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We continue in worship as we read from the second book of Moses, commonly called Exodus, chapter 1. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 15. Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shephra and the other Pua, "When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them upon the birthstool,

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if it is a son you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter he shall live." But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this?"

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and let the male children live. The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and are delivered before the midwife comes to them." So God dealt well with the midwives and the people multiplied and grew very strong,

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and because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every son that is born to the Hebrew you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live." Now a man from the house of Levi went and took to wife a daughter of Levi.

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The woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch, and she put the child in it

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and placed it among the reeds at the river's brink. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, and her maidens walked beside the river.

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She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to fetch it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and lo, the babe was crying. She took pity on him and said, "This is one of the Hebrew's children." Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter,

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"Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?" And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Go." So the girl went and called the child's mother, and Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this child away and nurse him for me,

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and I will give you your wages." So the woman took the child and nursed him. And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son.

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And she named him Moses. For she said, "Because I drew him out of the water." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me.

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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. The key story in the entire Old Testament is the story of the Exodus, when God's loving concern for his people set them free. The key story in the New Testament is the resurrection of Jesus,

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when God's loving concern set his people free. In the Old Testament, God breaks the chains of slavery, economic, social, political, ethical chains. In the New Testament, God breaks the chains of death

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and rips the sting from the mouth of it. So in both the Old and the New Testaments, liberation is a key thought. And the first noted biblical character, when most people think of the liberation theme in Scripture, is Moses.

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Now, everyone knows about Moses. What interests me tonight is that most people never think about the role that women played in his life. Plain fact of the matter is, there would have been no Moses without the girls.

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You know the story. The king, Pharaoh, was very unhappy with the Jews. He despised them. He put additional burdens upon them, which, interestingly enough,

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caused them to thrive. And finally, he got to the place where he ordered the midwives of Egypt to slay all of the male children of the Hebrews. But in Exodus 1, verse 15, we have the story of two midwives,

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one named Shiphrah and the other, Puah, who refused to kill the Hebrew children. Now, notice, please, these two women are mentioned before Moses ever enters the picture.

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He has not even been born yet. But these are the first people to stand up and over against Pharaoh. It's quite a picture. Here's a male standing against females.

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Here's the Pharaoh, the king, standing against two lowly midwives. Here is the one who represents the deity to the Egyptians. Pharaoh is God. And over against him, two lowly women.

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He pressures them to try to get them to yield. They make up an excuse about the fact that Hebrew women have their children so quickly we can't get there in time to kill them. He accepts that, and God blesses them.

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The Scriptures are very specific. They say that the women did what they did because they feared God. They didn't want to be murderers. They wanted to be midwives. So the first heroes in the liberation story in the Old Testament

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aren't heroes at all. They're heroines. They're two women who stand up against the king, refuse to do his will because they fear God. Tough ladies.

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I've collected for some time some of the things that famous men have said about women. Pliny said it is best to keep women hidden, and when they die, conceal all that they have done in order that no one might know that they ever lived. Homer said that a good woman was worth four oxen.

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Aristotle said that a woman was nothing but a mutilated male. Schopenhauer said their only function is to propagate the species. Nietzsche said that any man who thought women were the equal of man was shallow. Darwin announced quite plainly that women are inferior.

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And Sigmund Freud, in his new introductory lectures in psychoanalysis, and specifically in lecture number 33, said that the problem with women is that they all want to be men. And there are still those today who ridicule women and subordinate them in one way or another. Sometimes even women themselves do this.

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I think, for example, of that book that came out a few years ago, The Total Woman, by Maribel Morgan. Let me give you some quotations from that book. "A woman should surrender to her husband. A woman should worship her husband.

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The man is the king and the woman is to follow." She has a whole passage on how to sexually entice your husband. "Eat by candlelight and you'll light his candle," she says. "Call him at the office and tell him that you crave his body."

