Is God With Us, Or Not?
For audio recording, please click this link: https://soundcloud.com/emsworthup/march-23-2014-11-17-53-am/s-6KV1K
Exodus 17:1-7
From the
wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages,
as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the
people to drink. 2The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give
us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you
test the Lord?” 3But the people thirsted there for water; and the
people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt,
to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” 4So Moses
cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready
to stone me.” 5The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people,
and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff
with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6I will be standing there in
front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of
it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of
Israel. 7He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the
Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or
not?”
When my kids were younger, they played a computer game called The
Oregon Trail. Oregon Trail is
supposed to teach children about19th century pioneer life. The player assumes the role of a wagon
leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a Conestoga wagon in 1848. Over the course of the game,
members of the traveling party can fall ill and die from a variety of causes,
all of which flash up on the computer screen -- measles! snakebite! cholera!
Playing the Oregon Trail is a grand adventure, a way for kids to
virtually experience a dangerous journey through the wilderness without the
inconvenience of actually leaving their 21st century perch in front
of the computer. I found the
Oregon Trail sort of creepy, as I recall how casually the kids would loudly
announce the sudden deaths occurring in cybersace. “Hey mom, guess what?
My whole family just died from typhoid. Again.”
Most of us do have never been through a remotely “Oregon Trail” kind
of experience in real life. Earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes. Rebel uprisings, government takeovers
and crackdowns. We’ve had a rough
winter that we’ve certainly enjoyed complaining about, but life-shattering
natural and manmade disasters are about as real to us as what we see on a screen. We probably understand as much about
the reality of such experiences as my children knew about what it was like to
be 19th century pioneer on the Oregon Trail. We can read about disasters and wars, and
thanks to computer technology we can even virtually experience them. But, most often we are left to
interpret true disasters from a safe distance. And the more distant we are from an event, the more likely
we are to get the story wrong.
I think today’s story from Exodus is a text we very often
get wrong. All of us have heard at
least one sermon about those murmuring Israelites who miserably fail in the
business of faith. From a
distance, it seems that what we have on our hands today is a group of ungrateful
people. After all, look at what God has done so far in this story. The Israelites have been freed from
slavery in Egypt, led through the Red Sea, and have so far been kept alive with
sufficient water, manna and even quail.
God has done all of that for the people, through the person of
Moses.
In our text today, the group has arrived at their new camp
in Rephidim and things don’t look so good in this new place to which they have
been led by Moses. There is not a
drop of water to be found and pretty soon, the people begin to get thirsty and they
panic. And like most panicky
people tend to do, they Israelites begin to flail and yell for help like
someone drowning or surrounded by fire: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and
livestock with thirst?” Despite
all that a faithful God has already shown them, they are convinced that they
are about to die.
“Who do these people think they are?” says Moses. “Who do these people think they are, testing
and quarreling with God?” We may ask the same question. Who do these people think they
are? Who are these people with
such small, puny faith? Haven’t
they learned anything since Egypt?
This text begins to open up a little, if we narrow our
focus, and really look around at where we are in this text. In fact, let’s take at look at the
wilderness existence from the point of view of a single Israelite. Imagine if you can…all of your life,
you have been a prisoner. From
your small and limited vantage point as a slave in Egypt, you’ve heard whispered
rumors and vague promises about freedom.
Freedom is a concept so foreign to you that the possibility that you
could be anything other than a servant to Pharaoh has never crossed your mind. Suddenly,
you are kicked out of Egypt, the only home you’ve ever known, and find yourself
out in the middle of a desert running for your life. You’re chased by Pharaoh
and his army, and escape by the skin of your teeth. Then comes the walking and walking for weeks on end. The
trek through the wilderness is a daily struggle for survival. Nothing prepared you for this. Life in Egypt was difficult, to be
sure, but it was a life that was small and predictable. In Egypt, you had a place to lay your
head at night. In Egypt, there was
familiar food to eat, and even an occasional break from the unrelenting
heat. But here you are, catapulted
out of your small, limited life into a vast and frightening wilderness. At this
point in the journey, just six months out of Egypt, you can only dimly remember
the initial elation that came with the first breath of freedom. You don’t trust your leaders who seem
to be leading you in circles. You
thought you were leaving Egypt for a better life. But every day, you are becoming convinced that this journey
was a terrible idea. Given the grim
reality of daily life on the road with Moses, you have begun to romanticize
about the good old days back in Egypt.
It is not at all surprising that at least some of the Israelites
begin to wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off just staying put in
Egypt. It is always tempting to
critique the troubles of the present by improving the memory of what was in the
past. When life has become
unmanageable in its current state, we all have a tendency to wax nostalgic for
some better time that never actually existed. But the Exodus story tells us that once you have left Egypt
and entered into God’s reality, life will never be the same and there is no
going back to who you once were.
The future lies ahead out there, somewhere, formless and mysterious as a
dream. And only the God of mystery
knows how to get you there. And
the only option is to keep moving forward.
This is scary stuff. I do not believe there is one of us who wouldn’t prefer a predictable outcome to the wildness of freedom. Egypt starts to look pretty good when you can’t sleep at night and the anxiety of not knowing what’s next begins to creep in. When provisions run low, when deep thirst sets in, when your belly begins to ache from hunger, it’s easy to forget that God is not only with us, but out ahead of us.
