Sunday Service 19th January

The Challenge

19/1/25

Call to worship

Hymn 137: All things bright and beautiful

Time for all

Hymn 185: Come children join and sing 

Reading:  Exodus 1: 15-22 Margaret

Prayer

Hymn 543:  Longing for light

Sermon

Prayer

Hymn 1072(MP): In Christ alone

Benediction

Welcome to our meditation for 19th of January.

This service is a challenge to us all.

What would we do when confronted with evil?

Would we do the right thing, or try to pretend that it wasn’t anything to do with us?

We will reflect on this after Margaret leads us in our prayer and reading for today, where we see a real evil starting to take place.

Sermon

International Holocaust Memorial Day is on Monday 27th January.

On that day we are encouraged to remember the inhumanity of human beings on other human beings.

The problem I have is that often days like this come over as huge destructive forces that we are detached from.

We weren’t there; we couldn’t do anything about it.

And very quickly we then make the assumption that that truth is still true now.

That there are huge evils going on in the world and we can’t do anything about it.

And then we get into a spiritual depression, a general tiredness and malaise.

When this thought creeps into many parts of our lives, we feel so many problems that we face are beyond us.

The trouble is that it just isn’t true that there is nothing we can do about it.

Even with the holocaust there were individuals who refused to just do nothing.

We remember Oskar Schindler, made famous the world over through Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List”, and how he used his contacts and businesses to save 1200 Jews.

There was also the Scottish missionary Jane Haining who refused to leave the Jewish girls in her care in Budapest and who died in Auschwitz.

And Nicholas Winton whose story of heroic action in saving the lives of 664 children from Czechoslovakia was generally unknown until 50 years later when he was reunited with some of these children through the BBC’s That’s Life programme.

And yet we can still justify our indifference by saying that these were extraordinary people and we couldn’t be like them.

Which takes us to our passage today.

‘Then a new Pharaoh, who knew nothing about Joseph, came to power in Egypt...’

This is how evil starts.

Evil starts with someone in power not knowing, not caring, about others.

This new Pharaoh, if he had really thought the Jews were a problem, could have had his advisors guide him,

‘I notice all these Jews with their different ways growing at the edge of my Kingdom. Tell me about them, how did they get there? Why have they been allowed to flourish?’

The advisors could then have told him how it was a Jew that saved the Empire from seven years of famine, that their loyalty had been a great boon to the previous Pharaohs’.

Then the new Pharaoh could have said, ‘We need to make sure that relationship grows and develops to the further benefit of the Kingdom.’

But the Pharaoh didn’t do that.

He just didn’t care, couldn’t be bothered, he just saw the Jews as a problem, and everyone knows that you just want a problem to go away, so how was he going to get rid of this problem?

Now here’s the thing.

He won’t admit that he has a problem...because that shows weakness.

He doesn’t talk to his advisors; he doesn’t bring out the problem with his political gurus.

He tries to deal with it himself, quietly, under the radar.

The Israelites’ have two midwives; Shiphrah and Puah, he tells them on the sly that he has a job for them.

When they help the Israelite mothers-to-be they are to observe if the babies born are boys or girls. If they are boys they are to kill them. As the babies come out they could block the air passage, a small pressure on the neck would break the neck, anything like that, then just claim it was a still birth. Still births were common enough; they could easily get away with it.

The power was all one way here.

The midwives were women, had little more status than slaves, in fact they may have been slaves.

So Pharaoh has the power of life and death over them.

If the women got caught Pharaoh would deny that he knew anything;

why would all powerful pharaoh even be talking to lowly midwives about the slave population?

The women had no choice.

They had to do as they were told.

Until they decided that they did have a choice.

They decided that the world could be influenced for the better by what they did.

It might not be much, it might not even make much of a difference, but they would do what they could.

We then have the comic scene when the supposedly all powerful Pharaoh is complaining that the midwives have failed him,

and the supposedly stupid unimportant midwives lean into the Pharaoh’s sense of power and all knowledge.

Because the Pharaoh believes the Israelites’ are lesser humans, more like animals,

the midwives claim that it is because the Israelites’ are more like animals,

that they don’t give birth using midwives like civilized people, but go into the fields like animals and give birth there

so by the time they  appear the baby is already born and there is nothing they can do.

