Symbols of God's Faithfulness

 Exodus 17:1-7

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Please take a moment to reflect.  I want you to think about the life threatening experience that God has commanded you into….Well, that didn’t take long.  I would venture a guess that most of us would never imagine God intentionally putting us in situation where our lives were in danger.  Aside from missionaries, war veterans, and first responders who often have a sense that God called them to risk their lives for others, we are more apt to say those life-threatening times just happened and God got us through them; or, it was my own stupidity that got me into it but God got me out of it. We are very uncomfortable with the thought of God putting our lives at risk.  We tend to confess, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with,” not “Yea, God sent me to walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

But, if we take a moment to ponder the obvious here in our reading, that’s exactly what God did with his people.  At God’s command they left the Wilderness of Sin and camped at Rephidim where there was no water.  Let me show you a picture.  This is not a picture of the planet Mars.  It is of the likely location of Rephidim.  Rephidim is about a day’s journey to where they were headed, the place that the locals today call Jebul Musa, or the Mountain of Moses, which is the best candidate for Mt. Sinai.  It’s pretty bleak in the Region of Rephidim.  There’s no water there anywhere.  Just to let you know how the story is going to end, here’s a picture of a rock that is along the way from Rephidim to Sinai in the Wilderness of Horeb.  Horeb means “dry place”.  And wouldn’t you know it, the ground around this rock looks like water flowed there at one time.

Anyway, God sent his people to Rephidim where there was no water.  It is likely that this journey took place during May or June when the temperature there can average between 35-40degreesC (95-104degreesF).  The people of God were walking all day in those temperatures carrying loads of stuff and they came to camp at Rephidim where there was now water.  Medical science tells us that two days is the life expectancy of a person in that situation.  If it were especially hot (45C or 110F or higher) cut that expectancy in half.  

God had put their lives at risk, it would seem.  Israelites were one day away or less from dying for lack of water.  They were at the end of a long, hot day of trekking.  They were dangerously thirsty with no hope for water anytime soon. 

Have you ever been that thirsty?  I’ve had a couple of times once on a hike and once on a run in very hot temperatures with no water and gotten to the point of not being able to do anything more than stagger about a bit confused.  Never have I been a day away from death by dehydration.  But, if I were to imagine what it would have been like to be the Israelites that day, well, the feeling of thirst must have been excruciating; dry mouth, sore throat.  And, they weren’t able to get out of the heat and instead were loaded down and trekking on in it.  Your insides feel like a swarm of bees.  Your thought processes go all haywire.  No wonder the Israelites were complaining.  It really would appear that Moses had led them out into the wilderness to die; even turning back to where they last got water was too far.

They bring their complaint to Moses.  Yet, it’s really God they are after, but they don’t know how to get to God except by yelling at Moses.  (And, I can relate to Moses here.  It often happens that people take their grievances against God out on ministers.)  We’ve been taught to not get angry at God or at least don’t show anger at God.  But we do get angry with God because sometimes, or actually quite often. it just seems that God isn’t there and you never know what a day may bring and some days really bring a load of manure.  So, the Israelites really quite rudely/sternly make the demand for Moses to give them water to drink.  “Work a miracle Moses.  You’ve been doing it all along.”  

Because of the immediacy of this life-threatening crisis that appears to have no earthly solution, the Israelites are at the point of wondering whether the LORD was really in their midst or not. I’m sure each of us has felt that desperation at our most difficult times and wondered, “Is God really with me?”    The Israelites are so out of sorts with thirst, they are so overwhelmed with life and death reality they were in, that they couldn’t see the obvious anymore; that God had been with them to save them all along and things weren’t any different now in Rephidim just because there was no wonder.  

Just to refresh our memory, they had seen God plague Egypt. Their firstborn lived while the firstborn of Egypt died.  The Egyptians even gave them gold as they left Egypt and in that way, the Bible says, they plundered Egypt.  A pillar of cloud led them by day and a pillar of fire watched over them by night.  When Pharaoh pursued them, the pillar moved in behind them to be between them and Pharaoh’s army. God parted the Red Sea for them to cross on dry ground and then collapsed it back on Pharaoh’s army.  They had even been thirsty once before at the beginning of their wilderness trek.  They needed water at the very beginning and the only source they found was brackish.  But, God had Moses throw a piece of wood into it to make it drinkable and sweet.  Then God led them to an oasis.  They needed food and so God provided them daily with quail and manna.  God was certainly there with them.  That was obvious, but in this moment of being scared and hopelessly overwhelmed with physical thirst, they needed God to provide water…right now.  

