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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm
Speaker 2:Today, we are returning to this exploration of the book of Exodus, the sweeping story that we have jumped into this spring. You've got the grand Egyptian civilization featured prominently in the background. You've got cosmic apocalyptic events. You've got heated throne room confrontations. And of course, all the way along, there's this exploration of what it might look like for God to always be with the oppressed.
Speaker 2:And last week, Jeremy walked us through this sequence of how the Israelites finally get themselves and get moving out of Egypt. And one of the things I appreciated most about Jeremy's unpacking of just what the text means when it says that God hardened Pharaoh's heart, making him resist what feels like the inevitable in the story. Right? I mean, the Israelites wanna get out of there, and Pharaoh seems to be losing interest. So and there's weird stuff that keeps happening.
Speaker 2:I mean, read the sand dunes, bro, but he doesn't. And yet, the story makes it sound as though God has set the deck against this ancient ruler until we realize one second here. There we go. Until we realize that in the Hebrew syntax and vocabulary, that there's some clarity here around the fact that Pharaoh actually hardens his own heart. He sets his intention, and he holds fiercely to harmful and toxic perspectives.
Speaker 2:And it's only then that God appears to play a role in his demise. And I love how Jeremy offered this as a reflection for how sometimes we can take our sharp intellects and our tenacious will and our fierce independence. These are the skills and the strengths that God gives each of us. And if we aren't careful, we can let these things produce a hardness in us towards our own healing, can foster a resistance towards the vulnerability that we are actually looking for in our relationships, and ultimately can foster a blindness to the possibilities for change and renewal if only we would let go. And you are likely better than me.
Speaker 2:In fact, let's assume for the rest of the sermon that we are, things will go better that way. The point is is that as someone who spends a lot of time and energy trying to be and do right, trying to determine what's best and then trying to get everybody else on board with my better version of reality. I needed the reminder last week that God may be on my side and generously trying to shape me and that I might make it more difficult when I let my heart get hard. Now today, along with God's people, we are gonna head out into the desert. But before we do that, let's take a moment to pause.
Speaker 2:Some of us have had a crazy week, so let's just take a second, come into this moment, and pray together. I invite you to join me now. Loving God, you are present to us now in the rhythms of this space. And these people in friendly faces and in welcoming arms, you're here in the quiet moment in which we can be aware of you in some way, but also aware of ourselves, maybe our aching bodies, our our active minds that are spinning and solving and worrying. Maybe we can feel our affections, those parts of us that are so excited about some newness we're experiencing.
Speaker 2:Or perhaps tonight or today, we feel weighed down. We're thinking of someone or something that we care deeply about. Of all of these things, you are aware, and so we choose to be too. And we ask spirit that you would bring peace and comfort and awareness where we most need them. For you are our guide in all things, and you are also our light even as we turn to ancient words now.
Speaker 2:And so we pray that you would illuminate and uncover and reveal your presence in these moments. We ask in the name of Christ, our hope. Amen. Alright. Lots to get through this morning.
Speaker 2:Along the way, we need to talk about landscapes, about tests, about complaints, and becoming. So we're gonna jump right into the text, and as we do, I'm gonna just set the scene for you quickly here. The Hebrews have literally just walked out of the mud on the side of the Red Sea, and Pharaoh's pursuing army has been eliminated. The victory hymn has just wrapped up. And we read that Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert Of Shur.
Speaker 2:And for three days, they traveled into the desert without finding water. And so the people grumbled against Moses saying, what are we supposed to drink? And with these few phrases, we move from the Egyptian part of the narrative into what Robert Alter refers to as the wilderness tales, which gets my vote if we ever stop calling this book Exodus. The truth is that the Israelites will be in wilderness for the rest of Torah, for the rest of the first five books of scripture, and they were gonna cycle through a series of challenges and revelations and failures before they finally come into the land that they are headed for. And this means that as the setting changes and Egypt fades into our rearview mirror, it's important for us as modern readers to remember that all of the Hebrew Bible was composed and collected as theological history.
Speaker 2:Its characters, its plot twists, its landscapes, they all tell part of the sacred story. And we have to pay attention to how the people of God might be leaving empire and slavery and how they are entering wilderness and uncertainty. Just like you should pay attention to how your movement toward greater freedom, toward greater autonomy, toward greater health, this is a theological history in its own right. And maybe you need to hear that off the top today that just because the landscapes and contours of your life have changed, this does not mean that you are lost or that you're on the wrong path. Now as we track through the Exodus story, however, it's clear that these Hebrew refugees, they are in tough.
