There are many ways to speak to the powers of captivity and chaos. There are many ways to respond with the voices of release. You know the old familiar story of Moses the liberator recounted in the spiritual we sang. Go down and tell the pharaohs to let my people go. When it was first composed and sung sometime in the late 1840s by the people longing for freedom, it was ignored by the slave masters of the time because the words, they thought, were just an old Bible story. But it was a song used by the underground railroad as a subversive song of captivity and release. Just before this familiar story of Moses is another story in Exodus chapter 1. It is another way to speak to the powers of captivity and chaos. Akilah and I share it. The story of the Hebrew midwives.

Akilah: The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labour. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

Shelly: The Pharaoh said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.’

Akilah: But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them. And the name Puah means “splendid” in Hebrew and Shiphrah means “brightness”.

These two stories are about a vocation to resistance—resistance to cruelty, oppression, and injustice–necessary because the Pharaohs of this world are not going to be receptive to the suggestion that justice come rolling down like a mighty stream. The oppressors of this world, in power-over are not going to willingly step aside, repent, sit down, move over, or share. In the story, Pharaoh wasn’t willing when Shiphrah and Puah and Moses spoke God’s truth to him. The vast majority of white America was not willing in the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.  He said, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor….Frankly, I have yet to engage in a campaign that was ‘well-timed’ in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.” And it is painfully clear that the struggle continues.

In the biblical stories it is clear that our forebears counted the cost and did not want to go down and tell ole Pharaoh that he had to change, that the slavery had to stop. That nothing less than freedom for God’s people was being demanded.  In the story the holy mandate for freedom through no other means than through cleverness and relentless resistance of regular people.

Dr. King writes of the beginning of his call when, as a 26 year old preacher, he was asked to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott Association. Threatening phone calls began. He recalls his memory of one particular dark night of the soul when the hissing, vitriolic calls intensified. He writes, “I hung up but I could not sleep. I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing to be a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud: I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I can’t face it alone. At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced God. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me inner calm. Three nights later, our house was bombed.”

The skies around us seem dark with foreboding as though an approaching cataclysmic series of events is upon us. The times we live in seem cynical, a smug and discouraging. And yet, their times challenged the likes of midwives, Moses, and Martin, too.  As people of faith, my friends, we must choose a timely justice—a justice for our time and place. Martin said, “Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls ‘enemy…I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation, is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all humankind. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.”

It is my conviction that it is ours, no less than it was Martin’s, to seek justice by listening to the stories of our forbears, hearing the call of God, and/or, if you will, listening to our fundamental humanity, telling us what is to be done. Shiphrah and Puah, like courageous women before and after them, used their place and position to resist oppression. And the message is unmistakable and always the same, “let my people go.” Symbolically, their names mean Splendid Brightness and we also have that name! Moses and martin found their vocation and their voices, inspiring and leading the liberations. And for us, to us, through us, the message is unmistable and always the same: “let my people go!”Free the oppressed, speak and act. I must be willing to choose freedom for myself and for others–to choose a timely justice, struggling for equity and true unity within a celebratory diversity. It is not easy. It is easy to talk about it and for me to justify myself because I’m a liberal, well-intentioned do-gooder. While the truth is…that for those of us who benefit every day from white privilege, it is a choice whether or not we confront the heavy shackles of racism. But for many, many persons, the soul and body crushing effects of the oppression are not a choice, but life-threatening in every sense of the word. We must not normalize what is unjust and life-threatening, and not just to some, but for all of us. “Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with me,” says the old song. Let there racial justice and let it begin with me, and doing a fearless and honest soul inventory first is where it begins.

If you will, ponder these questions for your own life. What does it mean that until I was an adult, I had never given any serious consideration to my racial identity, to how I benefited from the oppression all around and within me? I had never had consciousness of what the great sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois called the “psychological wages of whiteness.” How do I compassionately work to free myself from my captivity to unconsciousness? How do you and I learn from our own and from others’ racial heritages, experiences, complicity, and wounding, so that we may then grow into effective and strong and nonviolent resisters who, because of the persons we are choosing to be, and because of the values we teach and hold as essential here in this church, will refuse hatred and subversively, choose love.  One way is by continuing to learn and there are so many ways to do that, both here and in our community at large. Resistance and vigilant interventions are key. The Christian Scriptures teach, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Offering the spiritual and intellectual tools to teach us best how to do that from the diversity of our own calling is essential and that’s why we preach and teach and have seminars and anti-racism education and opportunities to work together for positive change. To be a voice, an activist for the rights of all people is important work based upon political or legal convictions, but also, for me, and for many of you, too, the resistance to hatred and exclusion begins in a spiritual mandate to repent of my various stereotypes, self-justification, fears, and microaggressions unconsciously chosen or consciously expressed.

It is part of the UCG DNA not to shrink from the hard questions, and to care profoundly, and to work together to make a positive difference. That makes me hopeful–that we have one another and that around the world, there are people inside and outside moved by love and justice. And each individual in this room has an important place, a voice, an influence.

One of the lessons that MLK’s parents taught him, is the learning he calls ‘somebodiness’. ‘Somebodiness’ is a state of self dignity and worthiness, despite what others may think. It is a deep inner resolve that nobody can convince me that I am not somebody.

In 1967, Dr. King said this in Cleveland:

“The first thing we must do is to develop within ourselves a deep sense of somebodiness. Don’t let anybody make you feel that you are nobody. Because the minute you feel that way, you are incapable of rising to your full maturity as a person.”

May we dare to keep learning, to bring to the light our past, and to provide the safe soul space to speak and to hear the truth of one another’s experiences, embracing our diversity!  For when we do this, when I wrestle with truth, when you do, and we become somebodies–ourselves in this world as God sees us, then we may discover together a lasting compassion and will overcome with Love.