Exodus 1 & 2: Tov in the Noise

Sunday, September 20, 2026

The Rev. Megan Collins

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Well, hello church.

I sure missed you all last weekend, and I have been so grateful, and so humbled, by your concern and your prayers.

Last Saturday I had an episode of what I've since learned is called Transient Global Amnesia. It’s not dangerous, and it doesn’t cause lasting damage, but it sure is strange. What I’ve come to understand about TGA is that when you have an episode, for those few hours, you stop making any new short-term memories. It’s like your brain just doesn’t press record for a while, and you stop making new memories until it passes. 

But everything else about you during TGA is intact. You know who you are, you recognize your family, you can even drive a car or do your job. (I read a story from a surgeon who had a transient amnesia episode during surgery, and it went fine!) They tell me it’s not common to have it happen again, but unfortunately it’s not impossible either. 

The biggest sign of TGA is that you ask a question, understand the answer, and then thirty seconds later ask the exact same question again. Then you do it twenty more times, and your husband is super patient with you, every time. 

If you've seen Finding Nemo, for about six hours on Saturday, I was Dory.

If I’m being honest, it was scary, especially when they kept testing my memory by asking me who the president was. The first time it took me a minute and when I remembered it was ROUGH.  

A week out, there are just about four hours of memories I’ll never get back.

 But I do clearly remember my time in the MRI machine. The machine itself is genuinely impressive. It’s this amazing innovation that lets them see inside your body using magnets, truly remarkable. But an MRI is also not something most people look forward to, especially if you don't love tight spaces or loud noise. If you've never had an MRI and you're facing one, I can say, on the other side, it's not quite as bad as people say. (And there is another scientific marvel called Valium that can help make it more doable). But it is pretty loud. It sounds like someone doing construction on the wall, next to your head.  

In an effort to make it more comfortable, the hospital provided me with headphones with music piped in to block out some of the noise. As the scan started they started playing this soft, meditation-style music. So it was the sounds of singing bowls and flutes, alongside the drilling and thumping from the MRI. But then, about four minutes in, the music suddenly stops. And I heard this voice:

"Have you checked the tires on your car lately? Call Tom's Automart today for a free evaluation..."

Then the music came back.

You guys. 

The MRI is a multimillion-dollar machine.

The test costs patients thousands of dollars.

But apparently the hospital can’t spring for the ad-free version of Spotify.

It's like thirteen dollars a month.

But the thing that really kept me calm wasn’t the music anyway. It was Laura. Laura was the MRI technician. And in between the scans, Laura’s voice would come through the headphones, to check in on me. I was so grateful for her that I sent in a comment to the hospital about her care. I also mentioned they should get Spotify Premium. 

But sometimes all it takes is one, ordinary person to break through the noise. 

Even when that noise is very loud. 

The opening chapters of Exodus are very loud, and truly awful. The Pharaoh is lashing out. He feels threatened by how fast the Hebrew population is growing. 

¹⁵ The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live." (Exodus 1:16)

The most powerful man in Egypt calls in two ordinary women and demands they do the unthinkable. The easy choice would have been to just comply. But instead,

¹⁷ But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. (Exodus 1:17) 

 This is a big deal. They disobeyed a direct order from the most powerful man in their world. They risk their own lives, to protect infants who weren’t their children. It’s dangerous, and it’s so brave. Exodus makes sure we know their names, Shiphrah and Puah. But the Pharoah, the most powerful man in Egypt in our story, we don’t know his name. He is just some guy. I love that.  And the text tells us:

"So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very strong." (Exodus 1:20)

But just some guy isn't finished. When the midwives don’t get it done, he orders his own people:

"Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live." (Exodus 1:22)

The pharaoh is determined. I would imagine it was hard for anyone living through it to see past the absolute horror of what was happening around them.  But somehow, even in the middle of this horror, the good of everyday life stuff breaks through. 

"Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son..." (Exodus 2:1–2)

A marriage. A baby. The thing that had to happen to conceive a baby. Ordinary good things, happening anyway, right in the middle of it all.  And then look at what it says next:

"...and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months." (Exodus 2:2)

Let’s pause here, because there's a gem buried in the ancient Biblical Hebrew. Our English translation says he was a “fine baby” which sounds pretty mundane. There was a baby. He was fine. Let’s move on.

But he was so much more than fine. The word for fine here in the Hebrew is tov. And it doesn’t really mean fine.  It's the same word used in Genesis 1, the word God uses about creation. God doesn't look at the heavens and the earth and say, "eh, it's all right, it’s fine." God says it is good. The good God sees in the first creation is the very same word in the Hebrew attached here to this baby, a baby born in the middle of all this destruction, the baby who will grow up to be Moses.

