March 10, 1996

Text: “…the whole congregation of Israelites journeyed by stages.” Exodus 17:1

Exodus 17:1-17

A family gathers around the kitchen table one evening while on vacation at a resort area in Texas on the Gulf of Mexico. One member of the family complains: “Why’d we come here anyway? I like hiking and biking, not sitting in the sand and getting blistered from the hot sun. ” Another joins in: “Yeah, there’s not a movie theater for miles around. What are we supposed to do while we ‘re here?” A child moans: “I wanted to bring a friend and you wouldn’t let me. ” A parent finally responds: “All you do is complain, complain, complain (complain is the polite word for it) . Look at what we’ve spent on this cottage. Besides we had to bring your boogie boards, games and stuff and I even had to leave my golf clubs at home ”

How closely related we are to our spiritual ancestors the Israelites we meet today in this episode which finds them making their way through the wilderness of Sin in the Sinai desert. The Lord had just delivered them from slavery in Egypt. This once enslaved people were now enjoying their wonderful newly experienced freedom, but without the benefit of a hospitable country in which to settle down and live. Just a short time previous to this episode, they had engaged in a great celebration of their new found freedom. Their leader, Moses, had composed a song of deliverance for the victory God gave them in crossing the Sea of Reeds : “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously. . Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he cast into the sea… The Lord is my strength and my might and he has become my salvation… ” ( From Ex. 15) .

And all the people said, “Amen, Amen, Amen. ”

But no sooner had the people affirmed their faith in the God who had become their salvation and sang: “The Lord will reign forever and ever ” than they began a series of “murmurings”, a series of complaints about their desert conditions. And the desert is a harsh environment, no question about it. It is a difficult place in which to survive, much less try to live.

Today we come to the third “murmuring” episode in which the Israelites complain about the lack of water.

“Give us water to drink!” they demand of Moses.

“Why do you quarrel with me and test the Lord? ” questions Moses “After all, the Lord has already turned a bitter spring into sweet water back there at Marah. And he has provided quail in the evening and bread in the morning. Trust in the Lord, ” countered Moses.

“Well, that was a few days ago. Now we want water. Yes! Yes !” they all cried. And as children chant and bang their glasses on the table at camp, they demanded: “Give us water, water, water. ”

“Moses, why did you bring us out to this God—forsaken place anyway? Do you really want to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst ? We must have been crazy to leave Egypt. Oh, sure life was hard, but we did have our huts to sleep in at night, we at least earned a meager living from making bricks, and there was food and water on our tables. But it looks like the Lord isn’t with us here in the desert. God has left us all alone to die. ”

Moses feels helpless in answering the people’s complaints at this point and was probably wondering why he didn’t make a better case before God about his speech impediment and refuse to take this position of leadership of these complaining people. So Moses turns the whole matter over to the Lord. “I can’t do anything more, Lord. I don’t know what to do from here. You led us here to this desolate place. You take over from here I’m at my wits end. ”

“Here we are on vacation, look at all the money we’ve spent to get here, rent this cottage and all they do is complain. What am I going to do with this family? ”

Then the Lord steps in and answers the people’s question and that question was really a profound question of faith: “Is God with us, in our midst?”

That is a good question to ask about one’s faith. Moses is instructed to strike with a rod, as he did at the Sea of Reeds, one of those rocks in the Sinai that sometimes contains water. And behold water gushed out of the rock so the people could drink to satisfy their thirst.

That day the Israelites and we who follow them were taught a couple of very important lessons about their and our relationship with God. They discovered that they had not been liberated from slavery in Egypt for the death in the desert. But more importantly, they discovered that their newly found freedom was really not free. Though freed from the Egyptians, their liberation had been transformed into a new dependency upon the Lord who had promised them: “I will provide. ”

So Moses named that place so Israel and those of us who follow in their faith and doubting would always remember it. He called the place Massah which means “to test, ” for there the people tested God. He also called the place Meribah which means “to present a legal case against someone” for there the people quarreled with the Lord and made their case for his assistance.

Here in the desert, God answers their question and ours, “Is the Lord in our midst or not?” “Is God really with us in life?” “Can we really trust in God to be with us when we take a risk of faith? Is God going to be among us and with us? ”

The lesson we learn here is that God is large enough to take our doubts, our questions, our skepticisms, our critical judgments upon himself and answers “Yes, I am with you. You can trust in me. I am among you ”

You see doubting, searching faith, -and- making critical judgments are important stages of faith. Notice in our passage for today the way the biblical writer introduces this episode: “From the wilderness of Sin, the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages. ” I’m using the word stages in relation to faith.

Searching faith, doubt, making critical judgments in relation to our faith is an important stage in our faith development. Oh true, it is often painful and quite disturbing to deal with, but nevertheless doubt is a stage of faith, though it has often been a neglected stage by the church. In fact, the contemporary church does not deal very well with doubt and often refuses to deal with it at all.

