The Midwives In Our Lives

"The Midwives In Our Lives"

Exodus 1:15-22
August 24, 2008

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and
the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on
the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But the midwives
feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the
boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have
you done this, and allowed the boys to live?” 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.” So God dealt well with the midwives; and the
people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he
gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy that is born to
the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.”

There is a story about the “obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis who grappled with a puzzle
involving childbed, or puerperal fever, which is an infection of the female genital tract
that often killed women who had recently given birth. Working in a prominent Viennese
hospital, Semmelweis noticed that women on one floor were contracting childbed fever
at a dramatically lower rate than women on another floor. Women treated by midwives,
he noticed, had fewer infections than those treated by medical students. Midwives were
careful about cleanliness and were not allowed to do autopsies. But, Dr. Semmelweis
observed, medical students did autopsies regularly and went to patients directly from
the dissecting room without washing. The new mothers who were getting sick were
being tended to by medical students just after they left the autopsy room. Noting that
the students were not washing their hands, he hypothesized that neglect of hand
washing might be responsible for the deaths of the new mothers. His hypothesis
preceded Louis Pasteur's theory that the spread of bacteria caused disease, and the
establishment of sterility as a primary requirement and common practice in treating
patients.

“To stop the spread of childbed fever, Dr. Semmelweis proposed something radical: He
ordered all medical students working on the affected maternity ward to wash their
hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before entering the ward. The rate of infection
plummeted from 18 percent to 1.5 percent over several month

“Now, you might think Ignaz Semmelweis would have been lauded as a hero. Instead,
his brilliant observations and courageous actions stirred up such controversy that he
lost his position at the hospital and ended his career in disgrace at Budapest. He was
eventually committed to an insane asylum and died of a blood infection similar to the
one he had prevented so successfully. This courageous doctor was vindicated in 1879
when the great scientist Louis Pasteur personally defended Semmelweis' theories at a
meeting of the Academy of Medicine in Paris.” Dale A. Matthews, The Faith Factor
(New York: Viking, 1998), 57-58.

In many ways, Semmelweis’ story is a sad one—it says a lot about our ignorance even
only a hundred or so years ago, and it says something about the way people react to a
radical new idea—they destroy the messenger because the message is too radical,
even if the message is actually true, even obviously true as in this case. But it also
says something about the way the role of midwives were discounted in our Western
culture, even though they have played an important role in human history. The
midwives knew it was best to wash their hands before beginning their work of helping to
bring in new life into this world. Maybe they didn’t know why it was best—maybe they
didn’t know the theory, but if you’ve been helping to bring new life into this world for
thousands of years, generations and generations of woman doing the sacred work of
helping others get through the joy and pain of childbirth, then there is a good chance
you’ll know what’s best for the woman in need of your help. Maybe because of sexism,
maybe because of an Enlightenment mistrust of anything too ancient, the doctors
simply refused the wisdom of these women, and it ended up costing more women their
lives, until Pasteur vindicated poor Semmelweis’ theory, decades later.

But they should have listened to these wise women, these women who facilitated the
giving birth to life in this world, these “mid” wives, these in-between figures who straddle
the chasm between the one becoming two, who stand in the breach between the
inherent danger that was part of childbirth in the ancient world. I was doing some
research on midwives and I found the following: “Midwives are also primary care givers
providing general women's health care. Midwives are trained to recognize and deal with
deviations from the norm. Obstetricians, in contrast, are specialists in illness related to
childbearing and in surgery. The two professions can be complementary, but often are
at odds because obstetricians are taught to "actively manage" labor, while midwives are
taught not to intervene unless necessary.” (Wikipedia article on midwives) Of course,
both are needed, and both are important, but I was fascinated by the idea of midwives
only intervening when it was clear that things were not going smoothly or naturally, that
there was a problem. When the problem arose, they intervened; they did the right
things to make sure that both of their patients survived childbirth, if at all possible.

I wonder if that ancient midwife instinct came into play in our story today, the story of
these two Hebrew midwives who thumbed their noses at this new rules set out by this
new Pharaoh who did not remember Joseph, this Pharaoh who only saw a potentially
restless foreign element in his land. To give you a sense of how forgotten these
descendants of Joseph had become in the land of Egypt, you need to know that the
text itself here refers to them as “Hebrews” rather than Israelites—you see, in the
ancient Near East world, the word “Hebrews” was used to designate any group who had
no social standing, or who owned no land, and who were believed to endlessly disrupt
an ordered society. The Egyptians had forgotten why these Hebrews—not Israelites
anymore—were in their land in the first place—that they had been saved by the first
ancestor of these people who they now clumped together with the other Hebrews of the
Near East, the nobodies of the ancient world. (NIB Exodus)

And so the Pharaoh decided to take matters into his own hands, or to have other
hands to do his work of genocide, the hands of the Hebrews midwives, who were being
told to do the very opposite of what they had been trained and called to do in their
communities—they were to kill the baby boys with the very hands that were meant to
bring life into this world. Can you imagine being given that order? But, of course, they
didn’t do as they were told—they resisted the command, and let the boys live, and
simply made up a lie, a lie about how they could never get to the pregnant woman in
time for the actual birth, thus not allowing them to do the dirty deed they were
commanded to do.   They feared God, they were more in awe of God’s power than they
were of the Pharaoh’s power----and if you’ve been a witness to as many births as they
had, to witness the true miracle of life coming into this world, well, I suspect you and I
would also fear God more than the Pharaoh as well.

