Sermon of August 21, 2005
Presented by Rev. Chuck Ericson
Scripture lesson: Exodus 1:8-2:10

“Unlikely Heroes”

There are just about five chapters from Genesis 45 to Exodus 1; Genesis ends with Chapter 50. So it’s a short amount of reading, but it’s a long period of time.  When the passage in Exodus 1 begins there is a new king in Egypt who didn’t know the Hebrew patriarch Joseph from Genesis, or as one of my teachers in seminary Rabbi Rothman used to say, “there arose a pharaoh who knew not Joseph”. No matter how I read that, that’s the way the phrase always comes into my head.

Between Joseph’s time and this new time, there are many generations, and many pharaohs in Egypt . Back last week when we looked at Genesis 45, Joseph was pharaoh’s right-hand man, he was rationing out food and supplies to people, and he had come to be reunited with his brothers who were starving in Canaan and had come down to get food from him. So he arranged for all of his family, and extended family, to come down and live with him in Egypt , where they would have plenty of food and be safe and survive. They begin to populate there, and it came to a time later on in Exodus 1 now, where a few generations have gone by, and as I said a few pharaohs have come and gone; maybe 200 to 300 years, maybe more. And now there is a new leader, who doesn’t even know who Joseph was. When Joseph was there, the pharaoh looked favorably upon the people. This new pharaoh, who didn’t know Joseph, does not look favorably upon the people; things have changed. They changed worse than that though, because as you have probably listened and heard, not only does this pharaoh not look favorably upon the people – he’s in fear of them. He’s getting paranoid about these Hebrew people, the people of Israel , who are multiplying, growing bigger and bigger, and he thinks they’re going to side with him enemies against him. So he starts to institute slavery, and enslaves them and causes them to do hard labor under the eye of terrible taskmasters; they have to work harder and harder and life becomes bitter for the Hebrew people. Between the time of Joseph and this new era, times are bad for the people of Israel and they need a hero.

In today’s lesson there are a few heroes, so I wanted to take this as an opportunity, once again, to look at heroes. I know I’ve preached about heroes before, but I think in here there are several different kinds of heroes and today I’d like to look at the different categories of heroism that exist.

One, I think, is that there are universal heroes. Joseph, the one who’s mentioned in the first line here and who we heard about more last week, was among his people a universal hero. People loved Joseph because he saved them. As I said when they all migrated down from Canaan in the time of the famine, he got them food; he got them a place to live in Goshen; he provided for them and made sure they survived and didn’t starve and continued to live. So Joseph was a universal hero among the Hebrew people; they adored him for all the good things he did for them. Moses, who’s introduced later in this passage, also became a universal hero because after the time of enslavement, if you’ve been to Sunday school you know that Moses eventually got the people out of Egypt and across the Red Sea , the Sea of Reeds where the waters parted and then came crashing back down on the Egyptian soldiers. And Moses got them almost all the way back to the Promised Land (he died before getting there) but he got them most of the way back and they got the rest of the way with Joshua. So Moses, even though people complained about him along the way back to Canaan and even though he had his imperfections and flaws, became a universal hero here as well in the history of the people of Israel. Jesus is Christianity’s universal hero. He’s the one who stands above all others who are believers in the Christian church. Jesus, in that first hymn The Great Savior, is described in so many different ways why he is the universal hero of Christians. He’s our friend, he’s the one who’s beside us, he’s the one who comforts us, he teaches us, heals us and ultimately is our savior. Jesus is a universal hero.

In our day and time, or in our era, I think we can name a few people who we might consider universal heroes. Some people might say that Gandhi was kind of a world universal hero for his movement towards peace. Mother Teresa is someone that probably comes to mind for a lot of people, comes quickly to mind for me. Martin Luther King. In another realm some people look upon John Glenn as a hero for his willingness to orbit the earth for the first time. I always think that it’s too bad that Alan Shepherd doesn’t get more credit. That poor guy didn’t orbit the earth, but he was the first one in the United States that got locked into one of those capsules and went up into space. It was 20 minutes or 40 minutes whatever it was, but still the first person ever to get locked in, out of the atmosphere and then back down again took a lot of bravery. So I know for some people who love science, those astronauts, those first astronauts especially were heroes; universal heroes.

There’s another category of heroism that I’m thinking about calling either artificial or manufactured heroes – people who probably don’t necessarily earn or deserve hero status, but somehow end up being considered that way by some people.  I put Pharaoh in that category. Pharaoh didn’t do a lot of good deeds and was not a man of loving kindness and full of God’s grace. Pharaoh was one who exerted his power over others, the Hebrews, the people of Israel obviously and his own people. He was out to make a big name for himself. But some probably looked upon him as a hero; some of the ignorant people in Egypt who shared his mistrust and dread of the Hebrews probably looked upon Pharaoh as a hero if he was keeping the Hebrews down and keeping their threat away. But it would have been manufactured, artificial, not a real hero – just one who maybe was seen that way because of the mean and nasty things he did, or because his new assistants and lieutenants were telling everybody he was a hero. Sometimes heroes get hero status because a lot of people say they’re heroes, not because they really are. I’m concerned today that we have lots of these manufactured, artificial heroes; that we have people that we start to think they’re heroic, but they haven’t done anything really that wonderful or that good for the welfare of the world or the country or anything else like that.

