Exodus 17:1-7, Numbers 20:1-13; Matthew 17:1-8
Preached at Tigard Community Friends Church
Oct. 6, 2019
I mentioned
last week that we have dug 80+ holes for trees, shrubs and plants, and some of
those holes were into rocks. We did have enough sense to wait until rain
softened the top 4 inches of soil, but nothing softened the rocks.
I really
enjoyed the work, to be honest. I watched my spouse use the 26-pound prybar to
evict sizable rocks and break up the hard clay, and I used it myself (though I
thought I might lose my balance on the sloping surface, fall on prybar and
break out my front teeth). One day, I felt a decided burning in my tricep and
thought, “Well, that’s enough for the day.” So I waited a day or two before
using that prybar again. And I congratulated myself on paying attention to my
body.
A couple of
weeks into heavy digging, I noticed my hands were really sore in the morning.
They got better as I used them during the day, and when I really got going,
endorphins took all the pain away. Then my middle fingers on both sides started
catching in the phenomenon known as trigger finger. Now I get them caught in
the shape of claws and they stick there for a bit until I can pry them open.
They wake me up in the night to complain. So I warm them up, massage them with various
liniments, and continue digging.
The amount
of work I did made me proud of myself, and I wanted to impress my spouse when
he got home each day. Also, I just love planting things. So I pressed on, until
a little voice whispered, “You might want to get those hands looked at.” I made
an appointment and got referred to physical therapy. Where my therapist “congratulated”
me on doing so much hard work as a happy way to transition into telling me I’d
better take it easy if I want my hands to improve. This is annoying. I could,
of course, ignore her warning and persist with my shoveling and raking and
digging. But I’m going to try to listen and obey.
The
significance of my story is that all the work I was doing was positive, and I
enjoyed doing it despite all the aches and pains that ensued from it. But I
didn’t quickly listen to when to ease up, and now I owe my body some rest. I
pressed on when I should have put my feet up. Maybe some of you can relate.
On a day
off from work at the yearly meeting (denominational) office, I thought about
what things I should get done, and I asked God, “What do you want me to do
today?” And, to my surprise, God said, in my inner self, “It’s a nice sunny
day; get outside and enjoy it.” So I went and sat in my swing. Another time,
after the career disappointment I mentioned, I said, probably angrily, to God,
“Now what? What am I supposed to do now?” And God said, “You don’t have to
achieve another thing in your whole remaining life. I’m fine with that.” Notice
God didn’t say, “I forbid you to achieve” or “you better not try another job.”
Just that God didn’t require me to continue to be ambitious and aspirational,
God isn’t pushing me to fulfill my potential, God is just happy for me to be.
I’ll add,
right up front, that my whole spiritual life took a turn for the better when,
as a young adult, I heard Bill Vaswig at Newberg Friends Church say, “Jesus
promised that the Spirit would guide us into truth, so why not ask what the
Spirit of truth would have you do, take some time and space to listen, and then
do what you hear.” St. Augustine said, “Love God and do what you will, acting
always out of love.” (No law but the law of love: Love God with all your heart,
soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.) This sounds
enormously free and a little scary if we aren’t accustomed to working without a
net of rules and guidelines, without expectations we are trying to meet.
(Just a
word about what I “hear” when I say I hear God. Some of what I hear are mental
impressions, metaphors, ideas about things I’m turning over in my mind. George
MacDonald said that God sits in the darkness where the light of our
consciousness goes out and sends us up beautiful things. Sometimes also, when
I’m working on a course of action, I receive in my mind a simply factual
statement about what I need to do next, such as “take the day off,” or “take
the next step in forgiveness,” or, in the middle of an argument with my spouse,
“you know you’re going to have to get over this, so watch what you say.” God’s
word doesn’t come clad in shaming, guilt-producing, manipulative language. I’ve
never had God thunder at me, despite my various wayward tendencies.)
