2023.09.03 | Laboring in Midian
“Laboring in Midian”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring, Senior Minister & Executive Director
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
September 3, 2023
Exodus 3:1−15 (NRSV)
Midian. Show of hands for those who were born and raised in Midian (Northwest Saudi Arabia) or who have visited or even touched down in a plane to refuel. Not so many, I suspect. My inlaws haven’t even been there.
My cousin Bruce is the only person I know who has been to Saudi Arabia. Bruce was several years ahead of my sister and me in age, education, and life experience. He and his family spent all of our growing up years living overseas.
Bruce’s dad, Richard, was an engineer and officer in the US Army. His orders were always about building or rebuilding water and sewer systems in third world countries, and places that had been profoundly damaged as a result of war or natural disasters. For example, I remember a time when the Beedle family was stationed in Frankfurt, and Dick was building and rebuilding sewer systems in Vietnam.
Like his dad, Bruce studied engineering and geology in college and then went on to work overseas. I was in college when Bruce landed his first big job in the Middle East. Shortly before he moved to Riyadh, he invited me to meet him for supper in a nearby city. His parents had retired to Milwaukee. My college was located about an hour away, near Sheboygan.
I didn’t know Bruce very well, because his family only visited every two to four years when his dad was on leave. They lived the rest of their lives on the other side of the world. But even though they were like foreigners in a foreign land when they came home--home to their mother’s home--we always had a blast with Bruce and his younger brothers, Rodney and Scott.
They were fun to be around, and they always knew stuff that we didn’t know about. The reverse was also true. Our parents put the fear of God in us about keeping the Beedle boys safe in the wilds of Iowa. Every time they came home, my dad would give us these lectures: “If any of Shirley and Dick’s boys gets hurt when you are around, you’re responsible, and there’s going to be Hell to pay.” My dad never swore in the house. These lectures were memorable. I was like, “Wow, I guess boys, or at least Army brats, are very fragile. Handle with care.”
Fast forward to supper in Milwaukee with Bruce, circa 1983. Bruce suggested that we meet at Benihana. This was my first taste of Asian cuisine. I didn’t know that people ate raw fish. I had never seen a man cook, especially at a table where I was eating. And I had never heard of sake, but I was pretty sure that Aunt Hazel and Grandma’s minds would be blown if they knew what Bruce and I were having for supper just a few nights before he was flying off to Saudi Arabia.
Supper with my cousin Bruce at Benihana’s in Milwaukee in the early 1980s was about as different from a family picnic in Iowa in the 1960s as one could get. Not much has changed since then. Pretty much anywhere in the US or Saudi Arabia is profoundly different in topography, weather, and culture.
II
Rewind back to Moses’ time, as described in the book of Exodus, and--newsflash--Goshen (aka “Egypt”), the place where Moses was born, and the far side of Midian, where we find Moses in today’s Hebrew Bible reading, were night and day different from each other.
Nevertheless, we learn in Exodus, Chapter 3 that Moses is now on the far side of Midian, herding his father-in-law’s sheep, in order to pay the bride price for the woman who he has asked to take as his wife.
The Midianites were an ancient tribe descended from Abraham and his concubine, Keturah. (My wonderful spouse, Stephanie, describes them as “nomadic sheepherders” with a “low carbon footprint.”)
Due to their social location and agrarian vocation, the Midianites did not live within a firm geographic boundary, they did not build villages, and they did not have a written language. So the traditional scholarship available on Midianites is not as robust as that of those from more prosperous, settled cultures.
Given all of these differences between the Egyptians and the Midianites, you may wonder, why would Moses, or any person in their right mind, travel hundreds of miles on foot to a different country in order to look for a bride?
Part of the answer is that Moses wasn’t exactly visiting Midian on a tourist visa. He was, by contrast, a fugitive from the law. He was a foreigner without “papers.” His sole purpose of being in Midian was to escape the death penalty for killing an Egyptian solider, after that soldier nearly killed a Hebrew slave while she was resistantly “helping” to build Pharaoh's empire.
Moses ran home to confess his actions to his mother, and to sort out what to do next. His mother knew that he would pay the highest penalty for killing the soldier, so she (Queen Bithia, Moses’ adoptive Egyptian mother) did the only thing that any good mother would do. She helped her son pack his bags. She made him some food, and sent him on a personal exodus--to her people.
On the one hand, Queen Bithia’s plan was normative. Think about how we do family today. If we have a child in distress and we cannot help them, what do we do? We send them to their “other mother,” who is often one of our sisters, who loves them and might not kill them, even though she knows about as much about them as we do.
