If the past two
Sunday’s readings from the Old Testament were about sin as an individual
failing, this Sunday’s reading is about sin as a communal activity. We’ve got all
of those Israelites who left Egypt, who escaped from Pharaoh and his miserable
brick-making operation, who saw God’s power and protection as the Sea was
parted for them to pass and was drawn back together to drown their Egyptian
captors…they should be happy, right? Moses has led them out of Egypt. God has
protected them. There is a land promised for them. They only have to get there.
They should be
happy, but they’re not. They’re complaining.
They’ve been camping
out, and there is no water, or at least not enough. Not a surprise – they’re walking
through the desert. It’s not a picnic at the beach, literally or figuratively.
They probably have blisters on their feet from walking over the hot sand. They
are most likely afraid that Moses doesn’t have a clue where they’re supposed to
go. They have no sense that what they were promised will ever come to fruition.
They fear that they will die out in this blasted moonscape of heat and grit and
nothing to eat or drink.
In this passage, the
words that describe what’s happening are quarreling and testing the Lord. I
think that would translate into something more like whining and complaining and
picking fights with each other, because God isn’t visible to them. Otherwise,
they’d pick a fight with God.
If you want to put
yourself in their place, imagine that you’re driving to the Outer Banks and
somewhere on the highway, after your kids have eaten and drunk everything you
packed to help you all get through the trip, the car gets a flat tire. You get
out, laboriously unpack all the stuff in the back that you packed so carefully
only a couple of hours ago so that you can get to the spare, only to discover
that it, too, is flat. You mutter a few choice words. By now, the kids are
saying “when will we get there? I’m hungry/thirsty/need to go to the bathroom.”
And you murmur sarcastically under your breath “God, thanks a lot!” You
conveniently forget that God is responsible for you having the kind of work
that means you can afford a car and a vacation and such. And as the temperature
rises while you’re waiting for AAA to show up, the tempers of everyone in the
car rise as well, until everybody’s blaming everyone else for the situation. “I
thought I told you to get the tire pressure checked.” “Mommy, I’ve got to go
potty NOW.” “Why is it always my job to make sure the car is maintained?” “Who
ate all the Pringles?” “This was supposed to be my vacation, and I’m spending
it frying like a, like a…potato chip on the side of the road.” “I’m bored.” “He’s
touching me!” “It’s not MY fault!”
Muttering and
murmuring, just like the Israelites. You can imagine the Israelites had exactly
the same kind of conversation, minus the car and the Pringles.
Now you and I both
know that in the car ride with the flat tire scenario, eventually AAA will come
and help. We can stay in a motel down the road if it’s impossible to get to the
beach that night. There are 7-11s and supermarkets and restaurants, and we will
not starve or die of thirst. And still we mutter and murmur, because our needs
are not being satisfied and because we have lost touch with the hope that they
will eventually be satisfied.
We have lost touch
with hope. I’d say that was the biggest failing of the Israelites on this epic
journey from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. At regular intervals, they
lost touch with hope. They forgot the promise, or didn’t believe that God would
deliver on the promise, or didn’t think it was happening fast enough, and Moses
was a convenient scapegoat, since Moses was the one having the conversations
with God.
And so Moses went to
have a conversation with God about these aggravating people who kept saying the
Old Testament equivalent of “are we there yet?”
Some of us are old
enough to remember a comedian named Henny Youngman, whose most famous routine
always started with “take my wife.” With those words, he set us up to believe
that he was talking about his wife as an example of something or other, but he
immediately extended the phrase, “no, please, take my wife, take her.” And then
he would make a joke out of whatever thing she did that was annoying Youngman
at the time.
Whenever I hear the
verse about Moses talking to God about the muttering and murmuring Israelites,
I hear the voice of Henny Youngman: “Take these Israelites, Lord. No, please, take
‘em.” Only it isn’t a joke. He is exhausted with the task of keep them going,
keeping them walking and camping and worshipping and simply existing, and he
has had enough. The people have lost hope that God will give them what was
promised, including what they need to survive the journey. And when you lose
hope, you lose faith.
So God provides Moses
with a little miracle, to remind the people where all that they have comes
from. God instructs Moses to go to a rock and hit it with his stick, and then
water will come out, beautiful refreshing cool sweet water, all the water they
need. Presumably, a nice swig of that water helped them remember that God was
with them, and that Moses was God’s servant in this expedition.
Would that a glass
of water were all we needed to reconnect with hope! We all may have had times
in our lives when we lost hope that God would be with us. That might have been
because God did not give us what we wanted when we wanted it – we didn’t get
the promotion we wanted, our child married someone we didn’t much like, our loved
one still died despite all our prayers, someone we cared about continued to
drink or abuse drugs. We might have muttered and murmured and said, like the
Israelites, “Where is God when I need him?”
But God does not
always give us what we demand of him, as if we expect God to be our personal
servant. God sometimes does other things that make little sense to us in the
moment. And like petulant children strapped into the car seat on that trip to
the Outer Banks, we complain and say “why aren’t we there yet? Why can’t I get
what I want?”
But somehow God
doesn’t get aggravated and say “take these people, please.” Who would God ask
to take us away? No, God is stuck with us in all our muttering and murmuring
and God loves us still…and God is with us in ways that we can see and in ways
that are invisible. And that should reconnect us to our hope in God’s promise
and to our faith.
Changing that tire
on the side of the road? No one driving by too quickly hit you, right? God is
with us. The water that comes out of the tap doesn’t give you cholera or river
blindness? God is with us. The nurse caring for our dying grandfather ever so
gently caresses his hand when she checks on him at 2 am, shortly before he
passes into God’s arms? God is with us.
We may not want to
call losing hope a sin, but if sin is most simply defined as turning from God,
what is hopelessness but the sense that we no longer believe that God is with
us? When God isn’t the butler attending to our needs, we say we have no hope
that God will deliver.
And if this is a
painful failing for us as individuals, how much sadder is it when we lose hope
as a community or as a nation?
When we all start
muttering and murmuring, forgetting all that we have, because we want what we
want it and we want it now?
When we expect to
have the right to do whatever we want to do and the heck with other peoples’
needs, like food for the hungry and clean water for the thirsty and care for
those who are ill? Who cares about them? I want MY needs met!
Like the Israelites
at Massah and Meribah, we too may be feeling hopeless. We may be thirsting for
something…water, love, companionship, whatever…and we may even be a little
angry at God or think God is not attending to our needs. But when we as a
community of believers put our thirst ahead of the thirst of others, we never
get the water we need. We are bound to follow Jesus Christ, the Christ whose
death and resurrection we ponder in the season of Lent. He is the hope that is
in us. He is the living water that banishes all thirst.
But unless we
remember that it is not our personal living water, our individual living water,
but rather the living water that is freely given to all, we will continue to
choke on our own dryness of mouth and heart.
Got hope? Share it,
trust it, have faith in it. Offer water for those who thirst to everyone, not
just ourselves and our immediate clan of family and friends. Then, and only
then, will our thirst be satisfied.Then we will not ask "are we there yet?" We know that we will be there, at last.
Amen.
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