GIVE US BREAD, BUT GIVE US ROSES
Rev. Karen Pidcock-Lester
First Presbyterian Church, Pottstown, Pa.
Mothers’ Day 2016
Exodus 1:7-21
Acts 16:23-34
Introduction to the Scripture Readings: Exodus
In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, God makes a covenant with Abraham and Sarah in which God promises to make of them a great nation, and to give them descendants that would be as numerous as the stars of heaven. The second book of the Bible, Exodus, opens in the land of Egypt. Abraham’s descendants have migrated to Egypt in an effort to escape famine in their homeland. They are immigrants.
For many years, the Egyptians have welcomed these immigrants, and lived happily side by side. But a new king, a new Pharoah, has risen in Egypt—a new administration, so to speak. And this Pharoah does not like the Hebrew people. He is threatened with their growing population. This new ruler takes action to get rid of them. But God has not abandoned His people nor forgotten His promise. Let us hear how God’s plans are furthered and Pharoah’s evil plans are foiled. Exodus 1:7- 2:10
Introduction to Scripture Reading: Acts
Paul and Silas are on their missionary journey bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to Europe. Their first stop is Philippi. In Philippi, they meet Lydia and some other women, who receive the gospel and become the beginnings of what will be one of the strongest Christian congregations of the early church.
But Paul and Silas have run into some trouble with the local business leaders and authorities. They have been attacked, stripped of their clothing, and beaten severely with rods. After the beating, they have been thrown in prison. The jailer has followed instructions and put Paul and Silas in the ‘innermost cell” of the underground prison, and locked their feet in shackles. Let us hear what happens next: Acts 16:23-34
Pray.
What a splendid story.
What a grand spectacle of a story.
I am heartily grateful for it.
Apart from being thrilling, and dramatic enough to hold the attention of our children, it reveals so much about God, so much that I need to know…so much that I suspect you need to know, too. This story contains truths about God we will want to cling to, especially in times of terror and trouble.
What are these truths?
God is the God who flings open doors,
who breaks chains, and sets people free.
Do you know anyone who is bound by some sort of chain?
Hold onto this story when you see reports of people all over the world who languish in prison cells or dungeons vile,
or when you yourself, or someone you love, is shackled by some chain you cannot free yourself from – some poverty, or addiction, or noose of shame, or regret, or debt, some shackle that keeps you from living free.
Ever since God began revealing God’s Self in Genesis, God has been the God who sets people free.
Here is another truth: God gives us strength and courage and hope so that even in the darkest hour, even in the blackest midnight, when there is not a glimmer of light, God hears our prayers and gives us songs to sing. Share that with the ones who grope along the torturous pathway of disease or depression or oppression.
And God is the God who is mighty. This is another truth given to us in this story in Acts. God performs miracles. Even the earth quakes at the divine bidding! God shakes things up, or shakes them down, as needed. God changes things. Changes hearts, minds – changes history. With this God, people can change, can be changed. Look at Paul: he is the one who had spewed threats and murder against his enemies. Now, he is pouring grace upon his captor who has thrown him in a hole in the ground, chained his feet and bolted the door.
God is mighty. Tell that to the friend who sees no way out, no way ahead, no way through. God does miracles.
Yes, this story is a gift to us, a treasure trove of precious truths about God. Tell it to our children – speak of the earthquake, sing of Paul and Silas…
But tell them, too, about the woman.
Tell them about the woman.
“What woman?” you may ask.
The wife and mother in this story. You probably didn’t notice her, but she is there, the wife who sent her husband off to work the night shift at the jail, the mother who tucked her children into bed as her household settled down for the night.
This woman is wakened by the rumble and shaking of the earthquake, fearing for the lives of her loved ones, I suspect. In the middle of the night, she opens the door of her house to see her husband, flanked by two prisoners of the state on the doorstep. Her husband is taking the law into his own hands. He is defying the law of the Roman empire, an empire which maintains order by brutal reprisals to those who do not comply with the rules.
This woman has seen what the law does to a man, stripped, beaten, bloodied; she has seen the executions of enemies of the state, crucifixions. Now, her husband harbors two condemned men, he stands at the door of their home…
and what does she say? She says, “Come in. Come in.”
