Identity
Week 4: The Courage of the Midwives
This is my sermon manuscript from yesterday’s gathering at Meizon Church. I hope that it brings you some encouragement and clarity in this dark season we all find ourselves in.
Identity — Week 4
The Courage of the Mid-wives
Exodus 1:8–21
Hey Friends. Good morning. If we haven’t met yet, my name is Joe and I’m one of the pastors here. I hope that you’re doing as well as you possibly can be.
We are in week four of our Lent series called Identity, and over the past few weeks we’ve been slowly exploring how identity actually forms in our lives.
In week one we sat with the story of Hagar, a woman pushed to the edges of someone else’s story. In the wilderness she encounters God and gives God a name: El Roi, the God who sees me. And the truth we carried with us that week was simple: the first thing God does is see you.
In week two we talked about how many of the beliefs shaping our identity were never actually chosen by us. They were inherited from families, from churches, from cultures, from systems that existed long before we arrived.
And last week we watched Jesus step into his own wilderness where competing voices tried to rename him. Voices telling him he lacked something, voices telling him to prove himself, voices offering him power. And the question that story left us with was this: which voice will you trust? Kevin did an amazing job walking us to an idea that helps us answer that question- the voice you trust will determine the life you live.
If you missed any of those weeks, I’d encourage you to go back and watch/listen.
Today we take the next step in that journey. Eventually the voice you trust begins shaping the choices you make in the real world. And identity stops being theoretical and becomes tangible. When that happens, something begins to solidify itself in our lives. Identity becomes visible in our choices.
When Power Feels Threatened
We will be in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament all morning. Specifically, the book called Exodus. Chapter 1 starts off right in the middle of a story and expects us to catch up. “Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” (Exodus 1:8)
That one sentence carries a lot of history inside it. For those that don’t know... Joseph (as in the coat of many colors) had been one of the 12 sons of Jacob, part of the family that would eventually become the people of Israel. His brothers sold him into slavery, and he ended up in Egypt. Over time, through a series of twists and turns, Joseph rose to a position of leadership in Pharaoh’s court.
Then a famine hit the region.
While other nations were unprepared, Egypt had grain stored because of Joseph’s foresight. People came from all over the surrounding lands looking for food, including Joseph’s own family. Pharaoh trusted Joseph enough that he welcomed his family to settle in Egypt.
For generations after that, the Hebrew people lived there peacefully. They worked, they raised families, they built communities. They were not outsiders in the beginning. They were guests who had once helped save the nation.
But time passes and leadership changes. Memory fades. And eventually the story reaches a moment where the text simply says, “a new king arose who did not know Joseph.”
The history that once created trust has been forgotten. And suddenly the Hebrew people are no longer seen as neighbors. They are seen as a problem. Pharaoh looks at their growing numbers and says,
“Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them.” Exodus 1:9–10
Fear has entered the story, which has a way of reshaping how people see each other. Neighbors become threats, and communities become problems that need to be managed.
Here’s a truth that has never changed... when power begins to feel threatened, it always looks for ways to secure it’s control.
The First Target of Power
When power begins to move in authoritarian directions… when leaders start tightening their grip over a people… one of the places control almost always shows up first is in the lives of women. Not only women’s bodies, but women’s voices. The ability to decide what happens to one’s own body. The freedom to speak. The freedom to influence. The freedom to participate in shaping the future of a community.
This isn’t unique to ancient history. You can trace it across empires and across centuries. In systems of slavery, the reproductive lives of enslaved women were controlled because their children became economic assets. Under colonization, governments regulated marriage, birth, and family structures to reshape entire cultures. In authoritarian regimes around the world, restricting women’s education, silencing their voices in public life, or limiting their freedom to work, organize, and lead has often been one of the first ways power begins reorganizing society.
And we can see echoes of that same pattern playing out in our own political moment. Debates around reproductive autonomy, healthcare, a woman’s right to vote and the legitimacy of women’s authority in public life keep getting pulled to the center of the conversation.
