Resist

The power imbalance between the unnamed king at the beginning of Exodus and the midwives Shiphrah and Puah is vast, yet the two women remain steadfast in bringing new life and light into the world. Ada María Isasi-Díaz celebrates the way that the midwives use their apparent lack of power. In her contribution to The Book of Women’s Sermons: Hearing God in Each Other’s Voices (Riverhead Books 1999), she describes a “revolutionary integrity.”

“The word of God says to us today: Resist obliteration, resist death, struggle to hope for tomorrow, struggle to live. The word of God calls us today to be clear that to struggle for life is to do the will of God and that to struggle for life often requires of us revolutionary integrity: commitment to life, disobeying oppressive and unjust authorities, oppressive religious structures and religious authority. Revolutionary integrity is about living the life that is given to us by God, even if we have to struggle to live fully with every ounce of our being” (p. 173).

This message is excerpted from the Bible study “Just love” by Christa Compton and Gladys Moore in the July/August 2020 Gather magazine. Today we commemorate Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, 1153.

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