Scripture: Exodus 1:18-25
A few weeks ago Lee Walters asked me if I’d like her involvement in planning the worship service for Mother’s Day, today. That’s one of those questions—like when Cathy Bollinger asked if it would be o.k. for her and Mary Gordon Hall to sing in church sometime—one of those questions that you don’t have to think too hard about. I said sure. A little later, as we actually started to talk about it, I asked Lee if she had any thoughts to start off with. She said, well just that she had been thinking about this scripture about the Hebrew midwives from Exodus—and then she told me the reasons that story had occurred to her. I didn’t have to think too hard about that one either. I said let’s go with it.
The reason I was so quick to second the motion on that scripture is that I have some very vivid associations with that scripture too. One in particular came to mind immediately. It’ll take just a moment of explanation.
In the mid-nineties I took two trips to Guatemala. I’ve spoken of those experiences a few other times in sermons, and I apologize for returning to them if it seems like I make too much of them, but they were important experiences to me. The first trip to Guatemala certainly qualifies as a life-changing experience, since that is when Ava and I met. (You never know quite in what ways experiences may come along that will change your life.) It was also at least life modifying in a number of other ways, because although I came back and took up my previous life, I did see a lot of things in a different way and had new feelings to process. For me anyway, it was not so much that I saw new things, visited different places, met new people, had some different experiences. All those things were nice and happen at least to some extent any time you travel. In this case though the greatest change was not in what I saw in someone else’s culture but the changes in the way I viewed my own.
I can’t go into that in great depth or detail this morning. But one of the things I realized is that most of us who went on that trip thought, subconsciously at least, that we were going to visit people who needed our help. And that was not an unreasonable thought, because they did. We were going because the UCC in Illinois was already in a helping relationship with indigenous Guatemalans who had been exiled to Mexico because of the violence in their homeland, and who were beginning to return. There were definitely people who were in need and who needed help. And there were some things we could offer. But what I came to see, much more clearly and deeply than I had before, was how much help we, in our culture, need.
So when I made a return trip to Guatemala several years later, those of us planning the trip tried our very best to plan out the idea that we were going there to see how we could help, to see how we could best distribute our largesse, or to have our hearts warmed by the success of our efforts, along with many others, to resettle people in their homeland. There was simply no way to avoid some of that, but we tried our best to envision this as an experiment in cross-cultural Bible study.
We were going to end up in a remote mountain village, living for four days among Mayan Indians a few of whom spoke Spanish and none of whom spoke English. Some of us spoke Spanish; none of us spoke any of the Mayan languages spoken in the village. In this situation we were going to see if it was possible not just to listen to the leaders of the village tell us about their situation so we could see how we back in Illinois could help, but to come together across all the enormous differences that separated us, just to study the scripture.
The first effort in this direction was planned to be a women’s Bible study. This was a very male-oriented culture. Women in general didn’t have much contact with the outside world, and probably not too much contact with each other beyond their family groupings, certainly not much opportunity to get away from their daily work and just sit and talk. Our missionary in Guatemala thought it would be a good thing to invite the women to come one morning, without the men of the village. The men in our group would stay just long enough to meet the women who came, but then we would go off by ourselves with whatever men from the village showed up to have our own conversation. Our missionary told us that she intended to use the story of the Hebrew midwives for the Bible study. She also said that she had no idea how many women would show up, or whether any women would show up. She didn’t know whether the word would get around, whether the women would feel free to come, whether they would want to come.
The Bible study as we imagined it never happened. At the time things were supposed to start, more or less, a few women appeared, a handful. They wandered in and out, and it wasn’t clear whether they were going to stay. Then a few more came, and a few more, and pretty soon there were a couple of dozen. So we decided to get started, and our missionary got all the women together and said she just wanted everyone to stand up and say her name. Since even the simplest thought needed to be translated into several languages, this took a few minutes to get understood, and by then there were more. And as the women began to stand up and say their names, more and more kept arriving, many with children on their hips or trailing along. Pretty soon this large barn-like structure that was used for all sorts of community purposes was filled and overflowing with maybe a couple hundred women, more women than you could have imagined living in this village from walking around in it during the day.
As one woman after another came forward to say her name, and as this began to take quite a long time since they had to make their way through the crowd to come forward and many of them needed to be coaxed, I leaned over to our missionary at one point and said, “I don’t think we’re going to get to the Bible study.” She said, “I had no idea this would happen.” And then, “You know, this is a new experience for these women. Most of them have never said a single word in front of a group before.” She didn’t need to say it; I got the message. Don’t worry about the Bible study. Something much more important is going on here. Counting a number of breaks along the way, the introductions ended up taking about four hours. At the end of that our missionary stood up, read the scripture in Spanish, said just a few sentences in Spanish, and everyone went home. By the way, I have to say that many times when the term liberation theology is bandied about in North America, it seems to bring to mind an image of people plotting revolutions in base communities where people are being taught that God desires their freedom just the way God led the Israelites out of Egypt. There is a kind of revolutionary mystique about liberation theology that horrifies some people and inspires other. But the real face of liberation theology may be more like when several hundred women find themselves coming forward for the first time in their lives to, in public, speak their names.
When Lee mentioned the names of Shiphrah and Puah as a possible focus for our service this morning, it immediately brought to mind all the women I remember who came forward that day to tell the world who they were. In a way there was no connection between the story of Shiphrah and Puah and what happened in this Mayan village, except for the fact that we had intended to read and study the Exodus passage that morning. There will always be a connection for me. The story in Exodus is a story about people being given birth, about people who helped bring others to life, about people who found themselves, just because of what they did every day, involved in a movement of liberation. The story of Shiphrah and Puah is a story about people coming to life in various ways, both because of what happened in Egypt, and for me because of what happened in the highlands of Guatemala. And I think: When we talk about seeking justice and when we talk about being and becoming people of faith, is this not all part of the same thing. Aren’t we really talking about doing things that help bring others, and help bring ourselves, to life?
Jim Bundy
May 11, 2003
Words above are Part 1 of sermon. Part 2 written and delivered by Lee Walters is lost.