The Best She Could

Sermon

Have I ever told you about my great-great grandmother, Halldora? She was a midwife who immigrated from Iceland with her husband and two sons at the end of the 19^th century. We don’t know how many babies she delivered in Iceland, but the newspaper in Duluth, where she ran a maternity hospital, said that she had delivered 1,500 babies there. I have a deep respect for the courage of midwives, founded in Halldora’s work in support of poor and immigrant women in Northern Minnesota, at a time when midwifery was subjected to active hostility on the part of the medical community. Then there were all those unmarried girls she compassionately served.

This summer’s preaching series focuses on hearing what the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic voices are saying to us today. We’ve been hearing from the prophets who have solo albums: Isaiah, Micah, Malachi, Jeremiah. But the apostle Paul includes the gift of prophecy in teaching the church in Corinth about gifts of the Spirit available to them, so I think it’s fair to include the back-up singers in our conversation this summer. The prophets we’re listening to today are midwives Puah and Shiphrah, Jochebed (Moses’ mother) and Miriam, his sister. As if on cue, this week Richard Rohr’s daily online meditation has been a series on the gift of prophecy.

Let’s start with what Rohr and his guest writers had to say about the contemporary role of prophets. For one thing, they are system subverters, reminding us God is still at work. Prophets see a new thing coming, something not just for the sake of newness, but new because things have got to change. A prophet’s word plants a promise, which is intended to stretch us and deepen our capacity to be human. As Walter Brueggemann says in The Prophetic Imagination, the prophet expresses a now and not-yet reality, something we’ve been given but do not yet possess. A critique of the way things are in order to express the way things oughta be. Prophets are the locus of what the late John Lewis called, good trouble, what Rohr terms holy disorder.  What is so disturbing is that the prophetic word is powerful enough to actually call forth the new order, while simultaneously reminding God’s people not to make an idol out of either the old order or the new.

Parents of small children often remind the crying child on the verge of a tantrum, “Use your words!” You might have said it yourself when faced with figuring out what the kid actually wants. Hell hath no fury (they say) like a 3-year-old who wanted a triangle sandwich and got squares. Use your words, honey. Prophets don’t always use words, perhaps remembering the proverb, “Actions speak louder than words.” What John Lewis understood as the wisdom of prophetic good trouble as he worked in the service of racial justice.

Prophets were called to speak to the people on behalf of God, and to God on behalf of the people. And they didn’t always use words. The prophet Jeremiah was told by God to put on clean underwear to symbolize the intimate relationship God desired with the people. Then, after wearing those skivvies for months without washing them, the garment demonstrated the spiritual filth of the people. The prophet Isaiah was told to go out naked in public, an early telling of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” to be a demonstration of the risks of trusting alliances with the wrong nations rather than God, with the catastrophic result of exile. John Lewis advocated prophetic actions of civil disobedience, sit-ins, marches, refusing to move from a seat at the front of the bus. For him, it eventually meant running for political office to craft new legislation.

Do you see where I’m going with this? We might be called to prophetic actions ourselves, standing with the oppressed and marginalized, the stranger and immigrant, perhaps like the midwives who defied Pharaoh’s fear-mongering and abuse. This was literally true for my great-great grandmother, practicing midwifery in Duluth. We may not be called to civil disobedience in this time and place, but if you read Valarie Kaur’s work on Revolutionary Love, you will be familiar with her birthing imagery for these times. “The darkness of the tomb,” she suggests, “might be the darkness of the womb.” She speaks of the transition portion of labor and delivery, a time when things may feel out of control to the mother, a time to breathe and push. Boy, does it help to have someone with you to coach you to breathe as you prepare for the culmination of the process. When the midwives faced the challenge of Pharaoh’s evil, they had a companion. Shiphrah had Puah, and Puah had Shiphrah. As the story moves to particularity, we learn of one particular boy child in trouble. And again, we see a prophetic partnership, Jochebed has Miriam, Miriam has Jochebed. Their good trouble followed the letter of the law—throw the child into the Nile. There was nothing that said you couldn’t put the child in a boat first.

These days, the most reassuring thing I learn from these four prophets is that each woman did the best she could, with what she had, where she was at. I love the wily way they address state-endorsed genocide from their own position, with their specific gifts. They did what they could, each in her own way. Each fomented good trouble, both cunning and effective.

