But think about this story, told by Andy Andrews, a motivational speaker, in a little book The Butterfly Effect, named after the scientific theory that says that a butterfly flapping its wings in North America can set off a chain of events that causes a hurricane in China:
In April 2004, ABC News named its person of the week – Norman Borlaug. You may never have heard of him, but in the 1940s, Norman Borlaug created a hybrid strain of wheat and corn that could survive in arid climates, making it possible for people in dry climates from America to Africa to grow grain. Norman Borlaug’s hybrid grains are credited with saving over 2 billion lives from famine: one small action that caused a Butterfly Effect that changes the world.
But wait, says Andrews, maybe the chain of events started before that. Maybe it started with Henry Wallace, U.S. Vice-President under Franklin D. Roosevelt, a former Secretary of Agriculture who championed the creation of an office that would develop hybridized wheat and corn, and hired a young man to run it – named Norman Borlaug. So maybe it was Henry Wallace that started the chain of events that saved over 2 billion lives.
But wait, says Andrews, maybe it started even before that – with the man who mentored Henry Wallace as a 6-yr-old boy, took him on long walks and explained agriculture to him, and awakened a love of agriculture that lasted throughout his life. That man was named George Washington Carver, born into slavery in 1864, who became a famous agriculturalist and developed 266 uses for the lowly American peanut. So maybe it was George Washington Carver who started a chain of events that saved 2 billion lives.
But wait, says Andrews, maybe it started even before that, toward the very end of the Civil War, When Mary Washington and her infant son, slaves in Missouri, were kidnapped by a terrorist pro-slavery group called Quantrill’s Raiders from across the border in Arkansas. And a couple named Moses and Susan Carver refused to give up, and kept looking for the kidnappers. It was too late for Mary Washington, who had already been sold into slavery in Kentucky, but Moses met the kidnappers in the middle of the night and took custody of her infant son, naked, cold, and dying, and opened his shirt and placed the baby boy against his skin to warm him up. And Moses Carver took the baby home to his wife, Susan, and they raised him as their own son, made sure he learned to read and write, though that was illegal at the time, and named him – George Washington Carver. So maybe the chain of events that saved 2 billion lives started with Moses and Susan Carver.
Maybe it began with that – or maybe it began with parents even before that who taught the Carvers that the life of a human child, and the love of parents, and the ability to read and write, were values worth risking one’s life for.
Who knows who set in motion the Butterfly Effect that saved 2 billion lives – so far. The point is, we just don’t know how what we do can change the world.
Our Old Testament lesson today tells us a story that set in motion a chain of events that changed the world, without which you and I might not be here today. It’s the story of Moses in the bulrushes, which if you grew up in the church, you probably learned by heart in Sunday school. But what you maybe didn’t learn by heart was the story that put that baby in the basket – the story of two brave midwives who risked their lives to save that baby. Unlike most women in the Old Testament, we know their names.
Shiphrah and Puah ignored the Pharaoh’s command to practice genocide against Hebrew baby boys, made excuses to avoid his command to drown them, and just might have saved numerous lives. One of them grew up to be another man named Moses, who heard God’s call, went to Pharaoh and demanded that he “let my people go.” He led the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt toward the Promised Land, where they would establish a nation that would live a way of life devoted to God until the day when another baby was born, named Jesus of Nazareth.
And that child would grow up to be recognized by Peter as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, and would live, die and be resurrected for our sake, and would open for us a new way of life.
We live in the Kingdom of Heaven he proclaimed, because he opened the way; because of him, we have committed ourselves to a new way of life in our baptism, and because we worship him, we are here today, getting ready to build a new church to accomplish the mission of Jesus.
All because two midwives stood up to the Pharaoh.
And when I think about those midwives, I’m pretty sure they didn’t know they were making it possible for the Messiah to come into the world, or for us to be here in this room today. I’m pretty sure that all they knew was that they were committed to a profession, a calling, of bringing life into the world, and they were determined not to let that calling change into a calling of bringing death to innocent children. And they risked their own lives to answer their own calling. They refused to conform to what Pharaoh demanded of them. They stood up to an empire because they saw a power more important – the power of life that they had committed their lives to.
“Do not be conformed to this world,” says Paul in our lesson from Romans today, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-- what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Or, as Martin Luther King translated this passage, live a life of transformed nonconformity. People who live lives conformed to this world, said Dr. King, are like thermometers, who just adjust to the temperature of the air around them. But if you live a life of transformed nonconformity, he said, you are more like a thermostat, that actually measures the temperature of the air – and then changes it.
When we live a life of transformed nonconformity, we look at the climate around us, and we make judgments about what needs to be changed. We become people who are, in the words of French sociologist Jacques Ellul, “positively maladjusted” the world around us. As Dr. King said, he hoped always to remain maladjusted to the evil of segregation. When we are positively maladjusted to evil, then we can work to change it.
And that’s what it means to live in the kingdom of God. Shiphrah and Puah were positively maladjusted to the kingdom of Pharaoh, that demanded the death of children to maintain Pharaoh’s power. And they stood up for life instead, in their own small and domestic way. You and I can be maladjusted to the things we see in this world, that are not the kingdom of God – poverty, disease, famine and suffering. We can devote ourselves instead to the things God calls us to do: to parent our children in positive ways, to teach the young and heal the sick and bring comfort to those who are suffering, to give of ourselves to help the poor. To develop strong businesses that will employ people to manufacture things and serve others and develop new products that will improve lives. To heal a sick person, to mentor a child, to start someone on a new path. Because these are the ordinary, everyday things that regular people like us devote our lives to, and Paul says these things are our spiritual worship.
We may think of worship as these things we do here on Sunday morning: something that involves singing and kneeling and hearing sermons and receiving bread and wine. And if we think that, we’re right – we do these things because we love our Savior Jesus, and we want to conform our lives to him, not to the world. We do these things so that we are constantly renewing our minds in his direction, always remembering that he is the Messiah, Son of Living God.
But Paul says that worship is far more than that. Worship is what we do every single day when we present our bodies, our whole selves, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Paul isn’t saying we should sacrifice ourselves in the sense of accepting death, or putting up with mistreatment from others, or giving up everything we love. Paul is using the word “sacrifice” in its original sense: we are setting aside our lives to make them holy, sacred to God.
Paul says that this is exactly what has happened to us in our baptism. We have been set apart as holy – living sacrifices, people who are sacred to God – which means that every single thing we do in our lives, we do for God. God has given us different gifts – one person is a priest, another is a businesswoman, another is an entrepreneur, another is a philanthropist, another is a parent, another is a lawyer, another is a teacher, another is a healer. Every single one of these everyday activities is sacred to God. Each of us can live a life of transformed nonconformity –not just thermometers who just reflect the world around us, but thermostats who take action to change it . Every one of us, every day, can do small things to change the world.
Because we are the church, we are the ones who have staked our lives on our faith in the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. And on the Rock of our faith, Jesus builds his church.
As we let Christ build us into his church, as we live into our identity as members of the Body of Christ, as we live lives of transformed nonconformity, declaring our loyalty not to the kingdoms of this world, but to the kingdom of God, we too can stand up against the evils of this world. We too can become midwives, helping Jesus bring a new kingdom to birth. We too can set events in motion in a Butterfly Effect we may never understand.
What if I told you that something you do tomorrow might turn into a movement that will change the world?
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