As I said they went to Moses, not God, and demanded water, but even Moses seems at a loss.  Moses does what every great church leader does when threatened by the minions (and I’m being sarcastic here).  He places the blame somewhere else and threatens that God will get them for their complaining against the leadership.  He says, ”Why do you quarrel with me?  Why do you test the LORD?”  That’s like saying, “Don’t blame me.  I’ve just been doing what God’s told me to do.  Y’all are testing God, folks.  You are just trying to get God to do what you want him to do.  Is God now at your beck and call?  God’s provided before and will do so again.  Just show some patience.  Don’t be churlish children or God will strike you dead for testing him, because that’s the way god’s are, you know?”

The people continue to murmur against Moses.  I think maybe they think Moses has somehow screwed up or taken a wrong turn or something.  Murmuring is low-level background noise.  The background noise ringing in Moses ears was. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt to kill us, our children, and our livestock with thirst.”  He can’t get away from it and he’s thirsty too.

Feeling a little threatened by the people and perhaps a little hung out to dry by God, Moses cries out to God, “What shall I do with this people?  They’re ready to stone me.”  You know, riots happen when people have had enough.  Just saying. Moses is thinking like a minister in crisis here; thinking that the problem was his to solve and not God’s. “What shall I do?” he asks.  

Well, God answers.  God tells Moses, “Go get ‘the staff’ – ‘THE STAFF’ - the staff that you struck the Nile with and turned it to blood.  Get some of the elders.  Walk up through the midst of the people and get in front of them and go to the rock at Horeb” (which means “dry place”).  “You will see me standing there.  Strike the rock and water will gush forth and the people can drink.”  

We just have to take a moment and appreciate the symbolic value of what’s happened there.  Remember how President Trump did a perverted version of this when he had his security forces use tear gas and rubber bullets to clear a path through a peaceful protest so that he could parade with a general or two and some key white House people from the White House to St. John’s Church to hold up a Bible for a photo op.  He wanted to say, “I am law and order and God is on my side.”  That was so wrong.  But here, God is getting Moses to make a very symbolic walk through the people with a very powerful symbol of God’s faithfulness - The Staff.

Imagine being in the crowd in Rephidim.  It’s hot.  You are overwhelmed with thirst.  Your feet hurt.  Your back hurts.  Children are crying.  You’ve been murmuring mad and Moses, your trusted leader, is your identified target. You’re wondering where God is in all this. You’re afraid you’re going to die.  In fact, you feel like you’re dying and this is the greatest sense of futility you have ever felt.  Then, like the Red Sea parting, the crowd starts to part and make way for a group of some of the elders and in the middle of them is Moses carrying “The Staff”.  You see that staff; the staff that Moses used to conjure up plagues against Egypt and make a mockery of Egypt’s gods, the staff that Moses raised to part the Red Sea and lowered to drown Pharaoh’s army, the staff that was the weapon by which God decimated Egypt; and now Moses is wielding it again.  The crowd goes silent.  What’s Moses going to do?  Make water out of nothing or wield the staff against the people for their murmuring?  Is God for us or against us?  What’s Moses going to do?  What a pregnant moment!!

Moses leads the elders to a big, prominent rock there in Horeb.  Then, in the same way that he struck the Nile and turned it to blood and showed that is was the God if Israel who really controlled the Nile waters that gave Egypt its life, Moses struck that granite rock with a wooden staff and the rock cracked and water gushed forth – from a granite rock.  Talk about making life out of nothing.  God made water from a granite rock in the driest place of Sinai in order to save his people from death by thirst. When death was certain, God made the means for his people to live.  God has power over water.  Remember the waters of Chaos sermon a couple of weeks ago.  At the Red Sea God drowned the army of Pharaoh in the waters.  In Rephidim, the polar opposite of the Red Sea, God made water for his people so that they could live.

People, this is our God, the God who raised Jesus from the dead, who will raise us from the dead.  When we walk through troubling, dangerous times, when we walk through the Valley of the shadow of death, God is with us; His rod and staff, they comfort us.  I think in these days when trouble seems to abound.  COVID has everything out of kilter and is threatening a second wave.  The flu season is coming.  Winter and lots of snow are coming.  Nothing seems safe.  There’s so much craziness.  You know, if I get a runny nose or a sore throat do I have to get tested and isolate for two weeks.  If you turn on the news, it seems they just want to convince us that a civil war is imminent in the US.  Everywhere people are murmuring, there’s this background noise of anger against leadership, but really its anger against God.  We thirst – we long – we crave – for life just to be normal again.  But, let’s not forget who our God is – water from a rock, life out of death.  Maybe we should just cool our jets and wait and see what God is going to do because he truly is in our midst.

