Class Traitors
Exodus 2:4-25
The Untitled, Open-Ended Study Bible
September 27, 2026
Preschool Sunday
Rev. David Collins
Good morning, church!
For those of you who don't know me, I'm Dave. I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm a preschool alum. Class of '84. You've already met my co-pastor and wife, Megan, preschool class of '83.
We have two sons, Mac and Andrew. Mac is 22. Andrew is 20. They are both very grown up. Great men. And that's a relief because we were basically children when we had them. When Megan tells people that we have grown children, they're always shocked. But then they look at me, and they're like, “That tracks.”
One realization we had when we were pregnant with our first-born, Mac, was that we were going to be grown-ups and equals with him for a whole lot longer than we were going to have this power dynamic of “we're the parents and you're the kid.” Even when they were little, our big goal after “keeping them alive” was “make sure they want to come home when they don't have to.”
We wouldn't change a thing.
But I've since learned that “we just want them to be happy” is something you only get to say when you're already pretty sure they'll be safe.
Today in The Untitled, Open-Ended Study Bible, in which we are going through the whole Bible bit by bit to see where God is and where God isn’t, and where we got it all wrong and how we can put it right, we are looking at Exodus 2, the story of how Moses was raised and what that means for the story of God's people, and for us and our kids and their kids and the kind of world we're making.
Moses was born into a world built so that no Hebrew parents could ever say about their kids, “I just want them to be happy.”
Exodus 1:22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”
When a king gives people permission to be their worst, plenty of them take him up on it. So we are left to imagine how many Egyptians did just that, and followed the king’s command.
We are also left to imagine where God is in this chapter. Because we won’t see him show up for what amounts to decades in this story. There are so many places like that in the Bible where the meaning isn’t just handed to you, and the readers are invited to discern together what God is really up to.
So much happens in these verses, I hope I can cover it all.
Last week, Megan showed how Moses' mother technically complied with the king’s evil order, putting her baby in the Nile, but putting him in a little ark first, after hiding him for three months. Counting the two midwives, she's the third woman in this story to find a way around Pharaoh. In the next verse we meet the fourth, and she won't be the last. It says,
Exodus 2:4 His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.
In the movie version, a girl who's maybe old enough for a sleepover and maybe not goes running along the bank as the basket floats downstream. But verse 3 says that “she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river.” Maybe if the baby's father had placed the basket, he would have looked for some rapids.
I have a feeling it was a very strategic placement in the reeds, because look at who found the basket.
5 The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. 6 When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews' children,” she said.
Here we meet the fifth woman, and she's a surprise for sure. The princess. Pharaoh's own daughter. She knows it's a Hebrew baby, and she knows what her father ordered done with Hebrew babies.
There's an old insult for people like her. Traitor to your class. It's what the people at the top call one of their own who looks at the people underneath and decides to take their side. Empires only work if everybody at the top stays loyal to everybody else at the top, and that loyalty usually costs them nothing, and provides them with everything.
The princess was born on the winning side. But right here she becomes the first class traitor in the Bible, and her calling is to help create the second one.
Right on cue, the fourth woman, who had been hiding and watching, steps out of the reeds.
7 Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” 8 Pharaoh's daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child's mother. 9 Pharaoh's daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it.
Pharaoh's daughter could have handed him to any Egyptian nurse in the palace. But she hands him to a Hebrew one instead.
Pharaoh's household is now paying a Hebrew slave to nurse the baby Pharaoh ordered drowned, and the slave is his mother. The empire is cutting checks to the resistance. You can almost hear the sister trying not to laugh.
It's bittersweet, too. That wage came with an end date. We don't know how long she got to keep him before she had to hand him over to his new mom, but every day of it was borrowed, and she knew it. So she spent it teaching him not how to be happy…but who he was. And where he came from.
10 When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
Say his mother kept him until he was two or three. That's old enough to know her voice and the language, and a few prayers. The princess could have scrubbed all of that out of him. If all she wanted was a happy little prince, that would have been the easy way to go. And she does give him an Egyptian name.