Speaker 2:They've been walking for three days. Supplies are apparently running low. And chapter 15 tells us that ultimately, they find some water to drink. It's not all that good. The people start complaining to Moses, and God tells Moses to throw some bush, I guess, into the water, and it makes it instantly drinkable.
Speaker 2:And on the heels of this divine intervention, we get this cryptic saying that we're gonna find echoes of in other episodes. The text says that there on the site of this pond, the Lord issued a ruling and instruction for the Israelites and put them to the test. God says this, if you listen carefully to the Lord your God and do what is right in God's eyes, if you pay attention to God's commands and keep all of the divine decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases that I brought Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you. And for me, there's a couple things that stand out here. First, there's this idea of God testing people.
Speaker 2:We're gonna come back to that in a moment. And second, there's this contractual language that God is using. You obey my commands, and I won't be the God to you that I was to the Egyptians. Now for the record, scholars note that this language, this contractual language, it actually mirrors ancient Near Eastern agreements and treaties between conquering nations and those they now control. And because Hebrew Torah emerges from the ancient Near East, this is likely why God has imagined speaking this way.
Speaker 2:And the problem or yeah. The significant problem for us is that as the story continues, we are gonna see that the Israelites, they do not hold up their end of the agreement. Right? They don't listen. They don't obey.
Speaker 2:They don't follow. And in response, in the vast majority of cases, God does not hold up the divine side of the agreement because God is endlessly patient, and God is lenient, and not at all like the God that meets out judgment on Egypt, which is why I think we do a disservice to ourselves, to the text today if we read this story about God testing the people as a not so veiled threat, like a legal threat. I think it's better to read these wilderness tales to when we are doing so, to correlate the word testing with the word invitation. And I think this primarily because it's in keeping with the whole arc of the sacred story. Because God is leading the people away from where they've been, and God's gonna reveal God's character.
Speaker 2:God's gonna reveal a new way for them to be a community. And in all of this, God invites them to trust and to change. And what if that invitation says something to us too? It means that the closed doors and missed opportunities of your professional life, these are not a test. They're an invitation to consider new possibility.
Speaker 2:Your worst moments as a parent, they're not a test. They're an invitation to embrace your limits and address your faults and then inspire your children as an example of how to get up and start over again. And while we are camped here, let me be super clear. Mental and physical illnesses, these are not tests. That's bad and toxic and cruel theology.
Speaker 2:In all of these experiences of our humanity, there is an invitation to trust others and to grow in compassion and to encounter grace in unexpected places. And what this expansive view of scripture reveals is that God is not the author of the tests we face, but God is the presence that comes alongside and then invites us to change direction and to adapt and to trust a better way. So to recap, we're three days into this story and the Hebrews are already struggling. And the truth is it is not going to improve. The wilderness is going to inspire a lot more frustration and a lot more divine intervention.
Speaker 2:Exodus chapter 16 records how God miraculously feeds the Hebrews even while they keep saying things like, hey, guys. You remember how awesome those slavery buffets were? They keep complaining about the food, and God provides food for them in daily measure and profound excess. And they aren't at all grateful. They don't really follow the instructions.
Speaker 2:They push back on the generosity and the fulfillment that they do find. And then we read that the whole Israelite community sets out from the desert of sin, traveling from place to place as the Lord commanded, and they camped at Rephidim. But surprise, surprise, there's no water for them to drink. The text tells us that they quarrel with Moses. They demand that he give them water.
Speaker 2:Moses doesn't know what to do with that for one thing, but he also seems to understand that there's something bigger happening here. He asked them, why are you quarreling with me? Can't you see that you're putting God to the test? And they respond by grumbling some more, and they ask him if he's directionally challenged because he's obviously led them out here to die. And there appears to be something ominous in between the lines of all the complaining in these wilderness tales.
Speaker 2:Scholar Carol Myers notes this because or she sees it in Moses' prayer to God. He asks God what to do, and then he says that he can sense that the people are going to kill him in their frustration and their outrage. And God mercifully intervenes, tells Moses to take the staff that he has, that he's used to hit the river and hit the sea, and he strikes a rock. Water mysteriously flows, and all are saved. But then almost as a footnote, we read that Moses called that place Masa and Meribah because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested God by saying, is the Lord with us or not?