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"Be a pixie. Be a pirate." "I meet my husband at the door dressed like a baby doll wearing white boots and he loves it." "Never give your husband your opinion. He doesn't need it." And perhaps this one will sum them all.

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"Make a list of all your husband's faults and then tear it up and throw it away." This is an evil book and an evil teaching. It is a far cry from the picture of the nobility of womanhood that's held up in the Scriptures, exemplified by these two tough ladies with whom the whole liberation narrative begins.

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I think it's very interesting that we do not know the name of the Pharaoh against whom these women stood. A lot of doctoral dissertations have been written to prove it was one man or another. But the Holy Spirit of God saw to it that their names are written forever on the pages of Scripture. Three cheers for Hipprah and Puah.

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Now the mother of Moses heard about these brave women and so when she had a child, she kept him for three months, did not put him to death as she was supposed to do, and then she put him in a basket made of bulrushes and she put it out where it would be found and she put her daughter, the baby's sister, to watch and see what happened.

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Now notice, here are two more women entering into the story. Moses' mother and his sister. Not a man has appeared in the narrative till this time. As a matter of fact, the only thing we know about Moses' father is this. He was a Levite and according to the Scriptures, he did absolutely nothing to save the life of his own son.

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Now the Old Testament, of course, was written in the midst of a culture in which a man owned his wife. She was subordinate in every way. She had to be a virgin. He didn't have to be. If she was not a virgin, she could be stoned to death. Nothing happened to him.

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He could be a priest. She could not. He could divorce her. She could not divorce him. These were the common cultural views and these views, interestingly enough, fly in the very face of the teaching of the Word of God which the Jews claim to honor.

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For example, in Genesis 2, verse 18, when it talks about the creation of woman, it says that she is to be to Adam a "sah," that is, she is to be a helper. Now most people, when they think of that word "helper" influenced by the chauvinist culture of which we are a part, think it means subordinate.

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She is to be an assistant, a vice president, someone who pitches in when extra help is needed. But if you take that word "ah-zah" and you look up every instance that it appears in the Bible, and there are many of them, you will find that 90% of the time the word is used to describe God, our Father. When it speaks about God being our helper, he is called "ah-zah."

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God is in no way our subordinate, our assistant, or vice president. Why then do we interpret this verse, or tolerate those who interpret this verse, in a way which subordinates, in a few instances, when the clear teaching of Scripture is that the word carries no subordinate thought at all? And interestingly enough, the word also means a builder, and one who builds things of great permanence,

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like fortresses and cities and mighty gates. This is the way a woman is described. And I think it very interesting in Genesis, that it says that a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. But it does not say that a woman is to do this.

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The woman is seen in Genesis as a far more independent and unique personality than the man. That's the reason that it's important always, when we're seeking out what the Scriptures have to say about women, to understand what the Word of God says as over against the culture in which that word was spoken. You know, there are still those who treat women as they were treated in the Old Testament period.

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In 1967, I was in Morocco, and I was invited to go to a sheikh's tent one night for dinner. And we went. We had a wonderful meal, lamb and chicken, little chunks of it, in a kind of rice pilaf with small potatoes and tomatoes. And it was a wonderful bread, great flat bread, very, very good. And for dessert, they had orange sections, chilled and covered with cinnamon. Delightful.

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And as a concession to Americans, they also had Coca-Cola. Now, we were there that whole evening, and we never saw a single woman. We could hear them giggling behind the screen. They could see us because the light was in our part of the tent and not in their part.

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We did see one woman. I should correct that. There was a belly dancer later in the evening. But aside from that, no women were allowed to show their faces. That's the biblical picture, you see. Not the God-inspired picture, but the biblical cultural picture. For the women were seen to be only domestic servants and for purposes of having children.

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But you don't find that in the experience of the mother of Moses. She broke the law in order to save her son. And we can think of a lot of other very, very noble women who made great contributions to the faith through the gifts of their sons. Think of Hannah with Samuel. Think of Mary and what she imparted to Jesus.