But she doesn't scrub it out. She raises him in both worlds. He grows up in the palace knowing he's a Hebrew, and his new mom doesn't hide from him what's being done to his people. She raised him that way in that palace on purpose.
Every so often, a palace does raise somebody like that.
FDR
Franklin Delano Roosevelt grew up on an estate in Hyde Park, New York, with old money on both sides of the family. He had every reason to stay loyal to the people who raised him. Instead he gave the country Social Security and the right to organize, and the rich never forgave him. They called him a traitor to his class.
In 1936, at Madison Square Garden, he named the monopolies and reckless bankers lined up against him and said, “I welcome their hatred.” Ninety years later, those same interests have talked a lot of poor white folks into hating him too, which might be their more insidious accomplishment.
FDP was no saint. Ask the Japanese Americans he sent to internment camps. But on money and class, he knew which side he was on. And it wasn't the one he was raised in.
The City of Maitland is a little bit of a palace too. Not for everyone, of course. Plenty of people in this town are struggling financially. But it's a pretty nice place to live and raise kids, and most of us know it.
So we get the princess's choice. We can raise our kids to look out for their own, like everybody else in that palace. Or we can raise them to know what life is like for the kids who never got a basket before they went into the Nile.
Moses Grows Up
Now, a good deal of time passes between verses 10 and 11. The scholars and rabbis argue about whether 20 or 40 years have passed.
11 One day after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor.
His people. He was raised a prince of Egypt, and he goes out to the slaves. That makes Moses the second class traitor in the Bible, and he learned it from the first.
Anyone walking through Egypt would have been tempted to look up. The pyramids and palaces and statues. Moses doesn't see any of that though. He sees the labor. And he sees violent exploitation too.
He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people.
12 He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
And right here, I'm going to stop for an… aside.
It's a side issue, but it's a big one. In case you're new to this story, let me catch you up on several centuries of debate.
Murder or Just War?
Some people, who coincidentally also happen to hate FDR, use this incident to say, "See! No leader is perfect. Moses murdered a man who was just doing his job."
Just doing his job?
We've all been formed by this culture to believe, deep down, that whatever you do for a paycheck gets a moral pass. As long as it's legal. And even if it isn't, as long as your heart's in the right place. That's how people end up calling this murder. The guy was just following orders… to violently beat enslaved people, and kill them if they got out of line.
Others point out that this is more akin to an act of war on Moses' part. That you don't have to be a leader or a general to be on the wrong side of a war. That following evil orders makes you evil.
I don't love saying that out loud.
That Egyptian probably had a family, and he probably needed the job. At Nuremberg, the world decided "I was following orders" wasn't a defense, and the world nodded along because it was the Nazis. It gets a lot harder when it's a guy in a mask with a mortgage, who you went to high school with.
But should it be? Maybe the reason that it is so hard is because it forces you to start asking whose orders you’re following?
So Moses fighting back, even to the death, is an act of just war, not a murder.
I'm still not super comfortable with it, but I did grow up in the palace, so to speak.
It is problematic though, and you'll see why right now.
/Aside
13 When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting, and he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?”
Walter Brueggemann points out that the oppressed don't dare hit back at the master, so they “work out their unresolved violence on each other.” That suits the overseers just fine.
When you live under a boot, it's tempting to go looking for somebody you can put under yours. Seeing yourself as part of an oppressed workforce means admitting how little power you have, and it feels better to cut somebody down, even for a minute. It's the same trick that gets poor white folks voting against their own unions and hating the man who gave their grandparents Social Security.
Moses steps in, and he doesn't lecture. He asks one question. I wonder if he'd already started organizing. Brueggemann says the only future the Hebrews had depended on solidarity, and you can't build solidarity with people who are busy beating each other up. Maybe this was a union meeting that went sideways.
So the man in the wrong does what people have always done when someone tries to help, especially when they've just been caught doing wrong themselves. He goes after the helper. To this man, Moses isn't one of them. He's the kid from the palace playing Hebrew.
14 He answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “Surely the thing is known.”
And Moses does what most of us would do. He isn't ready to die for this. The movement, if you can even call it that, is about a day old, and its first recruit just threatened to turn him in.
There's no army and no plan. So Moses went home and started packing a bag.
