I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on October 2, 2011 as part of our exploration of baptism. The text is Exodus 15:22-25; read it here.
After the Israelites cross the Red Sea, there is some party. Miriam takes up her tambourine and all the women follow her, singing. There is feasting, and dancing, and, definitely some drinking. “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously!” the people sing. “Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” The celebration goes late into the night by the shores of the water.
And in the morning,
when the sun rises,
the people of Israel wake,
to find that the sun is hot and bright,
and there is no water to drink.
Have you ever had a moment like this?
A moment when the fanfare of victory has only just faded,
and you are smacked in the face with reality?
For three days the Israelites trudge through the wilderness with no water, carrying all that they have on their backs. And on the third day, their throats parched and dry, they see a spring! They run toward it, cupping their hands to their lips, only to find that the water is salty.
Have you ever had a moment like this?
When what you need is right in front of you,
Yet you can’t get to it?
There’s a sense in this story of running suddenly and unpleasantly into a wall. The spring is filled with water, the water you need to live, yet you can’t drink.
The last two months for St. Lydia’s have been all about getting to Brooklyn. Back in the Spring I met pastors and wandered around neighborhoods. Richard went on covert missions to check out parish halls and kitchens in churches all over the place. After I learned that Redeemer might be a possibility for us, there were planning meetings with bishops and canons and phone calls and e-mails and letters back and forth. We planned out a timeline. We said goodbye to Trinity, we packed up all our things and stuffed them in a car and unloaded them and unpacked them. We began to make ourselves at home, here, in this place.
And then learned we need to leave, at least for a while.
What we need is right in front of us,
but now it seems like we can’t quite get to it.
There is a sense, a very real sense, of running unpleasantly into a wall.
Reading the Exodus story the other day, I started thinking about wilderness. The euphoria of victory, and the sudden slap of reality that inevitably follows, in this story as well as in our own.
It’s easy to imagine that God delivers us from our bondage and deposits us straight in the promised land, our cups overflowing with milk and honey…but that’s not the story we’re here to tell. If anything, this story reminds us, as one commentator put it, “That we’re not really all that different after we’re saved. The difference is that now we have a relationship with the God of life.”
It’s a little like getting married.
There’s dancing and singing and tambourine playing, and probably some drinking.
There’s celebrating late into the night, as there should be.
But after the songs have faded
and the flower petals have been swept away,
you’re left not with dream,
not with a fantasy,
but a relationship.
Something real and live,
fragile and imperfect,
a covenant of love.
On the other side of the Red Sea,
we find not dream, not a fantasy,
not a land of promise,
but a journey with a God who refuses to leave our side.
Who makes bitter water sweet.
Whose manna, though spartan, will sustain us.
We may not feel prepared for a journey,
but a journey is where God calls us.
And unlike the Israelites, we don’t need to carry everything on our back.
What do we need to make a Dinner Church?
A folder of hymns,
the shruti box.
A few scripts and some post cards to share.
It turns out Heather can make pasta sauce from three ingredients.
A bible.
But mostly we need all of you.
Your voices and your stories.
Your minds and your hearts.
Your prayers.
Your hands.
We need God. And God, we know, will not go away.
If there is one thing that I know in this moment,
it is that life and death hold hands in the midst of resurrection.
This building is crumbling around us,
and yet there is new life springing up even as we speak,
new life that will find someplace to take root,
whether it’s here,
or someplace we have yet to imagine.
God has, and will continue to
bring us safely through the sea,
bring us through to the other side,
and provide us with water to drink.
It’s not a dream,
not a fantasy,
but a relationship that only grows stronger
in the midst of the unknown.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
But I know that this is water we can drink.
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