Pip: What if the whole arc of history turns on someone you never heard of — a midwife, a sister watching from the reeds, a princess who ignored her father's orders?
Mara: That's the territory Fr. John is working in this week — small actors, enormous consequences, and what Paul's letter to the Romans has to say about how gifts get distributed across a body. Let's start with the sermon itself.
Sermon: Holy Purposes and the People History Forgets
Pip: The sermon opens with a provocation: history's biggest disasters and turning points may hinge on actions so small the people taking them had no idea what they were doing. The question underneath the whole piece is who actually carries the work forward when the famous figure is still in a basket.
Mara: The sermon sets that up early with the Exodus story, and the framing lands here: "The story of Exodus is not just the story of Moses. Instead, it is the story of God and the individuals He endowed with specific gifts so that His will might be accomplished in their lives and in the world."
Pip: And Moses, in this telling, is almost beside the point for this particular passage. He rides in a basket, eats, sleeps — the sermon is blunt about it. Four things. Everyone else is doing the actual work.
Mara: The sermon traces four figures who each carry a piece of that work. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah are summoned by Pharaoh to kill male Hebrew newborns — professionals, the sermon notes, important members of the community — and they simply refuse, fearing God more than Pharaoh.
Pip: There's a quiet observation buried in there worth pulling out: the sermon notes that the Hebrew word for the basket Jochebed builds is tevah — the same word used for Noah's ark. She's not just hiding a baby. She's building an ark.
Mara: Right, and then Miriam watches where the ark goes, and Pharaoh's daughter — the one person in the story with every advantage — sees a Hebrew child and chooses pity over policy.
Pip: Which is where Paul comes in, and the sermon earns the connection. The Romans passage lists gifts: prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, generosity, leadership, compassion. The sermon points out the list is short but the categories are broad — broad enough to hold midwives, mothers, watchers, and wealthy women with the courage to contradict their fathers.
Mara: The sermon then pivots to Peter's confession, and the move is interesting. Jesus asks Peter who he says Jesus is — and the sermon suggests turning that question around: ask Jesus who he says you are. The answer, it argues, is usually already visible in what you can already do.
Pip: God, the sermon says, is not going to make a brain surgeon into a carpenter. He takes what's already there.
Mara: The closing line pulls it together: "If we allow it, God will take our natural gifts and give us opportunities to use them for holy purposes."
Pip: Small actions. Tremendous results. The reeds are still there if you know where to look.
Mara: The thread running through all of it is that the people history skips over are often the ones holding the story together.
Pip: Ask who you are. Open your eyes. Apparently the answer is already in the water.
Candle in a Cave 