When Plans for Children Unravel Sermon by Pastor Rohde Bethlehem Lutheran Church, St. Charles October 3, 2020

Today we explore the theme: “When our plans for our children unravel.” Part of what I love about this worship series is that we’re reading and exploring stories all over the , many of which we don’t often read during the lectionary year. This week we’re at the very beginning of Exodus, and this particular passage tells us of and his mother when he was a newborn baby.

Moses’ mother, Jochebed, gave birth to him at a very scary time. Moses and his family were part of the , and at the time of Moses’ birth, the Israelites were living in under the tyranny of Pharoah. Pharoah held a strong prejudice against the Israelites; he felt threatened by them, as he noticed the way they kept growing in number and therefore in strength, and his main agenda was to wipe them away, literally to get rid of them. His first strategy was to instruct the Egyptian midwives to kill all the Hebrew boys that they helped to deliver. The midwives heard the order, but they refused to comply. And when caught wind of the fact that their respect for and for life was larger than their fear of him, he was even more incensed, and led to something even more drastic. He sent out a decree to all the Egyptian people, commanding that every baby boy born to a Hebrew woman be taken from her and drowned in the River .

So Moses’ mother gave birth in the midst of this frightful reality. She went into labor, knowing that she may bring into the world a baby that Pharaoh could immediately take away. Jochobed hid as best she could, and when she saw that her baby was a boy, she remained in hiding. She kept him as close to her body as she could, and she managed to keep him out of sight from the Egyptians for three months. But her baby was starting to get squirmier and louder – you know how fast things change in that first year of life – and Pharaoh’s soldiers were patrolling day in and day out, and she knew there was no way she could keep him safe indefinitely, and she also knew there was no she was going to let them take her baby out of her arms. So she prayed the most anguished of prayers, the kind any parent prays when there seems to be no good option for their children; when the mere chance of survival is the only hope.

Then came the day when she did the hardest thing she’s ever done. Jochobed and her daughter, , wove together a basket. Jochobed nursed him one more time, she cradled him in her arms, and wove her fingers through his stringy little hair, and kissed his forehead, and then she placed her baby son in that basket, and, fighting all her maternal instincts, she pushed him into the river. She let him go. It was the absolute last thing she wanted to do, and it was the only way she could give her precious little baby a chance at life.

This moment in the story gives us pause – it’s a place to remember and to feel the anguish of parents who have had to make absolutely heart-wrenching decisions for the sake of their children. I think here of immigrants and refugees, whose circumstances are so dire that they are willing to risk illness, danger, imprisonment, even death out of the slight chance that their children might live. Or I think, too, of parents who have had to let their children hit rock-bottom; of parents who have turned their children into treatment centers, or parents who have made their children stay in jail or pay the fine – these painful, painful choices made out of desperate hope that maybe, this time, their children might live.

When Jochobed let Moses go that day, there was no telling what might happen. He might drown, the winds might pick up and flip upside down the basket that carried him. Who knew who might find him, and what they might do upon seeing his face. There was no way around it – her baby’s future was out of her hands, and it tore her apart.

Moses’ basket floated down the river, and it ended up getting stuck in a tangle of reeds where, of all people, Pharaoh’s daughter was bathing. Now she knew full well the decree that her father had given, but who knows if, up to that point, she had given it much thought. It’s really hard to see and to appreciate the pain of oppression when you yourself benefit from the system.

She must have felt pretty removed from the pain of the Hebrew mothers, that is, until she peered into that handmade basket and saw inside a vulnerable little baby boy. She knew her dad’s rules, but this face, this little, innocent face that seemed to have no one to care for him. Something about this child tugged on her heart; she could not let him go. So she scooped Moses out of the water and held him, but that only satisfied this little baby so much. He was hungry; it was time to eat! Moses’ sister had been watching from afar, she’d followed the basket downstream, the way a big sister is known to do. When she saw Pharaoh’s daughter draw her brother out of the water, and when she heard her brother’s cries, she ran to Pharaoh’s daughter and said, “Do you need me to find someone who can nurse him?” She ran back and got her mother, and Jochobed was allowed to be with her son and nurse him for another two years, until she gave Moses back to Pharaoh’s daughter for adoption.

What a story, huh?

