A sermon for lent
Exodus 17.1-7 [John 4.10-15]
24 February 2008
Bunyan Baptist Church
I never wanted this job. I told God that I wasn’t the man. But when God comes a calling, your resistance doesn’t last long, especially when faced with a non-consuming burning bush! So I went, to Egypt that is. I confronted the Pharaoh again and again. I was criticized, ridiculed, complained at, but eventually, God’s promise to free his people came true. We were off. Off to the promised land. Everyone had big dreams. Everyone was full of excitement at what lay ahead … But we hadn’t gone far when the people realized that between us and the promised land, was the desert, miles and miles of wilderness. And dreams and excitement gave way to moaning and complaining – why had God and I brought the people to the desert to die? Some people even began saying it was better back in Egypt as slaves, that at least there was food to eat and water to drink. I felt like saying to God, I told you so. I told you I wasn’t the man for the job. The burden of being God’s spokesperson, the weight of hundreds of people unloading their grumbling and whinging upon me day and day after was enough to bring me daily to my knees. So here I am again God, asking you for a miracle, asking you to provide water to drink.
In the desert, the wilderness, there will always be problems. For Moses, there was always a problem being presented, something was always lacking, and he always boldly voices the problem to God. The structure of this wilderness story reminds me of the TV adverts that appear so regularly – they begin with a problem – hair loss, credit issues, loneliness, stress, indigestion, thirsty, and on and on. They then present the miraculous solution – a cream, a low-interest loan, a dating agency, a tablet, a drink - the “product” that will transform your life to one of companionship, calmness, popularity, peace, joy, well-being, a full head of hair. The world believes it can solve every problem we have; to the extent, that some believe we will eventually be able to eliminate all sickness. It can turn our mourning into dancing to use the words of the Psalmist. And in this, the world has displaced God. It no longer thinks God is necessary; he has become an accessory we add on. It says trust in the “product”, trust in us.
When I left Egypt the first time still a young man it was to the desert I came. I spent most of the middle years of my life in the desert. I knew what to expect. I knew there would be hard days ahead. All the people had never left Egypt. They didn’t realise the journey would be so hard. When the people asked ‘Give us water to drink’, I responded by saying ‘Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?’ There was a lack of trust in God. There was no confidence in God. They just continued to complain. They got more angry. I thought they were on the verge of killing me. They blamed me from bringing them out of Egypt. I was no longer their liberator, but it was as if they felt I had only released them from one kind of slavery to another. So I cried out to God.
Those who follow God, who take the journey of faith, are always moving from one act of obedience to another. God doesn’t free the people of Israel for a life of luxury; freedom from slavery is not a freedom from anything. As Paul writes to the Roman Christians, we are freed from the slavery of sin and are now slaves to God. Bob Dylan sings, ‘you’ve got to serve somebody’ – the Israelites who once served the Egyptians, are now free to serve God. We who once only served ourselves, are set free to serve God. The Israelites who trusted Egypt to provide food and water, are now to trust God. We, who trust so much of our lives to the economy and the promise of a ‘happy life’, are now to trust God. The irony is the Israelites once free, longed for the relative comfort that living in Egypt provided, the harsh realities of slavery diminished or forgotten, in the face of their thirst. The Exodus story reminds us that following God is not easy, and the pull of Empire, with its ability to provide a life of comfort is strong, we soon forgot that provision does not come free. By the word 'empire', i mean the overarching mentality that we all share and that is drummed into us day after day, summed up in the slogan 'tesco ergo sum' - 'I shop, therefore I am', in other words, shopping will make you happy. Exodus is about freeing us from the lies of the Empire mentality. Those who follow God, who take the journey of faith, are always moving from one act of obedience to another.
I cried out to God. The cry of desperation, the cry of man who feared for his life. God had demonstrated his trustworthiness so many times, but the nagging doubt always remains - will God answer? Will he provide? Only God can provide water in the desert. And if God’s name is ‘I AM’, then mine is surely ‘I AM not’. And God answered: ‘Strike the rock.’ That doubt resurfaces, water from a rock? What if it doesn’t work?
This story is what we might call short. We are left wondering what happened in between Moses hearing God’s command and his acting on it. Did his memory reach back to that encounter with God before the burning bush? Did the familiar doubts surface? Moses is no different from you or I. He faced the same question of whether God was to be trusted. The burning bush taught him that while God’s name is ‘I AM’, his name is ‘I AM not’. And so he doesn’t have to try and be God. He doesn’t have to be the answer to the Israelites’ need. He knows that miracles only come from God. And we celebrate and give thanks this morning for the miracle of God, who is Noah. It is only the faithful, powerful intervention of God who can give us water to drink. There are no other miracle workers. In our gospel reading today from John, we discover that it is Jesus who gives us living water. Water from the tap or the well will quench our immediate thirst, but we will become thirsty again. The new 'product' we purchase will satisfy for a short time, but we will become unfilled again. Only the living water of God is unquenchable; only the gifts of God - his Son Jesus and the Holy Spirit can give us meaning and life.
So why do we trust in that which is short-term? Why do we believe the adverts that promise to transform our lives, only for us to find that they cannot satisfy? We need to remind ourselves, like Moses, that we are not God, that our name is ‘I AM not’, and equally all the beautiful-looking, great-sounding commercials are not capable of what they promise. There are no miracle-workers, apart from God. Christians, like their cousins the Jews, are a wilderness living people, in the sense that we depend upon God to provide – ‘give us today our daily bread’ Jesus taught us to pray.
So God gave us water and our thirst was quenched. I named the Rock from which water came ‘Massah and Meribah’, which means ‘Test and Quarrel’ as a reminder of Israel testing of God and lack of trust.
The question Israel asked was ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’ They wanted to treat God as their sugar-daddy and in this they were like Veruca Salt, the spoilt child from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She'll have a temper tantrum if she doesn't get what she wishes for, and her parents usually rush to give in to her desire. She is described as "spoiled rotten," and the story tells of how her parents have given in to her every whim and desire since the day she was born. As such, she is constantly asking for things whether or not she needs them, and seems to think she can take whatever she wants, whenever she wants it and insist that what she wants is more important than anything else at that given time. Lent is about coming to terms with the commands and promises of God. He is not a divine sugar-daddy, he is not like the parent who panders and spoils their child. Compared to the relatively easy gifts of the empire – which incidentally come with an enormous price tag – God’s way in the world is lean and precarious. Being a Christian is risky! It's living life as if God really matters. And so lent is about learning to trust God. Trusting God is realising that God gives us everything we need to follow him, to worship him and be his friends. In a world where everything can be bought with a touch of keyboard or a swipe of credit card, it is perhaps a hard lesson to learn to depend on God. It took Israel forty years and the church sets aside forty days a year. Perhaps many of us don’t like Lent or ignore it because it pulls that question of where does my faith lie too starkly into view and we are afraid of the answer we would give. Like Israel I think we all live, whether we admit to it or not, between faith and doubt, between theism and atheism, of living as if God mattered and living as if he didn’t. And so we need Lent, we need to find ourselves like Israel, like David, like Elijah, like Jesus in that place where the pull of Egypt, of the comfortable life, causes us to step forward and strike the rock and depend on the living water of God.
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