Exodus 2 "Drawn Out" Scott Hoezee

She knew it was a Hebrew baby. That's what we are told in verse 6 about the princess of Egypt: she took one look at the baby in the basket and instantly she knew it was a Hebrew baby. How did she know that so quickly? In the past various ideas have been proposed. Maybe it was the weave of the blanket in which the little tyke was swaddled--maybe it was of some distinctive Hebrew-like design. Maybe she saw he was circumcised. Or maybe even as an infant this little one just looked like a non-Egyptian.

She knew it was a Hebrew baby. But how did she know? The answer is obvious: she knew it was a Hebrew baby because in those days, the Nile River was precisely where you could find lots of Hebrew babies. Mostly, though, those other babies were dead. The River Nile, a source of life to the Egyptians, had become an infant graveyard. Many Hebrew babies were floating in the Nile at that time, most just didn't have the benefit of a basket to keep them alive.

And maybe it had bothered the Pharaoh's daughter all along. What if on some previous bathing excursion to the Nile, the princess had been pouring refreshing water over her naked body only to feel something brush past her leg in the water. Looking down, she was horrified to see an infant corpse drifting lazily downstream with the current. Perhaps it sickened her. But what could she do? She could not defy her father, could not start blocking the paths of the Pharaoh's troops each time they marched to the river bank to toss yet another screaming child into the waters of death.

Maybe the princess hated the whole ugly thing and so saw in this chance encounter with the baby in the basket an opportunity to do something positive, something good, in the midst of so much badness. At least she could rescue this one. She did it with full knowledge that this was a baby of the very same people her father had declared public enemy Number One. But perhaps she knew that if she applied all her daughterly charms, even her hard-hearted father could not refuse her just this one teensy, weensy little request. Standing ankle-deep in the Nile that day, staring down at the bawling child, the princess calculated all of this in her mind and decided to gamble on her ability to pull it all off.

That, in turn, was precisely what the baby's mother had gambled on. Usually when we think of Moses' mother setting the child adrift in his little basket, we tend to see it as an act of desperation. They had hidden the child as long as they could, but as his little lungs developed, he got pretty good at crying loudly enough to be heard out in the streets--in the streets where the soldiers patrolled listening for just such infant cries. So what could they do!? What in the world would prevent this fine young son from being discovered and murdered after all!? And so we tend to think that since she lacked any other idea, this mother just launched the baby out into the wider world in his amphibious bassinet and could then do no more than hope for the best (yet without a clue as to what good could possibly come out of this infant's nautical voyage).

That, however, is a mostly unlikely scenario. Instead it seems likely that this shrewd mother had done some advance work, had scouted out the location of the princess's favorite bathing spot (and likely found out which day of the week was bath day, too). Egypt is large and the Nile is long. There were a thousand places where the basket could have been launched that would have resulted in nothing other than the child's floating away out of sight only to die somewhere downstream. But if your goal is to keep your baby alive, that's not what you would do.

So this mother was savvy and careful. She knew the day and the place. She didn't set it adrift but made sure it got stuck in some reeds very near the princess's private bathing place. She then set her daughter Miriam as a kind of sentry to wait, watch, and see if the very plan she had concocted would work out the way she had been praying it would. The providence of God, after all, works just as surely through our carefully planned efforts as it sometimes works over and above and beyond anyone's awareness. Sometimes our prayers are answered in surprising ways, but other times they are answered exactly the way, and in the manner, we had hoped. Both kinds of providence are proper causes for thanksgiving.

And in this instance this is, of course, precisely what happened. When Miriam emerged from out of nowhere to offer the princess her services in securing a wet nurse for the just-discovered water child, the princess was no fool. There is every likelihood that she surmised Miriam was the baby's sister and that the wet nurse was not someone Miriam found by consulting the Egyptian Yellow Pages but was the child's own mother. It didn't matter, though: the princess wants to save at least this one child and make him her own adopted son once he was weaned. So she happily plays along with, and play right into, the scheme of the baby's mother. And so the child who will be named "Moses," the one "drawn out" of the waters, is preserved for the incredible work God will set before him when Moses is tapped to draw out of Egypt the people of Israel. Before this chapter is finished, the adult Moses begins to emerge as a champion for the oppressed, defending a fellow Hebrew against a ruthless Egyptian and then defending the daughters of Reuel against some ruffian shepherds. And the last word of Exodus 2 is that God hears the groanings of Israel and is concerned. Something has to be done, and this new champion for the oppressed will be the one to do it.