Maybe, it would be good for us to surround us with a few symbols that remind us of God’s faithfulness.  I’ve got things that remind me of God’s faithfulness to me over the years.  This is the Bible that my father gave me when I was sixteen, a few weeks after we had a discussion about the possibility of me going into the ministry and look where I am today.  This is the Bible that my best friend gave me at graduation from seminary.  The mother of my childhood best friend gave this little gold chain of a bookmark to me.  It used to have an amulet of a pair of hands clasped in prayer, but it fell off long ago.  I went to visit her one-day after I graduated from university and she gave it to me to let me know she would always be praying.  These Bibles are never far from me and they remind me of how God has been with me over the years and how he made that obvious by the love of a good many people.  I would encourage you in these difficult times to find some symbols of God’s faithfulness to you and keep them in your sight to remind you of who God is and that he is with you.  Amen.

 

God's Economy and Pharaoh's Economy: A Comparison

 Exodus 16:2-15

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The other day while I was eating my big bowl of purple gruel for breakfast I read an article about a recently completed study on Arctic climate change put out by the American governmental agency known as the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.  The authors of the study, Laura Landrum and Marika Holland, set out not just to determine the extent of climate change in the Arctic in the last four decades, but they were working with the question of “is the climate of the Arctic now a new climate.”  This means, “Can we predict what the Arctic will look like next year or in another decade according to patterns that were in existence 40 years ago?”  They found that we cannot.  The Arctic ice melt has been so severe the last four decades and particularly since 2007 that what we all called the Arctic Climate when we were studying 8^thGrade science – a climate which had looked the same for thousands of years, just ask the Native populations – that Arctic Climate now longer exists.  The Arctic Climate is a new climate now.

         Physical evidence gained from thermometers, rain gauges, geological surveys of landmass and permafrost, wildlife surveys, plant-life surveys, and satellite pictures is telling us that the Arctic is a different place now than it was just 40 years ago. It is warmer and rainier. The ice is dramatically less prevalent leading to more open water. The permafrost is melting. Coastlines are eroding. Species of animals and plant life are going extinct while new species from warmer climates are moving in. Native communities are having to change their centuries old way of life and move their communities to find food. Not even a series of very cold winters the next few years could restore the ice levels to what they were even a decade ago.  

The global impact of this new climate in the Arctic is astronomical.  Sea water levels rise.  Storm systems that originate over the oceans become more powerful and destructive.  Human communities built in coastal areas have to do something to protect themselves against the rising waters and storms.  Inland temperatures rise, things get dryer, and wildfires really get unimaginable.  Windstorms are windier.  Rainstorms are rainier.  We are beginning to notice something’s wrong on planet earth.  It’s different than it was just 40 years ago.  

Let’s think of this Arctic climate change in terms of weight loss.  Who among us is weight conscious?  I weigh about 215lbs.  That’s about 35 pounds more than I ought.  I have to do something about that.  What if I start losing weight at the same rate per year that the arctic has been losing ice per decade the last four decades?  That’s a rate of 12%.  Next year this time I would weigh in at 189lbs.  With the exception of a bunch of loose skin, I’d look good, feel better, and yet still remark about how I wish I could lose another 15.  Another year of losing weight at that rate goes by and I weigh 166lbs.  Now, wait a minute.  It would be impossible for me to get to that weight in a healthy manner without having lost some significant muscle mass and had a bunch of that loose skin removed.  I might look buff, but I wouldn’t feel good.  Another year goes by, I manage to continue that rate of weight loss except now I’m losing bone mass, organ mass, and more muscle mass to weigh in at 146lbs and another year goes by and I weigh 129lbs.  Something’s wrong, wouldn’t you say?  Even if it took me forty years to lose that much weight it would not be healthy.  It would kill me.  That’s what cancer, drug abuse, and concentration camps do to the human body.  But, that’s what’s been going on in the Arctic the last forty years due largely to our consumeristic, industrialized lifestyle.  The climate of the Arctic has become something different than it was 40 years ago.  

We all have these pictures in our minds of what the Arctic is supposed to look like based on our memories of 8^th Grade Science – Ice, snow, polar bears, seals.  Friends, that Arctic climate is now gone.  We can no longer simply think that all we have to do is curb our greenhouse emissions and the Arctic will stay the way we imagine it to be.  We need now to be thinking a lot more about how to live with the immediate consequences of this new climate in the Arctic. There’s a new climate in the Arctic and by mid-century it will be evident what this new climate will be in its full strength and global impact.  We have blown it for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  If we want planet earth to still be liveable in 100 years, then we have got to stop doing life the way we’ve been doing it.  We have got to get our governments to stop thinking economy first, which amounts to making the rich richer so that everybody can get rich, and start thinking ecology, which means finding a sustainable way to live on this planet where everybody has enough.  If we continue the way we are going, Mother Nature is going to kick our B-U-T-T-O-C-K-S’s in a way like humanity has never seen before.  We’ve seen earthquakes and tidal waves, but never has the entire global climate said, “it’s payback time”, but that’s what’s coming.  

Well, let me change gears and start talking Bible before everybody tunes out.  Studies show that we can only tolerate about eight minutes of talk about the environment before we tune it out.  After God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and got them out into the wilderness, he had them wander and wander and wander and wander some more – 80 years in all – in order for them to learn how the economy of his reign works as opposed to the economy of Pharaoh so that when they settled in the land God had promised to give them, their society would be fair and equitable and even environmentally friendly.  Let me compare Pharaoh’s economy and to God’s economy.

In Pharaoh’s economy, God’s people were slaves.  They belonged to Pharaoh, everything they had belonged to Pharaoh, and everything they worked for belonged to Pharaoh.  In Pharaoh’s economy, one rich and powerful man who thought he was a god owned everything.  In our culture, the pursuit of wealth is the Pharaoh who enslaves us all.  It has turned us into consumers who believe we are nobody unless we have the comforts of the wealthy which we believe we  deserve but that they are also scarcity for which we will pay dearly to have and so we toil away.  The result is that the cost of living always goes up leading to a growing enslavement to debt.  Some of us, a very small number of us, may be personally free of debt, but debt still affects us.  Show me a nation that does not have a national debt weighing over its citizenry.  That one affects us all.  The Corporations from whom we buy all their stuff have debt but they manage it by getting us to gamble our retirements on their profitability.  We need to rethink this stock market thing.

In the wilderness where God’s economy was in effect, there was no Pharaonic pursuit of power and wealth and therefore no enslavement.  God provided everything his people needed to live.  God even listened to their complaints.  Everyone had enough.  Nobody hoarded.  In fact, if you tried to hoard, it would rot.  God’s people lived one day at time and God provided what they needed.  What would our world be like if we simplified and satisfied ourselves with having just what we need for today instead of this enslaving lifestyle of hoarding resources?  God provides enough, abundantly enough for everybody.  But when people start hoarding wealth something rotten breaks into the system – poverty, disease, famine.

Yes, this simpler lifestyle that’s required of us in God’s economy led to some complaining by God’s people and as I said God listened and responded.  They complained that God had brought them out into the wilderness to kill them with thirst and hunger; and, “if only the LORD had killed us in Egypt were we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill”.  But, memory is flawed.  Nostalgia is flawed.  Ever thought of what a fleshpot is.  It sounds like they ate a hearty stew everyday, but rethink that.  A fleshpot was a stew of food wastes provided by your taskmasters.  It had meat – entrails, rats, animals that died of disease.  We wonder what goes into a hotdog.  Fleshpots were way grosser than that.  They were like cooking up the food wastes you find in a dumpster. 

In God’s economy in the wilderness, God provided bread, manna, and quail; abundantly enough for the day and hoarding was not allowed nor needed.  Imagine if we could simplify our lifestyle and let ourselves by satisfied with the daily bread God provides.  I don’t know.  That might be unimaginable.  Some might take offense and say it sounds too much like socialism or communism.  But seriously, what do we have now?  We have rampant obesity and are largely unhealthy and have to take drugs to counteract what are essentially dietary issues.  We humans throw away 25-40% of the food we produce while almost 800 million people, 10% of the global population, mostly women and children won’t get enough to eat today.  Upwards of 6 million children a year globally die due to malnutrition.  That’s the end result of our Pharaonic pursuit of wealth and power.

In Pharaoh’s economy everybody had a job producing the stuff that made Pharaoh look wealthy and powerful and there was no rest from their labours.  In the wilderness under God’s economy, the people were united in their purpose of getting to where God wanted them to be even if it did seem like purposeless wandering and God made sure there was a day of rest.  In fact, the first labour law in history was God’s provision for the Sabbath; every seventh day was a day of rest.  The Sabbath laws even grew in scope once they got into the Promised Land to include the land itself.  Every seventh year a field was to be left to rest.  Today, due to technology, internet, and smartphones work is everywhere our smartphone is.  There’s no time off.  We used to have an economy where people worked five days, Saturday was chore day, and Sunday was rest day.  But, our debt-encrusted pursuit of wealth has done away with that weekly routine…

…and… 

…its killing the planet we live on.  We can talk about reducing Greenhouse gases to stop global warming and save the planet, but until we are willing to put aside our own individual pursuits of more wealth and simplify and resolve to live on the abundance of the “enough” that God daily provides and find a way to make God’s economy the way our global economy works, we are not going to solve the global climate issues we’ve created.  If we want to curb a global pandemic, then we each need to make the simple lifestyle changes of wearing a mask and keeping physical distance.  If we want to curb the coming global climate crisis, then we each must make the lifestyle choice of living according to God’s economy rather than Pharaoh’s.  Amen.

Chaos, the Bubble, and Dry Ground

 Exodus 14:9-31

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In the past few months I’m sure a good many of you have likely developed a new relationship with YouTube.  It’s amazing the stuff you can find.  Take the parting of the Red Sea.  Search YouTube for the parting of the Red Sea.  There’s some interesting videos.  There’s Cecil B. Demille’s Moses played by Charlton Heston standing on the shore of the Red Sea with rifle in hand.  There’s the Disney version from The Prince of Egypt.  But, most of what you will find are some very sincere videos showing either archaeological evidence and/or scientific proof that the Red Sea parting and crossing actually happened.  Yet, all of these videos seem to be working from our ingrained cultural assumption that truth can only be established upon historical or scientific validation.  This assumption carries over into the world of faith by saying that the Bible can only be true if its details and “miracles” can be historically or scientifically validated and if they can’t be, then through God and everything else out with the bathwater.  So, archaeologists go looking for chariot wheels in the Red Sea and find them and weather scientists note that a strong wind can part shallow waters and so forth. 

I would like for us this morning to look at the story of the parting of the Red Sea from a different angle than it was a miracle that can only be true if there’s hard historical or scientific evidence.  You see, the people who wrote the Bible did not have the save philosophy of truth that we have.  For us, truth is in the details – get the facts, assemble them in the right order, voila, truth.  For them, truth was the story.  When they wrote down the stories of the Bible they didn’t think they were writing down detailed facts in a God-ordained history textbook or scientific journal.  They were simply writing the stories that said who they were as God’s people.  

The Red Sea crossing is a story of a foundational event that formed the identity of the Israelites as the people of God whom he delivered from slavery.  It is also a story that was passed down by word of mouth for generations before anyone ever wrote it down.  Moreover, the story seems to develop over the years.  It was also old differently among these cousins than it was among those until finally what we have in the Bible today actually appears to be two stories of this foundational event from two different time periods combined into one.  

It’s like this.  Your great-great-great-grandparents had an eventful wedding back in Scotland a long time ago.  The story was told every year at Thanksgiving.  One year, you’re great-uncle decide to write a family history as many in the family starting moving to Canada and he included the story as it was told to him in his part of the family.  Still, the story continues to be told every year at Thanksgiving.  Your grandfather, not wanting to forget it and wanting something to pass to the younger generations because they are spreading all over the place now, took your great-uncle’s version that he got from his cousin and mushed it together with the story as he had heard it but neglected to mention your great-uncle’s written account as a source because your grandfather was a storyteller not a historian.  Now, you’re working on an official family genealogy to be published and handed out at Thanksgiving and you have your grandfather’s account in hand not realizing it’s a mush up of two versions of the same story.  That would be similar to the process of how we have come to have the stories of the first five books of the Old Testament.  

For the people who wrote it down, the story crossing of the Red Sea on dry ground was a bigger story than just a historical record.  It was their family’s story that told them something about their family’s nature.  It says this is part of the reason we are the way we are.  It is also even bigger than that because it is about something God did for them.  To them, this story is the story of how their God, the God who created this good ordered world by parting the primordial waters of chaos and creating land for humans to live on had now created something new by once again parting waters, the waters of the Red Sea, to create dry ground for his people to cross over and be free from that evil resurgence of chaos that had broken forth into God’s good ordered world in the form of Pharaoh and his oppressive power.  When their God drowned Pharaoh and his army in the sea, he was putting this outbreak of chaotic evil back into the primordial waters of chaos.  

I’m reasonably sure you’ve never thought of this parting of the Red Sea story in quite those terms before, as a fight between God and the forces of Chaos, so I realize I’m going to have to explain myself. Brace yourselves, this is going to be different, but what we’re going to try to do is hear this story in a way that people from back around 600BC and earlier would have likely heard it.

The person or persons who wrote this story of God parting the waters of the Red Sea so his people could cross and escape Pharaoh and his armies is also the same person or persons who wrote the Creation story in Genesis 1.  It also seems that this person or persons wants us to hear the Red Sea story from the perspective of the Creation story because there are some pretty awesome similarities between the two stories.  Let’s dive in.

First, there’s the role of waters, wind, and darkness in the two stories.  In Exodus we are told, “The LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night.”  We should be thinking, “Hey, that sounds like Genesis 1:1-2” which reads, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”  There’s water.  There’s wind.  There’s darkness.

I need to tell you some things about the Genesis story too.  We’ve been taught the doctrine that God created everything out of nothing.  The “out of nothing” part of that doctrine doesn’t come from Genesis 1.  We have to look elsewhere in the Bible to find that.  In Genesis 1 we see God’s creating work beginning with the primordial elements of shapelessness, darkness, and water, yes water, not nothing, but water.  Reading further, we see on the first day that God in essence turns on the lights so he can see what he’s doing.  He creates Light.  Then God creates a big bubble in the midst of the waters. Verse 6: “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”  Please note that the waters do not go away.  There is just a bubble of safety, so to speak, in the midst of the waters in which God is going to bring about a good, ordered, and beautiful place for life to flourish and in which he may come to repose, to relax and enjoy its goodness.

Again the waters, the darkness, the shapelessness are not gone.  In other creation stories written in the same ancient period the catchword word for those primordial things outside the bubble is chaos.  They are still there outside the bubble with the possibility of being able to break in and mess stuff up.  It seems that one way they find way back in is that human sin opens things up, but not always. 

For an example let’s talk about Noah’s flood.  Humanity had become so unrighteous that God needed to cleanse his creation of us so God causes a flood.  In Noah’s flood, it didn’t just rain.  It rained the primordial waters of Chaos back into the bubble and those waters also broke forth from the ground.  We can’t just read the flood of Noah as a literal water flood.  We have to add to that the understanding that this was also the primordial waters of Chaos form outside the big bubble pouring back in so that God’s safe and good ordered bubble was awash with the primordial waters of chaos.  But yet again, just like at creation God provided a bubble of safety for Noah and his family – the Ark – and eventually God made the dry ground appear once again.

Looking back again at the Red Sea crossing and Genesis 1, a second commonality we have to note is that parting things, separating things, dividing things to create a bubble in which to bring forth firm, safe ground is the way God brings new things into existence.  Genesis 1:9 reads: “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.”  That dry land would be where land life inclusive of humans would live and move and have their being and in the end God would come and repose with them.  In like manner, in the Exodus story God gathered the waters of the Red Sea and exposed dry land for the Israelites to cross on to reach safety on the other side.  They would then be free to god to the land God had promised their ancestors, the land where he would come and repose with them once his dwelling place was built.

Just a footnote here on the image of “The Sea”.  In many places in the Bible “The Sea” isn’t simply a reference to the Mediterranean or Red Seas.  It is a metaphor for the unknown and something to be feared.  Who knows what lies in the deep, dark depths of the Sea?  There are monsters in the Sea.  The Sea is chaotic and can’t be controlled.  God’s parting the waters of the Red Sea wasn’t simply that God was literally parting the waters of the Red Sea.  (I have no problem believing God literally did that.  With God all things are possible.)  We also have to see here that God is also parting the waters of chaos in the primordial sea of Chaos in order to provide a bubble of safety with dry ground and a safe path for his people to cross through the Sea to get to the other side where a new good, ordered, and beautiful life awaits them in the land God had promised their ancestors.

Last week, I talked about how God by means of the Ten Plagues defeated the gods of Egypt by showing he had power over the things these particular gods were supposed to control.  Here at the Red Sea, God went all out and put this outbreak of chaotic evil, which came into the bubble by means of idolatry, power mongering and greed and embodied in Pharaoh and his army, back into the realm of the waters of Chaos where they belonged, the waters outside of the bubble that he created for us to live in and for him to repose among us.

Just to wind this down and maybe even have a point, we are now living in a time when it seems that Chaos has yet again broken into the bubble.  This Pandemic caused 100% by human lifestyle has us on edge.  American politics has us on edge.  There are so many fearful things we can be anxious about.  But, you know, there is a bubble we can go to where we can meet God on the safety of dry ground and find rest – the daily discipline of a devotional life.  

There’s simply taking the time to sit and be aware of God’s presence with us.  I’ve talked before of setting up a chair in the room and let that be where God sits.  Sooner or later, you will get a sense that God has come to you there.  Your reaction to God’s presence may be just to start crying or burst out with anger at God or a profound sense of thankfulness.  God is there to be with us.  Talk to him.  Get whatever you got on your chest off your chest; even if you’re livid angry at God.  God’s a big kid.  God can handle our anger at him.  God will take tthat anger and move us forward from there.  There’s also taking the time to read the Scriptures everyday listening for God to speak to you.  There’s keeping a prayer list and praying daily for the people on it.  

Take the time to walk the solid, dry ground that God provides by spending time with God.  You’ll find God is parting the waters of this present outbreak of Chaos and leading us to a new thing that he is creating.  Amen.

Idolatry, Oppression, and Plagues

 Exodus 12:1-42

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Throughout my ministry I’ve often heard people say that they believe that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are not the same God.  Their line of thinking goes that if Jesus is the clearest self revelation of God that God has given and Jesus is so loving, then how does one square that with a God who plaques people as we see here in Exodus with the ten plaques against Egypt.  Did God not care about the innocents of Egypt who suffered as he set about the utter destruction of the Egyptian economy and its ability to be a world power that culminated with the death of the first born of everything in Egypt, people and livestock.

I’m not going to deny the validity of that critique of the way God conducted himself in ancient times as attested in the Old Testament.  It is a difficult thing to square to say in one breath that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son so that whomsoever follows him faithfully will have a life-giving relationship with God and not perish and then in the next breath say that this same God so loved his people that he delivered them from those who oppressed them by means plaques and even killing their firstborn children.  There is some dissonance there.  It’s like expecting a proper chord on a musical instrument and winding up with a sound that would even make a jazz aficionado wince.