So when the people heard this story long before it was written down in Exodus, they would have heard that in the middle of Pharoah’s violence, a baby was born, and he was tov. And they would have heard in that word the presence of God. They would have remembered when God created the heavens and the earth and it was good. They would have seen in Moses’ story God creating something good and new again. God has been pretty quiet in the first few passages of Exodus. But God is also unmistakably there, quietly bringing tov in the middle of an awful period in their lives. 

All it took was one, ordinary person to break through the noise and remind them of the goodness of God. 

That’s still true. 

God is still breaking through the noise of our lives, through ordinary people, to remind us of the goodness of God. 

For me, last weekend, those people were Laura, the MRI tech, who was so kind.

There was also Jacqueline, the night nurse, who brought me at least 10 warm blankets and would wrap them around me when I was confused and overwhelmed.

And there was Dave. Shortly after I arrived at the hospital, I had two cat scans, back to back. I was still in the depths of amnesia and wasn’t sure what was happening, and the scan wasn’t going well. So he came into the radiology room with me. I have no memory of the scans, except for this one image. It’s like a photograph, in my memory. It’s him, standing in the corner, with this heavy drape on because of all the radiation. His quiet presence there anchored me, in the chaos and noise of that room, when my own memory couldn’t. Tov. 

In the noise of your life, God is breaking through with goodness through ordinary people, those people who help you remember that you aren’t alone.  And my goodness do we need them, because life gets very noisy. The world we live in is constant noise. 

You know, sometimes I think we look for the antidote to that noise and the general awfulness of things we experience by retreating into quiet. Don’t get me wrong, I do love quiet. After I got home from the hospital, one of the church members here reached out and mentioned a friend of theirs had a TGA episode, and that it had changed him. I wondered if it had changed me too.

In one small way, it had. My brain felt quieter. I found I was more present those first few days. I noticed the way the water shimmered on the lake on my walk, how green the leaves were on the trees, the sound my feet made on the pavement.  It was kind of wonderful to feel the to-do lists and news cycles and running inner monologue stop for a moment, and to just notice the quiet.

Some of you need to find a little of that kind of quiet too. That’s what Sabbath looks like. Every few days, every seven days in fact, God wants us, commands us, to quiet down, and to notice the goodness around us. Sabbath is this gift God gives us, to step away, to rest, to let our thoughts slow down so we can notice things like how green the trees are. 

But sabbath is a break from the real world, not a break up with it. We can easily become tempted to hide from the world altogether. It’s tempting to stop engaging with the pain of other people and the things happening in the world altogether. We catch a glimpse of the goodness of God and we want to hide away in it indefinitely, so that the world can’t take it from us. We think we are protecting our peace. But really, we are just hiding. 

Back in our story from Exodus, after Moses is born, his mother keeps him for three months. For a time, she can hide him away. But then it says:

"When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him." (Exodus 2:3–4)

The ancient Hebrew has another gem for us here. We always hear about Moses being put in a basket. A basket, in my mind, is a sort of flimsy thing, and it seems like just a good stroke of luck that he survives it. But the word in Hebrew isn’t a basket. Moses’ mother knew what she was doing. The word for papyrus basket used here is used just one other time in the Bible, back in Genesis, when God tells Noah to build an ark. 

Moses’ mother takes the good thing God has given her, and she protects it from the chaos of the water in an ark. It’s not a flimsy basket. It’s quiet and protected and it’s safe. It’s like a little, physical, sabbath, from all the horrible things happening around them.

But even arks are meant to be temporary. Moses isn’t hidden there forever. The time comes for Moses to be drawn up out of the ark. He becomes another ordinary person, who would show the goodness of God, to his people.  And he won’t be the last. 

As we move through the Bible story over the next few years, we’ll see another slaughter of the innocents like we saw with Pharaoh much later in the Bible. This time the leader’s name is Herod, and he is also afraid of losing power, when Jesus is born.

Herod was right to be scared. The infant Jesus grows into a teacher, a Savior, who would tell people not just to look out for themselves, but to go love their neighbor. He taught them to be brave and courageous in their faith even when it cost them something. He trusted them to not only look for the good God was giving to them, but to believe that good was for everyone. Jesus showed what the goodness of God, in flesh, could really look like. And then he sent out ordinary people to show that good to the world.

Jesus is sending you too. 

Maybe your life is loud right now. God is putting people there, in your life, to show you the good, that tov that seeks you out. God will also meet you in the quiet, in the kind of rest where we hide away in our own version of an ark that feels safe for a while. 

But don't move into the ark. It’s not your home.

Because as we continue in Exodus, and the rest of the Bible story, we’ll see what it looks like when the good is unleashed out there in the world, when God uses ordinary people, like you, to break through the noise of the world to show just how good God really is. 

Let the good find you.

See it in the people God sends. See it in the quiet. Rest in it, hide away in it. 

Then get up, get out of the ark, and go be the good that finds somebody else.