Jill Kondrath writes a weekly reflection in support of sales people. She’s a friend of a friend, and what makes her blog engaging to me is the spiritual lessons I glean from it. Last week her lesson came from zebras. She and her husband were on safari and learned that there are three purposes for the zebra’s stripes: camouflage from predators, distinctiveness enabling individual identification, and temperature control. When it’s cool, the fur of the black stripes lifts and spreads out to soak up the sun’s heat. When it’s warm, the fur of the white stripes spreads to bounce the heat away, allowing cool breezes to circulate against their skin. The zebra doesn’t grow a new coat for summer and another for winter. It doesn’t become a different animal when the weather turns. Instead, it meets the cold and the heat with the very same stripes, just leaning on different parts of what it already has. Kondrath asserts from this is that we already have what we need to change and adapt to life. We get to stay who we are while drawing on different strengths for different times. We don’t have to betray our essential identity to meet what is coming. We just have to know what stripes to raise. In other words, to do the best we can, with what we’ve already got, where we actually are.

Every week I see people in spiritual direction who are grieving the way the world is going, inevitably concluding with, “But what can I DO?” They experience grief and anger and a sense of helplessness. There are so many venues for a compassionate response to the world’s suffering, but what we post-Enlightenment folks have forgotten is that compassion means to suffer with. There is nothing about fix or change the system in that word; only with-ness. This is about solidarity and companioning one another. The women of this story exhibit creativity from their own position as they respond to the situation. They show courage to enact good trouble. The midwives couldn’t change Pharaoh’s edicts about birthing baby boys. In fact, in response to their action, Pharaoh responds with more draconian measures—don’t just intervene at birth, kill whatever boy survives birthing. Jochebed and Miriam didn’t go into business making baby boats, nor do they establish an underground railroad for babies. They save the child before them, they save this child.

Prophets are truth-tellers. Rohr rephrases their message as, “No one else is your problem. You are your own problem. What you think is goodness is too often delusion, and what you think is bad just might be your spiritual best friend.” I hate it when that happens. That’s totally topsy-turvy. That’s an invitation to trust God to bring about God’s plan. But to show up and do your work within it. Prophets offer not only criticism of what is, but also visions of a more just, more merciful, more peaceful society. Maybe that’s why prophets can be so difficult to be around. There’s this uncomfortable habit of noticing when the dominant culture is working from a place of self-interest, of maintaining the institutional status quo. Usually for the benefit of the rich, the powerful, the ones who don’t need any more of what they’ve already got. Prophetic promises are always in the service of aligning our deepest hopes and desires and dreams with those of God.

There used to be a pastor in our presbytery whose first response in every discussion was to point out the oppressed, those who were getting the short end of the stick, who stood to profit. I came to think of this person as “Pastor Yes But.” The school building was obsolete and didn’t meet seismic standards, enrollment was down, so it was torn down. Yes, but it was a Title 1 school, and the gentrification is forcing out families and long-time residents. Yes but non-profits are losing free space. Yes but children are losing a safe place to play. Any gesture of reform on our part always got a “Yes but” before other considerations. Annoying and predictable as that was, Pastor Yes But held us accountable as an institution. We needed that voice.

Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev, one of the guest contributors to Rohr’s prophet meditations would recognize Pastor Yes But as a prophet. He writes of the Hebrew prophets, “While [the Jewish] elites treated the impoverishment of common laborers as an acceptable condition of society, the prophets would not turn aside from this human suffering. Seeing the situation as if through God’s eyes and carrying God’s word, the prophets proclaimed that economic injustice and the oppression of the poor were intolerable and abhorrent. The growing inequality was, in the prophetic perspective, an existential crisis.” What existential crises do we need to see—with God’s eyes? Income and tax inequality, access to health care based on ZIP code, loss of confidence in public education, low minimum wage, voter suppression? Rabbi Ward-Lev says a prophet is one who has an encounter with divine love and concern for the world, the courage to name oppression, and the moral imagination to articulate an alternative future. I think what he means is, if you knew all you had to do was what you could do, what kind of good trouble would you get into?