What's in Your Basket?

 

Imagine...

A mom, holding her baby tight, rocking it gently:

“Hush little Baby, don’t you cry,
It’s not safe when there’s soldiers nearby”

She stops and lays him down in a basket in front of her.

“I wish I could sing to you but the tears in my throat won’t let me, you poor dear.  I wish I could find another way but my neighbor reported you to the soldiers and they may be coming at any minute.  I wish I knew a safe place I could put you.  I wish I knew what your future holds in store for you.  I wish I could be there for you and I wish I could make you understand that I don’t know what else to do. I’m running out of options and running out of time. I don’t know if this plan will work, I don’t know if the river currents will carry you to the palace where all the women live, I don’t know if the crocodiles will find you before an Egyptian might, I don’t know if anyone will find you or even if they will care if they do find you.  So much uncertainty.  So much danger.  I wish I could do more.”

We don’t know her name, this nameless Levite mother.  We know the names of the brave midwives who lied their way out of a confrontation with the angry pharaoh, but this woman, making a desperate sacrifice of all she holds dear, is a heart-wrenching story.  She is not that different than modern moms in North America who have to tell their children how to act around the police in case they get stopped because of their skin tone.  She’s not that different from the mom in Athabasca deciding whether to send her children to school, the first nations mom wondering what kind of life her baby will have, the mom who has lost her husband in the explosion in Beirut.  Refugee moms having to sacrifice all that is near and dear to them in hopes that the future will somehow be better than the present.  Abused moms faced with the harsh reality that their current situation is desperate and ugly.  Moms who will be nameless in the history books for the choices they make.

You and I don’t have a baby that we are going to put into a basket and float down the Nile river.  You and I don’t face clear life-threatening choices.  You and I don’t live in constant danger of our worlds turning upside down because of violence that justifies itself with racist assumptions.

But we do have a call to make sacrifices.  We have been asked and begged to give up, to sacrifice, our vacations to other provinces and countries, to sacrifice our freedom to shop whenever and wherever we want.  We have been asked to sacrifice our habits around hygiene and masks, visiting our families, seeing new babies, celebrating weddings, attending funerals, hugging our neighbors.  We’ve been asked to sacrifice going to church and even singing.

Some people have responded to that request for sacrifice with dismissal and disregard.  Others have responded with resistance, anger, resentment and even rage.  Some have sacrificed their common sense, floating it in their baskets down the longest river in the world, the denial river.  Old joke, I know, but it is still a pertinent joke.

As Christians, we are to respond to the request for sacrifice with, well, sacrifice.  Peter got into Jesus’ face when he told Jesus to stop talking about sacrifice.  Couldn’t following Jesus be fun?  A joy?  You know, the don’t worry bit of the birds of the field and the lilies of the valley?  But no, ‘take up your cross and follow me,’ Jesus replies.  That’s what Christians are called to do.  Make sacrifices of their personal preferences in order to serve the greater good.

I’m not talking the sacrificing of a jar of peanut butter or putting off buying those new shoes.  I’m talking about sacrificing our sense of outrage when we’re asked to wear masks, or our feelings of entitlement when we’re told we need to self-isolate for two weeks in our homes.  Our urge to react angrily when we discover that the store has run out of something we can’t live without.  Our envy and jealousy when we think that someone has gotten more than their fair share of what we deserve. Our need to control others who don’t want to be controlled.

Jesus calls us to sacrifice in a Christian way, with wisdom, kindness and faith.  Now more than ever, we need to sacrifice our assumptions about who we are and learn to practice greater self-understanding.  As Paul wrote,

 Do not be conformed to this world, 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. Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to, but with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has given.

What does that look like right here, right now in the midst of our upside down world?  I think it means keeping calm, keeping thoughtful, and keeping kind.  These are the traits that we get when we sacrifice our fear, our anxiety, our anger and our entitlement.

We Christians know that the world can be tough.  There are Pharoahs that we will never meet passing laws that we don’t understand or making commercials that push us to buy things we don’t need.  There are soldiers following orders that we disagree with but that have little choice, like the grocery clerks who get yelled at because they have to tell folks to wear a mask.  But there will be midwives that undermine the bad decisions of others like the nurses who patiently test even the grumpiest conspiracy theorist.  There will be nameless princesses who disobey their fathers to rescue helpless innocents, like the many teachers preparing for the first day of school.  And there will be God, like the mighty Nile river, holding and supporting our baskets of sacrifice until they are transformed into beautiful gifts of hope to the world.  May it be so for us all.