Sermons

"Awe and Fear"

Sermon by Mrs. Mary Garner
Emmanuel Church, Newport, RI
Pentecost 14 – August 21, 2005

During world War I, a chaplain named Oswald Chambers wrote,” The remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else.” Fear is a very important emotion in this morning’s reading from Exodus. On one side is the fear that the powerful have of losing their power. The story begins with Pharaoh’s fear that the numerous and powerful Israelites will join Egypt’s enemies and fight against him. Pharaoh’s kind of fear leads to death- he orders the murder of newborn male babies by the very midwives who have helped bring them to life. Later, he orders that every boy that is born to the Hebrews thrown into the Nile.

On the other side, there is the fear of God that enables the midwives Shiphrah and Puah to disobey the Pharaoh and do what they can to stop his plans of genocide. Their fear of God leads to life. What does it mean to fear God? Fear usually entails dread or anxiety caused because we expect something terrible to happen. I think that for most of us, talking about fearing God makes us uncomfortable. We try to live and pray in a way that will help us to be closer to God. We strive to have a relationship with God that is based on love, not on fear. Many of us just cannot thrive spiritually with the notion of God as a white-bearded, angry old man who is ready to smite us for our failings. We believe that God’s love for us and our love of God will help to transform us to be better people, to do the right thing for others.

I believe that the emotion the midwives felt was awe and reverence of God- not fear. They could not have done what they did if dread, anxiety, or the expectation of something terrible is what motivated them. They refused to participate in killing those babies because they knew that there was a higher law than the law of Egypt, a higher king than the Pharaoh. Their reverence for God allowed them to disobey the highest power in the land and instead to obey the highest power in all of creation, the power of God in their hearts. Reverence for God means understanding that we are not God, that God’s ways are not our ways and that God will be with us and sustain us when we live with God as our ultimate authority.

Moses’ mother also lives in reverence and awe of God. Because she is afraid of what will happen to her son, because she loves him, she cannot accept the Pharaoh’s law. First, she hides him and when he becomes too old to hide, she puts her trust in God, puts Moses in that basket, and sets him on the bank of the Nile.

Moses’ sister lives in reverence and awe of God. Because she is afraid of what will happen to her brother, because she loves him she cannot accept Pharaoh’s law. She waits to see what God will do and stands at a distance to see what will happen to him.

Even the Pharaoh’s daughter cannot accept Pharaoh’s law. She opens the basket and feels pity for the baby, even though she suspects that he is one of the Hebrew children who her father has ordered to be drowned.

Poor Pharaoh- he was afraid of male Hebrews-little did he know that he should have been afraid of women instead! The midwives, Moses’ mother and sister and his own daughter are instrumental in saving the life of the baby who will grow up to be the liberator who will lead the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and lead Pharaoh to his watery death in the Red Sea.

What a fearful place the Egypt of Exodus was! We can only begin to imagine the terror the Hebrews felt as they faced the almost certain deaths of their children. What could be worse than losing your child? Imagine the fear Moses’ parents and his family lived with for those months when he was hidden. Every cry-every baby gurgle of joy could alert the authorities to the crime his parents had committed. Imagine the fear when his mother put him in the basket and hoped against hope that he would be all right.

Last month, during Vacation Bible School, I told the story of Moses and Miriam and the crossing of the Red Sea to our children. They could not understand how a mother could be so afraid that she would put her baby in a basket in a river because there was nothing else she could do to try to save him. They could not understand because for the most part, our children have grown up in relative safety. They have never been hungry or afraid of death, or experienced war. Some of them could not understand why God allowed the waters of the Red Sea to sweep over the Egyptians, when it was Pharaoh who was responsible for hurting the Hebrews and the soldiers were just doing their job. Our children may not understand these things. I do not either. However, they do understand instinctively, that each one of us is beloved by God and that God does not love one people more than God loves another. As we grow older, the fear of others may lead us to make choices that disregard our earlier, better understanding of God’s love. Pharaoh feared the Israelites because they were “other”- they were threats to the security of the country. The midwives use this fear when they tell him that the Israelite women are different from Egyptian women and do not need the midwives’ help when they bear children.

I think that Americans today understand the fear of others. I remember how afraid I was on Sept, 11, 2001 when my husband sat in his office on an aircraft carrier in Norfolk, Virginia as I watched the television and waited to see if the United States’ largest military base , filled with many aircraft carriers would be bombed in an eerie reenactment of Pearl Harbor. I remember how afraid I was when he could not come home from the ship for days and how afraid I was when he went off to fight in a war I could not understand and did not believe was right. I remember how afraid my children were that their Daddy would be hurt and how afraid they were that people in Afghanistan would be hurt and killed.

We live in a world filled with fear- fear of terrorists, fear of suicide bombers, fear of weapons of mass destruction, fear that our borders are not secure, fear that our enemies will align against us, fear of the daily death count of US soldiers in Iraq. Over 1800 of our soldiers have died in a war ravaged land about 500 miles east of Egypt and thousands of years since the time of Moses.

Imagine what a fear filled place Iraq is today. UNICEF reports that 1 in 4 children in Iraq are chronically malnourished and that 1 in 8 die before their fifth birthday. Experts estimate that of the approximately 23,000 Iraqi war casualties, 20 percent were women and children. US sanctions against Iraq claimed the lives of half a million Iraqi children before the war even began. As a mother and a Christian, I believe that we cannot allow our fear to keep us from seeing that other people are afraid too. Sometimes, they are afraid of us. We cannot allow ourselves to believe that God loves one people more than he loves another or one country more than he does another or that it makes any difference to God if a dead child is Egyptian or Hebrew, one of “ours” or one of “theirs.”

Today, in Crawford, Texas mothers of dead children stand on the road and hold a vigil, asking to meet with the President to talk about the reason for their children’s deaths. They keep a vigil just as Moses’ mother and sister did- but for them there is no miraculous rescue and their question is the same question Hebrew mothers asked long ago in Egypt “Why?’

As Paul says in our reading from Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-what is good and acceptable and perfect.” What is good, acceptable, and perfect is what Shiphrah and Puah did to save the Hebrew children. God calls each of us to be midwives - to bring life into the world and to defy forces of death and destruction. Our call is to act as Moses and his mother and his sister and Pharaoh’s daughter did; to have awe and reverence for God. That kind of fear of God is invincible against Pharaoh, against death, against fear itself. We know that we are one body in Christ, individually members one of another. We know in our hearts that we are all God’s children. May God help us to remember that. Amen