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Think of Lois and Eunice, what they gave to Timothy. Think of Monica, what she gave to St. Augustine. Think of Susanna and what she gave to John Wesley. The kingdom has been blessed by strong mothers. Now the story continues and along comes Pharaoh's daughter with her maidens. More women enter the picture. No men at all.

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Woman after woman and not a male in the tale. And there's an interesting phrase here. It specifically pointed out that she is the daughter of Pharaoh. Now get the tension in that. In other words, she's not an Israelite woman. They were over against the royal house and made no bones about it.

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But now we're into Pharaoh's own house and under the culture of that time, Pharaoh's daughter was owned by Pharaoh. She had to be absolutely obedient to him. And she knew this child was a Jewish child. It says in the second chapter of the sixth verse that she recognized him as a Hebrew baby. And it was very important also, the example that she gave to her maidens.

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Her maidens were along with her. They were seeing what she was doing. And what she did was to break filial constraints, racial constraints, economic constraints, social constraints, and political ties. She shattered them all. Talk about courage. Talk about nobility of spirit to save the life of this little child.

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Shouldn't surprise us, of course, when we see women doing things like that. The Old Testament gives us some wonderful pictures of women. The first theologian in the Old Testament is a woman. You remember the conversation that the woman had with the serpent? It's really a very erudite conversation, you know.

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The serpent says to her, "Did God say you were not supposed to eat of the fruit of any tree?" And she replies, "He not only said we are not to eat of it, but also that we are not to touch it." That's a very sophisticated remark. See, God didn't say you couldn't touch it.

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But the woman was smart enough to know that when you start touching things and playing around with them, you get in trouble. So she said, "We're not only not allowed to eat it, we're not allowed to touch it." Now, in Jewish tradition, that's called fencing the Torah. The Jews build up a whole series of rules and regulations which were designed to protect the law of God.

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They call that fencing the Torah. And it's interesting to notice that when you read in rabbinic commentaries about how the woman here fences the Torah, the rabbis admit that she did that. But then they go on to say that Adam told her to do it.

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There is, of course, no reference to that in the Scriptures at all. And in the New Testament, we have great women thinkers also. Remember how often Paul talked about Priscilla and Aquila? That's a very interesting thing, you know.

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There's a husband and wife combination, but who is mentioned first? The woman, consistently, every time he notes them, she is mentioned first. And she is described as the principal teacher of Apollos. Now, those who have problems with women teaching need to think about that.

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She is the teacher of Apollos, and she is honored for her knowledge. We don't have to think very long about history to know the contributions that have been made by women. Think of Madame Curie, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Cassatt, Pittsburgh woman, Sister Kenny, Florence Nightingale. Think of the contributions of that noble spirit, struggling against the prejudice of her day,

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not asking for any governmental funds but using her own, regularly put down just because she was a woman, and also because she was a nurse, going to a part of the world where no British woman had ever gone before, serving in the most primitive conditions, coming to be loved by the wounded and the dying so that they called her the lady with the lamp, staying single all of her life out of dedication to her purpose, finally being honored by her queen and her country,

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and slipping back into her country to avoid all the applause, living on into her 90s, always advancing the cause of nursing. Thinking of this woman in medicine reminds me of Dr. James Berry. Did you ever hear of Dr. James Berry? On July the 5th, 1813, a scrawny lad by the name of James Berry presented himself at a hospital in eastern Pennsylvania and asked for a job. And the interviewing doctor asked him why he wanted a job, and he said because he loved work in a hospital.

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And the interviewing doctor asked him what his experience was, and because he had none, he stood there rather mute. And the doctor looked at him and said, "Are you Scots?" And James Berry replied, "Aye, I'm Scots, and my grandfather was a Scots Earl." And the doctor was impressed with that, being Scots himself, so he allowed the young man to sign up. In 12 months, he advanced to the level of assistant surgeon.