And starts to make supper.
This is a dangerous act;
this is a subversive woman.
Without our even noticing her, this unnamed wife and mother who stokes the fire and puts the kettle on joins the long line of subversive women that appear in God’s story with the human race. It is a line that stretches back to Shiprah and Puah, in Exodus, two women who shrewdly thwarted Pharoah’s efforts to kill Hebrew babies. It is a line that stretches forward to women across the centuries in too many countries who have opened the door to find a person hungry, beaten, bleeding, on the doorstep, and who could not leave them standing there, so they said, “Come in.”
What begins with a cup of water or a crust of bread, century after century, has swelled to movements that have defied the Pharoahs and Caesars of this world because these women feared God, honored God, obeyed God, more than men.
We need to tell our children about them, too.
Because the God who sets the prisoner free,
the God who liberates those who are oppressed,
who changes hearts and minds and history…
this God does not always send an earthquake.
There was no earthquake for the men and women shackled in dungeons in the slave castles on the west African coast centuries ago, who looked through the Door of No Return for ships that would take them in chains across the sea …
God did not send an earthquake to children in our own country in the last century, shackled by poverty to the spindle and the lathe in factories that scarred their limbs and filled their lungs with lint as they worked from dawn until dark…
there has been no earthquake for girls in China, imprisoned by ignorance because they have been deprived of education and literacy…
there was no earthquake in Nazi Germany when that 20th century Pharoah rounded up the Jews and plotted to exterminate them;
or in the United States when Jim Crow laws, or in South Africa when an apartheid system, set taskmasters over black people to oppress them with forced labor;
there was no earthquake when gay men and women were being beaten, imprisoned and even murdered only decades ago in our own country;
there was no earthquake in Argentina when sons and daughters were dragged away in the Dirty War by government soldiers and never seen again;
there is no earthquake now in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where people are shackled without education or property or voice or vote.
The God who is mighty does not always send an earthquake to set people free.
Sometimes God sends women, subversive women, women who fear God, who honor and obey God rather than powerful men.
Over a century ago, God sent Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Johnson, Sarah Johnson, Quaker Philadelphia farmers who defied unjust laws and said to the slave running the underground railroad, “Come in.”
A hundred years ago, God sent women, wives, mothers, Sarah Bagley, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, into the factories and streets, marching, marching, crying “give us bread, but give us roses…”
God sent educated women to China and around the world, Christian missionaries who set up schools, opened the doors, and said to every child – boy or girl – who appeared on the doorstep, “Come in.”
God sent women, subversive women, into Nazi Germany and Vichy France and occupied Poland, Magda Trocme, Zofia Kossak-Szczuka , Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz, women who carved rooms behind walls, set up networks, and said to the prisoner on the doorstep, “Get in…we’ll get you out.”…
God sent women, subversive women, Diane Nash, Rosa Parks, Helen Suzman, and the Federation of South African women, into Selma and Johannesburg, and Capetown, exposing the corrupt and sinful systems in their countries…
God sent mothers, loving and proud mothers, Jeanne Manford and Adele Starr, into streets and living rooms working for dignity and justice for their gay children…
God sent women into the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Azucena Villafor de de Vincenti, Maria Adela Gard de Antokoletz, Mothers of the Disappeared, who challenged armies of Argentina’s Caesar, bringing their dark deeds into the eyes of the world…
Even now, God is sending women into Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and Pakistan, women who fear God, who stand up and cry out, or devise shrewd plans to thwart some Pharoah’s efforts to deny education, or the right to vote, or a voice in the future of their country…
because in the absence of an earthquake, some foundations must be shaken, foundations which perpetuate cruelty and violence, systems that shackle people in poverty and powerlessness, and imprison people in dark places with no escape. The fortresses of power built on such foundations must be shaken and brought down, because
God is the God who sets people free,
and those who fear God,
those who honor God,
who worship and serve God
must do the same.
So indeed, let us tell our children of the mighty earthquakes God has sent –
but let us also tell them of the jailer’s wife, of Shiprah and Puah,
and all the women who feared God more than Pharoah or Caesar …
In the absence of an earthquake,
let us tell them of the mothers God has worked through
to shake foundations that must be shaken
to set the prisoner free.
Amen.