And there’s a reason for that.
If you can control whose bodies give birth… if you can control whose voices shape a community… if you can decide who gets to participate in the formation of the next generation… then you are not just managing the present. You are shaping tomorrow.
Which means when Pharaoh begins to fear the future of the Hebrew people, he doesn’t start by targeting soldiers or political leaders. He starts with targeting women and two women specifically.
The Midwives
See, Pharaoh has already decided that the Hebrew people are a threat. Fear has convinced him that their growth must be controlled if his power is going to remain secure. And like so many leaders before and after him, he looks for a place where the future can be managed.
So Pharaoh calls in the Hebrew midwives (midwives were the women who assisted mothers during childbirth). And scripture does something interesting here. It slows down long enough to tell us their names. “The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah…” (Exodus 1:15)
Shiphrah. Puah.
Remember their names. Because the Bible wants you to remember them.
That detail might not seem important at first, but it is. These women are not generals. They are not rulers. They are not people anyone in the empire would normally pay attention to. They are simply midwives... women whose work is to help bring life safely into the world.
But Pharaoh understands something about power. If the future of a people is threatening you, you control the place where the future begins. And b/c he knows that... Pharaoh gives them an order.
“When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” (Exodus 1:16)
It is a horrifying command void of any humanity. It is demonic in every sense of the word. Egypt is the superpower of it’s time and it is targeting a vulnerable people in it’s most vulnerable places. As an American, that seems incredibly familiar. Pharaoh is asking ordinary women to turn the moment of birth into the moment of death. Which gives us a glimpse into how power operates when it feels threatened. Fear convinces leaders that survival requires control. Control hardens into domination. And domination always escalates to violence.
Violence becomes the solution.
The birthing room, the most intimate and vulnerable space in human life, becomes a place where empire tries to enforce its will. The moment that should mark the beginning of a life becomes the moment where power decides whether that life is allowed to continue.
And Pharaoh assumes something very simple about these women. He assumes they will obey. Because systems of dominance depend on ordinary people carrying out the violence that power demands.
Identity becomes visible in our choices.
The Moment Before the Choice
What strikes me about this story is how quiet the moment of decision actually is.
There is no crowd watching. No dramatic confrontation. No speech being delivered in the palace. The future turns in a place no one else will ever see... a small room, a tired mother, a newborn child, and the midwife holding that life in her hands.
Pharaoh will never be in that room. The high and mighty officials of the empire will not be there either. The system that created the command will be far away from the moment where the command becomes real.
That is how power operates. It issues orders from a distance. It signs documents. It passes laws. But the people making those decisions are rarely present when the consequences unfold. Eventually those consequences arrive somewhere very close to ordinary human life. They arrive in homes and hospitals and cities. They arrive in the spaces where real people must face the reality that those same systems try to hide.
And that is exactly where Shiphrah and Puah find themselves standing.
The order has been given. The system demands their obedience. Everything about the structure of power assumes they will simply play the role that has been assigned to them.
But this is the moment when the story stops long enough to show us something important. Moments like this are where identity becomes visible.
Not when life is comfortable. Not when the cost is small. But when a decision arrives that forces you to ask a deeper question: Who am I going to be when the moment comes?
When you step back and look at the story this way, you begin to realize that what we are witnessing in Exodus is not just one isolated event in ancient history. It is an archetype.
There have always been pharaohs... leaders who believed their power was more important than human life. And just as importantly if not more, there have always been midwives... ordinary people who just refused to cooperate with harm.
Sometimes we know their stories. We know the people who hid Jewish families during the Holocaust. Stories like Schindler’s List or Corrie ten Boom’s family in The Hiding Place. We know the courage of people who sheltered neighbors during the genocide in Rwanda. We know the images from Selma, where ordinary citizens walked across a bridge knowing violence waited on the other side because they believed justice mattered more than fear. We know the bravery of those in the Stonewall riots that helped spark Pride movements all across the globe.
