Sunday, August 27, 2023 - Partnerships

This sermon was preached for Sunday, August 27, 2023. The readings for this sermon were: Exodus 1:8-2:10, Psalm 124, and Matthew 16:13-20.

If I told you that Great Britain’s Libby Clegg won gold in the 100 meter sprint with a new world record in the 2016 Paralympics in Rio, Brazil, that’d be true on paper. But it wouldn’t be the full story. Libby Clegg is almost totally blind, so as is the practice in the Paralympic visual impairment events, Clegg runs her sprints completely blindfolded. She runs loosely bound at the hand to her guide, Chris Clarke. The video of them running is mesmerizing to watch - the two hurtle down the track completely in sync, stride for powerful stride - except for right at the end, the last split-second when Clegg throws herself forward over the line and Clarke pulls himself back. Clarke is Clegg’s eyes, but her speed is all hers. The win and the medal are hers technically, too, but anyone could see in the way the pair joyfully embrace at the end, that their victory is truly shared, born of hours of training and of absolute trust. Clegg and Clarke and their victory is the Paralympics doing what it does best: transforming something the world sees as a source of dependence into a moment of strength and power and interdependence. 

Exodus begins with the origin story of Moses, Israel’s great deliverer. One way of telling history as a series of extraordinary individuals who stand in the current of history and shift its trajectory forever: Joseph, Israel, Pharaoh, Moses. But all that focus on the great individuals can make us overlook the partnership at the heart of our story from Exodus today. When Pharaoh commands the Hebrew midwives to kill any male babies born to the Hebrew women, Shiphrah and Puah together refuse to obey his orders. Not only do the two midwives defy him in secret, they even cleverly use his own prejudices against him to hide their deception and continue saving the infants. 

How were Shiphrah and Puah able to do it? How did they have the courage to stand against the divine dictator, Pharaoh? We actually don’t know if Shiphrah and Puah were Egyptians who served the Hebrew women or if they were Hebrews themselves - names are ambiguous and the text can be translated either way. What we know is this: “the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.” The Biblical phrase “feared God” is perhaps better understood by modern listeners as “the midwives revered God,” from the same etymological root as awe and awesome. Clearly, their sort of fear was not an anxious, paralyzing fear that forces someone to submit against their better judgment. Nor was it the same kind of fear as the existential dread Pharaoh whipped up among the Egyptian so that they would lash out in cruelty against the Hebrew slaves. No, Shiphrah and Puah’s “fear” was the source of their courage. The midwives’ reverence for God meant they trusted that God’s laws were higher than Pharaoh’s, that God’s long view of history overrode the political threats of their present moment. Their reverence was their faith was their conviction was their courage - and it was their and the babies’, and therefore Moses and his people’s, salvation. 

I cannot help but wonder, too, if the midwives’ courage also came from one another. They were risking their lives to stave off a genocide together. They encouraged one another’s faith, they held one another to their shared conviction that the innocent babies deserve to live. Could the two midwives have done what they did, saving countless Hebrew infants, if not for the witness of the other?

God accomplishes extraordinary things through individuals, and he acts through communities, and families, and partnerships, too. 

I suspect when people hear a priest talking about the sanctity of partnership they’d probably assume I’m talking about either marriage or our partnership with God - a sort of Jesus is my copilot situation. The image of the Paralympic sprinter and her guide is a pretty good one for faith after all. If your life is anything like mine, there are lots of times that feel like you’re hurtling blindfolded at full tilt down a track praying that God’s guiding you toward some sort of finish line  you cannot see and away from any brick walls. And yet, I have learned over the years that the way God often does that guiding in my life is with and through other people. It’s human beings I’m bound to each day, human beings I need to trust and run alongside. 

Our lives are made up of all sorts of different kinds of partnerships, whether brief interactions or intensive projects or life-long friendships. The people we need to rely on and trust are not always who we planned on. Your best partner at work is not necessarily your direct colleague or manager. Single parents, stepparents, and foster and adoptive parents can tell you that the parenting partners you end up relying on are not necessarily the ones who created the child. God puts us beside all sorts of people who challenge us and push us and comfort us, if we choose to set aside our prideful and independent insistence.

In a recent interview, the visually impaired sprinter, Libby Clegg, remarked that people only saw her ultimate moment of victory - they didn’t see the months of training that goes into that feat. Clegg and Clarke didn’t begin by sprinting full speed. They had to start slowly, jogging at first, learning each other’s rhythms, putting in the time to build up their collective trust and skill. 

Shiphrah and Puah’s story in Exodus only mentions their moment of triumphant defiance. We don’t hear about how they had spent years of their lives doing God’s work already, day in and day out. As midwives, they would have been in the midst of life and death every day and night, guiding women risking their lives to bring new people into the world. They would have witnessed miracles, God’s miracles, made real through the blood, sweat, and tears of laboring mothers. Shiphrah and Puah were Israel’s deliverers even before they defied the Pharaoh. The courageous stance that landed their names in the annals of history was simply an extension of the life of faith they were already living.

The work of faith is made up of everyday acts of love that prepare us for the big moments of truth. And that work is often done in partnership. The leadership of St. Mark’s have convinced me of the transformational power of partnerships. You’ve taught me how partnerships make the work sustainable in the long run, how they prepare our parish to do the brave and right thing when it matters most. 

There’s our co-senior wardens, Chris and Dan. I love how they rely on each other, hype each other up, and bring out the best in each other’s complementary gifts. We’re all still benefiting from the vision and efforts of the powerhouse team that was my predecessor, Father Peter, and his senior warden, Sue. Then there’s Meg and Meg, the dynamic duo of the St. Mark’s book club, and our outreach co-leaders, Claire and Lori. And new leaders, too - Donna and Linda who are heading up the 5k fall fundraiser, and Deb and Meg, who we intended to bless today and send out as a pair to do Eucharistic visitations - except COVID got in the way. 

Then there’s our treasurer team. When Melinda stepped out of her comfort zone and into the new challenge of serving as St. Mark’s treasurer last year, she began to carefully identify the parts of the job that she felt least confident in. Then she found someone who would both mentor her in those building skills and take on the roles she didn’t connect with. And Don Edwards, for his part, said yes. We don’t see a lot of the behind-the-scenes work they do together, but we all benefit from both their everyday striving and their big victories.

Partnerships in ministry give us courage to take on challenges we’d otherwise turn down. They prevent us from burning out from loneliness and exhaustion, from having it feel like it all falls on our shoulders. After all, even Moses didn’t say yes to God without first being assured that he could recruit his brother, Aaron, to fill in the gaps in his leadership skills. Church, at its best, means you don’t have to do God’s work alone. But it does mean you have to trust and you have to train, you have to walk before you can run. You need humility to ask for help and the self-awareness to recognize where your gifts end and another’s begins. 

Who has been a partner to you in your work of faith - the work you’ve done at church or work out in the world to make it a better place? Take a moment to think of that person or those people and thank God for them. And if you can’t think of anyone, take a moment to think about what’s gotten in the way of you asking for help. 

St. Paul famously wrote, “let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” Sometimes it will feel like we are running it alone. But other times, God binds us to the people that will guide us over the finish line.