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“The Congregation Journeyed by Stages”, Jeff Wright, 9/21/14

“The Congregation Journeyed by Stages”
A sermon preached at
Heart of the Rockies Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ)
Fort Collins, Colorado
September 21, 2014

The scene is at Rephidim in the wilderness. Nobody knows where that was. It is simply a place with a lack. It was a dry, hot place, and they had no water. Imagine, no water, the most elemental requirement for life, the scarcest commodity in the wilderness, and they had none. They could not produce any for themselves. There were no wells. They had no adequate substitutes for water that could possibly sustain them. The focus is upon their deep need and upon the way in which the deepest question of faith is connected to the deepest material reality of life.
Walter Brueggemann, Inscribing the Text

Texts: Exodus 17:1-7 & John 4:7-15

You may have noticed. There’s a lot of traveling going on in the Bible. A whole lot of going from one place to another. Adam and Eve leaving the Garden. Abraham and Sarah packing their camels and heading for a distant country. Moses fleeing from Egypt, then returning, only to flee again with the Israelites, who caravanned for forty years. Jesus, too, always on his way somewhere – nowhere to lay his head, he said – gathering a wide diversity of people, inviting them to pull up stakes and go with him on a journey, along the way of which, he warned us, we will lose our lives in order to save them.

The Bible’s imagery of journey is more than a metaphor. It’s the Bible’s primary description of life. I read recently that as many as one-fifth of the world’s population is in transition, away from home, in exile, on its way from one place to another. I’d put the figure closer to 100 percent. We’re all pilgrims, every one of us. I don’t know how you feel about the undocumented aliens that pour our concrete in Fort Collins, mow our lawns and change the sheets at the Marriott, but we’ve got more in common with them than most care to admit. We’re all in-between, none of us truly at home, all of us “looking for a better country.” That’s how the author of the Letter to the Hebrews puts it. We’re “strangers and foreigners on the earth (11:13).” “Aliens and exiles,” that’s how Peter describes those who follow Jesus (1 Peter 2:11).

But it’s not just the Bible. Most of the world’s epic literature is all about the journey – physically, emotionally, spiritually. The most engaging chapters in those stories? Those that describe the in-between times, the difficult transitions from one place to another when folks find themselves in a kind of wilderness, lost, hungry, thirsty. Our reading from the Hebrew scriptures describes one of these moments when Israel was wandering in the desert.

William Bridges was a professor of English at Mills College in California when it occurred to him that every change we experience in life is accompanied by a period of transition. A change, Bridges writes, is a shift in the external conditions of our lives: things like buying a new car or starting in a new school, getting married, having a child, recovering from a long illness, a job change, losing a loved one. Transition is something more, something deeper, he writes. Transition is the internal reorientation that accompanies a change. It’s the process through which we disengage from our old way of doing things, and negotiate our way through a confusing in-between time, a time of distress as well as creativity that can lead to more fully accepting the change and embracing the gift within it. Bridges says that on far too many occasions we suffer a change in our lives without making the transition. As a result, the disappointment, the stress, the confusion we experience in the midst of a change – even long after it – are due, in part, to our failure to have tended to the inner reorientation.

When I heard Bridges speak at a conference, I thought of this defining time in the life of Israel: their having been freed from having lived under harsh slavery for generations, and delivered into the wilderness where they had to reorient themselves to both the gifts and the responsibilities of freedom. Everything Bridges writes about living through change – how hard it is to let go of the old ways, not just when we’ve been forced to but even in those times when we’ve welcomed or chosen the change; and how, when circumstances have changed, even for the better, we seem unable to avoid a time of confusion and distress; and how, when we finally enter the Promised Land it never seems as wonderful as we had imagined it; everything he says – brings me back to this morning’s text.

The Israelites have come a long way. The spirit of celebration – their joy in having left everything about their harsh life behind them – is fading. It’s not just an emotional thing. Back in Egypt, along the Nile River, they had all the water they could drink. They’re in the desert now. They have no access to water, life’s most important necessity. No wonder we call them “desert experiences”, these seasons of wandering. They can be tenuous, fragile, frightening times. Times of regret, self-doubt and confusion. But as Bridges suggests, and the Bible confirms, these times in the wilderness are potentially the most formative of life’s experiences.

We’re traversing such a time in the life of our congregation, moving from one pastor to another. This is why I was attracted to the picture drawn for us at the outset of the text, where it’s written, “…the entire congregation of Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded.” Scholars tell us that the verbs in this sentence are designed to give the sense of a process. Through the journey, God was shaping a community of faith, stage by stage. Most of the time, I find this to be an exciting prospect. We’ve come through many stages in our life together as a church, even some difficult ones, quite refreshed, empowered, more mature, more connected to God and others. But we know this, too: in the midst of a change, the way forward can be impossible to see and exceedingly difficult.

