Benchmarks: Wandering with Moses

Mothers Day

May 11, 2008

Joe Kutter

Have you noticed that your prayers change over time?  In a very real way, as you change, your relationship with God changes. Experience causes you to see God differently, to pray differently, to hope and pray differently.

In the next few weeks, we are going to explore some of the benchmark experiences that inevitably reshape our prayers and our relationship with God. To do so, we will walk with Moses through his life, see the changes in his walk with God and use his story to inform our own.

Today, we begin at the beginning, birth. It’s a benchmark both for the one born and for the one giving birth. Today is Mothers Day and it’s fair to say that nothing will change a woman’s prayers more quickly than a baby. 

Perhaps you remember the story. The people of Israel are living in Egypt and they have become slaves. This race of people, this entire cultural group has been reduced to slavery and their lives are at the whim of their Egyptian masters.

At the time of Moses’ birth, the oppression had been intensifying. The Israelite population had been growing and the Egyptian slave-owners were afraid that the numbers would grow sufficiently to make a social or political revolution possible. They were afraid of a slave uprising. It makes sense. In spite of the propaganda of slave-masters, and in spite of the stories told by the slave-culture, slaves never want to be slaves and sooner or later, they will try to be free. It is the way that God made us. God made us neither to own nor to be owned by anybody other than God himself.

The slave-masters had a simple solution. It was a severe form of population control. They ordered that every male child should be killed at birth, a kind of post-partum abortion. Why the males? Who is going to fight the revolution? Young men will fight the revolution. So, to prevent the uprising, you kill the fighters before they are old enough to fight.

Why not the women? They can work and they can make babies when you are ready for more babies to be made. The masters never want to lose the slave population. They want to control it. 

In the midst of this mess, Moses is conceived and born. Can you imagine his mother’s prayers?  Given the public policy of killing all Hebrew baby boys, do you think that she prayed for a girl?  What were her prayers concerning the government? Do you think that she was frightened? She was not personally at risk; it was “only” her baby – “only” her baby. One nearly gags on the word “only”.

Something happens in pregnancy that we men can only imagine. Within the womb, the union of egg and sperm start a process the results in a full grown, image of God human being. Can you think of anything more precious? In the beginning the woman and the egg are one. Even fertilized, the egg and the woman are one. Then, over only a few weeks, somebody new emerges but still, this new being, this newly emerging person is a part of the woman.

And that being is fully dependent upon the woman for his or her survival. Even with today’s medial technology, the not-yet born being, can not survive outside of the womb until it is 23 or 24 weeks old. Peggy, my wife the NICU nurse, tells me that survival at 23 weeks has happened but that 24 weeks is usually the magic number, the necessary maturation. And even then, with today’s technology, medical intervention is necessary for the child to survive and thrive.  During this time, the mother is totally responsible for the child’s well-being.

Let’s return to Moses’ mom. How would you imagine her prayers?  This was before our ability to determine gender within the womb. So she is wondering if it is a boy or girl. The child is growing within her and is totally dependent upon her. At the same time, so much in life is beyond her control. She is both responsible and vulnerable. And, if it turns out to be a boy, disaster strikes.  How do you imagine her prayers? Do you think that pregnancy changed her prayer life, her relationship with God?

Let me ask the mothers here, do you remember when you first learned that you were pregnant?  Let me guess at what happened. You and your husband may have been pretty care-free. You thought mostly about yourselves, your whims, your desires, your good fun, your future. You prayed about your life together, your future, and your personal well-being.

Then, suddenly, you have a new and powerful responsibility. You are totally responsible for this child. For at least 24 weeks it can not survive without. And even following birth, it cannot survive without you or somebody like you. If you are like many, the responsibility was a little frightening. You wonder if you are up to it. You hope beyond hope that you and the child will be healthy. You wonder what the future will be. Now you are praying, not only about yourself or you and your spouse, now your prayers are focused on somebody that you don’t even know. And a whole new level of responsibility and vulnerability settle into your life. Suddenly, you need God in a brand new way!

And then the baby is born. Here’s Moses!  And you learn something that you never knew before. You learn how to love. It is entirely possible that before you knew this child, you thought of love in terms of what love did for you and how love made you feel. Love with your spouse was a matter of how you made one another feel and how you were there for each other. It was a mutual thing, give a little and take a little and bask in the enjoyment of your shared love.

But with this baby, the scales of mutuality are rebalanced. You give and you give and you give and the baby eats and messes its diaper. You give and the baby cries when you do not give the right thing in the right way at the right time.  You learn how to love, not because of what the baby can give to you but simply because the baby is yours.

You do things that in the absence of love are completely unnatural and contrary to your self-interest. You take long walks in the early hours of the morning, carrying a baby that doesn’t want to sleep. You forfeit your sleep. You get up at strange hours to clean up urine and feces simply because you love the child. For a fleeting moment or two, you may wish that you could flush the child with its mess but then love reasserts itself and you take that cleaned-up baby and you hug it and feed it and walk it until he or she is ready to sleep. Then you stagger back to bed knowing that you’ll go to work on short sleep in the morning. You spend huge sums of money on this child, money that could have been used on exciting vacation trips or on a big new boat or a larger house. But living more modestly is ok because, it’s not about you and your house and boat. You love your child.

With that child, everything changes. In a profound way, you become somebody else. And because you have become somebody else, your relationship with God takes on a different shape and you find yourself praying about your child’s health and your child’s activities and your child’s future. You take a whole new agenda to God.

Do you think that it was so with Moses’ mom? Of course it was and even more so. Moses was a boy and his life was immediately threatened. So she did what every mother and father would try to do. She tried to protect him. She hid him even though she knew that he must grow and soon be found. But she did what she could do hoping and praying that another way would be found.

And then, when the boy’s growing size and his louder cries demanded it, when being found became inevitable, Moses’ mom did the impossible thing. She waterproofed a basket and she put the baby in it and she set the little basket-boat afloat on the river. To save his life, she gave him away.

The Bible doesn’t say so but I can promise you that a part of Moses’ mom died that day. She tore off a part of her very self that day. She gave away the person that she may have loved the most of all.

But love is a wonderful and powerful force that sometimes compels us to do the thing which is right for the other person even when it costs us dearly. I suspect that Moses’ mom felt as though her very heart had been torn from her body that day and that it was a sacrifice worth the making.

This time, it worked out ok. The pharos’s daughter found the baby and took him in and hired Moses’ mom to be his nurse. And in due time, just as the slave masters had feared, Moses grew up to lead the rebellion that took the Hebrews to freedom. 

In that risky act of love, Moses’ mom served as an agent of God’s love and justice. She became a perfect reflection of God’s own character. She was as she was born to be, in the image of God.

As I read the story, it all begins and ends with God. God’s love is a self-giving love. God has sacrificed himself, in Jesus Christ, simply and profoundly, because he loves us. In the words of Paul, he sacrificed himself and took the form of a servant so that we might be led to God. He died so that we might know the forgiveness of sin. He loved us and he loves us and he will always love us as Moses’ mom loved Moses, as a very good mother loves her children.

Amen