This post, by Heather Weir, is a reflection on the “God Always Wins” sermon as part of the “Unraveled” sermon series.
A friend who was out of town texted me “How was church?” and I texted back “Good.” Then I texted: “What else am I going to say?” Left unsaid in the text-message exchange was my dissatisfaction with part of the sermon, the reading on Pharaoh’s daughter. The way I heard that reading didn’t line up with what I consider good interpretation of the Bible. So I did what I commonly do when something in the sermon sounds off to me: I emailed the pastor. And Elaine invited me to write this reflection.
The reading we heard on Sunday was from a book of essays called Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization. What distracted me was the language used to talk about Pharaoh’s daughter and Miriam. In my ears, the language implied that Pharaoh’s daughter was a colonizer and Miriam an indigenous person. In the biblical story, this is not the case. Certainly, Pharaoh’s daughter was part of an oppressive over-class, and Miriam part of an enslaved and oppressed people, but the Hebrew people were not indigenous to Egypt. They were an immigrant group. A closer current example of immigrant groups oppressed and marginalized by native people is in Europe. The kind of racism and anti-immigrant language swirling around Brexit is the parallel example that springs to my mind.
But perhaps the author of the piece on Pharaoh’s daughter is more concerned with white settler/first nations peoples here in Canada, here in Toronto, than with Brexit parallels to the biblical text. Is there a way that the story of Pharaoh’s daughter can speak into that situation? Yes. I think there is.
Pharaoh’s daughter is like me, like many of us. She was born into a time and place and lived within a particular system of government and way of life. She didn’t set up the systemic injustices that surrounded her, but she was on the lucky side of the system. She did not have to worry about her daily bread, and lived a life of relative comfort. She chose to see and do something about one baby her father had ordered thrown into the river to die. In this case she said no to her father’s decree and chose life for one child. By doing this, and by listening to the advice of one of the enslaved and marginalized Hebrew children, she changed the life not just of the baby, but of his mother and family. Pharaoh’s daughter used her positional power and her economic power to change the world of one family.
I also have been born into a particular time and place on the lucky side of the system. I didn’t set up the systemic injustices that surround me. Are there ways that I can choose to see and do something for people stuck in the injustices of systems around me? As I go about my day, what injustices present themselves for my notice? Do I see them? Or do I let the baby in the basket float on by?