God Always Wins

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Sermon Notes:

In today’s sermon, two books are referenced. The first is by Leymah Gbowee & Carol Mithers, “Mighty Be Our Powers“. The second is a compilation of various writings by various authors, edited by Steve Heinrichs, titled “Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization.” In this second book, I read Jennifer Henry’s, “I Chose Miriam” (pp. 21 – 22).

Scripture Reading: Exodus 1:8 – 2:10 (NRSV)

8 Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. Read more…

Looking to Sunday

by Elaine Poproski

I’ve been thinking a lot about justice of late. I’ve been thinking about what it means and what it looks like. I’ve long understood justice to be a key characteristic of God’s kingdom, which was inaugurated by Jesus, and which the Church is intended to manifest. This Sunday, as we explore the first two chapters of Exodus, paying particular attention to the women in the story, we will be required to think about justice.

Justice in the Bible is closely connected to the idea of right-ness or righteousness. It is based on the fundamental belief that there is right and there is wrong and that God is the ultimate arbiter between the two. God’s own character is described as righteous (or right) and those who seek to honour God in their own lives are called to be righteous, which means they are called to live in a way that is consistent with God’s righteousness, abiding by the precepts identified by God as right. In the Old Testament, those precepts are collectively named the Law. In the New Testament, Jesus is presented as the embodiment of those precepts – as the embodiment of righteousness – and thus His followers are intended to model their lives on Jesus’ life.

The reality of our world is that not everyone cares about making right choices and among those who do strive to live righteously, not everyone agrees on what constitutes what is right. So often, our perspective – shaped by our life experience, by our understanding of the world, by our education – dramatically colours our interpretation of righteousness. Furthermore, because justice is essentially the act of setting things right (Plato describes it as a tool, as a human virtue, and as a social consciousness, all of which are directed toward making people and society right or good in part by protecting people and society from those who perpetrate wrongs)[1], our perception of what constitutes justice is necessarily impacted by our perception of what is right to begin with.

On Sunday we’ll read the story of wrongs committed by the most powerful person in Egypt. And we’ll read the story of how some of the least powerful people in Egypt acted as agents of justice in the face of those wrongs. As you prepare for Sunday, I invite you to read these first two chapters of Exodus. Consider the stories of the midwives, of the mother and the sister, and of the Pharaoh’s daughter. Can you put yourself in any of their places? Can you imagine the pressure on the midwives and on Pharaoh’s daughter to obey the rules? Can you imagine the feeling of powerlessness and fear that must have been a constant companion of the mother and sister? How do you imagine that you would have behaved if their story were yours?

[1] See D.R. Bhandari of JNV University, “Plato’s Concept of Justice: An Analysis” in The Paideia Institute Archives, presented August 1998 to the Twentieth World Congress on Philosophy, in Boston, MA (https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciBhan.htm, accessed Nov. 7, 2019).