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Between a Rock and a God
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Between a Rock and a God Place What is a rock? I don’t know the Hebrew word for rock. I could have looked it up, but I didn’t feel that I particularly needed to. I am no great expert on Israel’s historical and cultural understandings at that time in history, either. But I will go out on the first of two limbs here and say that I think those children of Israel of so long ago — different time, different place — still pretty much looked at rocks in the same way we do. Rocks are solid, unyielding — being caught between a rock and a hard place, had they heard such an expression at the time, would have made sense to them as it does to us. We don’t get water out of rock. Oh, water might come flowing out from between or under or over rocks — a good thing, because rock by its very nature isn’t going to soak the stuff up before we can get to it. But you can’t get water out of rock; that is our understanding, and we can safely say that it would have been Israel’s, too. This would have been Israel’s expectation, vis-à-vis rock — and Moses in leading them to a rock would not have been seen as overturning that expectation. The children of Israel, here and elsewhere in the five books of Moses, have issues with expectations. What was Israel expecting, anyway? I’m sure Moses asked himself that question many, many times during the journey from Egypt to the outskirts of the Promised Land — and I hesitate to put myself in the place of God, but I can imagine God asking God’s self that question, too. Who are these people? What do they want? Wanting freedom What did Israel want, anyway? This very book of Exodus tells us that story. They wanted, to put it simply, freedom. They were literally enslaved and languishing under their oppressor — Pharaoh, in this case. The opening chapters of this book provide a textbook example about how it is between the oppressed and their oppressors. It is from this account of Israel’s slavery that we get, among other things, the expression “making bricks without straw.” Israel was set to work making bricks. Israel said the workload was too hard, Pharaoh’s expectations were too high, and Pharaoh responded by cutting off the supply of a necessary ingredient for the proper making of bricks, thus forcing the Israelites to forage for it themselves, actually increasing the workload. They had to make more bricks, with less material. Pharaoh did this just to show Israel who was boss and to tell them what they could do with their complaints. Israel was oppressed, enslaved. They cried out to God for freedom. And God granted them freedom from Pharaoh. Expectation met, right? Not exactly. The people of Israel found themselves, apparently without knowing what they were getting themselves into, embroiled in a half-century long process of learning that with freedom comes a different set of expectations. In order to be free, we need to remove ourselves entirely from that which is enslaving us. Removing ourselves from that which is enslaving us entails a step into the unknown. When we are truly set free, we begin a journey. We leave surroundings that, however oppressive they may be — however boring, stultifying, draining, petty, enslaving — are nevertheless familiar, what we’ve always known. In Pharaoh’s land, we may be oppressed, but we nevertheless know who we are, where we can go, where we can’t go, how to get from one day to the next without really having to think about it too much or work at it too hard. In the wilderness When we are set free, we are removed from the old familiar. We set forward into a wilderness land to make our way to a new home, and we don’t know where the new home is yet, what it looks like, what it will be like, and we won’t know until we get there. And until we get there, our home is in fact in the wilderness. And that is where we find Israel, when today’s story begins. We are in this wilderness! We need water! There is no water! And they look to Moses, their leader out of oppression, and they say, What have you gotten us into? You were supposed to be leading us to freedom! We don’t really know what we were expecting, but it wasn’t this! You call this freedom? We were better off in Egypt! At least there were wells there! And Moses. Moses, not only a leader, but a leader called and appointed by God. What does he do? He calls upon the one who appointed him to this task. And God answers Moses’ cries, not by fixing the situation for him, but by telling him what to do about it. God tells him to:
Moses goes, as he is told. And Israel follows. And they get water. Moses is spared a stoning. Israel continues to march — until their expectations run up against the next God-place. Who are we? But enough of this rehashing. You all can read. I invite you, I urge you, to read the entire book of Exodus — again, if you’ve done it already. Read the whole thing. I invite you, I urge you, to bring your expectations to the reading-task with you. All of them. Talk about your expectations — to me, to your brothers and sisters, most of all to God. This is a perfect exercise for this time of Lent. But what I want us to consider now is this question: Who are we in this story — who is it that we identify with? Is it Moses? Is it God? (Yes, it’s perfectly okay to identify with God in the reading of a Bible passage — Oh! I can just imagine how God must have felt, leading these people to the freedom they asked for, and all they do is complain, complain, complain — this is perfectly fine, but be careful with it! Playing God is not only less-than-perfect advice in most situations; it is the easy way out!) Who are we in this story — we the church of Jesus Christ, in this year of our Lord 2008? Are we Moses, trying to lead a recalcitrant people, a rebellious and reluctant nation, to the only real freedom that there is? Well … maybe. Are we God? Well, no, of course we’re not God — but are we a people so perfectly committed to God and God’s ways that we can identify with God, feel some of what God must feel as God looks over this rebellious, recalcitrant nation of ours? I am going to go out on another limb here and say that we, all of us, are the children of Israel, the grumbling, bumbling, whining, complaining children of Israel, which means, of course, that we are also the grumbling, bumbling, whining, complaining people of God — nothing less than that: the people of God. We have every right to feel good about that. Indeed, being the people of God is all we need. Some of us are “Moses,” in a manner of speaking. I suppose I am “Moses” in that I am your pastor — but I have to say that you folks don’t grumble and complain anywhere near as much as the children of Israel did! And in yet another sense, you all are indeed “Moses,” because whether any of us like it or not, we the pastors and lay leaders get our direction from you, and we all know we are going absolutely nowhere if you are not behind us all the way. But mostly we are, all of us, the children of Israel, making our grumbling, bumbling way, one step at a time, one day at a time, to freedom, to the Promised Land. And we are finding, a little bit at a time, that the freedom for which, as Paul tells us in Galatians, Christ has set us free, isn’t quite what we expect it to be. We learn, day after day, that freedom in Christ isn’t easy; it’s hard. It brings us up against rock after rock after rock. And we complain to one another and to our leaders. And when we get the complaining out of our systems it occurs to us that we are, after all, the people of God, and maybe we can cry out to God instead of to one another. And, finally, we do cry out to God. And God shows us, once again, that this rock we are up against is a God place — not a hard place, but a thin place, a place that does not conform to our tiny expectations at all — Thank God! This rock is not a hard place; it is a place of nourishment, it is truly a gateway into the Promised Land. |
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