A Sermon for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost

Today I am with the good people at All Saints Church in Worcester. The readings for today can be found here. The sermon is something of a recap of the second book of the Bible, Exodus, from which those of us who use the Revised Common Lectionary have been reading since the end of August.

Since the end of August, we have been reading from the Book of Exodus as our Old Testament reading each week. Have you noticed this? Sometimes we kind of don’t fully wake up until we get to the epistle reading and the gospel; you know – the "really important stuff" in the New Testament! But on August 27 we read from Chapter 1 of Exodus, and we’ve been plugging away ever since, over these past nine weeks. Last week Jose preached a fine sermon on the golden calf and the meaning of idolatry in our lives today.

Today we come to the end of our readings from Exodus; next week it’s on to old Deuteronomy. So it seemed to me that a quick review is in order. Ready? A new Pharaoh arose who didn’t know Joseph and the Hebrews who had come to Egypt during a famine. And he began persecuting them. It’s what oppressors do. They worship the economy and they forget that the measure of a nation’s real wealth is in its workers, not GDP. You all remember what that rabbi from Galilee said about how you cannot worship both God and mammon, right? Well, in this case the Hebrews are being used as a permanent underclass to make bricks that make Pharaoh richer. The whole Passover liturgy of plagues and the flight from Egypt is about remembering that. They leave and end up with the Red Sea in front of them and Pharaoh’s army behind them and in that moment, they are between a rock and a hard place and obviously scared to death.

You don’t need to be a history professor to know what happens to escaped slaves if they get caught. And you don’t need a PhD in psychology to know what happens to people’s brains when they are experiencing anxiety. We become like reptiles. In that moment of desperation and fear, the finger-pointing begins. It has to be someone’s fault. “Why did you bring us out here to die?” they say to Moses. Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt? We told you this would happen, why didn’t you leave us alone to serve the Egyptians? Slavery is, like, way better than being dead!

Maybe, maybe not. Amazingly, though, Moses doesn’t get defensive or go on the attack in response. Instead he basically tells them that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. You can look it up in Exodus 14, where he says: “Do not be afraid; stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today.” The Lord is going to work this out.

Now we have the distinct advantage of 20/20 hindsight and of knowing that it all did work out, because we’ve been telling this story for thousands of years now. But pause for just a moment to consider what happens when you are in a situation like that in the present tense and you don’t know for sure. When you are between a rock and a hard place at home, or at work, or at church with what may feel like the world’s most powerful army behind you and the sea in front of you. Oh, and you can’t swim. And the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God, is: “don’t be afraid. Stand firm….”

Do you believe this? As it turns out this is good advice because it moves us out of our reptilian shame-and-blame brains and into something more closely resembling human thought. In Exodus, the Hebrews cross the Red Sea (or the Sea of Reeds) and right after this great miracle, they sing a little ditty you may remember. We sing it every year at the Easter Vigil, about how “horse and rider have been cast into the sea.” They bring out their tambourines and they do a little liturgical dance. Essentially it goes like this: God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good. Praise the Lord!

And then they look up. And now the waters of the Red Sea are behind them, and the Sinai Desert is in front of them. We know as readers that they are about to spend the next four decades wandering around in that wilderness. They don’t know that yet, but it probably does dawn on them finally that the move from slavery to freedom has only just begun and that it will be a long and arduous journey. Because the journey from slavery to freedom is always a long and winding and arduous one. Try to imagine yourself in their shoes: it’s not that hard if you’ve ever felt scared, hot, tired, hungry, thirsty and cranky. So the complaining and shaming and blaming and bickering all start up again. It seems to be a theme in Exodus. Oh the cucumbers and melons back in Egypt! Those were the days!

In Israel’s memory, as parents told their children and then those children grew up and told their children and grandchildren what happened that day, the message of this text is really quite profound and quite clear: God was with us. We simply would not and could not have made it without God. We made it because God had a plan for us. We made it because we cried out and God heard and God saw and God sent Moses to Pharaoh. We made it because God keeps God’s promises. Not always on the timeline we want, but always over the long haul. Sandwiched in between that message of good news, however (and even layered into it like a club sandwich) is real honesty about the realities of what fear can do to us, about leadership and courage and hope and tribulation and the fear of scarcity and God’s providential care in hard times. It’s good news because we are kind of living through some of this right now in this nation and in this congregation and a lot of us feel jammed between a rock and a hard place, and maybe even paralyzed by fear. But we really are not alone. And if we open our eyes we’ll find some gifts along the way, like daily bread and water from the flinty rock. The people survived that arduous journey from slavery to freedom, and you will survive, all saints, because God really can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. And because God really is good even in the times when we doubt it. God is good, all the time.