And look at
the arrangement in the garden, before humans took their fate into their own
hands. Every evening, after the humans doing anything they wanted to (except
that one thing of eating the fruit of the Tree of Death), God showed up to walk
and talk with them. This sounds like a golden age to me, and we do keep trying,
on our own steam, to get back to the garden.
Last week I mentioned the problem
of running ahead of God. God wants humans to live in ongoing conversation and
responsiveness to God’s leading. The temptation in the garden speaks to us of human
beings running ahead of where God leads, putting our own ideas of how we want
things to be in the place of listening to God, pushing forward because that’s
what we know how to do.
So today, I
want us to look at the story of Moses, who led the Hebrews out of Egyptian
slavery to the edge of the promised land. I am going to simplify the story,
leaving out huge portions to focus on three incidents in Moses’s life.
To recap,
for those who are unfamiliar. Moses was born a Hebrew in Egypt at a time when
all Hebrew boy babies were supposed to be killed at birth. His midwives
disobeyed this law, and his mother nursed him up until she felt he could
survive, then put him into a little boat on the river, where he was rescued by
Pharaoh’s daughter. She brought him up as a prince in Egypt, and she employed
his mother to be his nanny.
One day
Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and he flew into a rage and
killed the Egyptian. (This is Moses acting on his own, by the way.) He fled the
country and went to work as a shepherd at the back of beyond. After decades,
God got in touch with Moses via a miraculous burning bush, and God told Moses
to use what was in his hand, which was
his shepherd’s rod. This rod became imbued with powers that looked magical: it
could turn into a snake and then back, for instance. God sent Moses back to
Egypt, saying, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say.” So
Moses went.
After a lengthy negotiation period between
Moses, Pharaoh and God, Pharaoh let the Hebrews go into the wilderness to
worship God. When Pharaoh saw that they had escaped, he and his army pursued
them, thinking them trapped by the Red Sea. But God told Moses to lift up his
shepherd’s rod over the water, and it parted so that the Hebrews could escape.
Now I’m going to take you to three
times when the Hebrews murmured against God and complained to Moses about
having no water. The first time was not long after their escape across the bed
of the Red Sea. Three days into the wilderness they ran out of water. The only water was a stream called “Bitter” (Hebrew:
Marah) because of its nasty taste. They couldn’t drink the water. And God said
to Moses, “Take the tree I’m pointing out and throw it into the stream.” Moses
did exactly that, and the water became sweet and drinkable. Moses took the
opportunity to point out to the Hebrews how important it was to listen to God
and do what God says.
Some time later, the people arrived
in another place in the wilderness where there was no water. Keep in mind that
they had livestock as well as families along, so there was a lot at stake in
having an adequate source of water. Moses asked God for help, saying “Help!
They are about to stone me to death!” and God replied, “Take the elders of the
people with you, and bring your shepherd’s rod that struck the sea. I will go
with you to the rock, and you will smite the rock with your shepherd’s rod, and
water will come out of it.” So Moses obeyed God’s word, and indeed, water
flowed out of the rock.
Much later, after the Hebrews have
reached the promised land and denied themselves entrance by their cowardice and
then disobedience, they arrive again at the place in the wilderness where there
is no water. They complain against Moses and God, saying, “Why have you brought
us up into the wilderness to die of thirst? Why have you taken us out of Egypt,
a place of figs and pomegranates, to this evil place?”
So Moses went to seek God’s face
and will. And the Lord spoke to Moses, and said, “Take your shepherd’s rod,
bring your brother Aaron along, and gather the people together. Then speak to
the rock, and water will gush out of it right before their eyes.” Moses got
Aaron, picked up his shepherd’s rod, and gathered the people together.
And he said to them, “Listen up,
you rebels! Must we fetch you water out of this rock?” Then he smote the rock
with his shepherd’s rod. Nothing happened. So he struck it again. Uh-oh.