Speaker 2:Now if you're reading in your Bible, it's gonna tell you that massa means quarreling, that merabah means testing. And this is probably all starting to sound really repetitive. Right? Right? Like, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We get it. Things are hard. The Israelites complained. We'll just file it away as a moral indictment against being whiny, and our kids will miss the memo.
Speaker 2:But for the record, there's more to it than that. See, the Jewish tradition doesn't really have a problem with complaining. I mean, they canonized it and incorporated it into worship. Many of you might be familiar with the practice of lament in Jewish literature. We see it in the Psalms.
Speaker 2:We see it in the prophets too, where poets say things like, how long, Lord? How are you gonna how long are you gonna hide your face from us? That's Psalm 13, and there are loads of examples like that one where the poet grieves and mourns over the difficulty of their experience. Their injustice they see and the loss they've experienced and the illness they suffer with. They name all these things.
Speaker 2:But then there are instances where the poet zooms out a little bit, and the complaining gets a little more pointed. See this in Psalm 44 where the writer says, in God, we make our boast all day long, and we praise your name forever. Sounds amazing. He's off on the right foot. But then they proceed to say, but God, you haven't stayed with us.
Speaker 2:We're losing our battles now, and we're losing resources, and our communities are falling apart. You sold us out. And the poet's just getting warmed up because in the next few sentences, they are really gonna stick it to the divine. They say, all of this came upon us, though we did not forget you. We haven't been false to your covenant.
Speaker 2:Our hearts haven't turned away. Our feet haven't strayed from the path that you gave us, but you crushed us and you made us a haunt for jackals. You covered us with deep darkness, which is is really profound example of how the Jewish tradition takes a certain kind of complaint and adds it to our spiritual toolkit under ways to pray. This Psalm 44 poet is gonna end their rant with an inspiring wake up. What are you doing, God?
Speaker 2:Don't forget about us. And I have come to hear that as a kind of, God, be better. And it's right there in the scriptures teaching me to pray well. So when the Israelites despair and they quarrel and they complain and they test God here in Exodus, why is that a problem? Well, I think I think there's something between the lines where they willfully choose to ignore the obvious and repeated provisions in the story.
Speaker 2:They keep embracing scarcity. I think it's there in the blaming of others for where they find themselves, and they berate their leaders, and they avoid whatever responsibility they might have for where they are. And I think it's also there in the way in they the way in which they seem to be dehumanizing Moses and threatening him with violence. How they dehumanize others as enemies and they are unable to see how God might have actually showed up in the efforts of another person no matter how flawed. And it's this kind of complaining that's the problem.
Speaker 2:Remember, the scriptures have all kinds of room for the heart broken by injustice and the soul crushed by violence and abuse of power, and they actually offer us their words so we can pour out our complaints as prayer and catharsis and therapeutic rage. But the scriptures seem to be warning us, warning me about here is the kind of complaining that numbs my heart to how privileged I am. The kind of complaining in which I blame others and I take no responsibility. The kind of complaining that leads me to say and think horrible things about other people and posture as a victim while actually doing harm. The point is not that there aren't good ways to complain because there are.
Speaker 2:The point is not that we should never, like the Israelites, find ourselves saying something like, is God with me or not? The point is that sometimes it's not that God is absent. Sometimes, it's that I've let my complaining blind me to the actual care and beauty in my life. Forgetting that, like Exodus, shows my journey too is littered with signposts of God's faithfulness. Now all of this wilderness wandering is in fact leading the people of God somewhere.
Speaker 2:We get a hint of this as Exodus 18 begins. We read this, that Jethro, Moses' father-in-law together with his sons and wife, they come to Moses in the wilderness where he is camped with the people near the mountain of God. The mountain in question is, of course, Mount Sinai, which we will discuss more in coming weeks. God has led the people into the shadow of this place where a major event in their shared history is going to occur. But for today, we're gonna focus in on Moses being met by his father-in-law who is definitely the main character in this scene.
Speaker 2:See, Jethro shows up as a priest from another nation, from another culture, from a completely different religious tradition. And he praises Moses God, and then even more surprisingly gives Moses, God's chosen messenger, some divine advice. See, they're spending some days together. Jethro's there in the camp. He observes Moses working long days, sitting through endless meetings, settling the disputes of the people, and Jethro says to Moses, this is not good.
Speaker 2:The work is too much. You can't do it by yourself. And the Hebrew terminology here actually implies that he's telling Moses, you are going to wither away. So he gives him some instructions. He says, Moses, you teach them God's decrees.