We can get so down, depressed, resigned, that some of us are tempted to give up.

I have a colleague who thinks she knows why Israel spent those forty years wandering in the desert, why some churches spend far too much time in the desert too. She says that like a lot of men Moses simply refused to stop and ask for directions. It’s an old joke, but I think she’s on to something. None of us – male or female – is good at negotiating the unknown. Few of us are prepared, emotionally and spiritually, to ask for directions or to follow them.

There’s another reason we wander during a time of transition. Maybe you’ve read how, during our military actions in the Middle East, our cartographers have been at a loss to draw accurate maps. It’s not just that the desert is almost impossibly large to chart. Shifting sands constantly cover then uncover major roads and other familiar landmarks. It’s easy to lose one’s way apart from familiar signposts, in the shifting sands of community life and the wilderness each of us knows within ourselves. Like the Israelites, we ask, “Where will we find the resources to survive?”

But this morning’s text reveals an even deeper question: “Is the LORD among us, or not?”

You know why this particular account made it into Book of Exodus – the Israelites complaining that they didn’t have enough water to drink? It isn’t about the water, not primarily, not this time. God has been providing all along in the Hebrews’ journey in the desert. God’ll provide again. No, there’s another point here. This account ends with word that Moses named the place Massah and Meribah – meaning, Test and Quarrel – because the Israelites tested God and quarreled, saying “Is the Lord among us or not?” To be sure, this is an account of God’s faithfulness. God provides water for the congregation. But the story makes it into the text because it’s a story of our failure to trust God.

That’s why the account was handed down from generation to generation to be read in our worship this morning – to remind us, to call us up short. Here we are, like the Israelites. Maybe not all of us this morning. Maybe just some of us. But we’ve all been here, at Massah and Meribah, every one of us. We’ve known God’s grace and deliverance. We’ve seen God’s hand at work in amazing ways. Each of us has passed through how many stages, each time by the grace and provision of God. Even if, for some of us, we haven’t known enough to name the experience a gift of God’s grace, it doesn’t matter. It’s God who has brought us through. Brought the world this far. This is the Gospel truth.

But here we are – again, you may not be feeling it this morning; but we’ll all come around again to Massah and Meribah – wondering how in the world we can go any further. Hungry. Thirsty. Quarrelling. Complaining. Asking in our heart of hearts, “Is God among us or not?”

God isn’t about to abandon us. God is with us and for us. God’s got all kinds of rocks around the next bend, seemingly solid rocks that will be struck to the end that life-giving water will come pouring out and our need will be met. When you and I look back – isn’t it true? – while we were doubting, God was sending some Moses on ahead of us to strike a rock. The sooner we learn this lesson, and trust it, the sooner God can use us, send us on ahead to strike the rock for others.

I’ve shared with you before how in his book, A Month of Sundays, author John Updike writes of life in the desert. Those of you familiar with the book know that it is written as if it were the journal of a pastor who because of some dreadful indiscretion in his church has been sent by his bishop to a retreat house in the desert to reflect on his life and ministry. On a Sunday morning near the end of his stay, the pastor writes a sermon that he preaches to himself. He has discovered that the Spanish had a different name for the desert known as Death Valley. They called it La Palma de la Mano de Dios, the palm of the hand of God. Updike writes,
Are we not all here, in the palm of God’s hand? …What a chorale of praise floats free from the invisible teeming of desert life — peccary and the ocelot, the horned lizard and the blacktailed jack rabbit, the kangaroo rat that needs never to drink water and the century plant that blooms but once in decades. How ingenious and penetrant is life! …The seeds of desert plants wait cunningly; a mere sprinkling does not tempt them to breach their carapaces; only an acid-stirring deluge dissolves. And then the desert is carpeted with primroses and poppies and zinnias, and the tiny ground daisy and the desert five-spot, and sand mat and rock gilia entrust their miniature petals to the glare of the sun, and the sticky yucca blossom invites the yucca moth….

What lesson might we draw from this undaunted profusion? Live. Live, brothers [and sisters]. To those of you who have lost your place, I say that the elf owl makes a home in the pulp of a saguaro. To those upon whom recent events still beat down mercilessly, I say that the coyote waits out the day in the shade. To those who find no faith within themselves, I say no seed is so dry it does not hold the code of life within it, and that except a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit….

We are found in a desert place.

We are in God’s palm.

We are the apple of God’s eye.

Let us be grateful here, and here rejoice. Amen

—Jeff Wright