Song & Dance

Sermon

It’s important to note that before this lectionary text, often called the Song of Moses and Miriam, we meet Miriam in Exodus 2. She, along with Moses’ mother and some revolutionary midwives, saves Moses from certain death, as Pharoah has ordered that all baby boys be thrown into the Nile River. Listen with me for the word of the Lord found in Exodus…

² The Lord is my strength and my might (power, defense, song), and she has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise her; my Mother’s God, and I will exalt her.
³ The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is her name.

⁴ Pharaoh’s chariots and his army she cast into the sea;
Pharaoh’s captains were swallowed in the Red Sea.
⁵ The floods covered them; they went down into the depths like a stone.
⁶ Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power—your right hand, O Lord, shattered the enemy.
⁷ In the greatness of your majesty you overthrew your adversaries;
you sent out your fury; it consumed them like stubble.
⁸ At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up; the floods stood up in a heap;
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.

¹³ In your steadfast love you led the people whom you redeemed;
you guided them by your strength to your holy abode.
¹⁴ The peoples heard; they trembled; pangs seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
¹⁵ Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed; trembling seized the leaders of Moab;
all the inhabitants of Canaan melted away.
¹⁶ Terror and dread fell upon them; by the might of your arm, they became still as a stone until your people, O Lord, passed by, until your people passed by.
¹⁷ You brought them in and planted them on the mountain of your own possession…
the sanctuary, O Lord, that your hands have established.
¹⁸ The Lord will reign forever and ever.”

¹⁹ When the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his chariot drivers went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them, but the Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground.

²⁰ Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. ²¹ And Miriam sang:

“Sing to the Lord, for an overflowing victory;
horse and rider she has thrown into the sea.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

 I’m going to pray before this sermon differently than I usually would. I’d like to offer an image, a legend, that might help us with this scripture. Often when I read in the Hebrew Bible or our Old Testament, I find myself wanting a map, or some legend, to see the Nile or what the Red Sea is like—where are all of these people going?—but in seminary they would often give us maps. I found them not to be helpful, because I wasn’t there when these events happened or were storied about, and neither were any of our professors, so… so, no maps here, but here’s an image as prayer:

Over spring break, my wife and I took our son to one of the San Juan Islands for two days—we’d never been before and always wanted to go. And as with all travels, especially travels with small children, there were mistakes, redemptions, and unavoidable obstacles; long story short, one afternoon we needed to go do something, perhaps anything, to move cranky bodies, but nobody wanted to do anything. ARGH, but with varying levels of effort, pants putting on, and whining, we walked to a beach where, because of the tides and time of day, you could walk clear out to another island, on dry land. Or damp land. Either way, it was great. I was so glad we all made it onto this island—it was a harrowing journey of like maybe 190 yards, all downhill, but sometimes moving only a few people of various ages, and stages of existential dread, in the spring of 2026, is an exodus. And the island was neat. It had birds, one tree, and because the tide was out, we were walking on stuff that hours ago we looked at and was well underwater.

This was cool, but whining can take over anyone’s cool quickly, and one of us in our group, though I won’t name him, wanted to play a game called “water city” that no one else on the island understood. And I wanted to stretch and point out the big colorful starfish and not learn a new game, and my wife was thinking practically and starting to suggest that we turn back and go the way we came. Let the church understand: my wife’s idea was the best idea. No argument here: the rocks were getting bigger, and it was only going to get harder to keep going around the island. But I said we should keep going. We had to climb quite a bit and walk with caution to keep going, and I noticed this required a lot of each of us—with all the barnacles and shells and rocks you could get hurt if you tripped. But this kept us from whining. And with some ups and downs and hands held, we all made it all the way around; we circumnavigated the whole island; heroes, makers of our own maps, and whatever the game water city was. The whole island was probably not bigger than the church building. But there was singing and dancing. Then we had our choice of beverages, on the rocks, as puns intended, then the whining returned… and later we looked back and could see where we had all escaped was underwater again.

In addition to that biblical circumnavigation, I had the privilege with 19 or so of you this Lenten season to read MOST of a book called, In the Beginning Were the Women by Claire McKeever-Burgett, which is also where our liturgy came from for today. The book has stories of many women from the Hebrew Bible, and Miriam was one of them. Miriam is a well-known woman. If you know any cool woman named Miriam, and we all do, she is very probably, somehow named after this Miriam. And so, I’m surprised, as was Professor Lynn Japinga, to find that, like most women in the Bible, we don’t know that much about Miriam; the Bible doesn’t tell us much about her other than that she’s a prophet. In the Beginning Were the Women and Blessed Are the Women, McKeever-Burgett’s earlier work, help me to fill in some blanks and offer images where maps fail.