Soon, Moses will loom large in the text of Exodus. But let's not fail to note with gratitude the role of the women in all this. In a marvelous twist of irony, the daughters of Israel, and even the daughter of the Pharaoh himself, are the ones who ultimately prove to be Pharaoh's undoing. "Kill their sons!" the Pharaoh had decreed, "but let the daughters live! After all, we are not threatened by the girls in our midst!" How wrong Pharaoh was! The daughters who had been exempted from Pharaoh's holocaust were the very ones who brought Moses to life and then preserved his life. It began with Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives we met in Exodus 1, and it now continues with these other women. Moses may get all the credit and all the glory eventually, but only because the providence of God worked great wonders through the women of the story first. Through their clever and faithful efforts, the seed of Pharaoh's destruction gets planted into the soil of Pharaoh's own household. The child raised under Pharaoh's roof, and bankrolled by the Egyptian budget, is the very one who will soon rain down destruction on Egypt.

But there is more, far more, going on in Exodus 2, than just a charming story about the origins of Moses. Instead what we find here is not a story of what was long ago and far away, something that happened just to other people, but rather our own story. Because Exodus 2 is really a narrative of baptism. This chapter is one of several in the Bible that introduces the twin, and the yoked, themes of water and death, and hence of our need to be rescued from the waters of death that surround us, that threaten to engulf us.

Water in the Bible is a source of life that we cannot possibly do without (as seen near the end of Exodus 2 when Moses provides water for the daughters of Reuel and their flocks). But water also, when unleashed and unchecked, is a potential source of death. It all started in the beginning. As depicted by the text of Genesis 1, before God began to impose the order of his cosmos onto what would become creation, all that existed were the fierce and deadly waters of chaos. In order to carve out a safe niche, an island of security, for his creatures, God first had to push back the threatening waters. And so Genesis 1 shows God shoving the waters aside to create some dry ground. The earth under our feet was seen as a kind of barrier to what the Bible routinely calls "the waters below" or "the waters under the earth." God also had to make us safe from the waters above, and so the firmament was set into place. The so-called firmament was not just the sky the way we usually think of it but was seen almost like a giant plastic or glass dome that prevents "the waters over the earth" from cascading down on our heads and drowning the whole lot of us. The earth, in other words, was like those little globes you can buy in souvenir shops--you know, the kind of thing that is filled with water and fake snowflakes with maybe a little house and yard in the center. Shake up the globe, and you can create the illusion of gently falling snow.

The creation was like that except that in this case the waters are outside and all around the globe. The creation floated like a submarine with life-threatening waters all around. Indeed, during the flood story involving Noah, the text of Genesis does not show that the flood resulted from some monsoon-like whopper of a rainstorm. Instead we see God punching some holes in the firmament above and in the ground below such that the floodwaters both came down from the skies above and welled up from the earth below. The story of Noah was a story of uncreation, a brief time when God allowed the safe cosmos of his good creation to be swamped once more by the same waters of chaos that had once filled the universe prior to God's intervention.

Noah's Ark was a kind of mini-cosmos, literally a microcosm, of creation's original safe haven for all people and also all creatures. Now we come to Exodus 2 and we find a nearly identical story of God's preserving providence upon the waters of death and chaos. The Nile was a source of life to the Egyptians but had become a source of death for the Israelites. Though only a river, to the mothers of the slain children, the Nile must have looked every bit as threatening and terrible as a tsunami tidal wave bearing down on a place like Bangladesh. These were the waters of chaos, a taker of life. Yet in the case of at least young Moses, those very same waters became, by the alchemy of grace, a source of life. Moses' basket floated upon the waters. The same water that took life from too many other babies buoyed up the life of Moses. He was kept safe through the waters, even as later in Exodus the man whose name means "drawn out" will draw the entire nation of Israel safely out of the waters of the Red Sea.

