Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

You may already know this, but in case you don’t, let me just say it: I have a really high view of Scripture and a really high view of its authors! Time and time again when I approach the Bible, I’m awestruck by how completely inspired its authors were. Now, when I say inspired, I hope you’re not imagining someone channeling the Spirit of God like a medium is thought to channel a spirit at a séance. No! I don’t think that’s how the Spirit inspires. I think, instead, that the Spirit works through the various gifts the Spirit has already given each one of us, and to the extent to which we use those gifts and live those gifts for the sake of love, for the sake of the kingdom, for the sake of the Spirit, and by the Spirit’s own grace, we discover who we really are, we discover our voices, we discover our given-gifted uniqueness…and the Spirit is nonetheless visible in and through us. And this, I think, is part of what it means to be inspired. The authors of Scripture were given particular gifts, and they lived them fully for the sake of God, for the sake of Love.

I mention all that because of our Office Reading from Exodus this morning. In it, Pharaoh gives the order to midwives that they are to kill the newly-born children of Israel. It’s a disturbing reading, a disturbing and sinister inversion of what midwifery is supposed to be about, a devastating perversion of what birth and new life ought to mean and to be, a horrifying overwhelming of life by a heartless political power bent on death. It’s nothing less than demonic.

The good news is that the midwives resist Pharaoh. In an overturning of expectation that is characteristic of scripture’s genius, it’s the politically weak, the lowly, the powerless, the midwives, who thwart Pharaoh’s plans and undo them…by insisting on doing the good they have been given to do. It’s a wonderful turn of events that foreshadows the deliverance that God will accomplish when God brings the people of Israel out of Egypt and gives them new life, new birth, as a liberated people. But it gets even better…

…because John in the Revelation picks up on this imagery when he describes the Woman Clothed with the Sun about to give birth. And who should be masquerading as a grotesque midwife, but the Dragon, waiting to devour the Woman’s offspring. I’m convinced this is John making a sly and inspired literary allusion to the story of Exodus, because what happens to the Woman and her Child is that…they’re rescued! They’re delivered! Even when Pharaoh himself tries to act as the wicked midwife the Hebrew midwives refused to be, he’s thwarted! The liberation that God plans for God’s people will not be undone. The good that God plans for us and for the world will not be thwarted. God will bring us out of sin and death and into love and life, and no devil and no pharaoh can stop God’s work!

What does all that have to do with the inspiration of Scripture? Well, apart from a recognition of the amazing literary genius at work throughout the Bible, it's to say this:

Friend, in every circumstance of your life, in times of weal or woe, of danger or delight, God is bringing a gift, a good work, to birth in you! It may seem sometimes that there’s a dragon crouching to destroy it, but time and again, scripture inspires us to know and to realize that God is doing God’s work and that God’s incredible work of grace and love cannot be stopped or defeated. Sometimes what it takes, though, is our willingness to do, to be, to live the good that God is doing in us, to live our gifts and giftedness…so that we can midwife the good in others, in the world around us, so that the Spirit becomes visible in and through us.

Wherever we are, whatever constraints the present moment has placed on us, we can still live the good in us. We can pray, we can write letters, make phone calls, stay connected even if we can’t be physically present; we can still inspire and be inspired!

Dear Friend, whatever the present moment may seem or be, the good in us is and always will be bigger than the present moment!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+