I remember an experience I had when I was in high school with my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Carter . I usually didn’t speak up much in Sunday School or voice my opinions . In those days we were supposed to listen and not talk back and besides, I was in my cave years of adolescence and only came out to grunt once in a while. Well Mrs. Carter was talking to us about the creation story from the book of Genesis about how the world was created in six days. And as she told the story, I conjured up this picture of a day by day construction of the world which was quite a primitive picture. One day God created light, which was the sun, the moon, and the stars. The next, God created the firmament which included water above the lights (that ‘s where rain came from) and then the air below the lights. And then God created this flat dry land ( and it was flat in that part of Michigan) which we call the earth with vegetation. On the fourth day God created the luminaries which fixed the seasons of the year. On the fifth day God created fish and birds, and on the sixth day land animals, and finally man.

“But, Mrs. Carter, I spoke up. “That’s not the way it happened according to my biology text book. It says that first the earth was a gaseous form of substance then changed to fluid and it took millions on billions of years -for the earth to evolve as it is today. Earth wasn’t created in a day . It couldn’t have been. And that text book says the earth rotates around the sun and do you know how human life evolved?

Mrs. Carter stopped me there and said with this angry look on her face “Billy, you will not bring those kinds of statements into this class. You are arguing with the Bible. You must have faith in the Bible if you want to go to heaven”. . . Well, I didn’t even want to go to Mrs. Carter’s Sunday School class after I was reprimanded by her and I began a bit suspect about heaven. I made up my mind that the vocation of ministry, which I had been considering up to that time, was really not for me if one had to sacrifice ones intellect for the sake of faith. so I pursued studies in college of the sciences which made much more sense than Mrs. Carter’s religion, majoring in biology, minoring in chemistry and rarely attended church during my college days. It was only through a relationship established with a campus minister to students who sought me out, helped me reconcile some of my questions of faith, let me voice my doubts, and make critical judgments about the church and faith that I once again gave faith a chance when I found God was large enough to handle my doubts and questions.

A religion of the heart is, of course, important as a stage of faith, but “a religion of the mind” is a necessity at another stage for us to journey on to that final stage of owned faith, that is faith which is important enough for us to risk for, to live for, or even to die for.

The church needs to do a better job of affirming the despairs, the doubts, the questions, the critical judgments of people in their quests for understanding. And, of course, it isn’t over for us even when we commit ourselves or recommit ourselves to God again after moving through searching faith. At least it wasn’t that way for me.

Alan Jones in his book, Journey Into Christ cites three stages of the “metamorphoses of the spirit” which he picked up from Nietzsches writings that speak to our growth patterns as Christians. These three stages are identified as “the camel, the lion, and the child. ”

Jones says that our first impulse as newly formed Christians is to be like the camel and to bear as much of the world’s ills as possible. Eager to be needed and to bear much, we kneel down like a camel to be loaded down with the world’s pain and brokenness. We rush out to save the world like a camel aimlessly walks off into the desert. Then things usually don’t work out as they were anticipated. When I graduated from seminary as a young minister, I was intent on going out and saving the world. Alyce really believed after seeing the movie A Man Called Peter, that one day I would be chaplain of the U.S. Senate. Well, I found out in a rural parish in KY, after several confrontations with an old “buck” elder and a congregation that followed him to a tee, that not only was I not going to save the world, but the world as well as the parish, did not really want to be saved.

Then comes the second stage of the ” lion.” Disillusioned, and often angry, the young Christian seeks solace in going it alone, being strong, self—reliant, like a “lion” the king of the beasts. “No” becomes the favorite expression to God and the believing community. For me, that image of a lion led me to shake the “dust off my feet” leave that stubborn and willful parish and move to another congregation which I thought was really with it. And here I adopted for myself many of the cultures philosophies, political stances which were then quite right wing if you can believe that. I mean right wing. I really took to heart that tongue— in—cheek title of James Carville’s new book We ‘re Right and They ‘re Wrong. Except, I was often on the extreme right. In today’s comparison, probably just a bit right of Pat Buchanan. “No” was my favorite word in those days.

Jones reminds us however, only by turning and becoming a child can the bitter “No” be turned to a liberating, “Yes ” Jones says: “This childlike “Yes” is an act of a lover a cry of wonder, an act of worship that can heal the hardened heartache of the first two stages. And only this childlike acceptance of life on life’s terms, under the gracious rule of God, can the Christian, like the Hebrews — move out of the desert and the desolation that accompanies it, washed in and renewed by the living Water of the Spirit as John describes it in today’s Gospel: “the spring of water that gushes up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

But how we resist this stage of becoming a “child” in our adulthood. J.C. Watts, U.S. Rep from Oklahoma, former quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners, who spoke at the Governors prayer breakfast on Monday and focused his talk on the need for people to become a child in faith. He used illustration after illustration of his own children and how they taught him never to be so grown up, become so sophisticated or educated to outgrow a relationship of simple trust and faith in God.

It was interesting to hear a comment from a man leaving that breakfast say: “Well J.C. ‘s talk was interesting, but he didn’t give us much that was profound. ” J.C. ‘s talk went right over the head of that man because – it’s so hard for us as adults to risk the stage of becoming a child, turning the bitter “No’s” of life into the liberating “Yes ‘s”. To wonder again, to love again in the agape sense of the word, to worship the triune God in whom we place our trust. And accept life on God’s terms and not ours.

Yes, God is large enough to take your doubts, your questions of faith, your critical judgments, for that is a necessary stage of our faith development. It is only through confronting our doubts can we move to owned faith and become “a child” again and really trust in the Lord.