Moses does not follow God’s
leading. Moses takes the rod into his own hands and does what worked in the
past, rather than trusting that this time, it will be enough to be simply
obedient and speak to the rock. Now, God is kind and the people are thirsty, and
God still provides water gushing from the rock. But there will be consequences
for Moses.
Some here may have a hard time
believing the miraculous parts of this story, thinking of wizard’s wands, and
magic spells, and so on. And certainly, in Egypt Pharaoh’s sorcerers were able
to match Moses miracle for miracle up to a point (which, somewhat amusingly,
was the plague of lice. They could make frogs but not lice. Perhaps once you’ve
hidden a louse up your sleeve, it sticks around.) And I don’t want to worry
about defending whether these things did or did not happen exactly as written
in the Bible. What is written is for our correction, encouragement and
instruction in right living, so that’s how we’ll use it.
What I want us to focus on is that
the Bible faithfully recounts both Moses’s obedience and Moses’s disobedience.
The Bible tells that this man, who talked “mouth to mouth” with God, chose, after
decades of obedience, to take matters into his own hands and do what worked in
the past. And God took note of this
break in relationship. Moses did not live to enter the promised land after all
his wandering through the wilderness with the wayward Hebrews. Instead, God
took Moses up on a mountain to see the promised land, and said, “Because you
rebelled (the Hebrew word is Marah, like the bitter stream) against my
commandment in the strife of the congregation and did not honor my name and
word as holy at the water before the congregation, you may not enter the
promised land.”
This is instructive to us. The life
of the Christian is a life lived in obedience to the living Word, God’s Holy
Spirit, a daily and ordinary obedience. We are always likely to let the clatter
and conflict around us rattle us so that we can’t trust what God is saying to
us. We are likely instead to do what worked before. When we disobey, our
actions have consequences. Otherwise, our actions do not have any meaning. But
God is not harsh with us. I notice that God allowed Moses to draw water from
the rock because God is kind and gracious. And as an important side note, God
promises Moses that he will be gathered unto his people, which seems positive,
perhaps even more positive than entering the physical promised land. So though
Moses didn’t get to fulfill his hope of entering the promised land, he moved on
into a dimension of unbroken and unbreakable conversation and relationship with
God.
Jesus showed us what it looks like
to be a human being in living, continual, responsive conversation with God. He
said that he did nothing but what his Father told him to do, and that we could
see God by looking at Jesus. If you have questions about why Jesus did one
thing with a particular person and something else with another, perhaps here is
your answer. He was and is responding to the guidance of his Father in his
responses to individual human beings.
One day toward the end of the three
years Jesus ministered publicly, he took Peter, James and John up a mountain
(reminding us of all those mountains Moses climbed to be with God). On that
mountain, Jesus was transfigured: he lit up from within and his clothing glowed
with light (reminding us of how Moses’s face glowed with light). He looked for
once like the Son of God might be expected to look. And importantly, Jesus had visitors on the mount
where he was transfigured. Here is Moses, along with the prophet Elijah,
signifying that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets.
And because humans want to
memorialize big events like this one, Peter says, “Let us build three
tabernacles here for you, Moses, and Elijah.” You see, if there are tabernacles
there, people can make pilgrimages, people can hope to capture some of that
experience again. People like to have a place of worship that holds still so
they can find it whenever they want.
But God says in response to Peter’s
suggestion: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”
And isn’t that the way of following Jesus? We tend to pray at Jesus, telling
Jesus what should happen next. Like Peter, we find it challenging to be quiet
so we can hear Jesus, so we know what our next act of worshipful obedience will
be. God doesn’t give us a nice shrine we can revisit every year or every week.
We get an ongoing, intimate, personal, instructive, loving relationship with
the Son of God.
Jesus promised us a relationship to
God like his Father/Son relationship. Like Moses, like Jesus, we too can have
an intimate (if usually invisible) mouth to mouth conversation with God, and
our part in life is to enjoy that relationship and do what God tells us.
