Bethel 09/13/20 Service

If you haven’t read the introductory notes, please go back and read them before proceeding here. We will return to the issue addressed there in a moment. But it will be good to have the overview presented there in terms of worship as a whole before digging deeper into the text itself.

As with any miracle story, there is a tendency to want to explain it. In part, we’re hoping that it might become more believable if we can grasp something about how it might have happened. The crossing of the sea story has been de-mythologized until it is hardly worth hearing any more. The wind blew from the east, the text says, and some say that means it revealed to the clever Israelites that the “yam suf” or Sea of Reeds, was really pretty shallow and the people could cross on foot without a problem, and the Egyptians in their heavy chariots got stuck in the mud. Right? Well, maybe. But it removes the core of the event. And no, the core of the event isn’t a miracle of Cecil B. DeMille scale; it isn’t the miracle in and of itself at all. Rather the core is that this people on their own were sunk (OK, pun intended), but with the help of God, freedom is a possibility.

To spend too much time on the walking through the sea event, whether to say it didn’t happen like it says or it definitely did, is a distraction from the good news that is to be proclaimed here: that God is with us when we face insurmountable barriers to hope or the daily impossibilities of living in this world. God is with us when we can feel that hand at our back, and when we can’t. God is with us when it seems that every step is through deep and clinging mud, or when we dance across dry ground.

Our text begins with the note that the angel, which looked like a pillar of cloud, moves from the front of the pack to the back. The second verse says that it was to provide a buffer between the Israelites and the pursing Egyptians. But maybe it was there to push. Sometimes leading doesn’t achieve the desired results. Sometimes you’ve got to get behind and push. Which is worse, an army running after you or an angelic tornado at your back? No wonder the text says when all this is done, that the people feared the Lord.

Here’s a secondary theme, second only to the power and presence of God in the midst of the journey through the wilderness: Moses stretched out his hand. Did you get that? Even with an angelic tornado, even with walls of water on either side, even with a dry seabed under the feet, effort is required. God rarely says, “Sit back, I’ve got this.” No, go back to the beginning of this story: Moses on the mountain talking to a bush that burned, and he hears a voice saying, “I will save my people. You go.” God works through the effort of God’s people.

What are you willing to stretch out so that God can work with you and from you? Stretch out your hand, sure, but stretch out your resources? Stretch out your security? Stretch out your worldview, your belief that only people who look like you and sound like you and believe like you can be followers of God? What are you willing to stretch out so that God can bless your effort with transformation, that just might be your own transformation instead of those folk out there?

Did Moses know what was going to happen when he stretched out his hand? It’s hard to tell; the text isn’t clear. But he did it. And God made a way where there was no way. Because Moses trusted enough to stretch out. The result was no doubt more than he had ever imagined, which is often what happens when we stretch out, when we take a risk.

We might even become conquerors. A word like that conjures all sort of images. Similar sorts of images that arise when contemplating both the story of drowning Egyptians and the song of joy sung by Moses and Miriam on the shore of the Sea of Reeds. As a story, cheering the demise of the enemy, particularly one as obstreperous as the pharaoh and his army as presented in the earlier part of the book of Exodus, is the expected response. We cheer when they bad guy gets it in the end. No one is supposed to feel sorry for Hans Gruber as he finally falls off the Nakatomi Tower in the first (and best) Die Hard movie. We can dance and sing to the tambourine with the freed formerly enslaved Israelites — as a story. The problem becomes when story leaks into reality. Because reality is never as clean and neat, and the good guys are often confused with the bad guys and the bad guys are people too.

In the book of Revelation, in the Letters to the Seven Churches, each one ends with a specific phrase: “to everyone who conquers…” Maybe here we can understand better what conquering means. In those letters, the conqueror isn’t the one who vanquishes the foe, whoever the foe might be, but rather the one who holds on to faith to the end; the one who holds on to faith through trial; holds on to faith through suffering; holds on to faith until the light begins to shine once more. It isn’t about who is defeated, but who endures.

It is certainly true that the song that Moses sings and then Miriam takes up the chorus and dances revels in those who were wiped out. The horse and rider are thrown into the sea. It is the dead washing up on the water that brings about this response. But looking carefully at the song that Moses sings, it is more about God and what God as has done for God’s people than about how awful the enemy is. Maybe that should be our focus too. It is clear that the rabbis were uncomfortable with this story, which is why the teaching on this event includes a story of heaven’s sadness at the death of the Egyptians.

That the struggle is a life and death one cannot be denied. That there will be suffering, that there will be blood spilled is also a hard truth. But humility in the face of victory is something worth cultivating in the real world in which we live. Such humility embraces the truth that we are all still wandering through the wilderness.

------------------------------- Rev. Dr. Derek Weber, Director of Preaching Ministries, served churches in Indiana and Arkansas and the British Methodist Church. His PhD is from University of Edinburgh in preaching and media. He has taught preaching in seminary and conference settings for more than 20 years.