Seeing Value: The Power of Respect and Unexpected People

Lord, we have gathered here at this time to not only offer ourselves to you but to receive your presence and your word.

And so, Lord, I offer these words that I speak into your care, trusting that you will shape them and form them to carry your message and your truth to each and every one of those.

Lord, I pray this to you, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

So, I'm going to start out by saying our sermon title is "From Unexpected People."

And it says, "Robert," so I already fulfilled the sermon just by being here.

Right?

There was a pivotal word in the scripture that was read for us today, and it's a word that sometimes is translated as "ah," not like "oh," but more like "ah, awesome."

Sometimes it's translated as "fear," but today our scripture translated as "respect," and that's probably a little closer.

Respect and awe is a little closer to the original meaning of the word.

It said that the midwives had respect for God; they had awe for God, not that they were afraid of God, and that's important.

So, I have been thinking about this word "respect."

If you break it down, the "speck" part is easy; that's like "spectacles."

It's how you see.

But the "re" part means we change, we turn, we look at it in a different way.

We think about what we're seeing differently as opposed to what we think we see.

We come at it from an angle.

Respect is taking what you are looking at and treating it differently, seeing it differently.

And I have to confess, I have been learning that lesson personally over the last couple of weeks.

And it starts with another confession.

I don't know if you've noticed, but there's been a doll in the news and in entertainment an awful lot lately.

She wears a lot of pink, and I had more than one, and I loved my Barbie dolls.

I played with them a lot, and I got really excited when Barbie came out with bendable joints and she could move her arms, not just this.

It was so exciting!

And when they changed the texture of her arms and legs so they felt less like hard, shiny plastic, I was thrilled.

My favorite Barbie was Malibu Barbie with a tan and long, straight blonde hair.

It was so amazing!

My Barbies and I had so much fun together, and we played, and we went on adventures, and we explored.

I learned to sew so that I could make clothes for my Barbie dolls because, I don't know, but sometimes buying every single outfit you want for your Barbie can get kind of expensive.

But if you can sew it, it's a whole lot cheaper.

I had a lot of fun.

And then, as I got older, I started hearing messages that Barbie wasn't as wonderful as I thought she was, that Barbie was sending a message to girls and young teens that they were supposed to look like Barbie; they were supposed to have that impossible figure.

I remember reading an article where someone broke down Barbie's dimensions into normal human size, and it was unbelievable.

Not to mention, have you noticed Barbie never has a bad hair day unless you've done it to her?

And her makeup is always perfect, and she never gains an ounce no matter how many fake cheeseburgers you feed her.

I became aware, because of all the swirl around that Barbie maybe wasn't good, and that Barbie maybe wasn't good for people to encourage their daughters to play with.

And then I started feeling guilty because, yes, I gave my daughters Barbies.

I was a bad mother.

And then I just kind of put my thoughts about Barbie away until 2022 when I came across an article saying that they were going to make a movie out of a doll.

Now, how can that possibly be?

What kind of storyline can there be for a doll who, for most of her life, could only do this with her arms?

What could that be about?

And I thought to myself, in my cynical brain, "Oh, this is just merchandising.

There is no way there actually is going to be anything of value in this.

It's just meaningless, trivial, a pursuit of just empty-headed pleasure."

And I imagined there would be a lot of pink in that movie, and there would probably be a Barbie Dream House and maybe Barbie's car, and, well, I just blew it off.

I made some snarky comments, and I ignored it.

And then, well, a few weeks ago, the movie came out, and I started hearing from people who saw it really positive things, really powerful things about a movie about a doll that lives in an imaginary world called Barbie World.

So, I was compelled to show some respect and think about this differently.

So, I did some research because I like to do that, and I looked up Ruth Handler.

And if you've seen the movie or you know anything about Barbie's history, which I'm sure you all took a class on when you were in school, right?

Right?

I see the many nods of agreement.

Ruth Handler was the inspiration, the powerhouse behind the creation of Barbie.

