Sermon
If there were such a thing as a sermon topic multiple choice, my answer would always be “None of the above.”
- For example, this scripture might be about the two-way relationship between God and God's people.
- Or an example of someone arguing with God.
- Or an example of God changing God's mind.
- Or maybe all of this is a test for Moses much like the test for Abraham with Isaac.
All of these examples are perfect ideas for topics that use this scripture. But, always feeling called to the weird thing, I got hooked on an idea from a commentator on the WorkingPreacher website.
As Bonnie reminded us earlier, the book of Exodus is about the Israelites going out of Egypt into the wilderness and on to the promised land. While the class I took called Biblical Hebrew was an experience akin to that of the trauma of high school Geometry, I do find the nuances of that complicated language fascinating. It turns out that there are different ways of describing “to go out” or “to go up.” In Exodus, whenever God says “I brought you out of Egypt” or “I brought you out up from the land of Egypt” the word that is used that includes words of freedom, like that of a slave who has been manumitted. A slave no longer a slave. A suffering ended and something better beginning. There is a liberation from something included in the word. But when the Israelites speak of themselves being “brought out of” or being “brought out up out of the land of Egypt” they don't use that word. They use a word that only speaks of moving from place to place. They went from Egypt to the wilderness. To them, from the frying pan into the fire. Think of the phrase about being brought “out of bondage to slavery.” Depending on the comma, which doesn't exist in Hebrew, the Israelites were right. They were brought out of bondage, comma, to slavery. It doesn't sound good. But what about “out of, bondage to slavery.” Ah. The bondage to slavery is what has ended. That's not out of the frying pan into the fire. It's out of the frying pan.
Aren't languages clever?
Back in Exodus 3, during Moses' encounter with God through a burning bush is the first time God says to Moses, “I declare that I will bring you up out of the misery of Egypt…” and later, of the Israelites, God says to Moses, “Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land…”
Nothing moves quickly though and it is not until 12 chapters later that the Israelites are able to leave Egypt. Finally after crossing the Red Sea where the Egyptians were destroyed, they sang this song in Exodus chapter 15: “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my might, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father's God, and I will exalt him. The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name.”
Although it took 15 chapters of this story to get the Israelites out of Egypt, it took only two chapters for the Israelites to practically mutiny. At the start of today's scripture, Moses has been up on the mountain with God for 40 days and 40 nights – and the leaders of the tribes down below started to get itchy. Over and over again, God has saved from their worst distress, but as the virtue of patience is one of the most difficult to have, the tribes went to Aaron in Moses' absence. After they make a calf of gold and bow to the golden calf, God decides that this is Moses' problem. “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.” God has basically given up claim to them and wants to destroy them and make a great nation through Moses alone.
In his response, Moses puts the Israelites back into God's court reminding God that they are God's, not Moses' people.
Moses says, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people.”
That's some pretty good pastoral care on the part of Moses! Well, with a little human guilt thrown in – you can't treat the Israelites badly after bringing them out of Egypt, just think about what the Egyptians will say?
Moses is reminding God of the very thing that the Israelites seem to have forgotten – it was divine intervention that brought them up out of slavery, not Moses. Not human. Not other gods and graven images or calves made of gold. Forgetting the divine source of their redemption from slavery, of their manna in the wilderness, led to their fears taking over and driving their decision making.
Think of how all the time that had passed between the burning bush promise of deliverance and the final exit from Egypt. Think of all of the suffering they had gone through in the desert, even though there was ultimate relief, the fear of more suffering drove out the faith in God's further deliverance. That fear, which was very real – life in the desert would have been extremely difficult – is the basis for this weird point I'm making about the difference in the telling of the story of the Exodus. With fear, the people would only tell the story of being moved from one place to another – from Egypt to the promised land but via the wilderness. Without fear, the people would be able tell the same story but this the telling would include the freedom and liberation important divine aspects. Telling the story of God's deliverance of God's people, not just the story of being moved to another place like a chess piece. Telling the story of being moved “out of, bondage to slavery” not “out of bondage, to slavery.”
At our prayer time on Wednesdays, sometimes everyone there has a different fear about the world. Last week we talked a bit about how it isn't just a lot of political disarray, it's the disarray of so many categories. Politics, climate, civil discourse, education, critical thinking, power struggles. It sometimes feels like we're obliged to throw something nice in there just so we're not so negative. People who are afraid are not wrong. Anyone of African American heritage knows that words and images like “slavery” and “bondage” are very real, life destroying methods of control and humiliation requiring liberation and reparations. Countries who are not involved in as much climate destroying activities, are nevertheless suffering the greatest level of and types of climate change effects. The people of Ukraine are suffering under a war that is most likely protecting the rest of us from the advances of a brutal Russian leader. These are not real threats that we need to soften by throwing in a random act of kindness we witnessed.
Giving God the glory for delivering any of us from our worldly fearful experiences does not seek to change the facts or feelings of those fearful experiences. But by telling stories about God's work of deliverance from sufferings helps us bring a bit of hope to those times of fearful experiences. Bad things happen. And when they're long over and we feel better, we still know that the bad thing happened. But if we recognize that God was the reason that we are still standing, and will never be the same, then we have something to build on. We don't lessen suffering by watching videos of kittens, or throwing random thanks into the pot, as if we can create a different soup. We get through suffering by acknowledging it and remembering that God is fully engaged in the event. We get through our next struggle by remembering how we got through our previous struggle.
This notion of trying to balance sorrow and joy so that we feel some equilibrium is something Susan Cain discusses in her book Bittersweet. How sorrow and longing make us whole.1 She describes how American culture is organized around ideas associated with “buoyancy and strength.” She says this outlook is “forward leaning and combat ready; prizes cheerful goal orientation in our personal lives and righteous outrage online. We should be tough, optimistic, and assertive; we should possess the confidence to speak our minds, the interpersonal skills to win friends and influence people. Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents, then proceeded to write over thirty thousand books on the subject, as per a recent Amazon search.” (p.xxv)
There are many ways, but having faith is an important way to counteract our dislike of any talk of weakness, suffering, having an illness, going to therapy, needing anything at all certainly not help with anything. Sorrow and joy don't balance one another out like a judicial scale. More joy does not erase the pain of deep sorrow. More sorrow does not erase the pure amazement of joyful events. They are not balanced that way. Nothing gets erased. When we tell our stories of moving through pain and include the role of divine deliverance, we are telling a story, not an event. When I tell people I was depressed for many years and now I'm not, and I'm grateful, it sounds like there was a before and an after and that I'm telling about an event. But if I include the ways in which God was involved I'm telling a story. When I tell people I was depressed and now I'm not, I get to hurry away from the suffering and live in the warm waters of joy. If I include the ways in which God was involved, I don't have to hurry away and turn a blind eye to the suffering. We are more whole if we don't rush through how we tell even just ourselves about our own lives.
I used to think I lived on the dark side because I was depressed. But now I think I lived on the dark side because it was real. We have all been through sorrow and grief. We lived in the sorrow and grief because it was real. Getting through to the other side happens. When we include God's involvement in our getting through, then we recognize that we haven't just moved from one place to another, we have been delivered. The beauty of retelling the exodus story, of sharing our own stories, is that we are reminded again and again of the power of living in what is real. The beauty comes because we have been delivered, through to the other side and will be again.
Let's pray,
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1 Bittersweet. How Sorrow and Longing Make us Whole Susan Cain, c.2022, Crown, Penguin Random House, LLC, NY