On the other hand, these sisters’ people, these Egyptians and Midianites, were at great odds with each other, going back to Adam and Eve. They had been fighting for so long, no one could remember what were the original differences between the two.
(Hilbillies, think “Hatfields and McCoys.” English lit buffs, think “Capulets and Montagues.” West Side story fans, think Sharks and Jets, both the 1957 Musical and Spielberg’s 2021 adaptation for the silver screen.)
As an aside, ask yourself, “Self, how did two sisters end up in two different lands, with husbands of two different ethnicities, nationalities, and religions? How did they end up amongst two different peoples who hated each other?”
Hypothesis: well, the Bible doesn’t provide an answer, so I’m just going to state the obvious. Pharaoh's wife, Moses’ adoptive mother, was probably a war bride. That’s the nice way to say it. The more transparent way to describe her identity is to say that she was captured by soldiers one of those times when the Egyptians conquered the Midianites, and she was taken into Pharaoh's court to serve as a concubine, a sex slave, probably when she was so young that today, some people would call her a child prostitute.
Now back to Exodus 3. Moses’ mother’s plan to send her son off to Midian was a long shot, but what choice did she have? None, really. He couldn’t stay with her in Egypt, and Midian was the only place and the only people who she had ever known--and the Midianites just might help young Moses. And maybe, maybe just maybe, the Egyptians would never go looking for Moses in Midian, because what kind of Egyptian would ever run and hide with their arch enemies? Only the adoptive son of one of their own.
III
Imagine being Moses. Imagine fearing Pharaoh’s reprisal, so you run for your life to Midian. The trip takes months, not minutes, to complete. But at last it comes to an end, and there are some nice perks. Day one you encounter a group of women gathered around a well watering their father Jethro’s livestock.
Jethro was the high priest of Midian, who was ruler of the Midianites. The shepherds are his daughters. Jethro’s daughters lead Moses to their home where they meet their father, who welcomes you into his tribe and gives you his daughter, Zipporah, to marry.
We don’t know much about the possessions that Moses brought into Midian, but it’s safe to assume that he was traveling light. He was, after all, a fugitive. He’d been on the road a long time. No matter how much money he had in his bag when he left Egypt, it would have all been spent by the time he met Jethro. Given the speed at which he needed to travel, the best Moses could have done for provisions would have been to live off the land and take odd jobs, when he could, and live hand-to-mouth.
Due to his economic lifestyle, the only bride price that Moses could have offered his father-in-law Jethro would have been his labor. The need to work off this debt may, in part, explain why Moses and Zipporah spent the early years of their marriage in Midian.
According to Exodus, one day while Moses was herding his father-in-law’s sheep on the far side of Midian, he saw a burning bush, and he heard the voice of God beckoning him to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the land of Canaan, where they would be free.
Moses was scared out of his mind about this calling. Pharaoh had a long memory for fugitives who had committed capital crimes, and he was still in charge. In addition, Moses was the baby of the family, and convinced that he lacked the skills needed to carry out the mission. He did his best to convince God that he needed a different candidate for the job, but God persisted.
That’s because God doesn’t call the equipped. God equips the called. And God never sends us out one-by-one. God sends us out two-by-two. God said to Moses, I will send you with Aaron and Miriam, your older siblings. In the end, Moses laces up his sandals, accepts God’s call, and in doing so, he launches one of the most significant liberation movements in the history of the world.
IV
The Rev. Ernest T. Campbell, Senior Minister of Riverside United Church of Christ in New York City during the 1970s, once stated in a Sunday morning sermon: “The two most important days in a person’s life are the day on which [we are] born and the day on which [we] discover why [we were] born.”
Moses was born in Egypt, the son of slaves, and was adopted by an Egyptian queen who herself had been enslaved. When Moses’ life was threatened, she sent him on a personal exodus to Midian, where he received his calling to lead the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt to the promised land.
Most of us know where we were born. Some of us have been shipped off to loved ones in hopes we would have a better life expectancy. And some of us are also blessed to have received our calling, or as Pastor Cambell puts it–our “why we were born” clarification.
My prayer for each and all of us is that we not only know the origins of our birth, and our people’s people, but that we also have found our answer to the “why?” If that is not the case, stay tuned; God is about to set a bush on fire near you. No need to call 911, just open the ears of your heart and listen for what God has in store for you. It probably won’t be what you expect, and you and the world will be amazed! Amen.