“The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.”

— Exodus 1:19

As I write my first draft of this missive it’s been only a few weeks since a person stood on the lawn of the white house and shouted into a microphone an insult about a former first lady. I try my best not to get into the weeds of politics. I try, really hard, but this was just one more. One more insult layers deep with misogyny and racism, and it got stuck somewhere within me. I’ve read this pericope about Shiphrah and Puah so many times. I’ve preached on it so many times, but only recently have I thought about their response to Egypt’s king to his question about why the Hebrew boys still lived. In my sacred imagination, I can see such parallels between the dehumanization in place for Egyptian slavery to exist and the dehumanization of our racism and enslavement in this country. We had to make some people less than to justify our treatment because we knew it was wrong when we did it, but we did it anyway. Then we built an entire ugly mythos to support the evil we had done. We did such a good job at building it that it lingers today, in the very air we breathe and water we drink. It lingers in what some people think is just a stupid insult, but others know is laced deeply with racism. In my sacred imagination, I see Shiphrah and Puah taking the racist insults of the Egyptian people and using them against the Egyptian king to subvert the evil he intended. These Hebrew women are not like your Egyptian women, so delicate and feminine, so demure … these Hebrew women are more like animals. They give birth before we even arrive. Beloved, can we take the tools of the oppressors and use them against them? Can we turn the tables on the evil that lives within us, call it out and make a tool for justice? I don’t pretend to know how to do this, but I promise I’m willing to learn, to do, and to keep trying.