Speaker 2:Teach the people God's instructions and show them the way that they are to live and how they are to behave. But select some people from amongst all of the tribes and have them serve as judges for the people at all other times. He says, if you do what I say, you're going to survive and the people are going to flourish. So Moses does, and that's the end of the story, which on the surface can sound like an ancient managerial handbook with Jeff Jethro, the life coach, just telling people how to delegate. Right?
Speaker 2:But there's more to it, I think. Because remember, remember what I said right at the very beginning about how the book of Exodus, it's a kind of theological history. How all of its happenings and its characters, they're meant to be telling us a shared story, and they tell us how to shape a shared history. Well, I think this is how we need to view this little episode because remember, Exodus isn't just a story about how the Hebrews stopped being Pharaoh's slaves. More than that, it's a story of how they become God's people, how they left behind the rhythms of foreign cultures, and how over time they adopted new rules and routines that are more equitable and fair and just.
Speaker 2:And I think there's something here in Jethro's instructions and the actions that Moses takes. See, Jethro tells Moses that he needs to show the people the way to live. The Hebrew term here literally means a path or a roadway, and this is an obvious allusion to how Moses in the coming chapters is going to give God's law to the people. He's obviously referring to this, but I love how that isn't it. Jethro adds another divine command.
Speaker 2:He says, appoint judges and the term here is different than many of the other places we find that word judge in the Hebrew scriptures. It means something less judiciary and more it's describing more the kind of person who will restore community peace, and it implies that these individuals that Moses is going to find, they're going to shape the collective identity just like Moses will. And in this instruction that Moses find and appoint and rely on others, there's an acknowledgment of how limited our individual perspectives are. There's an encouragement to let multiple voices shape community, and there's an imperative to accept that wisdom can and should be collectively shaped. And for us, I think there's many ways to hear that.
Speaker 2:As individuals, Exodus reminds us that in all of our deconstruction, in our wrestling with faith, in our rightful separation from systems and communities that have hurt us and controlled us, at some point, you have to start building something. And there's a reminder too that like Moses, you are not supposed to do that building by yourself. There's also a picture of how easy it is to be principled and noble and engaged and like Moses to be doing too much, How easy it is to be overrun by compassion or justice fatigue. And as I read, reflected on these verses the past couple weeks, I was reminded of an experience I had a couple of years ago in our community. I was sitting at a pub with some guys and a conversation unfolded across the table from me.
Speaker 2:One of the guys, his career required him to work in the corporate world and to watch spending and to evaluate financial practices from the inside. The guy sitting beside him, his career and experience in life led him to engage local issues and services for vulnerable populations and the need for curtailed corporate overreach. And as you might imagine, they didn't exactly see eye to eye even though they were so generous to each other, even though each of them was doing advocacy in their own right, even though each was acting with wisdom and with care to the best of their abilities. And as that conversation unfolded, I caught sight of this picture of what kind of community we are meant to be, And it's in line with Jethro's ancient instructions to Moses. Because like Moses, no one person is meant to care about all the things and all the political issues and all the changes that the world desperately needs.
Speaker 2:You weren't meant to death scroll every night or respond to all of the comments or somehow support all of the noble causes or to call out all the misguided people who don't. You're meant to live in connection with others in such a way where you and they each care deeply about something or some things, and you offer your strength to them, finding that God's renewing work in the world takes shape in the practices of many, in the wisdom of many, through the voices of many, and then in their commitments to grow a community together across differences. A community where every person is more free and more healed and more known, a community where we are always becoming. Our wisdom, our voices, our perspectives offered in the service of flourishing for all. So wherever you find yourself in your own wilderness tale, may you trust that whatever challenge you are about to face in the coming days, it is not God's test for you to fail.
Speaker 2:May you trust that the right kinds of complaint, these are always heard. And may you know that you don't carry the burden of change on your own, that together, we're shaping and forming the good that God intends. Let's pray. Loving God, you are here in the mystery of our stories, the ways that we are all at any given time, we are moving from one place to another. We are being invited to change and grow our perspectives and our wisdom growing as we do.
Speaker 2:You're here in the mystery too of this ancient story that invites us into the practice of community, the practice of sharing the work of transforming the world, each of us offering our wisdom. And we know, I think, instinctively that this is not easy work. We know that we need your courage, we need your clarity, and we need great love for each other in it all. And so we ask that you would give us open hands and open hearts to receive the gentle ways in which your spirit comes and moves us forward day by day. We pray this in the name of Christ, our hope.
Speaker 2:Amen.