I think it has to do with 24-hour news. I think 24-hour news isn’t willing to admit that there’s not 24 hours worth of news. So they make up stories, well they don’t make them up they embellish little, tiny stories into big stories and have ancillary heroes in these stories and build it all up to fill the 24 hours. They could do 8 hours of news and maybe 16 hours of good ole Laurel and Hardy comedies or Three Stooges or Green Acres or something to make us laugh once in a while. There’s not 24 hours worth of news, so a missing person, a strange death, another mystery somewhere suddenly becomes a big, international story, when there are hundreds of other missing people, hundreds of other unexplained deaths, hundreds of other mysterious happenings going on that go overlooked, or unexamined. So we have these manufactured celebrities and heroes for a period of time to keep the news cycle going. I may be wrong in that, but that’s my feeling about it; we end up with manufactured heroes instead of real heroes.

The third category of heroes, I think, are the most important – those who are perhaps accidental or common or unlikely heroes, people you don’t expect to be heroes and this passage we heard today is full of them. I know I’ve mentioned before Shiphrah and Puah, the two midwives; they had a position that was low in society, they had this job of helping women deliver a baby, yet they are told by Pharaoh, the king, not to let the male Hebrew children live and told by God to let the male children live – and they obey God instead of Pharaoh. That was heroic in those days; to obey God instead of the edict of the King of Egypt. So these two common people, two people who shared a job with so many other people, who were everyday people like us only way back then, became, unexpectedly, unlikely heroes. Male children lived because of what they did, and others like them did, and in fact Moses lived because of either Shiphrah and Puah or some others like them -- if Moses’ mother had a mid-wife assisting her with her birth, because he wasn’t killed.

And Moses’ mother is another one of the heroes; she hid the child for three months. That was also in violation of what the Pharaoh would have liked. She hid the baby for three months. It sounds like a simple sentence, but it must have been incredibly difficult and incredibly brave. And Moses’ sister, that’s a good one. She’s watching this whole thing with the baby and the basket and the bulrushes, and Pharaoh’s daughter finds a baby and she comes to Moses’ sister, and says “Gee, do you know any people who could nurse this baby?” She says, “Oh, I know somebody,” and brings Moses back to his own mother! And she gets wages, she gets paid for it, so the whole thing this little girl figures out is how to get the baby back to his own mother, and get have her get paid for nursing her own child; pretty amazing little girl – a hero. And Moses himself, as I said, became a hero later on. All of them common people – each one of them just going about their daily routines, but each one of them having a role in Moses’ survival, which led to the people being freed from Egypt and being able to be on their way back to their homeland. All of those great events happened because of what happened in this passage, from unlikely heroes.

There are unlikely heroes today. I wish I could remember the soldiers name; I was reading the other day about the soldier who uncovered the spider hole where Saddam Hussein was. That was a pretty amazing story. It was a regular troop, a regular soldier who did that, just as part of checking that town, wherever they were, pushed that cover away and found Saddam Hussein, the great tyrant, and brought him in. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we hope that it’s going to lead to justice against all his crimes. But it wasn’t Donald Rumsfeld who did that; it wasn’t President Bush who did that; it wasn’t the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – it was one of the everyday common troops who accidentally stumbled upon this and did his job.

Another one that came to mind for me is Jack Goldberg. Anybody who grew up in Wethersfield in my era, Jack Goldberg was the police officer you feared after you got your license. You had to be careful driving, but you had to be especially careful if Jack Goldberg was on patrol because he was a big, strong, husky cop with a crew cut – there weren’t many crew cuts back then but Jack had a crew cut, the glasses with the mirrors and you didn’t want to get stopped by Jack Goldberg. I think he wasn’t as tough as we all thought he was, but we kind of created this legend of you don’t want to be stopped by Officer Goldberg. A couple of weeks ago there was a story I read about a woman in Wethersfield who was attacked in her own home by a dog – I think it was her own dog. It had latched onto her arm and it was not letting go and she was in real danger, and the dog was not backing down. And she happened to live next door to now long-time retired Officer Jack Goldberg who heard something next door and instinctively, based on his life’s work, ran over and wrestled the dog away from her and took the dog and somehow got it into a bathroom, or bedroom, and slammed the door so that the children in the house were going to be safe. I think got injured himself doing that; obviously trying to wrestle an angry dog away from someone, just became an unlikely, every day, accidental, common hero to that family, preventing further harm to the woman and to her children. So there are opportunities that happen to people like us all the time. And we become the heroes sometimes, and we’re surrounded by the heroes.

And that’s the good news today, that it’s not the universal heroes who are going to have an impact on our lives – other than we might model our lives after someone like Gandhi or Mother Theresa, or we might learn from them or be inspired by them. But the real heroes are common people like Shiphrah and Puah and Moses’ mother and Moses’ sister and Moses, and others. In Matthew Chapter 1 is the genealogy of Jesus, all his ancestors. And in that is a list of people who led up to the birth of Jesus, and one of them is Rahab, who was a common woman who hid spies in the big story of the walls of Jericho coming down; a simple woman who hid spies at great danger to herself. There is Ruth, a widow, who becomes a great person and a hero to the people of Israel . David, King David, started out as a little shepherd boy. The story of our faith is the story of common people becoming heroes. So if you ever think, oh I wish there was a hero around somewhere, don’t worry – you’re probably surrounded by heroes wherever you are, right here: in your neighborhood, at work, at school, shopping – all the time, because heroes come from common, everyday people. Heroes are unlikely heroes most of time, people like us, who respond when the call comes. So, two things, think about how you’re blessed by heroes around you and some of the people who have become heroic for you, and think about how you can be heroic when the call comes and be ready to answer God’s call – even if it conflicts with somebody else’s.

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