Midwives are not meant to destroy, but to give life—they facilitate the birth of a new
thing, a new life, a new beginning, and I have to say that I think there are midwives
amongst us, people who help us to give birth to something new in our own lives, people
who may not facilitate the birth of a baby, but who certainly help us to give to birth to
new life in this world. They are sometimes our friends, our family, a neighbor, our
school teacher, the professor at college, and sometimes even ministers—these people
straddle the past and the present in our lives, helping us to get perspective from the
past in order to get us into the next phase of our lives. Personally, I think of my youth
minister from junior high school as one of those people for me. Ronnie Adams was
constantly pushing me to think beyond the easy answers, beyond a discipleship that
was simply nothing more than going through the motions. He remains a giant in my life,
in terms of one of those people that pushed me from a simple faith to a more rich,
vibrant faith, alive with God and alive with the Christ.

But sometimes the midwives who come into our lives are not the expected ones, the
ones who are necessarily on our side, so to speak. It is said that young Pablo Picasso
almost nearly died of asphyxiation when the attending midwife mistook him for dead and
abandoned him on the birthing table. According to family lore, his Uncle Salvador blew
cigar smoke into his face, prompting him to breathe. You see, sometimes a midwife can
be an enemy, but sometimes even a well-meaning enemy can become a great teacher,
a great midwife. Last fall, I was in Spokane, Washington, the city where I first pastored
a congregation, in order to give a ordination sermon for a particular church member
who was getting ordained in the United Church of Christ. Amidst that celebration for
her, I found myself lucky enough to reconnect with many in my former congregation,
which was wonderful. But there was someone missing, a woman by the name of Jackie,
who had passed away after I had gone on to another pulpit. Jackie and I had a
tumultuous relationship, the most fractured I have ever experienced with a church
member. I was new and inexperienced and she was, well, a handful, by all accounts,
certainly by my account, and we just were at each other’s throats for most of my tenure
in Spokane. All that weekend last fall, I couldn’t shake the memory of her, because the
more I thought about it, the more I realized what a great teacher she had been for me
as a young, fresh, newly minted minister. That doesn’t mean she hadn’t handled
herself perfectly, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I had handled myself perfectly—I
made a lot of mistakes in that relationship, but all that weekend in Spokane, she
haunted me, and I became even more appreciative what she had helped to give birth in
me—a deeper sense of boundaries, a deeper sense of who I was a minister. She was
the bringer of new life in me, the facilitator of something being born in me, which was a
sense of who I was—she had been the midwife who coaxed the identity I would
eventually take on for myself, though I know at the time we only seemed to be at each
other’s throats, trying to wring the life out of each other. That weekend, I just wanted to
say thank you, Jackie, thank you—you were such an unexpected teacher for me, such
an unexpected bringer of new life into my life. Bless you, bless you, and we shall see
each again soon enough.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve had that experience, that experience of having a friend or
even enemy bring you to a new place, that experience of having someone facilitate a
transition in your life from one place to the next. Sometimes these people can be in our
lives for simply a few weeks, months or years, and then its over—their work in our lives
is over. The reality is that a midwife doesn’t stay around and raise the child they just
helped to give birth to—her job is get the new life out of that older life, the one carrying
the possibility of something new within them. The women in our story today didn’t stick
around—they just came and did their important work, which was sometimes painful for
the person trying to give birth to new life, and then, after the work was done, they
moved on. Sometimes they don’t know what they are doing—Jackie didn’t, and I didn’t,
until I grew up a bit—and I think we both grew out of that experience, we were both
different people after that painful experience with each other. Sometimes we grieve the
loss of these special, especially if they were more like a Ronnie in our lives rather than
a Jackie, but we ought not to—we all have work to do in this life with each other, God’s
work in this life, sacred work, but then it’s over because those people were meant to be
with us for just a little while and then their work is finished in our lives. The midwives
leave the room when the work of giving birth is done.

Again, so it is with us. I just wanted to preach a sermon this week that reflected on the
important people in our lives who helped us to give birth to something new, something
God had in store for us, but which we could not have received if it had not been for
those special people—friends and even enemies alike. I also think it’s appropriate to
think of those midwives and teachers in our lives on a day when we bless the
backpacks and laptops of our children and adults in this place, knowing they too are
about embark on a new year where they too might be working with someone who will
hopefully bring something special out of them. These midwives in our text, these brave
and radical and powerful women simply go back into the shadows after this—they
risked their lives so that others could have life, so that they boys of Israel, the Hebrew
boys, the boys of the nobodies of the Near East could have a chance to be born.
People have done that in your life, and if you don’t know who they are, you need to
think really hard, because they exist, saints and sinners alike, the Ronnies and the
Jackies, they have been part of your life, I can guarantee it. If you’re lucky, they’re still
alive, and you can do what I can’t do with Jackie now, at least not right now—you can
say “thank you, thank you for letting God use you to bring new life out of me.”   And for
the future…look out for these people, these midwives who come in and out our lives,
amidst the joy and amidst the pain. If we know who they are and what they are doing in
our lives, maybe, just maybe we can also recognize in those moments that we are in the
midst of giving birth to something new and wonderful in our own lives. Amen.