Forget the Boys. Get the girls!

Pharaoh fails to take into account some important facts. Fact: girls grow up to be women. Fact: women tend to outlast you. Fact: at some point women will put their foot down. They will not join your procession to the grave. Sick of being hemmed in and pushed around, repulsed by casual violence in the name of order, power, principle and pride, they will finally refuse to budge. “Not our babies!” they’ll say. “Not our people! Not our future!” If Pharaoh had half a brain, he’d leave the boys alone and go after the girls.- J. Mary Luti 

No spiritual person should miss J. Mary Luti’s blog, Sicut Locutus Est. No doubt Luti will be quoted in hundreds of sermons this Sunday.

Luti, a retired Andover Newton Theological School professor and a United Church of Christ minister, says she “just keeps talking and posting for whatever it’s worth.” This week she expands on an obvious but overlooked truth: Pharaoh’s greatest disability was his Y chromosome. His dull male brain defeated him.

I say that not to diss my gender or the other fifty percent of earthlings who share it with me. I live in close relationship with a spouse, five daughters, a daughter-in-law, a sister, a granddaughter, and many nieces and grandnieces whose supercilious snorts and rolling eyes warn me when I have wandered into male obtuseness.

This happens several times an hour. That must count for something. My feminine side may be dulled by male dullness, but I try to be a good listener. And even in the most awkward moments, I am assured I have value around the house when it comes to killing spiders, chasing moths, and lifting heavy objects.

Pharaoh, unfortunately, had no advisers to warn him about the danger of women. His tactical blunder is revealed in Exodus 1:15-17:

The king of Egypt 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." But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. 

Shiphrah and Puah bowed and smiled disarmingly. But as they backed differentially away from the monarch, they both thought the same thing: “Hell no.”

This moral certainty came easily to them. The ability to act on it was not so easy. It’s impossible to exaggerate the courage of these two women, and equally difficult to emulate it.

Shiphrah and Puah were members of an oppressed class, whose daily survival depended on their ability to stay out of the way, avoid attracting attention, and do what they were told. 

Pharaoh, the undisputed monarch of a vast empire, was worried that the enslaved but prolific Jews would soon outnumber his army. He decided to thin their ranks by killing the boy babies. It’s unclear if he gave the order to other midwives, or if less courageous women smothered the babies between their mothers’ legs. But we do know that Shiphrah and Puah defied Pharaoh and let the boy babies live.

They lied to Pharaoh and told him the Hebrew women delivered their babies before they could get to them, and Pharaoh, a standard blend of ruthlessness and stupidity, let them go. But Shiphrah and Puah had no reason to count on official stupidity to protect them. When they defied Pharaoh, they expected to die. They chose to die rather than carry out an order they knew was wrong. Their survival was an unexpected miracle.

It’s a little surprising that Shiphrah and Puah are such minor characters in our Sunday school lessons. Their courage and faithfulness transcends all whose stories were told in Genesis, and sets the stage for the dramatic events that will follow in Exodus.

They are pivotal figures whose roles were noted but not fully acknowledged by the writers of Exodus, who were of course male. With a little more insight, Exodus would have opened with the lines, “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not notice Shiphrah and Puah, lowly Hebrew women who would soon outsmart him and ignite the long fuse to revolution.”

Shiphrah and Puah set the gold standard for defending the powerless against bullies and tyrants. Almost all of us get a chance to take stands similar to theirs, even if on a smaller scale. All of us would like to think we would have their courage to stand up for others. But when you look at the history of the world, you quickly realize how rare were Shiphrah and Puah.

Throughout history there have been Shiphrahs and Puahs who have risked their lives to stand as a barrier between the powerful and the weak. And, like Shiphrah and Puah, “they feared God; they did not do as the King … commanded them” (Exodus 1:17). They recognized an authority far above the powers and principalities of perfumed Pharaohs and ranting dictators.