There is, in short, more to this story than meets the eye. In Sunday school we maybe all saw a painting of this story as the baby Moses floated charmingly in his reed basket even as the princess of Egypt looked adoringly down at the just-found little sailor. Although it would unsettle the hearts and minds of our own children, would it bring home the true import of this story better if we saw Moses's basket floating amidst the corpses of the other Hebrew children who were not as lucky? It would surely bring home the idea of life being drawn from the midst of death!

But it would also convey the overall truth of our Christian existence even to this day: we have our life in Christ in the midst of a chaotic world of death and as a result of God's One and Only Chosen One who did not, as a matter of fact, escape death. We live because he died. We emerge alive from the waters of baptism because Jesus went ahead of us, letting himself get drowned first so that he would be in a position to rescue the rest of us when we also go down into those waters of death. This morning at little Jacqueline's baptism, I tried to remind us all that this was not a polite rite of passage. Baptism is not right up there with getting a six-month portrait snapped at Wal-Mart or some routine matter like getting a well-baby check with the pediatrician. Baptism catches us up in the rhythms of life, death, and new life. Those waters do not merely cleanse, they kill; they do not just tidy us up, they drown us first so that we can then, and by grace, be raised back up, buoyed upon those same waters in the ark, the basket, the boat that is the Church.

We are baptized in the midst of a world of death because we believe that the only way to survive the threatening waters of chaos, the waters that keep rising ever higher on all sides, is through the way provided by Jesus. Recently, and for the first time in my pastoral experience, I did an odd and sad thing: I handed a certificate of baptism to two parents. That wasn't the odd part, though: I've given out baptism certificates about 100 times since getting ordained 12 years ago. The odd thing was that I delivered this particular certificate to parents who were standing next to the coffin of the child who had been baptized. I almost hesitated at first, thinking "Surely this is the wrong place to give them this." But then I realized: I've never given such a meaningful certificate of baptism. This is why we need the hope of Jesus as it is signed and sealed to us in the sacrament. We need baptism because we are each of us dying. We need baptism because we are not safe in this world, and no amount of Homeland Security, missile defense systems, antibiotics, or vaccines will ever succeed in making us ultimately secure or safe.

Moses was quite obviously drawn up out of the waters of death to receive his life as a gift of divine grace. But there is not a person in this room tonight or any Sunday of whom that is not likewise true. If we live, we live unto the Lord. If we die, we die in and unto the Lord. And if after we die we live yet again unto all eternity, it is in and because of the one Lord Jesus Christ who seals his grace to us in our baptisms. We do not live because we're good swimmers. We all drown. We do not live because we are so strong and healthy. We are all finally weak and sick unto death. We do not live because who knows, maybe the worst will never happen. The worst thing in the universe already happened: it was that Friday afternoon when the Lord of Life was put to death.

In a moment, I am going to lead us through a service of baptismal renewal and reaffirmation. We are actually baptized just once, and most of us cannot recall that moment (though a few of us can). So for us the ongoing sacrament of the Christian life is the Lord's Supper. Yet we do well to recall, and to reaffirm, what was sealed to us in our baptisms. We do well to remember that we live because once, spiritually, we died. But we live because our God is the God of resurrection, the one who does a "moses" to us by drawing us out of death and into life. We live because of something that inspires nothing short of dumbfounded gratitude, because of a gift we could never have secured for ourselves since at the time we were dead, and the dead don't generally have the ability to do anything. But now we are made alive, and we stay alive even in a world that never tires of reminding us of death's reality.

Tonight I suggested that Moses' basket was not set adrift by his mother with no plan having been made to secure the future of the child in the basket. Moses did not drift aimlessly upon those waters of death but was aimed in the direction of life all along. And the watchful eye of sister Miriam was there, too. So also the Church of Jesus Christ is not afloat on this world's waters of death and chaos in some random or haphazard way. A divine eye watches over us, and a pre-determined divine plan has set us in the direction of life abundant. People of God, as we will say again in a moment, remember your baptism and be thankful. Remember your baptism and sing praise to the Lord of all Life! Hallelujah and Amen!