Week before last, we left Joseph in a bad spot. His own brothers had sold him into slavery and convinced his father that he was dead. Bad spot to be in. Last week, we left Joseph in a very good spot. I told you that it was a happy ending. Through a series of extraordinary events, Joseph became Pharaoh’s number two man in all of Egypt. He had saved the entire region from famine, he was highly revered, almost as much as Pharaoh himself, and he was able to forgive his brothers and feed his family. “Bring everybody down here,” he had said, “I’ll take care of you.” So his whole family (about 70 people) moved to Egypt and asked Pharaoh for permission to stay. Pharaoh said to Joseph, “How wonderful! Your family has come! Settle them in the best part of the land.” (Gen. 46:27; 47:1-6) So generations pass, and the Israelites prosper and multiply in the rich land of Egypt. When Joseph dies, Pharaoh has him buried with great honors.

You know, relationships are everything. Relationship makes the difference between seeing someone as a friend or a threat, as a companion or as competition, as a person or as a thing. Joseph and Pharaoh clearly had a wonderful relationship in which Joseph was trusted, honored, and empowered.

A very happy ending, as I told you. But I also said, “at least for the time being. There are more stories to come.”

And so we come to this very ominous line, which I’m going to say in the King James language because it’s more dramatic: “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who knew not Joseph.” How would the new king view these prosperous, populous Israelites? He knew not Joseph. No relationship. So he sees them as a threat, as competition, as things — things to be enslaved. They were oppressed, forced into hard labor, and treated ruthlessly. Yet they still multiplied, and the Egyptians, seeing them only as source of labor and a potential threat, came to dread them.

So Pharaoh said to Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, “Kill all the baby boys.” He won’t be the last king to say these chilling words. Herod will order the murder of all the baby boys in Bethlehem in an effort to kill baby Jesus. (Mt. 2: 16-17) Clearly, we are in the presence of evil: “Kill the babies.”

But we are also in the presence of heroes. Shiphrah and Puah are heroes. At the risk of their own lives, they defy the king of Egypt and let the baby boys live. When he has them brought in for questioning, they play on the prejudices and ignorance of a slave owner and say, “Oh, well, these Hebrew women, you see, they’re not like your dainty Egyptian ladies; these Hebrew woman are swarthy and vigorous, you know, good stock, so, by golly they just drop those babies before we can even get there.”

Their names sound funny to our ears, Shiphrah and Puah, but we should remember them. They are heroes.

But Pharaoh is no hero. He orders everyone in the land to throw little Hebrew boys into the Nile. Can you imagine the horror? The fear? The mothers desperately trying to hide their baby boys? The Egyptians who felt conflicted? (I’d like to think there were some.) The Egyptians who were happy to comply? The River Nile with babies bodies’ bobbing on it?

In this time of terror, of the land filled with wailing, a Hebrew woman gave birth — to a fine baby — boy. For three months, she hid him, always afraid his cries would be heard, always afraid that at any moment, he would be discovered and murdered. When she could hide him no longer, she faced a terrible choice, a choice no parent should ever have to face: stay with your child, which would bring almost certain death, or give him a slim chance at life by abandoning him. We can only imagine her desperation and agony as she chose the latter.

So she got a basket and used tar to make it watertight and she put her beautiful baby in it and put it in the reeds along the bank of the river. And she left him. But her daughter, a young girl who would not attract suspicion, stood nearby to see what would happen to her brother.

And the worst thing imaginable happened. The daughter of Pharaoh came down to the river to bathe. The baby was discovered by the daughter of the man who had ordered that every Egyptian was to drown baby Israelite boys on sight. But God moved her heart. She knew this was a Hebrew baby boy, but as she held the crying baby, she, like the midwives Shiphrah and Puah, knew that she could not comply with her father’s decree to kill the baby.

So the little girl standing nearby offered to find a Hebrew wet nurse to raise the baby, and went off to get her mother. In a wonderful irony, Pharaoh’s daughter unknowingly pays the mother to raise her own son. In one day, this baby’s mother has gone from nursing her child in great fear to being paid to nurse him with royal protection. And what separates those two diametrically opposed circumstances is the agonizing, horrible decision to abandon her baby.

When the child grew up, his mother brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him for her own son. And she named him Moses, a name that will be absolutely central to God’s work, and a name that will echo through millennia as one of God’s greatest prophets and instruments of justice and freedom.

Surely, Pharaoh’s daughter took a risk in defying her father and rescuing this baby boy she was supposed to kill. And later, she adopts Moses as her own son. Think about that! She is crossing racial, religious, and cultural boundaries to make a Hebrew slave, a dreaded potential threat — don’t miss this— Pharaoh’s grandson. And, despite what you might have seen Yule Brenner doing in The Ten Commandments, the Bible gives no hint that Pharaoh ever even dealt with Moses, much less accepted him. There’s every reason to think that Pharaoh, if he knew about this at all, was distinctly “not amused.”

We don’t know exactly how Pharaoh’s daughter pulled this off, but whether she stood Pharaoh down or concealed it from him, I can tell you that in the history of the Israelites, she is a very unlikely hero. Because, unlike Shiphrah and Puah, she is not an Israelite. She is not only an Egyptian, but the daughter of the arch villain in the story. And she is the exact hero needed to save Moses from being drowned at three months old.

So, we have to ask: why did she do it? Why risk it? We can’t know for sure, but I think we can guess.

Relationship is everything. What it takes to enter into a relationship differs for different people. We know one thing about Pharaoh’s daughter: what it took for her to enter into a relationship was this — to hear the cry and to look into the face of a baby. Her father’s predecessor had been friends with Joseph; they had a relationship and Joseph was trusted, honored, and empowered. Fundamentally, that Pharaoh saw Joseph as a person, a human being, a fellow child of God.

The next Pharaoh “knew not Joseph.” No relationship. So the Israelites could become a political problem, a source of labor, a threat, an issue, an abstraction. But not people. Not faces. Not fellow children of God. So they could be oppressed. Their babies could be drowned.

But when Pharaoh’s daughter heard that cry and lifted that blanket and saw that baby, she didn’t see politics or labor or threat or issues or abstraction; she saw a baby, and her heart filled with a very human emotion, an emotion of relationship, an emotion of connectedness. Her heart filled with pity. And so, she became a hero in the story, and the great Moses did not become a baby body bobbing in the Nile.

It is always so tempting to think of people and groups as politics or labor or threat or issues or abstractions. We’re tempted to think that way about immigrants; developing world populations; Democrats; Republicans; gays and lesbians; people of different races, religions, national origins; people in the Sudan who are starving. Maybe that’s not your list, but I think we all have our own list. We all have our own list. It is so tempting to objectify people, to turn them into politics or labor or threat or issues or abstraction, and not fellow children of God with whom we have a relationship simply because we are all children of God.

History shows again and again that when we don’t make that human connection, when we give in to the temptation to see one another as politics or labor or threat or issues or abstraction, the River Nile fills with bobbing baby bodies.

When you feel the temptation to objectify another human being, and you will, resist! Do not follow the fearful impulse of Pharaoh. Follow instead the hero impulse of Pharaoh’s daughter. Look into the other person’s face; hear their cry, and, however you decide to deal with the politics and labor and threats and issues and abstractions of our time, know that you are dealing with fellow children of God to whom you are related.

Be an unlikely hero. You’ll never know what might come out of it. Maybe Moses.

The Rev. James H. Pritchett, Jr. St. John’s Episcopal Church, College Park, GA