But for every story history remembers, there are countless others it never recorded. Families who hid a neighbor. Teachers who protected a student. Religious leaders who opened their doors to people the system had declared expendable. Friends who refused to betray someone when the moment demanded it.
The vast majority of courage in human history has never been written down. And yet those stories are no less important. Every movement toward freedom rests on the shoulders of people the world never applauded... people who simply decided that harm would stop with them.
The Refusal and the Memory of History
And then the story turns. After everything Pharaoh assumed about power and obedience, after everything the system expected these women to do, the text gives us one quiet sentence that changes the direction of the entire story.
“But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.” Exodus 1:17
That’s the moment. Not a revolution. Not a grand declaration. Not a public confrontation with power. Just a refusal.
When the moment arrives... when a child is placed in their arms and the command of empire collides with the quiet voice of conscience... Shiphrah and Puah choose life. And they keep choosing it. One birth at a time. One child at a time.
Their resistance doesn’t look dramatic in the moment. No one outside those rooms would have seen it happening. The empire would have expected the machinery of obedience to keep running exactly as it always had. But something had shifted.
The system depended on ordinary people carrying out its violence. And when those ordinary people quietly refuse, the certainty of power begins to crack. Eventually Pharaoh notices.
“So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this and allowed the boys to live?’” 19 “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women,” the midwives replied. “They are more vigorous and have their babies so quickly that we cannot get there in time.” Exodus 1:18-19
Their explanation is simple enough to keep the system from collapsing, but the damage to Pharaoh’s plan has already been done.
There’s something else the Bible is doing here that I don’t want you to miss. We know the names of the midwives, right? Shiphrah & Puah. I mentioned that earlier.
But the most powerful man in the world... the ruler of Egypt, the head of the empire that believed it controlled everything... is never named. The text simply calls him by his title.
Think about that for a moment. The empire would have believed Pharaoh’s name was the one history would remember. Kings built monuments and carved their names into stone precisely because they believed power would secure their legacy.
But the Bible tells the story differently. The midwives are remembered. The ruler is not.
And the distance between those two legacies could not be greater.
The powerful often imagine their authority will define the story of the world. But over time, the pharaohs of history tend to meet one of two fates. They either disappear into the long forgetfulness of the past, rendered to the trash heap of history, their names swallowed by the passing centuries… or they are remembered only as the monsters they proved themselves to be.
There is rarely an in-between.
There’s something else I’ve always wondered about this story. Maybe you have to. Pharaoh could have escalated the violence. Once he realized the midwives weren’t obeying his orders, he could have sent soldiers into the homes of these families. Empires have done things like that throughout history. But he doesn’t. Instead, he tries to hide the violence inside quieter systems and indirect commands, hoping someone else will carry it out for him. Because power like this is spineless and perpetrated by the weakest of men. And the men behind this kind of feckless power never stand in the open light of day and own the harm they are causing. They hide behind policies, behind systems, behind slogans, behind other people’s hands. And in the rare moments history does remember them; it’s not for their strength, but for their fragile little egos. I can think of more than a few of our country’s current leaders that fit that description… men with fragile little egos and far too much power.
But the people who protect... the helpers... the people who refuse cruelty, who choose courage when the moment arrives... those are the people whose names endure. Here we are, in Gainesville, Florida, thousands of years later talking about this story. It’s not the king’s name we remember but two “lowly” midwives...Shiphrah and Puah.
The Future They Protected
And I’ve never heard anyone talk about this... everything that comes after this moment only happens because those two women, the two midwives refused to carry out an order.
The children lived. And because the children lived, families continued to grow. And because those families continued to grow, the people Pharaoh tried to erase continued to exist.
History begins moving in a different direction. Not because someone stood up to the Pharaoh that day. Not because a prophet loudly condemned. But because two women quietly interrupted the machinery of violence.
Their decision didn’t just protect a single child in a single moment. It protected a future none of them could yet see. And that’s often how the future actually works.
