’t really overthrow Pharaoh or dismantle Egypt’s machinery of oppression. They can refuse to do the terrible thing they have been commanded to do. I love how the Bible names these women while refusing to say Pharaoh’s name. The Bible shines on courage woven throughout history, and it looks like this. You refuse to repeat the lie, or laugh at the cruel joke, or treat another human being as a problem to be disposed of. Shiphrah and Puah cannot do everything. But they can do something.
When Pharaoh demands an explanation, they hand him one of the great lines of resistance in Scripture: “The Hebrew women are vigorous. They give birth before we arrive.” Vigorous is the Hebrew word hayot – it means animals. “What can we say, Pharaoh? These women are like animals, too strong for us.” They outwit the most powerful man in Egypt by appealing to his own prejudice. And while Pharaoh is busy believing himself, the babies live.
But Pharaoh escalates: now every Hebrew boy is to be thrown into the Nile. And then we see another woman on the margins, doing what she can with what she has. She gives birth to a son. She hides him three months. But one thing about babies is that they will not stay hidden with all the nursing covers in the world. Babies cry. Babies grow. Babies insist on taking up space in the world. Eventually she cannot protect him the way she has been protecting him.
So she makes a basket. And the Hebrew word is tevah. Also a cool word. It appears only twice in all of Scripture: here, and in the story of Noah’s ark. This mother makes her son a tiny ark. She cannot stop Pharaoh. She cannot control the Nile waters. She cannot know who will find her child or what will happen next. But she can find some woven papyrus. She can seal the seams with pitch. She can make one small vessel capable of carrying life across dangerous
waters.
That image is so powerful it raises the hair on my arms. When you cannot stop the river, make a basket. Make the phone call. Prepare the meal. Tell the truth. Show up at the meeting. Stand beside the person being targeted. Write the letter. Teach the child. Cast the vote. Offer the prayer. Do the next faithful thing that makes a way for life to float forward.
But I must admit, a basket is not the same as a plan. A plan promises control: if I do this, then that will happen. Particularly this time of year, I feel like a calendar is my superpower. And woe unto those who use words like TBD or let’s play it by ear. But a basket is what you make when the plan has fallen apart. It is an act of courage, but it is also an admission of profound vulnerability – because this mother must finally place the basket in the reeds and let it go.
That may be the hardest courage of all. We want our acts of faithfulness to come with guarantees. We want to know our children will be safe on that school bus, that our efforts will succeed, that the future will unfold according to spreadsheet. This mother receives no guarantee. She entrusts what she loves to the water, and to a God whose movement she cannot yet see. Anyone who has done a college drop off knows the power and vulnerability of giving over part of your heart to God’s care.
The poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was on a beautiful episode of On Being. She described poetry, language, and in fact all of life, like this one courageous act… setting a small woven boat down among the reeds, “not knowing where it might end up… in the lap, perhaps, of some Pharaoh’s daughter.” 1
That is exactly where the basket ends up: in the lap of the enemy’s daughter. She knows who this baby is. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she says. She understands her father’s command. And then the baby cries, and her heart opens for him. And by the water’s edge, we see another woman refusing the assignment evil has given her. Perhaps she cannot change her father or the policy of his palace. But she can save the child in front of her. And lo and behold, there is a helpful little sister sopping by in the water who knows just the person to nurse this baby … and it happens to be his own mother.
It is almost comical. Pharaoh’s entire system is undone by midwives, mothers, daughters, and little girls and baby boys, people doing what they can with what they have. They have no clue that this baby will one day confront Pharaoh. They do not know he will lead a people through the sea. They do not know the basket bobbing in the reeds is carrying a future none of them can yet imagine. But they make a basket, waterproof it, walk beside it, and let it go.
I see this kind of courage every day with you people. Someone makes a fruit basket for someone facing an oppressive grief or illness, hygiene kits for people cleaning up after Hurricane Helene, fill more than 200 clamshell boxes for community meals, hold hymnals so that sacred music carries through the generations, patch the roof so ministry underneath it is protected, accompany immigrants to their hearing, walk beside children, believing more than anything that all of these stories are somehow part of the salvation story of God.
Most of us will never be asked to do something that looks heroic in the moment. More often, courage arrives disguised as one small, faithful choice: refuse the assignment evil gives you, protect the vulnerable one in front of you, and when the time comes, let it go — trusting that other courageous hands will take it from there.
Downstream in our own story, another mother will swaddle her baby and lay him in a feeding trough because there was no room for him in the inn or anywhere else. Another vulnerable child under another hostile ruler. Another basket, of a kind. A river of love that never stops flowing.
We cannot stop every nameless Pharaoh or guarantee where our faithful acts will lead or know in advance who will find what we set upon the water. But we can make a basket, and that is how hope floats into the future.
Amen.