Jubilee: The Power of Proximity (Exodus 2:1-10)

Where and when do you feel yourself going into an “us and them” mentality? Do you feel it when you’re feeling just a tad socially uncomfortable? When you hear another language that’s not yours? When you drive through a certain section of the city?

Unconscious biases are stereotypes about others that we can form without even knowing that we’re doing so. We don’t design the environments, but maybe the environments are affecting us in ways that we don’t know. 

In an act of utter desperation, a Hebrew mother creates a makeshift basket and coats it in tar and pitch. Instead of giving over her child to be killed as the Egyptian gods ordained, she places the baby in the basket and lays the basket among the reeds of the Nile river…fully entrusting her baby to God. 

Pharaoh’s daughter finds the Hebrew baby in river, but instead of adhering to her  “us and them” worldview, she instead has compassion on him. Spares him. Protects him. All because of the proximity of a Hebrew baby’s crying.

This is what God invites us to do, too. Because that same God who recalibrated this story’s broken world is also working, right now, to recalibrate our broken world. God is singing a song, and wants us to join in and be a part of it.