Precious
Rev Rebecca Apperley
Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 14:43
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Read Exodus 1:8-2.10
We finish up our Joseph story today and move on in a sneak peak into the book of Exodus. I had a lot to say about Joseph and the end of Exodus and I’d done so much reading around it but somehow as I was writing my talk I just felt I wanted to share from the heart, so this is my offering to you today.
In Exodus 1 we hear how there is no memory of Joseph and that the Israelites were under subjection of the Egyptians who seek to kill them to stop them gaining in number and power. We’ll begin at the start of Exodus 2:
Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. (Exodus 2:1-3)
Here’s one of the ways in Aotearoa New Zealand that we care for our precious ones: a wahakura. It draws on traditional weaving practices and creates a safe space for parents to sleep with their babies whilst lowering the risk of sudden infant death syndrome. It’s a beautiful way that we care for our precious ones here that is used by many parents.
When reading about Moses and his mother, I was reminded of the wahakura and that there is nothing more precious than the love of a parent for a child. It is the kind of love that brings the greatest pain and the greatest joy. It’s a place where holiness lives, and where the grace of God is manifestly present.
It’s the kind of love that makes a mother hold onto her precious boy until she can no longer keep him safe. So she takes a basket, covers it with tar to seal it, and it literally becomes an ark - tevah - carrying the precious cargo; holding her precious one and she releases it into the river which brings life to all it surrounds; hoping that in turn that river will preserve the life she has protected for the last three months.
And we know that that’s what happens. Under the careful watch of his sister, Miriam, this baby is spotted by Pharoah’s daughter. His mother gets a few more precious months with her baby, and then Moses, as he is named, is brought into the Egyptian court to bring about freedom for his people from within.
So here’s Rameses II - he’s probably the ruler that oppressed the Hebrew people. His statue still towers over visitors in the British Museum. How can one baby possibly change the outcome of a whole people in the face of the massive power of the Egyptian empire?
And these people are oppressed beyond measure. The glory days of Joseph are long gone and despite the Hebrew people being ‘fruitful and multiplying’ like God commanded all creation to do in Genesis 1, it doesn’t seem to be working out. Egypt is afraid of Israel.
The writer of Exodus describes it to us like this:
11 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labour, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites 13 and worked them ruthlessly.14 They made their lives bitter with harsh labour in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labour the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.
The word for harsh labour is literally ‘pulverise’. The Egyptians pulverised the Hebrews.
That’s why Moses is in the river in the first place: Pharoah has commanded that all Hebrew boys be killed - he’s enlisted the whole country to help him - to rid the country of this ethnic infestation.
But it’s just one baby. One Hebrew baby that Pharoah’s own daughter in defiance of her father’s orders to the whole nation has rescued. That’s what God uses to bring the people of Israel out of exile in Egypt. Let’s just get our minds around that. Just one baby. I’m sure we can think of a whole load of other ways that God might have freed the Israelites from slavery: maybe military might? But God sees a whole people in suffering and he puts the future of them all in one fragile basket.
Many of you probably know how much I love the 14th century mystic writer Julian of Norwich - the earliest surviving woman writer in English. She describes how God showed her a hazelnut in her hand:
He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind's eye and I thought,
'What can this be?'
And the answer came, 'It is all that is made'. I marvelled that it could last, for I thought it might have crumbled to nothing, it was so small.
And the answer came into my mind, 'It lasts and ever shall because God loves it'. And all things have being through the love of God.
The hazelnut in the hand reminds me of Moses in his basket. Small and fragile. And it also reminds me of each of us. We are that hazelnut. We are Moses. We are in that basket. God sees us. Each of us are so loved. We are so precious. We are that single, lost sheep. We have a God who shows up again and again throughout human history to take the most precious and fragile things and bring resurrection and redemption and rescue. God sees Moses. God sees us. He doesn’t abandon Moses. He won’t abandon us.
Here is the great mystery of God: that the parent heart of God is prepared to risk his son Jesus. And that Jesus willingly chooses to offer himself as that gift for us. And not only that, but God’s rescue plan worked and is still working today in the living and resurrected Jesus still present to us.
Remember Jesus at the well, meeting an outcast Samaritan woman for the first time? He sees her for who she truly is: he has seen her as precious and worthy of receiving living water. And she knows it deep within her soul so well as to tell everyone in her village to ‘Come see a man who told me everything I did.’
And Jesus is still at work.
On Friday a friend sent me a text and asked me to pray for her. She said she felt worthless and filled with shame and though she knew it would pass she really wanted to know someone was holding her before God.
One of my favourite ways to pray for others is to use my imagination and notice Jesus turning up at that person’s door with a box in which he has a gift. In my imagining prayer, this friend had so many people at her church door that Jesus had to sneak his gift around the back and pop it through a window. And in the box was one of those big, oversized gloves you get at sports games to cheer the team on. My friend loved Jesus’ gift; loved knowing that she was seen and being cheered on by Jesus.
It’s just a little story but I hope it shows that God cares. He really does. It’s worth taking into the very fibre of our being. God considered us precious enough to give us Jesus. Jesus considers us precious enough to give himself. He cares for my friend and he cares for you and he cares for me. Moses was placed in the river that gave life to Egypt and God saw him as precious. Jesus came from the very heart of God to be that gift of living water for you because you are precious.
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” (John 4)
Take hold of that preciousness and accept the gift that Jesus has for you.
Quiet time: What is the gift that Jesus has for you?
Prayer?