I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on September 25, 2011 as part of our exploration of the waters of baptism. The text is Exodus 13:17-14:31; read it here.
Last week, we read the story of creation:
of God shaping the darkness and wind
of the formless void,
slowly but surely,
into the world that we inhabit.
The book describes God dividing the waters,
creating a dome
that separates the waters
into the waters above the dome (the sky)
and the waters below the dome (the sea.)
God is creating a space for us,
God’s creatures, to inhabit.
A home that exists like an island
between the blue chaos of the sky and the sea.
In our reading from this week, we find that once again,
God is separating the waters,
holding them back to create a space for us.
But in this story, something is different.
In this story, we are on the move.
In Genesis, God creates a dwelling place in the midst of the water.
In Exodus, God gives us the means to pass through the water.
I have one very clear memory of Sunday School from my childhood. I was visiting another church with a friend, probably after a sleep over or something. And some very industrious Sunday School teacher had created this sort of obstacle course-style reenactment of the book of Exodus.
I think the teacher was Moses, and she led us out of classroom (which I suppose must have represented bondage in Egypt) and around to the back of the church where there were all these sprinklers going. And magically, as we approached, the sprinklers stopped, and we passed through, and then they started up again behind us.
I think after that we all went and sat in the sandbox, which represented the wilderness, and there was some kind of eating of pita bread, which represented the manna in the wilderness, or something along those lines!
This experience clearly stuck with me, and what I remember about it most is that, at the end, when we returned to our classrooms, it felt like we had been on a journey. It felt like we had been somewhere, that we had moved through something.
Exodus is all about being called out and through.
Out of Egypt and through the sea,
into the wilderness
and through to the promised land.
But, as things so often are in these stories,
the journey is about more than journeying,
and the movement is about more than moving.
As the Israelites travel,
they are forming a relationship –
a bond with the one God,
who is leading them out of slavery and into freedom.
Every step of the journey,
they are forced to be dependent on God to give them what they need.
God instructs Moses.
God leads them through the Red sea.
God gives them food to eat in the wilderness.
God brings them to the promised land.
I love the line in the section we read tonight when the Israelites see the Egyptians coming and start to panic, saying to Moses, “it would be better for us to be slaves than to die here in the wilderness!” And Moses basically tells them to be quiet. And he has this wonderful line, “The Lord will fight for you. You have only to keep still.”
They cannot save themselves.
Only God can do that.
The journey is about creating an abiding relationship between God and God’s people.
As counter intuitive as it might sound to our modern ears,
it is a story of a people who escape involuntary bondage at the hands of the Egyptians,
only to be bound again:
this time to the God who has redeemed them,
this time, by their choice.
Their time in the wilderness serves to teach them again and again:
“I am your God, and you are my people.
I will deliver you.
You only have to keep still.”
A friend of mine died this week.
He had been in the hospital for a long time with cancer.
In the hospital, we used to talk about many things. He was a church musician, and he spent some of his time in the hospital working at his keyboard, writing out hymn arrangements. He spoke with courage and faith about his illness and God’s agency and presence in his life, even as he was dying.
He spoke also about his disease:
How he imagined what it was that he was going through.
“Some people talk about it like it’s a fight.
Like they’re battling the cancer.
It doesn’t feel like that.
And some people talk about creating a relationship with the cancer,
Like they’re befriending the cancer.
It doesn’t feel like that either.
It feels like going through a storm.”
He was also on a journey through the water.
Not along the sandy bottom of the Red Sea,
The waters forming a wall on his right and on his left,
But through a powerful storm that left him battered and exhausted.
That was his story.
What is your story?
What is our story?
What bondage is God liberating you from?
What waters is God leading you through?
How has God sustained you through the journey?
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