15 When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. So Moses fled from Pharaoh. He settled in the land of Midian and sat down by a well.
Midian is out in northwest Arabia, a few hundred miles from the Nile. That's a long way to walk with Pharaoh looking for you. As far as Moses is concerned, it's the middle of nowhere. He sits down by a well, and you'd expect a man who lost everything in two days to just stay sitting there. He doesn't.
16 The priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water and filled the troughs to water their father's flock. 17 But some shepherds came and drove them away. Moses got up and came to their defense and watered their flock.
Even at his lowest point, Moses can't stand a bully. He's a fugitive with nothing, alone in a foreign country, and he still gets up and throws down. That’s three times now he's stepped in on the side of whoever was getting pushed around.
His moms taught him that.
18 When they returned to their father Reuel, he said, “How is it that you have come back so soon today?” 19 They said, “An Egyptian helped us against the shepherds; he even drew water for us and watered the flock.”
And notice what the daughters call him. An Egyptian. He was raised to know he's a Hebrew, and out here he's an Egyptian anyway. He talks like one and dresses like one.
Cultural Egyptians
The culture raises our kids right alongside us, and sometimes more.
It's usually the other churches that make that point. Their answer lately is to find a drag queen to blame. We have a different problem, though. We're raising our kids inside a culture they're influencing more effectively than we are.
If you don’t contend for what’s right, if you don’t engage and understand their arguments and then explain why they’re wrong, if you don’t know what you believe and couldn’t talk about it even if you did…then how are your kids supposed to? If even Moses got confused for an Egyptian, what are we supposed to do?
What we can do is be more like the princess. She looked straight at what her own family was doing and didn't let her son look away from it either. We have to look at what we're complicit in just by being from here, and make our kids look at it too. There's a big difference between protecting your kids from seeing violence and protecting them from knowing about it.
If they don't know about it, they might just become the Egyptians.
20 He said to his daughters, “Where is he? Why did you leave the man? Invite him to share a meal.” 21 Moses agreed to stay with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah in marriage. 22 She bore a son, and he named him Gershom, for he said, “I have been an alien residing in a foreign land.”
Gershom sounds like “a stranger there.” Moses has been one his whole life, and now he names his son after it.
I know that a lot in this passage has been a little too much, and a little too familiar, so it’s nice to see here that sometimes it's okay to run away for a beat. We all need that sometimes. Moses runs away for like 40 years, so that’s a bit much.
But it does show that even when we do run away, it doesn't mean that it's over. The fight will still be there when Moses is called back to it. And when he is, he won't go back alone. He's going to go back with God behind him. With God sending him.
Doing the right thing because it's right is always good. And suffering for it can be very satisfying. But it's a whole lot more satisfying, and more effective, when the timing is right.
When God has finally had enough. In the Psalms, we hear plenty of yelling at God to wake up, and every once in a while, God does.
23 After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out. Their cry for help rose up to God from their slavery. 24 God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 25 God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.
That's the first time God is named in this whole chapter. By the time God takes notice, five women have already stood up to Pharaoh, and three of them made Moses who he is.
That's where God was all along.
Only one of those women was royalty. The rest were slaves, and a little girl hiding in the reeds. Each of them decided which side she was on before anybody told her God was on it too.
So here are a couple of questions to take home.
Parents,
What are your kids learning about which side they're on, just from watching you?
Young people,
What's one thing you already know is wrong that the adults in your life have gotten used to?
Everyone,
Whose side are you on?
And who near you is already standing up, that you could stand next to?
Let’s pray.
God,
Thank you for the women who wouldn't go along. For midwives who lied to Pharaoh's face and a mother with a basket. For a sister in the reeds and a princess who knew exactly what she was doing.
Give us their nerve. When we're comfortable, remind us who's paying for it. When we're tired, let us rest for a beat, and then send us back.
Watch over the children in this room and in our preschool. Raise them to know who they are and whose they are. And since so much of it they'll learn from watching us, help us give them something worth watching.
Help us find the people already standing up, and stand next to them.
In the name of Jesus, who left the throne to take our side,
Amen.
Comments