She partnered with a gentleman who could take her vision and create a physical copy of what she wanted.

And so, I thought, why?

So, I read more of her backstory, and she talked about watching her children play.

Her son, she would say, had all these options for toys.

He could become a fireman; he could get a cowboy hat and a rope and maybe fake pistols and become a cowboy.

He could have a doctor's outfit; he could have a policeman outfit.

He could be just anything he wanted.

He could be an astronaut; he could be a robot; he could be whatever.

There were so many possibilities laid open in front of her son.

Her daughter got baby dolls.

She got baby dolls, or she got paper dolls, you know, the kind that were made of kind of heavy paper, and then you punch out or you cut out clothes.

That is just a sheet of paper with little tabs, and you fold the tabs over the shoulders and around the waist, and all of a sudden they've changed clothes, but they're always in one pose no matter what.

That's the choices her daughter had.

And it began to bother her that her son could imagine himself in all sorts of different roles, but her daughter was so unsupported in her imagination.

So, one day, while they were traveling in Germany—because they were affluent enough to do that—she came across a physical copy of what she was imagining: a doll.

Now, we won't talk about the fact that the doll was based on a comic strip about a sex worker that went off with wealthy gentlemen, but it was an adult-sized fashion doll, and you could actually have real clothes that you would put on this doll.

And suddenly, she could be a ballerina, or she could be going to a ball, or she could be a nurse.

It was inspiring!

So, Ruth Handler took this idea back to the company that she had founded with her husband and another gentleman.

The name of the company came from the gentleman's last name and a part of her husband's first name: Mattel.

They started out making furniture, but they moved into the toy industry.

And she went and she said, "We need to make this kind of doll."

And the men in the board of directors said, "Nobody wants a doll that looks like a grown woman.

No little girl wants to play with someone who's shaped like a woman; they want baby dolls."

No, she kept pushing, and she kept pushing, and she finally got permission to show a mock-up of, uh, what do they call those things when you present something as an idea of what you want to sell at one of those big gatherings where merchants come and they say, "Oh, we'll buy that and stock it in our stores"?

And she presented Barbie, and nobody wanted it.

None of the men that represented the countries and the departments, the companies in the department stores that were selling toys wanted to sell a toy of an adult woman.

Did Ruth give up?

Well, you all know the answer to that.

She looked again at her daughter, whose name, by the way, was Barbara, and her son, whose name, by the way, can you guess?

Ken!

And looked at how they played and did not give up and kept pushing.

And on March 9th of 1959, the first Barbie in a black and white swimsuit was released, and it was wildly popular.

And over the decades, Barbie kept expanding.

She went from just wearing cute outfits and swimsuits and beachwear to there could be a Barbie who was a judge, a Barbie who was a doctor—not just a nurse—a Barbie who was a vet, a Barbie who was a beautician, a Barbie who was an astronaut, a Barbie who could do anything.

And Barbie became more ethnically diverse, and Barbie became representative of many other women types and body types.

There is a Barbie in a wheelchair; there's a Barbie who represents Down syndrome.

Barbie had expanded out of this vision of this one woman who watched her daughter play.

She wanted to give her daughter a bigger venue to explore her imagination of what she, as a girl, could be.

And Barbie expanded.

And so, I thought maybe there's more to this than I at first thought.

Maybe this silly, trivial little doll that I played with as a child can show me a little bit more than I thought.

Maybe there's more to Barbie than the childhood imagination and all the fun outfits, and maybe there's more to Barbie than that message that we layer on it that girls all have to be like that.

And so, I went and saw the movie, and I have to respect that movie because it took what Ruth Handler was trying to envision in the creation of a doll that did carry some negative images, but it took what she was trying to do and it played it out in a new way.

It invited all of us to explore what happens when we don't really see the other as having value, when we think our perspective is the only one that matters, and we don't have to pay attention to anything else.

If you haven't seen the movie, I'm not going to give you any spoilers, but I will say there were two lines that really stood out.

