Subversive Worship - Exodus 1:8-2:10, Romans 12:1-8
When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to his children. "You are sheep among wolves, be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves."
These are words from the opening lines of the great American film, Gone Baby Gone, staring Casey Affleck, written and directed by his brother Ben. It’s a crime a drama, a detective story centered around the abduction of a little girl. But at its center is the question—how do we do what is right in a world that is corrupted in every corner? How can we be guided by light when everything seems like a fog?
As the film plays out, Casey Affleck’s character, Patrick Kenzie, embodies the advice of his priest. He maintains a deep innocence and belief in the goodness of people, especially those down and out, but he is absolutely shrewd in turning the tables on those who stand in the way of his pursuit of truth. Patrick lives, in all the best ways, the life of a subversive. He is not powerful, but when met with power he turns it against itself.
I thought about Gone Baby Gone and Patrick Kenzie’s subversive ethics, as I read our lesson from Exodus. In the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, we see that same subversive spirit that embodies the soul of a dove and the mind of a serpent. When faced with an impossible situation they are guided by goodness and act with cunning.
Pharaoh is nervous. He rules Egypt under the guise of a god, but because he is not God, Pharaoh can maintain power only through coercion and exploitation in order to feed the appetites of his Empire. He has made the descendants of Israel into slaves—an ethnic underclass exploited for their labor. But their numbers are growing and Pharaoh knows that one day they could be strong enough to revolt. He identifies the threat in the Jewish male and so he seeks to keep them in their place.
To be a Jewish male in Egypt was a dangerous thing in the time of Pharaoh; not unlike being a black male in America . In both places the systems of the status quo locate their fears in particular bodies and seek to control the threat to power. But Pharaoh depends on the very people he seeks to exploit. He can’t exact his plan without the Hebrew midwives.
It may seem like a foolish plan from our side, centuries later, but from the perspective of Pharaoh this is a strategy that will work. Pharaoh sees from the position of power and since the Hebrew midwives are without power of the kind Pharaoh recognizes, he thinks they will do what he says because they fear what he can do to them. In his arrogance he cannot imagine an allegiance greater than himself.
But Shiphra and Puah have a different kind of strength. They worship God, and they know that Pharaoh, for all his violent presumption is not in charge. And so they act from an ethic of subversion, they turn Pharaoh’s racist understanding against him. The midwives tell him: “these Hebrew women are different, they give birth so quickly, there is really nothing we can do!” Shiphra and Puah are as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.
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How do we live now? It’s a question that comes each day, but in a time when our routines are unsettled and our habits out of sync, the burden of decision is even greater. We have to find an ethic, a guide to living that will help us move toward goodness and flourishing, even with all the evil in the world—the abductors and Pharaohs and automated systems of oppression. From Shiphra and Puah we can find some guidance. We need to live like subversives.
The pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson says that there are three assumptions that guide subversives. The first is that the status quo is wrong and must be overthrown. The world as it is is beyond repair, it is as the insurance agents say, “totaled.” The second assumption is that a livable alternative to the status quo exists. Subversives are not utopians, but they live in the assurance that, as my friend Claudio Oliver puts it, “another world happens.” Finally, subversives assume that the normal means of violence and coercion are not available to them. Subversives are not those with armies or weapons, the backing of corporations and electoral blocks. They have, as Peterson puts its, “neither a preponderance of power nor a majority of votes.” From those assumptions subversives find another way of acting, an alternative ethic in the world as it is.
It is an ethic we learn from Shiphrah and Puah as they seek to fear God rather than Pharaoh, it is a way of life Paul offers to the church in Rome as they follow Jesus under the shadow of Cesar. In both cases, the guidance isn’t some particular moral law, but rather a guiding center—an ethic formed in worship. Call it fear of God, or love of God—they are the same thing for both are responses to a proper appraisal of God’s reality—overwhelming in beauty and goodness, dangerous in power and mystery.
“Throw your whole body in the offering plate”—that is how scholar Beverly Gaventa says we should translate Paul’s call to present ourselves to God as a living sacrifice. By this Paul means that the whole of our lives should be an act of worship. A feel good supplement to life carried out on Sundays is not worship, for Paul. An offering of ten percent of our income is not good enough. Worship should be the basis of all our actions, it should be the guiding center of our ethics. It requires every aspect of our lives.
If the worship of God is the foundation of our ethics then we cannot help but be subversives for the world of the status quo is not formed by the love of God or the love of neighbor. Worship of God will always be out of sink with the way things are in this age of idolatry and greed. In order to worship God we have to have our minds renewed from their idol addled states. It is like a person who spends their day before a screen and then steps out into the evening realities of a garden, where life abounds and beauty surrounds in a way that no pixels could ever capture. It can be jarring, just as it is welcoming. The eyes and ears and body have to adjust. Boredom may even set in as minds have to change in order to free themselves from addictive stimuli. But once free, we can enter a powerful vibrant life that lies beyond us and yet welcomes us from the petty solipsisms of ourselves. This is what worship does—it puts us in touch with the other world that happens, the Kingdom of God that is here—and so we long for its coming rather than holding up the idolatrous empires of the world that do not recognize the divine presence and shield us from the truth.
In worship we begin to find the cracks in the Empire, the possibilities for the other world that is breaking in at the seams. This is the work of God’s kingdom and we are called to join it, but we cannot do so from the compromised positions of those who follow God but fear Pharaoh. We must throw the whole of our hearts and minds and bodies into the act of worship, we must join our bodies with the body of God’s subversive plot called the church, which must be remain subversive if it is to survive. When we do this, we will not find the road easy, but we will never be without enough light to travel by. We will know what to do, where to go, and how to get there. We will be like those great women in Exodus, Shiphra and Puah, who were guided by worship, cunning like serpents, righteous like doves. Amen.