You see, that question at the end of the text: “Is God with us or not?” really is the
punch line of Exodus. And the rest
of the Hebrew scripture seems to flow out of that question. And it is a question that flows out to
us, who are the inheritors of the journey begun in Egypt. “Is God with us, or not?” is a question
resonating when we find ourselves in desolate places, gasping for breath. In times
of deserts and drought. When life
feels unlivable. When prayer dries
up. When hope for something better
seems stupid and love is just too much work. It is the question that hangs
over us wherever and whenever there is the kind of suffering that brings us to
our knees, or the kind of suffering that we carry around like a continuing dull
ache. The question, “Is God with
us or not?” has been so much a part of human history for so long that to ask it
seems almost rhetorical.
And the question of God’s presence with us is never more finely drawn
than in the season of Lent, when we begin another wilderness journey, this time
to Jerusalem. The question that
rings over the Israelites in the desert is the same question that haunts us as
we stumble along a shifting landscape with Jesus toward the cross. From a distance, such an event seems a
terribly tragic ending to the story of Jesus. In Lent, everything is falling apart, and taking this long
road to the cross seems a very bad idea.
We wonder if there isn’t an express train to whisk us past all that is still
to come…the journey, the Passion, the betrayals, the denials, and the
crucifixion…right to Easter and resurrection.
Some of us are being sustained
by God in dry places but do not recognize it. We have been unable to trust our
full weight and the weight of our burden to God. We are like that man who fell
over the edge of the cliff and managed to grab with both hands a root sticking
out of the side of the cliff. Dangling there, he looked up and shouted,
"Help! Is there anybody up there? Help!"
A strong voice came from a
cloud above the cliff, "Yes, I am here, my son. Trust me and let go of the
root."
There was a moment of silence, and then the man shouted,
"Is there anybody else up there?"
This is part of what Paul has in mind, I think, in today’s passage
from Romans. Our journeys through
the dry deserts of life are not, as it may have appeared to an individual
Israelite, circular misadventures leading to nowhere. Paul understands the pain of life; there’s nothing distant
or disinterested about Paul’s language in Romans. Paul understands that there are plenty of alternatives to
the Lenten progression. One
alternative is not to go on the journey at all, to keep holding on to the roots
of the past and remain back in Egypt where life is awful, but also controllable. Egypt is where our expectations are so
low that we’ll never be disappointed.
That’s the way fear operates in our lives, when we would rather remain
locked in our familiar ways of doing things, even when such habits of mind keep
us dangling from a cliff, or even hurt us deeply. Instead of opening up our lives to God’s better
intention for us, we are fearful to take the journey at all.
But Paul says not only should we not allow ourselves to become stuck in fear, but to boast in our sufferings, because the bad stuff teaches us “endurance, 4and endurance produces
character, and character produces hope, 5and hope does not
disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the
Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
Before the manna and the quail and the water, there is the love of God which
we don’t need to seek, but is continually poured into our hearts. Love that is as light as air and strong
as iron. Like living water that
never runs dry, God’s love is like an overflowing fountain in the desert. God’s love is the voice that whispers
in the night, “Don’t be afraid. Seriously. You can do this.”
God’s love gives us the hope that grace will come – slowly but
certainly. We may not experience grace
as water gushing from a rock. It always seems like grace creeps in slowly at first, like a stubborn and dawdling Spring
thaw. Dean Leuking has a lovely
metaphor drawn from the realm of a glacier rather than from the realm of the
desert that describes the grace of God.
He writes:
A tiny rivulet
of flowing water between tons of ice and snow is called a winterbourne. It is hardly discernable, but it is
there. And as it continues to
flow, the icy mass that threatens to choke it, gradually gives way. The tons of debris does not choke the
winterbourne. That tiny stream
finally melts away the icy mass over it.
Every year, during Passover, our Jewish brothers and sisters recite
the Exodus story so that every generation will remember not only how easy it is
for us to lose sight of God when we are in the wilderness, but also so we can
be confident that God will never abandon us. Even on a good day, we are easily distracted people. We allow fear and cynicism to rule us.
Our emotions are fractured, our loyalties are divided, our commitment is
fleeting, and, like the Israelites, we want what we want when we want it. If we
allow it, the season of Lent takes us to places where we may practice our
spiritual survival skills, skills that can become weak in our more well-fed and
watered seasons. Skills that can
build up our endurance in order that we may see the small cracks in our lives which
reveal the movement of the Holy Spirit.
Skills we need in order to detect and uncover that tiny trickle of living
water when our spiritual thirst overwhelms us.
God is always leading us into better future than we could ever come up
with ourselves. And God will water
us with grace all along the way, pouring love into our hearts so that we may
never be thirsty. What God
requires, what God wants for us most lovingly is nothing more and nothing less
than all our attention. God wants
our attention so much, that in the fullness of time, God once and for all time answered
the question of, “Is God with us, or not?” with the resounding yes! that is
Jesus Christ. Emmanuel. God with us
and for us, to the end of time.
Wilderness journeys give us time and space – precious time in which we
are able to turn our full attention to God. How much richer would we be if we
considered not just these 40 days of Lent, but our whole lives as time in the
Lenten desert? What if we awoke
every morning, determined to look for the movement of the Holy? What would our lives be like if we were
attentive to God in the same manner that God is completely and forever fascinated
with us and all of God’s creation?
This is not just the territory of the monks and the mystics, my brothers
and sisters. I truly believe that
God is in all, just waiting for us to notice God’s amazing work among us.
If we take the time to give all our attention to this God who is leading
us with loving care, we will see how Holy Spirit is at work in every moment of our
lives. If we trust the One who
loved us so much that he was willing to take on our flesh and abide with us, we
will discover not just trickling streams, but gushing fountains of living water
that never run dry. We will be led by the One who fed us in the wilderness to a
table that is overflowing with good things for all who hunger for
righteousness. Thanks be to
God.