Here’s the thing. Those midwives may think that what they did didn’t make much difference.

But it did.

It set a scene and an attitude that allowed a baby called Moses to be borne and to survive.

Now the chances are those midwives never met Moses’ family directly.

But because of their actions, that child not only saved his people he created a system of law that influenced the whole of the western world.

And it started with two lowly women deciding that the world could be influenced for the better by what they did.

It might not be much, it might not even make much of a difference, but they would do what they could.

That is then our calling.

That is what God is calling us to believe about ourselves.

We can look at the state of the world and just give up on it.

We can look at the state of the world and decide that there is nothing that we can do to make it better.

We can look at the state of our lives and believe that there is no hope.

We can do that.

Many in Pharaoh’s time did that.

Many in Nazi Germany did that.

Many in the world today take one look at the news and do that.

But I don’t think that is why we are here today.

We might not believe that we can do much to change things, but I think the fact that we are even here is a sign of hope

that we want to grasp a hope that maybe something in the world can change;

we might not know when, or how, but we hope that maybe things can change.

And I am here today to give you God’s message

We can decide, today, that the world can be influenced for the better by what we do, inspired by God.

we may think that what we do will not make much of a difference, but we will do it anyway.

I have told the story before about Albert McMakin.

Albert McMakin was a farm hand on the Graham farm.

They had a son called Billy who was going off the rails; everyone had given up on him.

But Albert still cared about him no matter what.

And Albert wanted to help him.

But what could he do, he was only a farm hand.

Then this evangelist came to town and Albert thought that maybe the evangelist could say something that would change Billy, but Billy wouldn’t go anywhere near a revivalist meeting.

So Albert conned him.

Albert told Billy that he could drive their truck.

He didn’t need to go into the meeting, just drive the folk there and back again.

And of course in a huge outdoor event like that, even in the truck, Billy could hear the words of the evangelist.

And so Billy Graham found Christ and Billy became one of the world’s most influential ambassadors for God.

I don’t think God wants us to find the next Billy Graham and somehow move them towards faith.

I don’t think God wants us to find the next Moses and protect them from an evil Pharaoh.

But what I do think is that God knows that we can decide that we have a choice;

that the world can be influenced for the better by what we do.

It might not be much, it might not even make much of a difference, but we will do what we can do.

Now you might ask, how?

And that’s a valid question.

I think it starts with caring.

Oskar Schindler, Jane Haining, Nicholas Winton; they cared about those Jews who were vulnerable.

Shiphrah and Puah; they cared about the mothers and babies under their care.

Albert McMakin, he cared about a young teenager called Billy Graham.

If we want to make a difference we need to care, and if we don’t know who to care for, then maybe that is where we start,

by asking God to put in our hearts who he wants us to care for.

I was listening to a podcast and the women being interviewed said that if you ask that prayer of God, God always answers that prayer, God will put someone in your heart, and invariably it is someone that you already know.

The world can be influenced for the better by what we do.

It might not be much, it might not even make much of a difference, but we can do what we can do.

Let us pray

Heavenly Father

Sometimes the greatest prayer we can give is a sigh.

We can see that there is great suffering in the world,

innocents that we cannot protect,

and we feel that deeply.

And all we can do is sigh; knowing that the Spirit intercedes.

We see people living in places of great  trauma and experiencing terror,

terror that we do not even want to imagine.

And all we can do is sigh; knowing that the Spirit intercedes.

In history, we have far too many examples of our inhumanity to each other; wars, genocides, ethnic or religious cleansing.

And all we can do is sigh; knowing that the Spirit intercedes.

And then, you break into our lives, and our expectations, in unanticipated ways.

Amidst all this sorrow we see examples of those making a difference against the odds.

People making a difference in the lives of others; people showing hopeful living.

Lord, let your Church display hope:

may it display hope boldly, loudly and unceasingly

telling throughout the land the incarnational birth, the great resurrection story, that your presence in the world today.

Help us to make a difference when we feel overwhelmed,

When we come to you with our sighs too deep for words may we find we can rest in the knowledge that there is nothing comparable to the coming Kingdom.

We give you thanks for your unending love; may it inspire love within us.

Amen.