Dear Friends,
For how many months now - nearly 6? - has everything been about safety? We are worried about our own, our family’s, and our communities’ safety. And, for families faced with the choice about whether or not to send their children back to school, the question is suddenly looming larger. We’re still a few weeks away from the start of the school year where I live, with most of the schools beginning remotely, and the anxiety is palpable. It is, as Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it in her newsletter from last week, families’ turn to freak out.
We want to protect the people we love.
So did Moses’s mother. When she gave birth, at a time when all Israelite boys were sentenced to death, she kept him close as long as she could, and then she found a way to let him go that would, she hoped, ensure his rescue. This was one of the most familiar Sunday School stories of my youth, but it’s one we don’t tell quite as much in Godly Play. A supplementary story amid larger themes, we often don’t meet Moses in our classrooms until he is a grown man, the one who liberates his people.
But for Moses to become the leader who freed the Israelites from slavery and led them into the Promised Land, first someone had to keep him safe. His mother did that. But so did the Pharaoh’s daughter.
Pharaoh’s daughter, the one who “drew him out of the water” and paid for his care, did not have an obligation or relationship to the infant Moses, unless we think we have an obligation to everyone we meet. And, as Christians, isn’t that precisely what we believe?
As quarantine and social distancing continue on, a reality that we will be bound to for many months to come, it can help us to remember this obligation and the stories of our faith that underscore it. The infant Moses, yes, but also the Good Samaritan, a story that is almost an exact mirror of this one.
At a time when even children have to put on masks to walk out the door, we are acutely aware of how our actions are tied to the lives of others. As I’ve written elsewhere, we keep each other safe, and even if you don’t think this is some Godly responsibility, it’s a basic requirement of life in community. And community is such an extraordinary and holy thing.
In keeping with that theme, I am thinking about some of my favorite books about community. These aren’t just about protecting each other, but about Drawing the Circle Wide (a perfect gathering song for all occasions).
Some stories for you:
A Church for All by Gayle E. Pitman
When You Look Out the Window - also by Gayle E. Pitman (clearly she knows what’s up!)
Maybe God Is Like That Too by Matthew Turner
Just Ask! by Sonia Sotomayor
It's hard out there. But we can do hard things.
With room in my circle for you,
A. Bird