Proof
Exodus 17:1-7
September 25, 2011
It was necessary today as we hear another episode of our wandering in the wilderness for me to check the news websites just before I came up to the sanctuary to make sure something else hasn’t been added to our growing list. What kind of a list is this? All the tragedies and travesties that have beset our communities, our people and our consciences that make us whisper or scream out loud, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Is that the real question in the room and on the streets, on every newscast and perhaps even in the legislatures? Has God left the room? the universe? It’s not really what the author of Genesis was intending to focus upon as he reported the thirsty incident out in the Exodus desert. First it was the murmuring and complaining of the Israelites, unending it seems, highlighted here by their whining dirge about the ineffective God they thought they were following. It was really not the point at all for the water out of a rock was the proof they had demanded. The author kept on going, but for a lot of us we have stopped and asked the same question, not with a whine, but with an earnest plea. The elephant in all our rooms is the absence of God in a broken world that desperately needs God.
Just this decade alone fills us with grief, remorse, and anger in a seemingly godless world. Those popular and acerbic writers like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have filled the bookshelves and talk shows around the world with their blunt assertions not only that God is not great, and that God has left the building while human beings suffer, but that the idea that there is a God and a religious way of life based upon God is a delusion and so harmful to human life.
And they’ve had a lot of research material to write about: September 11, 2001; Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; the tsunami in Southeast Asia; the earthquake in Japan; tornado in Tuscaloosa; the Gulf Oil spill; the famine in the Horn of Africa and don’t forget about the interreligious violence and civil wars in Ireland, Palestine, Israel and Lebanon, Iraq, India. Is the Lord among us, or perhaps should we ask the Lord to leave?
Part of the price of admission to come into this sanctuary today to worship God and be graced by this beautiful and powerful music is that you and I cannot avoid grappling with this question. You have probably been asked countless times already by sceptics and by those who figure the best way to deal with this question is to ignore it as much as possible. We can’t ignore God here, nor can we ignore these absurdities, but the good thing about here is that we have a story.
It is both our history and our contemporary story. It always begins the same way: you and I are the spiritual ancestors of freed slaves who still have trouble figuring out what it means to be free. The Israelites freed from the bondage of Egypt were beginning to think that God is always there to light their path, to part a sea in their way, and last week to feed them bread every day with no work required except to collect it and eat. This week it’s worse, for as you know you can go without food for a good long while, but you can’t go without water for long at all. They have moved out to Rephidim and hey, this is a desert and there just is no water there. It’s part of God’s world, yes, but it didn’t come fitted ready made with wells and faucets. Freedom meant to have no restrictions and to have God as a servant of all our needs.
The thirsty people confront God’s servant Moses with their bitter complaint and he knows they are about to stone him to death. Wouldn’t get any water that way, but they sure would have felt justified. God, however, once again, had a way, a way so ridiculous that the only way it could be effective was to take along the leaders of the people, so seeing was believing. Water out of a rock doesn’t make sense, but they were no longer thirsty. Moses didn’t like death threats so he named the place ‘Proof’ and ‘Contention.’ The guys on the Exodus probably never got the punch line.
This is the sort of semi-miracle story that confirms the worst scepticism of atheists, agnostics, and those who ignore God and the life of faith alike. A snap of God’s fingers and a rap from Moses’ staff and all the problems of the world are solved. Yet, it is this story that tells us in the midst of earthquake, fire and storm what kind of God we have and what kind of hope God graces us with. It doesn’t matter whether it is the Old or New Testament or the 21st century, this story is always a little bit of resurrection.
We are always being pointed to the power of life to surprise death. Water comes out of a rock, bread rains down from heaven, the sea is divided in two – all as it shouldn’t be, but in God’s way life is resurrected again and again.
I was involved in track and field and running from the beginning of high school and one of the first books in the mid=’60’s I obtained about the sport was a small paperback volume by Fred Wilt, How They Train, a collection of short biographies of a wide range of successful runners. One of the most amazing was that of Louis Zamperini, a southern Californian runner who competed in the 1936 Olympics in the 5000 meters, finishing 8th. He would enlist in the US Air Force during World War II, during which he served on a crew doing search and rescue of downed planes. But in 1943 his plane’s engines died and crashed into the Pacific, killing all but three of the eleven members of the crew. Zamperini and two others were on a life raft for 47 days until they drifted onto a Japanese-held island and promptly made prisoners of war.
When his captors found out he was a famous athlete, they decided upon a cruel exhibition. Zamperini had gone from his regular 165 pounds down to 79 and was in an extreme state of malnourishment. The camp directors decided to have a race between Zamperini and some well-trained Japanese runners to prove their natural superiority. The track was in a small compound with a very short lap. At first, all Zamperini could do was follow the lead of his opponents. There appeared to be no determined length to the race, but after a while something seemed to spring forth in the exhausted runner. Maybe the best metaphor was water out of a rock. He found himself keeping up and then to the cheers of his fellow POW’s he passed his fellow competitors. Again, there seemed to be no end to this race, but after a number of laps the Japanese runners fell further and further behind. Finally, the directors stopped the proceedings so as not to be further embarrassed. They were not thirsty for water out of a rock.
Some see God’s absence in the midst of death, destruction and cruelty; yet others standing in the same mayhem see the spark of life, hope and kindness. There is no tidy explanation for the things that happen in this physical world, except that it is too simplistic to say that God causes all of them. There is resurrection, we keep hearing, in the middle of the worst of tragedies and outrages. Death makes brutal sense to us, but resurrection seldom makes sense. You can’t get water out of a rock.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan