Faith in the Middle Chapters
May the words of our mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Please be seated.
So last week, last week we sat with the radical invitation: “Come and see.” And “come and see” is an easy phrase to fall in love with. I think it’s light on your feet, right? It invites curiosity without immediately demanding a pledge card or that you bring the next goodies for after the service. It’s like an open porch door—which we may have to close soon, because it’s getting a little cold.
The trouble with “come and see,” though, is that eventually you do. You actually step through the door. You pack a bag, you take the hand of God who called you, and you walk into that open air. You come and see.
And that is where our lectionary refuses to let us live in a greeting card, because it doesn’t just leave us with the lesson of them crossing over the Red Sea; it doesn’t just leave us with the lesson of them receiving manna from above. No, we get to hear what happens next.
Because today we hear the people of Israel have taken God up on the invitation. They left Jesus behind—they left Egypt behind, wow—they left Egypt behind, there we go! They saw the sea split, they sang the songs on the shores with the tambourine. They came, they saw, and now they’re sitting in the dirt at Rephidim, and their canteens are bone dry. And there was no water for the people to drink.
Welcome to the wilderness.
Nobody warned them about this part, and nobody warns us about that part either. When we hear “come and see,” our minds leap straight from the Red Sea to the Promised Land. We think about deliverance and the land of milk and honey, and many times we skip over those middle chapters.
“Yet the middle chapters are where I think the majority of human life actually happens. It’s where faith gets lived out on a Tuesday afternoon, after the novelty has faded away and we’re stuck with real logistics, real thirst, real people who are starting to get on your last nerve.”
As an aside: you may know of or remember decades past when you had the March on Washington, and there was one hero of that march, sometimes forgotten or at least on the second page or the third page, and that’s Bayard Rustin. Bayard Rustin, they say, made that march happen because he did things like knowing exactly where they needed to put all the porta-potties on the way so that people could use the restroom when they needed to on the march. He knew where to put the water stations on the way so that people didn’t get dehydrated. And without that, the march might not have made it.
And I think in this part we see that, for whatever reason, the Hebrew people do not have a Bayard Rustin with them at the moment. They don’t have someone rushing ahead to ensure all is right. No, they are blazing a way, and they are exhausted, and they are a frightened bunch of humans whose adrenaline has worn off. And so they do what all of us do, I think, at some point: they start picking fights.
The text calls the place they’re at Massah and Meribah—testing and quarrel. They corner Moses with that tragic, absurd question that fear whispers in our ears: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”
Listen, in that fear, how quickly fear has rewritten memory, even recent memory. Suddenly Egypt—an empire of forced labor, state violence, brick quotas—is remembered as a well-stocked pantry. At least in Egypt we had food to eat; at least in Egypt we had water to drink.
“When the present time gets dry, I think our anxieties will make us gladly romanticize the very things that used to enslave us... Maybe that’s because captivity is predictable, but freedom is terrifyingly unpredictable.”
And then comes that real accusation they have. They don’t just ask Moses for water; they ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Now, I don’t know about you, but for me that question hits uncomfortably close to home. Because what they’re really asking, I think, or saying, is: God, if you’re real, perform. Do God things. If you’re with us, make this bearable. Maybe even make it comfortable, but make it at least bearable, and validate our decisions to follow you right now. Because I don’t know—I’m at my wit’s end.
And I think it’s a very similar dynamic playing out in the courtyard in our Gospel reading today. The chief priests and the elders march up to Jesus while he’s teaching and demand, “By what authority are you doing these things?” They want to see credentials. They want God to submit to an audit. They want proof of authority that fits nicely inside these structures of religion that have been created and, at this point, they feel fairly in control of.
And God responds with a parable of two sons. And in that parable, he kind of turns that mirror right back on them. For one son talks a good game, uses all the right words, is polite, says, “I go, sir,” and then never lifts a finger. And the other one grumbles, says no, probably whines a bit, but then later has a change of heart and thinks, I should really—I should go into that vineyard. And so he does, and he does the work.
“Our faith isn’t measured by whether we can cross-examine God when the road gets rocky; maybe instead it’s measured by whether we are willing to stay in the vineyard even when our hands are blistered.”
Look at what God does at Rephidim. Moses is terrified—I think I would be. He’s got an angry mob on his hands, and he cries out, “What shall I do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.”
And God doesn’t smite them. God doesn’t tell them to be thankful—you know, just right back there last week he gave them manna, he gave them food, and now they want water. No, God simply says to Moses, “Take in your hand the staff in which you struck the Nile, and I will stand there before you on the rock at Horeb. Strike that rock, and water will come out of it.”
That staff—that staff that was an instrument of judgment against an empire—God is now saying to use it to bring salvation to God’s people. And God is saying, “I will stand there before you on the rock.” God puts Godself right where the blow falls.
So instead of striking down a quarreling, ungrateful people, God just takes the complaint. As I would tell college students time and time again: God can take you yelling at God. God’s a big kid; God can handle it.
And that’s what God did. And then God commanded that that staff hit the stone and gushing, life-saving water come out.
Centuries later, the early church read this story and many could only see one thing in that: Christ. For Paul tells the people of Corinth, the Corinthians, that the rock was Christ. Christ, who did not exploit divine status, but emptied himself. Christ, who took the form of a servant, absorbed our testing, absorbed our violence, and cracked wide open, living water to pour out onto the parched world.
So we don’t need to leave “come and see” behind. We just have to hear what’s after it, too, and we have to prepare the way.
For when you hear “come and see,” you might think you’re coming to God to solve every problem, to smooth every path, and hand you an easy life. And if that’s what we continue to think as we come into these doors, the wilderness that God puts us in will break our hearts.
“If you can stay present through the dry camp, through the mid-project exhaustion, through the days where the water seems gone... then you will see something far, far greater than cheap miracles. For we will see, we will all see, a God who doesn’t abandon us in the desert, but rather stands on the rock with us.”
For if you keep looking—if you can stay present through the dry camp, through the mid-project exhaustion, through the days where the water seems gone (not today, but the water seems gone) and the anxiety is loud—then you will see something far, far greater than cheap miracles. For we will see, we will all see, a God who doesn’t abandon us in the desert, but rather stands on the rock with us. We will see water coming out of the places that we wrote off as dead, dry stone.
So when a dry season hits, in whatever way that is, let’s not just retreat to the old safe bondages of the past. And we don’t have to put God on trial. We can, but we don’t have to. Because instead, we can have the mind of Christ: to pour ourselves out for each other, to dig in our heels, and to look for the living water that God is already splitting open at our feet.
Amen.
Comments