We like to imagine history turning in sweeping, dramatic moments — speeches, revolutions, freedom fighters rising to power. But when you trace those moments backward, you often discover something much simpler underneath them.
A decision.
A refusal.
A moment when someone chose flourishing instead of harm. And that choice set something in motion. One act of courage creates space for another. One refusal makes the next refusal possible. And slowly the world begins to move in a different direction.
The Journey We’ve Been On
Now I want you all to see how this story connects to the journey we’ve been on these past few weeks.
In week one we discovered that the first thing God does is see us. Before performance. Before achievement. Before we ever become anything. God sees us.
In week two we began recognizing the frameworks that shaped us... the beliefs, systems, and voices that quietly formed our understanding of God, of ourselves and the world long before we were aware of them.
Last week we watched Jesus stand in the wilderness and choose which voice would define his life. The voice of fear. The voice of power. Or the voice that had already named him beloved.
And now we have arrived here. Once you know you are seen… Once you begin noticing the voices shaping you… Once you decide which voice you will trust…
Eventually that voice begins shaping your choices. And that’s the moment where identity stops being something we talk about and starts being something the world can see.
Identity becomes visible in our choices.
And as we’ve seen today, those choices rarely stay small. They ripple outward. They connect with the courage of others. They begin shaping the kind of world that becomes possible.
But this journey isn’t finished yet. Because identity is never just an individual story.
Next week Pastor Miranda will be back from her sabbatical, and she’s going to help us take the next step in this conversation... exploring how identity is also something that forms between us, within communities, within movements of people learning to live differently... together.
So, the question we carry with us this week is the same question the midwives Shiphrah and Puah faced. When the choice is in front of you—and mark my words, it will be in front of you one day—who will you be?
Because identity becomes visible in our choices. It becomes visible in the small moments when no one else is watching. In the quiet decisions where the easier path would be to go along with what power demands. In the moments where fear whispers that it would be safer to stay silent.
But those are the moments that reveal who we really are.
Shiphrah and Puah didn’t know their story would be remembered. They didn’t know their story would echo across generations. All they knew was that a choice was in front of them and they chose compassion & empathy over fear.
Long after Pharaoh’s power faded into history… their courage is still being told.
Reflection
If you’re new, I end each gathering with a time of observation and reflection. I do that to allow you the time to listen to your body and to listen to the spirit. The band is playing so it’snot an awkward silence. Lights will be turned down to help create intimacy and I will ask a few questions to guide that process. So, just like we began our gathering, I invite you to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Allow yourself to be drawn into this moment.
Where in your life right now are you being asked to decide who you are?
What voices have shaped your identity up to this point?
Who are the “midwives” you have seen in your own life or in the world—people who quietly refused to cooperate with harm?
Where might God be inviting you to stand with that same courage right now?
God of the unseen courage, We thank you for the story of Shiphrah and Puah... for their courage, for their compassion, for the way they chose life when the world expected them to bow to power.
You are the God who sees the small moments where history quietly turns. You are the God who stands beside those who refuse cruelty and choose mercy. Teach us to recognize those moments when they come to us. Give us the courage to resist harm, the wisdom to choose flourishing, and the strength to stand with those who are vulnerable.
When the voices of empire grow loud, help us listen again for the voice that first called us beloved. And when the moment arrives, when the choice is ours to make, may we remember who we are.
Give us eyes to see and ears to hear. Bring comfort to the afflicted, healing to the broken and freedom to the chained. In the name of Jesus, the Liberator who stands with the oppressed and calls us into the courage of love. Amen. And so it is.
Benediction
As you go from this place, May the courage of the midwives go with you. May the God who sees you walk beside you in every quiet moment of decision. May Christ the Liberator stand before you when the voices of power try to claim your allegiance. May the Spirit of Life strengthen your heart to refuse harm and choose mercy. And may your small acts of courage join with the courage of others until the future begins to look more like the kingdom of God. Go in peace. Go in courage. Go in the liberating power of love. Amen.