Miriam is Moses’ sister, but she’s almost never written about that way, and even here she’s Aaron’s sister; Aaron who is Moses’ brother. Scripture, as written, is limited, as can be our understanding. But it’s widely thought that Miriam, along with some midwives, Moses’ mother, and one of Pharaoh’s daughters, saved Moses. All these women, through real risk and small but subversive acts, like making and monitoring a waterproof basket for a baby to float on water to safety in, saved Moses from the infanticide ordered by a Pharaoh, the all-supreme monarch of this time and place. All Hebrew boys were to be thrown into the Nile River. There are some biblical images of the Nile and baby Moses looking sweet, in a cute basket next to some reeds. And sometimes that’s the image that sticks with me, a peaceful backyard stream, where Moses just goes for a nice little buggy ride, and 10 yards away is plucked out of the gentle waters by a cool aunt or babysitter, never the wiser. It’s possible. We weren’t there. And I’ve never seen the Nile in person…

But I try not to let that sweet image, and the fact that we learned in school that there are crocodiles named after the Nile, discredit the women who made this happen. There are commentators, including John Calvin, a father of Presbyterianism, who do a lot of song and dance to discredit the acts of the women here, as if the heroics are no big whoop or not the works of women, but solely of divine providence. There are worse commentators that say the women couldn’t help themselves near the babies, of course they saved them—which makes both women and babies sound like weird biological pawns. But Professor Japinga writes, “though Moses is the hero of the book of Exodus, without the midwives and Moses’ mother, sister, and foster mother [Pharoah’s daughter], there would have been no Moses… He and countless other baby boys were kept alive by civil disobedience… Moses lived to adulthood [lived to liberate others] because women risked their lives for him.” There is no Moses without his two moms, Miriam, the midwives—their competence, their calculation of risk, their resistant joy in the face of true existential dread—one can absolutely say this is God working through women, or that these women trained for this, but to say biology or God used them as chess pieces in a political war game is wrong and unnecessary. It’s not needed, like an explanation for a miracle is not always helpful.

Similarly, and in contrast, is the good news we heard this week about the Artemis II crew. They’re showing amazing views of space and other miracles we don’t know—what an accomplishment—but what has caught my ear is that they’re constantly sharing the credit, reminding us of folks like Katherine Johnson, who was also a Presbyterian (thank God, so we can take a break from being mad at Calvin), and she calculated trajectories for some of the first Americans in space, and the Canadian part manufacturers, and their parents and spouses. Leaders can oppress others, alone, but they can’t go far. The certainly can’t go to the moon. In this case, it seems they can’t even make it out of town.

McKeever-Burgett writes, of and in the voice of Miriam, “she can’t not do it […] having lived in such terror for so long, we couldn’t not leave […] we stomped and moaned and sang and breathed our way out of Egypt […] as for the sea swallowing the Pharoah’s army, that’s between them and God.” Now, the Red Sea and the Nile River are not that far apart; if you’re looking at a map on your phone, they’re like a pinky nail apart. If you were looking at a map in a book, they might be two pinkies apart, but I’m pretty sure it’s farther in real life, even then. And the Red Sea is also probably wider, even if it was smaller back then, or even if the tides were out, or the wind was up, and moving the water in the right way to help these calculating, competent people escape. We don’t know; we weren’t there. But I wouldn’t discredit the big whoop of all these heroes coming out of the water; both Miriam and Moses’ names can be interpreted as something like coming out of the water. And there were a lot of ordinary people, working revolutionary acts to get there.

Professor Japinga and other commentators point out that the way Miriam’s Song is written here makes it seem like most of the song could be Moses’, but women were often the song leaders, and Japinga writes that if you’ve ever been a song leader, a choir director, then you know it’s a lot to make this happen. To go out on dry, or maybe damp, land, leading a song of victory—it might look easy, like a family of three walking less than a mile on a break—but it might feel like the very hardest thing that’s ever been impossible.

And as for if the supreme leader’s armies couldn’t make it there because of the tide, or because they were swallowed by the sea, or their own choices, we don’t know. There are translations of this escape that read more like “to shake off”—like the Taylor Swift song, or like how the puddles of water shook the mud off our boots on break—or maybe it’s like that Indigo Girls song about how the Mississippi is mighty, but it starts small, at a place where you people walk across. I focused more this week on the many others being still, frozen in place. That strikes me as an Eastertide note—like those stunned by the women’s preaching that Christ is alive, no longer dead; that we can use collective effort to do impossible things with our neighbors, instead of declaring impossible threats against them. That’s a song and dance I’m happy to cheer on, on damp land or otherwise… May it be so.