MIDWIVES, MOSES, AND MEXICO Sunday, August 21, 2005 Vespers Communion Service Jenny Gleichauf Director of Youth Ministry, Fourth Presbyterian Church Psalm 138 Exodus 1:8–2:10 Recently it was my great pleasure to accompany a group of sixteen youth and seven adults on a mission trip Mexico as representatives from Fourth Presbyterian Church. We traveled to Tucson, Arizona, where we joined up with a trip guide from an organization called Borderlinks, which happens to be founded by the Presbyterian Church’s current moderator, Rick Ufford-Chase. Borderlinks’ work is to lead groups like ours on educational and experiential trips along the U.S.-Mexico border. We left on a Sunday, meeting at Midway airport at 5:00 a.m. I can assure you that most of us did not find 5:00 a.m. a reasonable time to do much of anything, much less stand in line at the airport. After checking in, we had a three-and-a-half-hour plane ride, only to arrive in Phoenix in the 100-degree heat. Gathering our many bags, we found our ride, and twenty-five of us piled into two vans for a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Tucson. After lunch and a little bit of orientation, we loaded up our things again and drove the three hours, including the border crossing, to Nogales, Mexico. It was not until around 6:00 p.m. that we reached our destination—still the first day and we were already physically tired from travel and the suffocating heat. The community center we were staying in was nice enough, but conditions in Mexico were a shock for those of us coming from Chicago: cardboard, tire, tin, and other assortments of garbage made into houses; children wandering the streets; raggedy dogs and roosters at every house; noisy radios and car horns; dirt paths serving as roads that often seemed barely able to be navigated. We had been warned not to drink the water, but only now was it clear that it wasn’t just our sensitive American stomachs at risk. No one could drink the water that was coming from the sewage- and chemical-infested waters. Nogales is a way station: many come to work in factories for a short time to save money; many come to prepare to cross the border; many have been deported from the U.S. and are stuck there; while still more have come for one of these reasons only to end up staying. At the end of a long day of travel with culture shock all around us, we were told that we would be going to a local neighbor’s house for dinner. You could almost reach out and touch our group’s collective longing for a Domino’s pizza and a pillow. But we trudged down a dirt hill and around the corner to Juana’s house for dinner. Arriving at the house, my immediate question was how we would fit twenty-five people inside such a small house, and, as we were pretty hungry, I think many of us were also wondering what the owners of this home would be able to offer us. And that is when we met Juana. Juana opened the door and welcomed us with a big smile. Inside her home she had prepared enough food for twice as many of us. She had spent the whole day, in the heat, over her stove, cooking special dishes for us, including a prickly pear salad (much better than it sounds). There were almost enough seats for all of us in the small living room and kitchen, and the rest of us found a place on the floor. Juana poured us glass after glass of a refreshing drink and saw to it that each of us was fed until we could eat no more. And then, after what must have been a long day for her, Juana offered to tell us her story. It seems that twenty-five years ago Juana looked around her neighborhood and saw too many children that didn’t have enough to eat. She gathered a few of her friends and decided that they would make lunches to take up to the school and hand them out. These lunches were simple—a sandwich, piece of fruit, and maybe some juice. Soon enough there were more kids than there were lunches, and Juana and her friends realized they needed to do something else. In fact, it didn’t seem that a simple sandwich was nutritionally enough for these kids who might be depending on this to be their main meal of the day. So Juana and her friends began to cook hot meals in their house for kids. Within no time there were around 300 kids per day coming to Juana’s house for something to eat (and we thought fitting twenty-five of us in the house and feeding us was a challenge). Juana would have kids line up at the front door, walk through and get a plate, and then leave out the back door to eat somewhere nearby. As much as Juana and her friends could cook would be eaten. They realized that they could not sustain all of this by themselves, and they began to write to churches, other service organizations, and the local government for funding. Help was slow to come, but they kept at it, and more and more kids were being fed. Juana’s story was filled with setbacks over those twenty-five years: friends and supporters dying, funding being lost, an incredible and fast population growth in Nogales, among other problems. She took money from her own pocket with frequency and never earned any money from the hard work of shopping, cooking, and cleaning up after a meal for 300 kids every day. As the work developed over the years, however, she and her friends did build the community house where we were staying and which now serves as the center for Borderlinks in Nogales. The amazing thing about Juana and the other people we met during our week in Mexico was how much they had managed to accomplish despite living in a place that suffers from the global corruption and oppression that forces them to live in terrible poverty in conditions most of us cannot imagine. In fact, considering the depth of generally negative influence that U.S. policy has directly on these people’s lives, their willingness to open up their homes and share their stories with a group of U.S. citizens was quite stunning. Juana and others we met during our week had made what must have been an often daily, difficult, sacrificing decision to reject the oppression they faced and to live out their call as Christians to work for justice and peace. The economic and political oppression that Juana lives under would dictate that she should live out her life in poverty, busying herself with trying to make ends meet for her immediate family and remain uneducated about the world around her. Instead Juana provides meals and education for young people, work for young women, and now a connection with Borderlinks that helps to advocate for a better local and federal government as well as fair trade and economic policies between Mexico and the U.S. I see Juana’s story and many others we met in Mexico as a modern-day