So this Exodus narrative that has unfolded in nine parts since August 27 is about God, the great Liberator who has taken the side of this band of slaves in search of a better life. God is working God’s purposes out; make no mistake about that. But it is also worth noting that the narrator is pretty realistic that the journey from slavery to freedom is a dangerous and circuitous one that will take decades, not minutes, because the journey is not magic. It’s about building community. And that’s always hard.

When they cross the Red Sea, the text says that Moses stretched his hand out over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back. Moses has no super-hero powers. He is merely God’s agent. Whatever he is able to do is because of God working through him. But Moses does have to trust that when he stretches his hand out, he won’t end up looking like a fool. Think about it: what if nothing happens? Before he can stretch out his arm, before he can tell everyone else to “just chill”—he has to believe that himself. He has to be able to imagine freedom. He has to trust the Lord God with his whole heart. So he stretches his arm out, hoping that that whole thing at the burning bush wasn’t just a dream. This is what leadership requires, and not just from the ones who wear collars.

I love Jewish interpretation of Scripture because there is a built-in resistance to settling the story into one simple meaning. Midrash is about reading the story in ways that generate new stories and new questions. So somebody says, “there we were and the waters parted…” And the rabbis say, “that reminds me of a story…”

One of my favorite midrash on the Passover narrative is that while the Israelites were doing all that singing and dancing and playing of tambourines, God was weeping. When the angel asks God why, God says: “because the Egyptians are my children too.” God is Liberator—make no mistake about that. God takes on injustice – make no mistake about that. God sides with the powerless- make no mistake about that. But there are nevertheless real costs to freedom, as every soldier knows. People die when injustice is confronted. So God cannot join the singing and dancing in the midst of all that carnage. For Israel this is a great day, a day of celebration: God rescued them from slavery and they are on the road to freedom. And to be clear: Pharaoh’s government was oppressive and the Egyptians really did have this coming. Or at least Pharaoh did, even if those soldiers are only pawns in his game. But God still loves all the little children of the world; they are all precious in God’s sight. So God weeps, or so say at least some of the rabbis.

The other midrash I love about this event at the Red Sea says that the waters didn’t immediately part when Moses lifted up his staff, but only after the first Israelite steps out and puts her foot into the water. I like that because it adds another dimension to this story: insisting that Moses’ trust in God isn’t enough. The people’s faith is also needed. Courageous leaders need courageous followers. What Moses’ act of leadership does is to inspire the trust of others and together they take a leap of faith and put their trust in God and only then does the miracle happen. The leader can inspire hope, but true freedom is a community event and not hero worship.

Whatever you make of these two midrashim, the larger point is a truth reiterated again and again in both Testaments: fear paralyzes us, fear leads to blame, fear leads to death. The way forward in such moments of danger is to remember to breathe until perfect love casts out fear. We will never move from slavery to freedom if we let our fears truncate and distort our faith. And so we breathe in and we breathe out and we remind each other not to be afraid and we ask questions and we let God be God and we begin to move out of our reptilian brains and take that first step towards new life.

Now I’ve just used most of my sermon time to review the plot of Exodus and I have only a very little time left to focus on the text we heard today, before we turn the page next week to Deuteronomy. But I can talk fast from here. Today we have this little tete-a-tete between Moses and God. Moses feels he’s been bearing the brunt of things and he reminds God, “these are your people too and besides, you got me into this line of work!” God reminds Moses he is always with him and will give him rest, but Moses pushes back: “God, if you aren’t going with us, then let’s talk about that right now. Don’t carry us up from here only to abandon us down the road. That’s not fair.”

Have you ever prayed to God like that? The Psalms are a help in this deepening of prayer, but that’s another sermon for another day. For today notice this: God says, “you can’t see me face-to-face, but I will let you see my backside.” I wonder if that doesn’t mean something like this: we can make more sense of God’s presence in our lives looking backward than we can trying to figure out what lies ahead. We can see how God was at work in our lives, but looking ahead it’s much more challenging to predict how God will work. So all we can do is trust God to do God’s thing in the future like we know God did it in the past: the God who was with us will be with us.

In the meantime here is what I hope you will take away from this sermon today: we are on a journey to the Promised Land. But it’s not immediately in sight. While we are often scared along the way, and there will always be some complaining, there are also gifts given by a living God who is trustworthy. Look for those gifts and give thanks for them. God is with us. God is in charge, God is present, even if we only recognize that presence in hindsight. God really is good all the time; all the time, God is good. We pray that this is enough to go on as the journey continues.