I find myself absorbed by all the twists and turns; there’s so much pain in this story that stops you in your tracks, and then there are these surprising moments of redemption that help me, still today, believe there is reason to hope. This story draws us into the way God’s salvation has often been experienced throughout human history, in times of great upheaval and unraveling – salvation comes in the surprises, in the everyday choices of human beings whose lives get tangled up together, in the experiences that tell us indisputably that our life, and the lives of our children, are worthy of love.

So let me just share what I think is revealed to us in a few of my favorite parts from this story today -

I’ll start with the river. The river that was supposed to kill Moses ends up being the river that delivers him and saves his life. Sometimes the experiences that are most difficult or most risky for us and for our children end up carrying us to a place or a discovery that saves us. We can’t see that place when we let go from the shore; all we can do is live in trust that God is leading the sojourn and taking us somewhere.

Second, I love the way the face of a baby changes Pharaoh’s daughter, and changes each one of us, too. What if we remembered that every one of us came into the world that way? What if we remembered that all of us are alive because someone saw in us someone worth caring for? What if we let ourselves be led by compassion rather than by society’s rules about who’s worthy and who isn’t? Sometimes when I’m having a hard time with another human being, I’ll tell myself, “This person is someone’s , someone’s Owen.” That literally has the power to change the way I see and approach other people, especially people I’m tempted to write off.

And how about the women in this story? I love that Pharaoh thought that the way to wipe out a future was to just get rid of the boys, because, in his mind, there was nothing to worry about, no threat in keeping the girls around. Except it’s the women in this story – the Egyptian midwives, Jochobed, Miriam, and Pharoah’s own daughter – who are the leaders, the advocates not just for their own children, but for each other’s children. These women remind us that the most dismissed in society can sometimes be the very ones God chooses to lead, and they, by coming together, also lift up the truth that, as parents, it takes more than just us to raise our children. We need a village, we need our families, we need our neighbors, we need people who we’ll never call by name and who we’ll probably never see again, but they happen to be in just the right place at the right time to give us an extra hand or a word of encouragement.

And that leads me to just saying a few words about raising children, and trusting God when our plans for our children unravel before our eyes.

When that happens - whether it’s your child being diagnosed with a disability or a disease that utterly shreds your expectations for what it will mean to parent your child, whether it looks like your child growing up and identifying with a way of life or a political party that goes against your wishes, whether your plans for your children are unraveled when you meet the person they’ve fallen in love with or watch them raise children in ways you don’t necessarily agree with, or maybe your plans for your children have unraveled in the most painful of ways because your child has died, or your child is no longer in communication with you.

In some ways, and to certainly different degrees, I think the experience of parenting for a of us is kind of a constant experience of unraveling, if we’re honest with ourselves. We do a whole lot to shape and influence and guide our children, we can’t help but have specific hopes for their lives, but every day, from the smallest of things like picking out an outfit for them to wear to the biggest of things, like the choices they make as adults, we confront the ways our plans, our schedules, our hopes for our children don’t quite fit with what our children end up choosing or becoming.

The part of this story from Exodus that I want to lead us back to, as we think about these experiences of unraveling in the lives of children we love, is the moment when Moses’ mother releases him into the river. She wanted with all her heart to hold on to him, and while her choice to release him into the river was not really a choice at all, I do think it provides us with an image of the way love sometimes calls us to let go.

Jochobed loved Moses with all her heart, and she knew she had to let him go. And it was only in her letting go that her son, Moses, lived. So, whether it’s letting go of the hands of your toddler as she takes her first steps, or letting go of your expectations for your child’s success in school or in sports, or letting go of the hopes you had for this school year that looks absolutely nothing like the school year we thought it would be, or letting go of the future as you had envisioned it when it comes to what your family might look like, Jochobed teaches us the courage to love by letting go. We never let go of our love for our children, but we learn that loving them often requires us to let go of expectations, and standards and plans, so that they are released to learn, to fail, to grow.

And in every experience of letting go, we, like Jochobed, will stand by the shore, with all of our fears and questions, and we trust that, just like baby Moses, there will be helping hands for our children downstream, there will be surprising like Pharaoh’s daughter, like teachers and neighbors and coaches who show compassion to our children and invest in their futures, and along the way there will be glimpses of the weaving that is our children’s lives, a weaving that takes all the loose strands of unraveled plans and unmet expectations and turns them into something beautiful, something we never would’ve seen had we never let go.

Amen.