Fortunately for us in our increasingly treacherous times, there are still many who have the courage to speak truth to power. And, from the point of view of dictators and despots, the most dangerous opponents are women.

In 2012, a Taliban assassin shot Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani teenager who advocated for the education of women in Pakistan, in the head as she rode on a school bus. Hovering between life and death for weeks, Yousafzai – now 17 – recovered to resume her campaign for equal rights.

During the civil war in Liberia (1989 to 2003), rape was used as a weapon of war and children were abducted from their homes to serve as soldiers and prostitutes. Leymah Gbowee publicly confronted Charles Taylor, the ruthless warlord and president, and demanded an end to the terror. She helped organize thousands of Liberian women, both Christians and Muslims, to “pray the devil back to hell” and who stood as human obstacles between the warring sides until, peace was restored, Gbowee received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.

Aung San Suu Kyi, moral leader of the human rights and democracy movement in Myanmar (Burma), Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1991, endured years of threats and house arrest at the hands of the ruling generals until growing international opinion led to her release in 2010 and election to parliament.

Dorothy Day, a writer, social activist, and Catholic laywoman, helped establish the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement that continues to aid the poor and homeless in New York. The movement also engages in nonviolent protests and advocacy for the poor and homeless. She was editor of the Catholic Worker from 1933 until her death in 1980. The church has begun the process to lead to her canonization, but one of Day’s best known declarations was,  “Don’t make me a saint!”

Rosa Parks’ quiet act of civil disobedience on December 1, 1955 when she refused to obey a Montgomery, Ala. bus driver’s order to move to the back of the bus, helped ignite a non-violent revolution in civil rights in the U.S.

Sophia Magdalena Scholl was a German student active in the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Hitler’s Germany. She was convicted of treason for the crime of distributing anti-war leaflets in Munich and was executed by guillotine in 1943. Scholl is now recognized as one of Germany’s greatest heroes.

Years later, Hitler’s former secretary said she had been the same age as Scholl and lamented she had not been as moral or as courageous. 

All of us have reason to regret not taking moral or courageous stands as exemplified by these and other women, and by Shiphrah and Puah.

Pharaoh’s power was absolute. The Nazis were evil on a scale that drains the imagination. They were archetypal bullies against which all other bullies pale.

Usually, the forces we are called to confront are not as awesome. Homophobes who shout “God hates fags” at soldiers’ funerals. Islamaphobes who think Muslims are the enemy and yell vile threats at Muslim children. Xenophobes who think 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S. should be arrested, deported, or deprived of basic protections under the law. Ecclesiophobes who hate the churches for accepting and welcoming everyone – everyone – into the fellowship of Christ.

We often encounter individuals or groups who don’t believe God loves everyone, or that Jesus accepts everyone. What do we do when we hear these people say hateful, bullying or merely ignorant things about the people they don’t understand? My approach is to be passive-aggressive. Not wishing to get involved, I listen silently and politely to the rants of ignoramuses. But I write nasty blogs about them later.

The lesson of Shiphrah and Puah is that we have to take a stand when evil is afoot. And the lesson of the Gospel is that we don’t have to keep silent about it. God has given us the authority to speak out.

Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. (Matthew 16:16-20)

Jesus (in the non-apostolic view) is not addressing Peter alone.  He is addressing all who confess him. Jesus calls you and me individually, and all of us together, to be the bedrock on which the church is built. And along with that comes the keys to the kingdom, the authority – and the responsibility – to speak God’s truth.

Shiphrah and Puah took a courageous stand to speak God’s truth in action, even if it meant their lives. 

Jesus bids us to take similar stands. Because he has anointed us “to bring good news to the poor … proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18).

Whenever tyrants or bullies or ignoramuses bid us to do evil, or to stand aside silently while they taunt and threaten the weak and powerless, Shiphrah and Puah have shown us the way. Christ gives us the authority and, God willing, the courage to act.

And God grant that when we men lack that courage, the women in our lives will warn us with supercilious snorts and rolling eyes and invite us to follow them into the fray.