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By the time 12 years had passed, he was a surgeon major, and then became deputy inspector general of the United States Army Medical Corps. Then he became inspector general, the highest-ranking medical officer in the United States Army. He was everywhere as a fine physician and a fine administrator, but somewhat hot-tempered. He was engaged in a duel on one occasion, and sometimes had to be disciplined for being too rowdy.

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He died on July the 25th, 1865, in London. It was only when Dr. James Berry died that the secret was discovered. The secret, of course, was that the senior inspector general of the United States Army Medical Department was a woman. You see, suggestions to the contrary hold little water and no weight.

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She was the youngest black girl since the daughter of Pharaoh. She made a lot more of a contribution to history than her father, the Pharaoh, ever did. Well, they find this basket with Moses in it, and Moses' sister is watching. And very quickly, she says, "I know a Hebrew nurse that would be happy to take care of the child."

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She's the baby's own mother. And the Pharaoh's daughter says, "Fine, bring her." See how quickly the sister, another girl, comes to the aid of her brother. Boy, a lot of stories can be written about that. How many brothers have been benefited by the sacrificial service of their sisters.

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Once there was a vicar in a church in England. His name was Patrick. And his wife died when he was very young, leaving him with four children, three daughters and a son. And the son's name was Branwell. And it was immediately decided by the father and the three daughters that Branwell would be the genius of the family.

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And he was very bright. He showed himself talented in drawing and painting. He also could write well, both prose and poetry. And they did everything they could to advance Branwell. Saved and saved, finally sent him to the Royal Academy of Art, but he flunked out, lost all of his money.

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They thought he was misunderstood. And they got him a job as a tutor in a very wealthy home. He quickly lost that job with no recommendations. Then he turned to alcohol and to opium.

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All of their lives, his three sisters worked hard for him. They scrimped and they saved. They worked as teachers and as nannies. But he never turned out to be worth very much.

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This all happened 150 years ago, and I don't think anybody ever heard of Branwell unless they know this story. He died an utter failure. His sisters' efforts in his behalf were in vain. Except for this. To break the drudgery of their own lives, they would, by candlelight at night, write themselves.

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Anne wrote Agnes Grey. Emily wrote Wuthering Heights. And Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre. The Bronte sisters.

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Heroic women. Like Moses' sister, they did everything they could for him. But their own light was inevitably brighter than his. The Exodus is the key act of the Old Testament, and it's feminist in origin.

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The Resurrection is the key act of the New Testament. And while every one of the Resurrection stories from gospel to gospel differs, there is one common thread in each. The Resurrection is shared, first of all, in each story, with women. There are some who, in reading the chauvinistic culture which is typical of the Scriptures, think, because that is the case, that the Bible is irrelevant.

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And they toss it aside. There are some who, seeing the chauvinistic cultural background of the Scriptures, use it, believe it or not, as another weapon in a kind of ugly anti-Semitism which they carry. There are some who simply denounce the Bible as being hopelessly misogynist and forget about it. There are some who despair over the pages of the Scripture because they see them as advocating male power and nothing more.

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But if you love this Word, and if you seek out what God says in and through it, if you go behind the culture to the inspired utterances of the Holy Spirit of the Divine, there God's plan is made evident. And that plan is that His women children and His men children should be honored as the same in His sight. And I hope this little dissertation about Moses and the girls has helped to make that more clear. Let us pray.

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Our Father, we thank Thee for Shipprah and for Puah. We thank Thee for the unnamed mother of Moses or his sister. We thank Thee for Pharaoh's daughters and her maidens. We thank Thee for all of those women referred to in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

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We thank Thee for those women who have been mission servants of Christ. We thank Thee for those who have taught in our church schools. We thank Thee for our mothers who know and love Jesus Christ and who shared their faith with us. We thank Thee for all of those women who have played major roles in the most noble pages of history's chronicles.

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And we thank Thee that this night on Christian Family Sunday we can remember them before Thee with gratitude and great joy. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love.

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And to all those whom nobody loves, His peace. Amen. [silence]