example of our Bible story today. Throughout the summer Pastor Buchanan has been doing a series of sermons with the idea of telling Bible stories that everyone should know. He has joined others in the concern that so many people today grow up remaining pretty ignorant of these stories, which are not only the basis for a great deal of our literature and culture but also foundations of our faith. Today’s story from Exodus is one of those famous stories that would be a good addition to anyone’s list of familiar Bible stories. The first thing the story tells us is that there was a new pharaoh in Egypt who did not know Joseph. The book of Genesis ended with the death of Joseph, of Technicolor dream coat fame, who was a good leader and under whom the Israelites profited. So right off the bat we know to be wary of this new guy who doesn’t know Joseph and so probably doesn’t care much for the Israelites either. It seems this new pharaoh had a problem with how many Israelites there were in Egypt. They kept growing in numbers, and he worried about them becoming too powerful and perhaps trying to overthrow him. So he devised a plan to oppress the Israelites—force them to work, doing terrible, manual, grueling labor. Despite this, the Israelites continued to multiply. In fact, no amount of work seemed to quell their numbers. So the king decided to go a different route, looking to the servant class of Egyptian women to help him, identified here as Shiphrah and Puah, who were midwives. Pharaoh commanded them to kill all boy babies upon their birth. But these women were fearful of God, and so they went about their job without heeding Pharaoh’s command. When asked, they went so far as to lie to the king about Israelite women, a lie for which God rewarded them. Then the pharaoh went a route we are more familiar with in the story of Jesus: just like Herod centuries later, this pharaoh demanded that all the baby boys be killed, in this case taken and thrown in the water. Here enters Moses. Moses was born, like Jesus, at a dangerous time for baby boys. His mother hid him for as long as she could but eventually had to make a last-ditch effort to save her child’s life and so fastened together a basket and put him in the river, hoping that someone might find him who would be able to keep him. In fact, as Miriam, Moses’ sister is watching, none other than the pharaoh’s daughter comes along and finds the baby. Quickly, Miriam offers to search out a wet nurse for the child, and Pharaoh’s daughter agrees. Moses goes home to his mother until the time he is old enough to go and live with the pharaoh’s daughter and from there be raised into the man we learn about throughout the rest of Exodus. Quite a story. It is a story of women who made the decision that they would not live a life ruled by the oppression of the world around them. Heidi Newmark says in her book Breathing Space, Moses’ mother looked at her newborn child and didn’t see an impending statistic. She didn’t accept what demographic probabilities might say about her son’s chance of making it. Instead she wove a little basket of papyrus reeds and plastered it inside and out with bitumen and pitch to keep the water out. She did this in a holy conspiracy with others—a conspiracy of women from different classes, different positions in society, different races and resources. . . . Together they conspired against the death-dealing Pharaoh so that the child Moses might grow up and come into his own. Without these women of Exodus, Moses would have been a victim, but with them, he became a liberator.” Newmark reminds us that it is for the children that “we build, we labor, we pray, and we conspire.” These women of Exodus remind me of the work I witnessed Juana doing in Mexico. Juana, who decided children should not starve to death or wander the streets or lack education just because they were born into a world where those in power constantly conspire to oppress them for their own gain. These women of Exodus remind me of work going on here at Fourth Church, where we have committed our money, resources, and mission to acts of liberation through food, clothing, education, job training, advocating for better and fairer government policies. There are many ways in this church and this community to offer your time and resources to speak a witness into the world of what we see first in scripture—that oppression, injustice, and death are not the final answers and they are not the way God leads us. The example of Juana and the women we met in Mexico serves as a reminder that the time to conspire, the time to create, the time to stand up against the powerful and the unjust, the time to act with justice and dignity is not over. This is just as much the time as it was for Shiphrah and Puah, for Moses’ mother and sister and for the pharaoh’s daughter, if it is not even more urgent today. I would like to conclude by sharing one last story with you from our time in Mexico, though this time it is about two U.S. citizens. There is another organization on the border called No More Deaths, and it was begun by some folks at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, who saw the rising death toll of migrants crossing the border and decided they had to do something. No More Deaths sets up camps in the desert where they offer water, food, shelter from the sun, and medical assistance to those they come across. Often they offer these services at the point in which they are literally saving lives. Just a few weeks ago, two college volunteers at one of the No More Deaths camps came across three migrants so close to death that the volunteers decided they must rush them to the hospital to save their lives. In route to the hospital, they were pulled over and charged with “transporting illegal aliens.” Their fate, should the court rule against them, is to serve up to five years in prison. These young people with bright futures have rejected any governmental offer that does not clear them of all charges. They believe they have done nothing wrong. They believe that our calling as Christians and as human beings requires us to say no to systems of oppression, no to rules and assumptions that say some people’s lives are more valuable than others, no to borders and barriers that insist on furthering economic disparity, and no to laws that would instruct them to leave people to die on the side of the road when medical assistance is within reach. Even in small actions, in the ways we look at the need and injustice around us, even just our one voice that rejects a world like that begins to shape the kind of world the women of Exodus imagined. That is a world I hope to see someday. Amen.