But there are times when we just need to step back, take off the sandals of our sense of righteous indignation and our desire to pass judgement on God, and realize that we are standing on the holy ground of the fact that God is God and we are not.  After all, let us humbly admit that when we ourselves start pretending to be gods, it is authentic human community suffers and things like slavery, economic oppression, and pandemics result.  So, let’s just let God be God and have a deeper look at what was going on with these plagues other than just saying God is an evil ogre who plagues people.

Well, at the heart of the account of the plagues is an observation that we today will have difficulty seeing because we don’t live in ancient Egypt and are unfamiliar with the gods of Egypt.  If we lived back then, we would appreciate that by these plagues the God of Israel was disarming some of the most powerful gods that the Egyptians believed in and worshipped to ensure their economic stability and national identity and preserve their way of life.  In order to set his people free from Egyptian oppression, God had to demonstrate to the Egyptians who the true God is because their idolatry, particularly their devotion to the man Pharaoh, was the cause of oppression in Egypt.  Let us not forget that as a result the political genius of an Israelite forefather named Joseph, Pharaoh actually owned everything and everybody in Egypt.  Everybody in Egypt was under obligation to Pharaoh.  God was putting an end to that.  So, let’s have a look at Moses’s confrontations with Pharaoh and how theses plagues were the means by which God disarmed and defaced the gods of Egypt.

Moses went to Pharaoh and the first thing he did was to demonstrate his God-given authority by having Aaron throw his staff down on the ground where it became a serpent and then be able to pick it up again.  This was actually an affront to the Egyptian goddess Wadjyt.  She was the patroness, the protector, of Pharaoh and the Nile Delta.  I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of a cobra jutting out of Pharaoh’s headdress.  That’s Wadjyt.  She protected Pharaoh and the most fertile part of Egypt.  That Aaron could throw down his staff, have it turn into a serpent like Wadjyt, and then pick it up again demonstrated Moses and Aaron and their God had power over her.  Pharaoh’s magicians could do that too.  When they did, Aaron’s staff/serpent ate theirs.  The end result is that great goddess Wadjyt wound up looking like a magician’s plaything.  Everybody had power over her especially the God of Israel.  Pharaoh and the Nile Delta now had no patron goddess to call on for protection.  

So came the first plague.  Moses turned the water of the Nile, literally all the water in Egypt, into blood.  The Egyptians relied on the waters of the Nile for fish and as their agricultural lifeblood.  It’s flooding restored fertility to the land and they used its water for irrigation.  No Nile meant no agriculture, no fish, no drinking water.  God turned the very life of Egypt into blood, all the fish died, and the place began to stink.  By this plague, the LORD obliterated the Egyptian god Hapi, who was believed to control the Nile.  Yet, Pharaoh’s heart hardened and he would not let God’s people go.

Next, God plagued Egypt with frogs.  Frogs were the symbol of the goddess Heqt, whom the Egyptians believed to be the protector of women in childbirth.  Usually, an abundance of frogs was believed to be a good sign of human fertility, but in this case things got extremely weird.  The LORD covered the Egyptians with frogs.  Frogs were in their courtyards, in their houses, in their beds.  Pharaoh begged Moses to pray the LORD to take them away.  Moses did and the land and houses were full of dead frogs and it stank – so much for the power of Heqt.  Again, Pharaoh’s heart hardened and he would not let God’s people go.

Next, depending on your translation God plagued Egypt with lice (or gnats) and then with flies.  He covered the people and animals with lice and then covered the land with flies.  By these two plagues of insects God showed his power over the Egyptian god Khepri, whom they believed made the sun cross the sky.  The Egyptians pictured Khepri as a dung beetle rolling the sun across the sky.  (If it were me, I would have skipped the bugs and just covered the land in poo, but I’m not God.)  Again, Pharaoh’s heart hardened and he would not let God’s people go.

God then struck the livestock in Egypt with disease; horses, cattle, donkeys, camels, sheep.  All the livestock died.  By this plague God defeated the Egyptian god Apis.  Apis was always pictured as a bull, which was the symbol of strength and fertility, particularly the power and virility of Pharaoh.  Again, Pharaoh’s heart hardened and he would not let God’s people go.

God’s next plague was to afflict both humans and animals alike with boils that could not be healed by the medicine and magic of the Egyptians.  By this, God showed his power over the Egyptian gods that people called on for healing – Sekhmet, Imhotep, and Isis.  Again, Pharaoh’s heart hardened and he would not let God’s people go.