One is when Barbie is having a conversation about Ken, and they're saying, "So, Barbie, this is your dream house. Where does Ken live?"

And Barbie goes, "Huh, I don't know."

That was supposed to be her boyfriend, and she had no idea where he lived.

And the other line was when Ken and Barbie are having a conversation, and Barbie is trying to have Ken have some sense of who he is, and his response is, "Don't you get it? I am nothing without you."

Because it's Barbie and Ken.

I am Ken; that's it.

It gave me an opportunity to look at the world from a different perspective.

That's important, and that's respect.

And it's interesting to know that this movie is now this huge box office success, and it opened to limited theaters in China and in Russia, and the women who flocked to see it were empowered.

This, what I thought was a trivial, silly little movie, unimportant, is doing unexpected things in changing how we see how we respect each other.

And that brings me to these two midwives.

Now, we often read this whole section from Exodus chapter 1 and chapter 2 together as one story, and we jump right to baby Moses being put in a basket in the river and being rescued by Pharaoh's daughter.

And we will get there; that's next week.

But I wanted to pause because we can't really understand the power of what happened for baby Moses unless we stop and we take a look at two unimportant, unexpected people.

And the stage has been set for us.

A new king has come into power, one that didn't know Joseph, one that wasn't blessed by all of that relationship, one that saw the Hebrews as a threat and wants to treat them like something that should be squashed down and only used for what they can do for him and for his country.

And the scripture makes it clear that despite all the oppression upon these people, the Hebrews kept growing in number until the Pharaoh issues this decree, and it might sound achingly familiar.

The Pharaoh says, "We have to worry about these other people, these Hebrews, because there's more of them now than us, and they could rise up against us and take everything away from us."

That may sound like something you might have heard in the news.

And so, he commands his royal midwives to come in, and he tells them, "Here's what I want you to do.

Here is my plan: that when you attend a birth of a Hebrew woman, if the child is a girl, I don't care; let that baby live.

If the child is a boy, who potentially has power to rise up against me, I want you to kill it."

Now, these two midwives respected God.

They respected the promise God had given that they would know salvation, that God would be with them, that life was valuable, that they were valuable, their whole people were valuable, and they chose to defy the orders of a Pharaoh.

Now, they're slaves, and they're women, and they're unimportant.

Their only role is to help a woman give birth.

What could they do?

But because they respected God and God's law, they didn't obey.

And when Pharaoh calls them in and points out to them that there are babies being born that are not being killed, they make a great defense.

And this week, as I was doing research, I came across a cute video of their response.

In the scripture, it says they're in person talking to the Pharaoh, the king, and they give this response.

But in the video, it was, "Dear Pharaoh, it was a letter from your majesty's midwives to the Hebrew slaves, Shipra and Pua.

Your majesty issued us an order of the greatest magnitude to have us be a part of his incredible birth plan for the Hebrew people, and we were so honored by his request.

Unfortunately, we have to say the Hebrew women are not like the genteel Egyptian women who give birth in a genteel way, laying back on a couch and waiting for assistance.

No, the women of the Hebrew slaves, they are more like ferrets, and they just pop those babies out wherever they are before we can even get there.

We couldn't possibly carry out your royal decree because, well, we didn't get there in time."

And then it goes on in this little video I saw how they signed off the letter.

They said, "With the greatest respect, oh mighty Pharaoh, your royal midwives to the Hebrew slaves, Shipra and Pua.

P.S. We will be on maternity leave for the next eight months."

They respected God; they respected God's law, and they put that above all other things, including fear of the retributions of a man in power.

And God blessed them and gave them families of their own.

Sometimes those people that we might look over or ignore or think have no value or simply say, "Oh, they're an empty-headed Barbie," maybe they're the ones that God is choosing to bring salvation into the world.

And all the people say, "Amen."

Our song of response is in your hymnal; the words will also be on the screen.

"Take My Life and Let It Be."

Please stand as you are able.

Thank you.