Then God showed his power over the god of the sky, Nut and the god of the crop, Seth.  God sent down hail that flattened trees and everything growing in the fields.  Then, he covered the land and filled their houses with locusts who ate up everything the hail didn’t destroy.  Agriculture in Egypt was obliterated.  Again, Pharaoh’s heart hardened and he would not let God’s people go.

God then covered the land in a thick darkness that lasted for three days.  The darkness was so thick the people could not move around and were in essence frozen in place.  By this, the LORD removed light from Egypt and showed himself greater than the greatest of the Egyptian gods, Ra, the sun God.  Still, Pharaoh’s heart hardened and he would not let God’s people go.  It is amazing how ego – believing oneself to be a god – and addiction to wealth and power can get a hold on a person. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be the billionaire President of the United States.  The temptation to act like a god must be incredible.

The last plague, the death of the firstborn of Egypt.  To kill the firstborn son in a family, particularly the firstborn of a national leader, was to declare that their dynastic line was cut off.  This is why it was so often the case in the ancient world that when one king conquered another he so often killed the sons particularly the firstborn in front of the decimated king.  In the case of Pharaoh this meant he could not pass his “Pharaoh power” on to another generation.  Moreover, the Pharaohs believed themselves to be the earthly representation of the god Horus, the strongest of the earthly gods, the god who gave kings their power.  This plague ended any political power Pharaoh had and brutally ensured this particular Pharaoh’s dynasty would end.  Finally, Pharaoh’s hard heart broke with the death of his firstborn son and he let God’s people go.  Yet, Pharaoh’s heart hardened one more time and he pursued the Israelites with his army of chariots to the Red Sea and God drowned him and his army, all the military power of Egypt there in the Red Sea.

So, these plagues were how God disarmed and debunked Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt.  This was necessary because idolatry, the worship of false gods and particularly devotion to the man Pharaoh who believed himself to be a god, was the source of oppression in Egypt, particularly of God’s people Israel. Political power, economic power and wealth, and military power are so often if not always rooted in idolatry.  The consequence of worshipping the idols of wealth, economic power, political power, and military power will always be human community, that is supposed to in the image God, being marred by poverty, disease, debt, and slavery. 

You know, since this COVID-19 pandemic began, I have occasionally had people bring up to me their musings that this might be a plague sent from God to punish humanity for its sins.  I have generally sidestepped the question because in my experience people are not willing to sit and be my captive audience for about an half an hour as I ramble out my thoughts as I am doing to you folks today.  I usually just say that as far as I understand it, this pandemic is 100% the product of human lifestyle.  Human lifestyle has been and will continue to be factor number one in the origination and spread of this virus.  

The lifestyle components I look to, that I blame, as the main factors are our idolatrous unconstrained pursuits of wealth and power.  To those I would add the sub-components of human disregard for and encroachment upon wild environments for economic gain, the jet-set lifestyle, human pride reflected in leaders believing themselves all-knowing and all-powerful, a general citizenship also believing themselves to be all-knowing and all-powerful, a global information system readily used for propagating lies, and a pervading religious-like belief that gaining wealth is why we exist.  Put all that together and you have a pandemic.  

One of my New Testament professors in seminary, Dr. Paul Achtemeier, used to say, “The consequence of sin is having to live with the consequences of sin.”  Applying that to our situation, it is obvious that we humans cannot go about in an uncontrolled pursuit of wealth all the while aspiring to a god-like status for ourselves without it coming back to bite us on the ass.  I think that’s what the Apostle Paul meant in Galatians chapter six when he wrote: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked.  A man reaps what he sows.  The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.  Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.  Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal. 6:7-10).

I don’t think we need to blame God for this pandemic.  We should not say God is plaguing us us.  We’ve only ourselves to blame for this.  We’ve made idols out of wealth and power and continue to aspire to be gods ourselves.  We may ask why doesn’t God wave his almighty hand and make it go away before the global death toll reaches into the billions.  I could answer that question bluntly by saying we can tell a two year old child not to pull the cats tail, but its not until that cat has drawn blood that the child will understand why.  But that’s simplistic and totally ignores how God really is involved in all this in a very hands-on way.  

It’s better for me to say that I believe, indeed I know, that God is waving his almighty hand in the midst of this pandemic through people who are sowing seeds of hope through acts of compassion; like wearing a mask where and when asked.  God speaks through moments of insight and inspiration to the intuition of scientists working on a vaccine and medical workers innovating new means of treatment.  There are a lot of people taking advantage of this opportunity to do good in the midst of this world that has turned on us like an angry cat because we have indeed been pulling its tail with our selfish pursuits.  I believe a harvest of good can result from this pandemic. God is waving his hand to make it go away but God is doing so in cooperation with us through Spirit-given inspiration and human ingenuity and compassion.  A better world can and should result from this, but…we humans need to lay aside our idols.  Therein lies the challenge.  Amen.